578: The International Man, Casey Research, Anarchism, Doug Casey

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Doug it's my pleasure to welcome back Doug Casey, a returning guest. He's been on the show many times and he is the founder of Casey Research, the international man, the author of many books and a man with a lot of insight. And we want to talk about what to expect after the election. Doug, welcome back. How you doing?

Good. Jason, nice to talk to you. I'm talking to you right now from Charlottesville, Virginia, which experienced its riots a couple years ago. It's quiet now.

Sure. Did you have homes in Aspen, Colorado and in Argentina as well.

Right, And Uruguay as well, which is actually quite different from Argentina, even though it's right next door to what? Small country, only three and a half million people, mostly soybeans, cattle and timber, but a nice beachfront which is a jet set hangout during the southern summer. But I just came from Aspen, drove across country listening to NPR and shock.

Did you get brainwashed?

Well, you know, you hear something enough times by a reasonable sounding person and after a while it starts, it happens. It's happened to all of the United States, the whole country since the media is totally dominated by leftists. In fact, everything in the US is dominated by leftists.

It pretty much seems that way. Big Tech is dominated by leftists. Hollywood, book publishing, media. It is like you'd think the whole country is left, but it's not. Clearly it's not. But the left have the voice, don't they?

Yes, they do. And certainly in the little white bread mountain town of Aspen, Colorado, I call it the People's Republic of Aspen, Colorado, where I just drove in from.

And you've lived there for a long time. When did you buy your ranch in Aspen?

Well, I bought this ranch 20 years ago, but I'm planning on selling it now because Aspen is being inundated by rich people from New York And LA and San Francisco and people.

Okay, so what's wrong with that? Most people would say, doug, what's wrong with that?

Well, nothing wrong with it from my point of view as a landowner. The ducks are quacking, I'm going to feed them. Because these are wealthy people that are moving to Aspen. It's funny, the wealthy people in the People's Republic of Aspen hold all these BLM friendly views, but apparently they're running away from BLM in their native cities.

That's exactly what they're doing. It's like Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, massive hypocrite that he is. When they opened that Apple meeting right after the George Floyd incident, he decided he had to give us all a lecture on racism. Yet he doesn't live anywhere near those type of environments and has probably never come in contact with him in his entire life. He's a complete typical white hypocrite, elitist. It's unbelievable. I mean, I grew up in those neighborhoods, okay, where there was violence and mugging and broken windows and crappy neighborhoods of Los Angeles. That's my upbringing. I went to integrated schools. I actually lived in those environments. Right. But these people who have never experienced anything like it, have no concept, somehow feel the need to do all this virtue signaling. They're so self righteous and hypocritical, it's absolutely pathetic.

You're right. And when you were growing up, there might have still been a smattering of the values of the Beach Boys and surfer culture and car culture from the 60s, but that's all been washed away now as being very politically incorrect.

So no more Gidget.

With a little bit of luck, California, or at least the coastal counties in California and Oregon and Washington will separate from the U.S. but secession has been tried before in the U.S. and it wounded up badly with the so called Civil war, which I've got to point out that unpleasantness of 1861-1865, which we might see a redux of, was not a civil war, it was a war of secession. It shouldn't be called a civil war because a civil war is a war where two or more groups in a nation state attempt to take over the government.

Civil war is more like a coup then.

Well, no, a civil war is where two or more groups decide to fight for control of the Central Power, Washington D.C. what we had in the last, in the 19th century was a war of secession where the south simply wanted to part company from the North. There was no need for any violence and it wasn't about slavery. Incidentally, that's another thing which is.

A.

Factoid, incidentally, is not a little fact, it's a false fact. Like an Android is a false human or an asteroid is a false star.

One of many words that have been misused.

Right, right. That's great. I like the definition. But tell us more about the distinction. Civil war, coup and secession movement.

Okay, well, if you have a secession movement, if two groups disagree with each other seriously, political aspects, economic aspects, cultural aspects, it's best that they part company. Because when you have one government that's making all kinds of laws and regulations and taxes, one group or the other gets control of it and punishes the weaker group so they actually shouldn't be in one country. And that's where we are right now. That's where we were in 1861. And it could have just been a simple secession. Where the south parted and went its own ways was different in all those ways. We can talk about that.

And really, you know, when one group gets in control of the treasury and the House Ways and Means Committee and decides it can tax and spend the other group's money, isn't that called taxation without representation?

Yes, it is. And of course this whole idea of democracy is very problematical. Look, to start with, the idea of democracy is it boils down to two wolves and a sheep deciding to vote on what to have for dinner, right? Then people say, well, as Churchill said, democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others. That's incorrect. Actually we can talk about that. But because Churchill said it and it was a bone mole, people believe it. But Churchill said something else which is more appropriate. And that is the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. And there he was being candid and correct. So no, I actually don't believe in democracy. It's not the best way to organize people politically.

