CW 597 FBF - Privacy Rights & The TSA plus Obamacare Tax Provisions with Free Speech Attorney Jonathan Emord
7 Dec 2025 · 61 min
This is a pre-recorded Flashback Friday episode of the Creating Wealth show hosted by Jason Hartman. The episode opens with a host discussion (Jason and Steve) about macro risks — inflation, government spending, investor expectations, and an $8.5 billion bank mortgage settlement — and investment advice favoring housing and dollar-cost averaging. The featured guest is constitutional attorney Jonathan W. Emord, who critiques the Supreme Court’s Obamacare ruling (arguing the mandate is a penalty, not a tax, and warning of expanded federal power), criticizes the TSA as ineffective and intrusive, and describes FDA practices that restrict disclosure of nutrient/health information.
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Thank you so much for joining me. Do you know what day it is? Yes, it is Flashback Friday where you hear the best of the Creating wealth show and you hear some good prior episodes, some good review. Remember, we've got almost 500 episodes out and you know what? ITunes doesn't even hold them all. If you're an itunes listener. If you are listening on Stitcher. Thank you for joining us. So we want to bring you some good review stuff. Now, what's interesting about Flashback Friday? It's a little scary for me. I gotta be very, very candid with you on that because you, the listener, you get the chance to hold my feet to the fire. Did I make any predictions? Was I right? Was I wrong? I've been right about a lot of things, but I've been wrong about a few. So you can give me a hard time about that if you wish. But it's Flashback Friday and we will give you the uncensored best of the Creating wealth show with a prior episode. So let's dive in.
Here we go.
Remember, this is not current. It's Flashback Friday.
Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing some exciting techniques and and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.
We've got a great guest for you today. Jonathan Emord, who has been on my holistic survival show before, is a constitutional attorney who covers a lot of freedom related topics and he's won some landmark cases against the NBA, fda, the Food and Drug Administration, and he's taken on the TSA and I don't know where he is on that. Maybe he'll talk about it today in this interview. I frankly can't remember because it's prerecorded, but talking a little bit about Obamacare and the economy in general and TSA and FDA stuff So I think you'll find this to be interesting, although not extremely specific to income, property investing, real estate investing, but it always ties back to that in so many ways, especially as it relates to big government and the prospect of inflation and inflating their way out of the mess. So we'll talk about that in just a moment with Jonathan Imoord. But first, I've got Steve here with me again. You've been on a lot of shows, Steve, how are you?
I'm doing well. We're racking up the shows here.
We definitely are. Well, there's two things I just want to cover in our intro portion today. Quickly with you. One is I want to talk about, you know, investor expectations because investing ain't what it used to be, folks. And you got to come to grips with the new reality. It's still great. It's just not as great as it used to be. So we're going to touch on that and we're also going to talk about that big bank mortgage settlement, 8.5 billion with a B, billion dollars. But hey, you know, a billion, that's no big deal anymore. Nowadays we talk in trillions, don't we, Steve? I'll ask, you take the pick, flip a coin. What should we discuss first today?
It really is kind of shameful, Jason, that I see $8.5 billion. And you know what my first reaction was? I kind of thought is that it? That's all. Because when we talk 30 or 50 billion, then I'm going, okay, that's real money. Now that's really the sad state that we're in is it seems like this is happening all the time.
Well, this is an example of inflation. And part of it, part of inflation is one's perspective on money. You know, I remember when I was a kid and I remember I went to the store for my mom and I got some stuff and I remember I dropped $4 and lost $4. Nowadays, who would even flinch at 4 bucks, right? I mean, I lose thousands of dollars and in a business deal and when things don't go right and you know, even then I don't think it's that big a deal. But it does change our perspective. $4 ain't what it used to be. 8 billion ain't what it used to be. 8 million ain't what it used to be. And you know, sad to say, but with a 16 trillion dollar disaster that we've got in terms of running our country and a 60 to 120 trillion dollar time bomb headed our way over the Next couple of decades here in entitlements perspective has to change, doesn't it?