So is representative republic the best then?

No, I don't think so. Actually, this may shock some of our listeners because they have a bad impression of it. A misimpression is I've been an anarchist for most of my life and anarchism.

Why don't you explain anarcho capitalism then? Because that to a lot of people, including myself, seems pretty radical. But tell us more about it.

It's scary. When you turn on the media, they'll say BLM and antifa and anarchists or running around the street destroying something. The fact of the matter is though, anarchism as a political philosophy has absolutely zero to do with little round bombs and people in black capes, throwing them. Anarchism recognizes that government is congealed force. As Mao Tai Song said, the power of the state comes out of the barrel of a gun. So we believe that in a civil society, peaceful society, coercion, force should be limited. And in anarchism, we believe the state should be limited to the smallest amount possible. Now what does that mean? Okay, taking this kind of honor gradient, since the state is pure force, it just taxes and regulates and coerces in all kinds of ways. There's no volunteerism about it. The state should perhaps have an army to protect you from foreign predators, have a police force to protect you from domestic predators, and have a court system so you can adjudicate disputes without resorting to violence.

Yeah, that sounds pretty Ayn Randian, right?

Yes, exactly. And if the state did nothing but that, that would be fine. I could live with that. But the fact is that those three functions of government are way too important to be left to the kind of people that inevitably go into government. The kind of people that go into government are people that like to control other people. I mean, naturally, it's like the kind of people that go into the mafia are criminals. The kind of people that live in Las Vegas are gamblers. Kind of people that live in New York are upward mobile. There's all kinds of things. Well, kind of people that go into government aren't the best and the brightest, they're the poorest and the worst. So anarchists ideally want to do without government at all, which is possible. It's a whole different conversation we can have. But in the meantime, let's not just pare government down, let's chop it away with the meat acts. Because about 90% of what the government does today in the United States either shouldn't be done at all or can be done much better by profit seeking entrepreneurs.

So I want to get into the election stuff and you know, and not totally stick too much on this philosophical stuff. But it is interesting because I love talking about this macro philosophical, the ideology of what government should be and so forth. But I do want to ask you one thing about that and I generally agree with you. Although it doesn't always go right. And one area where I think it has gone sadly wrong, letting the sort of the free market. And it's not free, it's all crony capitalism. So that would be a misnomer, so I apologize in advance. But privatized prisons, bad deal. I don't think there should be a profit motive for incarcerating people that has not worked out. Well, thoughts on just that one.

Okay, to start with. The criminal justice system doesn't change just because the management of the prisons are for profit.

The reason it does when the judges get bribed, though.

Well, of course. Which is another argument to depoliticize the court system and make it an adjudication system where adjudication courts would compete with each other on the intelligence, the speed, the fairness, and the low cost of their decisions. Very, very different from the court system today, where it's impossible to get in. And once you get in, you can't get out and you're bankrupted if you are. Okay, prisons. The purpose of a prison in a free market society would be to.

Number one.

Well, several things are equal, but one of the most important things would be to ensure that the miscreant makes reparations to the person that he damaged. So if there's any profit to be made from keeping these people in prison, it should go to the person who was harmed.

Yeah, it's called restitution, of course.

Exactly. There's no restitution to speak of in today's system. In a free market system, if somebody had to be incarcerated, which is another question. Because I'm not interested in punishing somebody. I'm interested in making the victim whole. That's number one. And there are a lot of people that are in prison that could be productive if they realize that their sentence was not a matter of how many years, but a matter of how many dollars they had to somehow create or earn to pay the debt back. So the whole basis of private prisons are horrible. And they have an unjustly deserved bad reputation because of what they have to do. They have to incarcerate people for a certain number of years and try to make as much money as they can.

It's. Hey, listen, you know, we're both real estate investors, Doug, and I would love it if I could force people to rent my properties and have zero vacancy.

And have. Have triple occupancy, you know, over. It's called overcrowding. Right. You know, as a capitalist, that would be. That sounds great, but, you know, the system just gets maligned and perverted, so. I agree with you. You know, it's. It should be about restitution rather than, you know, time for sure. But hey, let's talk about the election, Doug. There's so much going on. We gotta get to that. You know, what. What can we expect? You know, it. The whole system, I think we've all can agree that it's. It's corrupt it was corrupt without, you know, fraud and miscounting ballots and all of that because we have a two party system that makes it corrupt on its face. But we are where we are. What can we expect?

I think we can expect the worst in this election because the country is really divided philosophically. It's like a marriage where you and your wife have learned to hate each other because you just disagree on what's right and wrong. You disagree on what's good and bad, what should and shouldn't be done. And that's the way things are right now between the red counties and the blue counties. I don't see how it can get better. People can't change their whole psyche. The optimal solution to what we're confronting now, a veritable cultural revolution in the US And I use that word, I'm trying to use that word accurately. What we're on the edge of is something that's similar to what China went through from 1966 to 1976. This is really serious and really ugly where people really differ on the most basic levels of things.