Yeah, it does, it does. It's run away, out of control. I don't know if we've talked about the so called fiscal cliff resolution that happened the other day, but I don't even know if we can dignify it with calling it a band aid to the problem.
Well, I just recorded another show with a FreedomWorks guest who came on. I just recorded it this morning. We'll post it soon. Talking all about the fiscal cliff, but yeah, I mean, what a joke, huh? Remember, you're listening to Flashback Friday. Our new episodes are published every Monday and Wednesday.
This is politics at its worst right now. Both sides clearly only concerned about saving their political skin. But you know, I think, I think it is waking up some of the electorate that are starting to go, okay, we know what you guys are doing here. You think we're stupid. You think we don't know what's going on. And I'm talking about both sides of the aisle. Whatever party you identify with, people are waking up to it a little bit. I mean, you got to wonder if they're behaving so stupidly that it's going to wake a lot of people up about this bad monetary policy. Only time will tell.
Well, we'll see. I think the people on the dole, the 47% that are getting something, they have no incentive whatsoever to wake up the 53% who are paying for them. But you know, it's not just that. It's, it's like, it's funny that and Republicans are the new Democrats. I mean, I can't stand either side. It's just a disaster. But I do blame the left more than the right. I mean, if you're gonna pick the lesser of two evils, I'll take the right being the lesser, but still evil nonetheless. But it's amazing that the left associates itself with compassion. You know, let's help the little guy, let's protect the children, let's do the right thing thing. Let's be compassionate. How compassionate can it be to saddle every child born with tens of thousands of dollars of debt the minute they're born, before they even get started in life, before they even have earning capacity 18 to 22 years later? I mean, that's not compassionate at all. There's nothing compassionate about that. It's unbelievable. It really is.
It is. And there seems to be this perception and people use the term entitled mentality, but because we are in this time period in America, with the technology we have medical and transportation, because that technology exists, because we've been able to produce it as a society, that everybody should be entitled to it. Now that would be nice in theory, if you could do that, hey, great, but you cannot. The money has to come from somewhere and it's all catching up. It's all catching up to where, you know, hey, everybody can have all these neat things and these neat services that we have that, you know, capitalism has blessed us with, but it's coming crashing down rapidly. And yeah, that's the sick irony of it, Jason, is that the people that you're allegedly helping are the ones being hurt the most by this because of that hidden tax of inflation, this fiscal cliff, all this debate, all this. Nobody wants to raise taxes except on the evil rich people. But everybody's got to pay. They're going to pay somehow. And most people don't know that they are. They're paying through inflation. And that's the sad part of it. And more and more people are dependent on the government. Like you said, 47%, which, you know, we said that we're evil. We probably have a polo match with Mitt Romney after this because we said 47%. It's such a bad number to say these days. It's so taboo.
Yeah, exactly. Yes. I'm smoking cigars with Romney at the country club after this.
That's.
That's correct.
That's correct. Actually, I maybe on one of his yachts, I'm not sure. But I just want to make that connection for people so it's really understood. Look at the way it works. Very, very ultra simplistically is this. Those who vote for more spending think that they can get the rich to pay for it by increasing taxes on the rich. And initially, you know, that makes a little bit of a dent, but it's, it's just nominal. It's almost, it's almost.
It'S negligible. You know, it's just nothing. And what ultimately happens is the government has to inflate. And the people who are hurt most by inflation are the poor and the middle class. Now, some of the middle class who are embracing our strategy and the stuff I talk about on this show, they're positioning themselves to actually benefit through the government's inflating its way out of its, its mess. But the vast majority of people, they want more government largess and so they vote for that and they think they're going to get the evil rich to pay for it. But the rich know how to position their investments and their businesses so that they can actually benefit from these disasters as much as they may sound like they're complaining about it. And all they get is more inflation that diminishes the value of their wages, increases the cost of everything they buy. And they are just hurting themselves and making themselves even more dependent on government until they get into this vicious cycle of becoming. If they're working, they're the working poor. And if they're on some on the dole and on sort of some sort of government entitlement program that becomes less and less meaningful. And really the only hope, the only savior for all of this stuff is technology. Maybe technology there will be a way out. I mean, certainly we see inklings of that. You know, I've talked a lot on the show and some people probably thought, why is Jason making such a big deal out of this? And it's 3D printing, but I'm telling you, 3D printing is becoming a big deal. You can go on Amazon.com now and buy a 3D printer for 1500 dollars and more than that. And I tell you, that's a huge leap in technology. That's going to be a big, big disruptive technology as the future comes along. So technology through, whether it be biote, nanotech, 3D printing, better electronics and software, systems, medical, all of this stuff that definitely makes life better, there's no question about it. And that improves the standard of living. The question is, as the disaster is impending, the fiscal and monetary disaster, and those are different. Fiscal means, government spending and revenue. That's the fiscal side of the equation. The monetary side is what the Federal Reserve does and the treasury does. And of course those are tied together. Treasury does both really. But fiscal and monetarily, can technology win the day over the disaster being created in the fiscal and monetary side? And I say that in high tech things, technology does win the day sometimes. But in low tech things, where there's no real disruptive technology like the ones I suggest everybody invest in, which is housing, because housing is very simple, it's made of stuff. And materials, technology, materials science, you know, that changes. But at the end of the day, I mean, how much better? What kind of disruptive technology? Until the time we all live in a force field rather than a house built of concrete, lumber, petroleum products, copper wire, glass, steel, sticks and bricks, essentially low tech items, not really subject to major disruptions in technology. Now nobody can predict the future. Who knows what will come next. But anybody listening has got to just agree with me probably that this is a low tech item not subject to big disruptions. It's not a laptop computer, it's not the new iPad. It's a low tech item. And when you invest in those simple commodities and you use debt to do it, I mean, wow, you're just in the position of power. Just a reminder, you're listening to Flashback Friday. Our new episodes are published every Monday and every Wednesday.
I agree that technology is going to be the only thing that saves it and it's going to have to be something very big, you know, like the Internet or the telephone, you know, and I was thinking about that when you did a podcast a few episodes ago on longevity and your guest was talking about some of the medical breakthroughs that are being made. Those are the kinds of things that may do it. But at the same time there really has to be some responsibility on the fiscal and the monetary side that the bad monetary policy is allowing the bad fiscal policy to happen. If the monetary policy were to stop, then they couldn't get away with this stuff. If you could go to Best Buy today and go get a bunch of plasma TVs and take them up the register and not have any money, but then just click print, it's not sustainable. And we get called crazy. Peter Schiff was on Fox News the other day talking about this with a couple of people talking about how, you know, spending had to be reined in. And there was a panel of three people and two of them were, you know, pretty moderate about it. They agreed we need to rein in spending. And you know, Peter Schiff comes in there, we gotta stop paying these entitlements. We gotta stop, stop, stop. I mean, it was gloomy stuff. But the host, I mean, I couldn't believe her response. Well, we've got in. That was depressing. That's all she would say.
They always marginalize Peter Schiff. And listen, I'll marginalize him myself. He's been on the show. By the way, you can go back and listen to his old episode, way under 100 episode number. We're almost at episode 300. And by the way, the longevity show was episode 290 if you want to listen to that. But Peter Schiff has all. He's right. His conclusion is just mediocre at best. The end conclusion to Peter Schiff and all of the others like him. That sound great. Is here it is. You ready, Steve? Buy gold. Yeah, and I've already addressed that one, but it's marginal at best. Okay, go ahead with what you're saying.
Well, it was revolutionary compared to the other solutions being proposed on this TV show. But, yeah, much. Agreed. I don't see technology disrupting housing unless we've got some kind of a chamber that we sleep in at night when we get to the Star Trek era. But, you know, people are going to need sticks and bricks to sleep inside of for a very, very long time here. And it's one of the very few ways that you can plan for all of this policy because like you said, they think that they're going to be able to tax the evil rich. They can slaughter the dairy cow and get a few steaks out of it, but then the milk is gone.
Exactly. It's the golden goose thing.