But I don't see how the US can break up so that people are in different political entities easily. It can happen. It should happen. Instead, they're going to be contesting for who controls Washington and who gets to boss the other group around. This is not a happy situation.

No, it's definitely not a happy situation. But what can we expect? What are the markets going to do? What about commodities prices? What about housing? I mean, the housing market is booming. It is. I've never, I've been doing this an awful long time, Doug, and I've just never seen a market with inventory this low and this much. I mean, the migration is a big part of it. Thankfully, our investors are buying suburban properties, so that's where all the action is. Right. But yeah, I mean, if you're in New York City or San Francisco, I think you're in bad shape. Or downtown LA or Seattle or any of these high density areas where you've got BLM and you've got Covid and.

All of this civil unrest. But what's the market going to do? Real estate, stocks, commodities, interest rates, whatever you want to say about that. I mean, you're a financial guy.

Well, I agree. First of all, as far as property in the big cities is concerned, they're essentially dead ducks. And for a good long time, because the governments of these municipalities are bankrupt and their main source of income is real estate taxes.

And that is under attack. That's going to suffer Greatly. And they're going to go even more bankrupt than they already are. So if you're investing in municipal bonds in these kinds of places, watch out, because you're likely to see some defaults. That's going to be pretty ugly. And the pension crisis.

And if you own proper, these big cities, the real estate taxes are going to go up. Furthermore, your occupancy is likely to go way down in the future as people move out. At the same time, as I've found in Aspen, the rich are moving in because it's safe and it's quiet and people generally share values with you. Mostly liberal values, I've got to say, or I shouldn't even use the word liberal. I should say statist and collectivist values. Very different from what liberal values historically have been because it comes from the world.

They have hypocrite values in those places.

Yes, you're right. So what are you going to do right now with. At the same time, real estate's being driven upwards because it floats on a sea of debt. And right now with interest rates, real interest rates being a negative, and actual interest rates, 2, 3%, something like that, in the real world, eventually interest rates, first of all, the dollar is going to turn into toilet paper because they're creating trillions of them as we speak. They already created trillions, are creating trillions more. They have no alternative. Trump, Biden, makes no difference.

Yeah, both spenders, they're both going to dole out the goodies, the stimulus, whatever. They're going to print. And they're already printing. I mean, it's just a foregone conclusion. But Doug, just. I mean, I know the inflation rate is a lot higher than the government would lead us to believe, than the official stat that say. But even that statement notwithstanding, and we both agree with that statement, I'm sure you agree with me without even answering. There still hasn't been anywhere near as much inflation as we might expect, given the amount of money creation coming out of the Great Recession this time around with COVID There's some inflation there for sure, a lot higher than we're being told, but it's not dramatic yet.

You're quite correct. This is in many ways a mirror image of the 70s, when the amount of money being created wasn't remotely comparable to what we have today. But retail prices were running away in the 70s. People forget that Nixon put on wage and price controls.

Right, I remember that. Yeah.

Okay, so it's not nearly as bad as that. But the financial markets were devastated. They were in real Terms as cheap as they've been during the 1930s. So now all that money is flowing into the financial markets, stocks, bonds and real estate. But it's going to float down to a retail level too. So look out. And eventually, while the dollar is really inflated out of existence, this is very, very serious. Interest rates will eventually go back to the levels I think and beyond what they were in the early 80s, which you might recall we're talking 12 and 15% for government borrowings. We're looking at very tough times. So what do you do? What do you do? Can't buy most stocks, they're grossly overpriced. Bonds are a triple threat to your capital. You've got interest rates, you've got default.

Risk, you've got the credit and huge inflation risk.

Yeah, forget about it. With bonds I see a lot of problems with a lot of kinds of real estate. Some are okay, much better than others. So where do you go? Well, all I can see at this point is commodities in general, but in particular the precious metals, gold and silver. I hate to tell people to buy gold when it's at all time highs, but I think it's going much higher, much higher. And more than that, I think what you have to do is reorient your psychology. You can't really be an investor today, you can't really be a saver today. The world's too unstable. You're forced to be a speculator. And what does that mean?

Which is not fair because older people who've saved money, who've been conservative, who've delayed gratification are forced into these speculative investments that can ruin their retirement. I mean, it's so unfair what's happened now. This isn't new, this isn't news. This has been going on for decades, but it's even more acute now, I'd say. Right, you're quite correct.