Yeah. They're going to try to kill it. They think. They're not. They think that these people are just going to happily work away. But there is a point where people start throwing their hands up and saying, it's not worth it for me to produce anymore. The reward I get for the work is no longer there.
Well, that's the premise of the wonderful book that everybody should read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and eventually the productive class just goes on strike. And, you know, there's actually. It's sort of tangential, but similar examples. What's going on in France. The nut cases in France want to make the tax rate 75%. So Gerard Depardeau, the movie star, has become a Russian citizen. Now, Vladimir Putin offered him citizenship, and the tax rate In Russia is 13%. And I was thinking, wow, maybe I should become a Russian citizen. No, I'm just kidding. I'm not quite there yet. Not even close.
That's really sad that we've even brought this up that, you know, maybe I could go to Russia and get better income tax policy.
The problem is you'll probably have so much Russian mafia to deal with that you'll have to do so many payoffs, and it just may not be worth it.
But, yeah, yeah, the real government will get you.
Well, hey, speaking of corruption and disgusting criminals who are in the elite class running our system, let's talk about the banksters. I mean, bankers. No, banksters. The mobsters that run the banking system. Now, just a couple of days ago, there was this $8.5 billion settlement announced and homeowners who were, quote, victimized, unquote. And I'll get to that in a moment, and I'm sure you will, too. Steve will. Anywhere from a few hundred dollars up to $125,000 in reparations. So the banks are going to have to pay it back for their faulty foreclosures and not following procedures and so forth. And you know what was interesting when I posted this in our, in our Facebook group, we have an internal group, well, several of them, that we use. And one of the comments from Doug, who's been on the show and who's one of the speakers at our upcoming Meet the Masters event is, you know, I posted the article and he goes, here' I read people who don't pay, who don't bother to pay their mortgage on time will get compensated because the banks didn't follow the right procedure in reclaiming their property. And then he goes, from the book Animal Farm by George Orwell, he goes, some animals are more equal than others. I love that comment, by the way. And I reply and I go, true, but the banksters and Goldman Sachs engineered the whole bubble machine from a macro perspective. And they are a bunch of crooks. And it's at first, when the crisis started to unfold, the mortgage meltdown, I took exactly the position Doug took. I was just outraged that all of the wrong people seem to be getting rewarded. But now I'm a little bit more in the middle ground of this because I think the banks have just, they've just raped and pillaged the entire system. And then they take bailout money and get a. They get all this TARP money from us and then they do all this sort of monkey business when they say they've repaid the government, which they really haven't. There's a lot more layers to that story than Meet the Eye. And I've talked about that in prior episodes. But Steve, your thoughts on the settlement and one of the articles that I posted in general.
Well, all you have to do to get your piece of the pie here, Jason, is to have been in some stage of foreclosure between 2009 and 2010. You don't even have to have lost a house completely. They just have to have been in foreclosure. So I'm with you. I say, hey, if you qualify for this money, go and get it, because you're going to pay the hidden tax of inflation on it anyways. You might as well get some of it.
Yeah, look at it this way. You're basically getting some of your TARP money back that you paid in your tax bill or your inflation bill. And that's what people have to understand. Back to the prior comments. There's only two ways the government has revenue, unquote, and that is through inflation or taxes. How does inflation create revenue? Well, it allows them to Spend like drunken sailors, which Reagan said would be, you know, would be offensive to drunken sailors, which is true. And debase the value of your savings, your stocks, your bonds, your debt and your wages, but your debt beautifully in a wonderful way. And that's how we game the system. That's our, our plan on the show here is let them debase your debt and increase the value of your commodities. And those are all the ingredients that go into your rental houses or apartments. Yeah. Amazing, isn't it, Steve?
Yep. They'll just keep doing it. It's one bailout after another, one settlement after another. The system has become very, very corrupt, unfortunately. So all you can do is understand it and position yourself correctly.