The only place that I think you should go right now is gold stocks, which gold is going higher. Silver is going higher. And these stocks are very, very cheap right now. They're under owned every gold producing stock in the world right now. Their market cap is not quite what the cash, or just slightly greater, I should say, than the amount of cash that Apple alone has in its bank accounts. That's how cheap they are. And most fund managers have been. They don't believe in gold. They think it's a pet rock.

Well, they think it's a barbarous relic, to quote Alan Greenspan.

That's right. So they don't own gold. It's very under owned. And gold stocks are very, very cheap, looked at from many points of view. Price, earnings ratio, all kinds of things.

Okay, all right, so. But what do you say? Commodities in general and what about rare earth metals? You know, and, and the thing, you know, the thing that's the wild card, Doug, it's a little further away, but I don't know if it's that far away is the asteroid mining. I mean, that could just tank the market for all of these, what we consider precious here on Earth because it's so abundant in space. Right. And you know, Japan has already achieved that. They have sent a probe to an asteroid, collected material, brought it back to Earth. We can do it today, you know, and there are companies that are, you know, raising money to do just this as we speak.

You're quite correct. And Elon Musk is hoping to land on Mars by 2024 and not long thereafter make it a colony on Mars, self sustaining, so.

And part of that whole Mars project needs to include asteroid mining, just for the water, if nothing else.

But yeah, yeah, things are advancing at the rate of Moore's Law and not just in computers, in a number of areas. Robotics and nanotechnology and biotech. So it's a wonderful time that we're moving into from one point of view, but I'm afraid from politically and economically and our personal freedom point of view, it's going to be very, very scary. That's why, incidentally, that's one of the reasons why I've written, with my co author John Hunt, a series of novels exploring what's going to happen in the future and what's happening now. We just came out with one. I've got to give you this commercial, Jason, I know you're go for it.

Yeah. Assassin.

Assassin. I bought a copy with me and basically it's talking about what's happening today. And the question is, Charles Knight, our hero, is trying to reform the unjustly besmirched occupation of political assassination. And the question we ask is, is political assassination moral or immoral? Right or wrong, is it effective? Does it really change anything or does it make the world?

Well, look, the CIA does it, so it does.

And would you, if you believe that Bill Clinton actually committed dozens of Arkansides, which could be termed assassinations.

Arkansides, I've never heard that. He's from Arkansas, folks, so. Yeah, that's funny.

Yeah, this goes on. It's the nature of politics. People kill each other, mostly in the form of wars where hundreds of thousands of people are involved. But on A personal one to one level. What about assassination? And I'm interested in the moral questions as much as the technical questions of how.

Okay, so the novel explores it. And can people get that at International man, or do they have to go to leftist Amazon or elsewhere?

Well, they can go to internationalman.com and hardback novels will be available there shortly. But at the moment, yes, Amazon does do a service by. They're the largest publisher in the world by far.

Until they censor you and shut you down. Yes.

No, I haven't had any problems.

No. But they've shut a lot of other people down.

Well, yeah, I'm sure that's in the cards. So get this book before, because it's highly politically incorrect. And I've got to say that I've been reading the book myself, having written and edited it, but now I'm reading it in the form of a paper like an ordinary reader. And it is one hell of a good book. I'm very proud of it. Everybody should read it because it is. Most people think it's about Trump and killing Trump, although we do a lot of things that are very different. But now buy this book.

I promise you it wouldn't be about that. Because I would guess that out of the two terrible choices we always get, you would have been a Trump voter more than a Biden voter. Right.

Well, faced with Scylla and Charybdis, you've got to choose Scilla. That's correct.

Yeah. Because at least Trump's better than the alternative, for sure.

Yes, he is. He's a cultural conservative. He'd at least like to see the US Return to the days of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. As opposed to Kamala Harris, who actually would like to foment a Marxist revolution with her buddies in the Gang of Four AOC and the rest of them.

Biden is determined to be the winner. She may well become president because Biden needs to retire a long time ago, actually.

I mean, you know, you've got to lose respect for the average voter. Assuming that the election results reflect the average voter, which is another question. How much cheating is there? Quite a bit, I'd say probably on both sides, but much more on the Democrat side. Now, this election is a major turning point in the US it's going to be as serious as the election of 1860. And I hope we don't go into a civil war. I hope it just turns into a mellow secession of the different groups in the US but unlikely. Nobody wants to see the US And I don't say America. America is a concept and a wonderful one, but it's a dead duck. It's been washed away. It's now the United States. And nobody, no president wants to see the US Break up on his watch, which is pretty much the thinking that Lincoln had.

Well, we shall see. Let's all hope for the best and we are on the edge right now. Everybody wants to know what's going to happen with this election and it's just a crazy time. So got to pray for the country and let's hope for the best. Doug, thanks for joining us. The website is internationalman.com right? Yes. All right. Thanks again. Good to have you.

Thank you, Jason.

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