No question about it. Well, keep listening to the show and listen to the old episodes to learn a lot more on that exact Steve just made. But one more thing we need to touch on Steve before we get to today's guest is of course we're looking forward to seeing everybody at the Meet the Masters event at the Hyatt Regency, which is just eight short days away. So that's going to be great. And totally sold out. And we've just got a great lineup for everybody. So look forward to that. But I want to talk about expectations, investor expectations for just a moment because we always have this problem and usually when you look at a graph at a market cycle of whether it be stocks or real estate or tulips in Holland and tulip mania in the old days, whatever it is, it seems like the little guy always gets in too late. Only after there's been a lot of media coverage and everybody's gotten into it and they always miss the boat because they get in nearer or at the peak of the market and they just really hurt themselves. Whereas the prudent investor, they get in earlier when there's less media attention about it and there's less hype. And unlike, I believe it was, John D. Rockefeller said he knew there was a crash coming in the stock market when he started getting stock tips from his shoeshine boy. And real estate isn't there yet at all. The opportunities are still great. But when you look at these rent to value ratios around the country, I mean, Steve, they're not what they were three years ago.
No, they aren't. They aren't. And the people that, the so called crazy people that back in 2009 when the mortgage market was frozen over solid and where the world was going to end, the people that purchased them when everybody was scared to death, they're the ones that are going to end up doing the best out of this. They bought at the very, very rock bottom of this thing. And people that have been buying over the past couple of years have really been taking advant. And while the mainstream media is not onto this, many investors who have the ability to invest certainly are. The cash is off the sidelines. And I think what's kept it from rocketing forward is that, yeah, the lending rates are great right now, but getting a mortgage is very difficult. You have to be prepared to jump through a lot of hoops with these lenders, but if you're prepared to do it, you can get the money. And that's what's really kept things from going crazy right now, because you do have Fannie Mae and Chairman Ben on the back end of this, writing a lot of checks, ready to buy a lot of mortgages and keep these going. And so that, to some degree, has pushed those RV ratios down historically. They're still amazing RV ratios.
Oh, they're fantastic. I mean, look, we had all sorts of people when I would do seminars back in 2004 and 2005 and 2006, we had all sorts of people that would be foaming at the mouth to buy income properties with income that wasn't really that good, where they're looking at a picture of anywhere from 0.5 to 0.7 RV ratios. And I'd say at the, you know, and I'm always talking about a good, solid market in which we would recommend that you invest, but I would say at the lowest point in the market in the past eight years or so, you could buy and get RV ratios of 1.3 to 1.7% even. I mean, that's unbelievable. That's incredibly good on single family homes or small duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes. Now, on larger apartment buildings, you could do even better than that sometimes, but you've got a whole separate set of expenses with apartments that don't come with single families. But now people can get 1% on a pretty consistent basis, and they can do a little better or worse than that too. Right, Steve?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's what has happened here, is you mentioned apartment buildings. Back in 2009 and 2010, when the economy was in free fall, there was still a lot of institutional money that didn't know what to do, and it was scared to death of the stock market. And so naturally it flowed to things like big real estate investment trusts and things like that. And they buy big office buildings and big multifamily properties. And that really drove up the pricing of those kinds of assets. And we have seen it now happen to a lesser degree as many institutions get into the small residential properties, you know, they've increased the competition on them. However, not as much as you would think. On newer properties in some of our markets, you can still get those RV ratios of above 1%, sometimes closing in on 1.5%, but it's definitely gone down from where it was on older properties. Yeah, you're still really high on those RV ratios. It just depends on what your taste for investing is. But it's not like it was a while ago where you could close in on almost 2% many times on these RV ratios. And people need to understand that. And what they need to avoid is saying, well, I'm looking for 1.8, and you're sitting there waiting, tripping over dollars, waiting to reach for these pennies. And before you finally decide, are you stuck at below 1%? I'm not saying that's where it could go, but the trend has gone down a little bit, certainly over the last 12 months.
This is how investors shoot themselves in the foot. They have their expectations set at an unrealistic point, and then they wait and wait, thinking that somehow they're gonna find the deal that meets their expectations. And what ultimately happens is they just miss the whole opportunity and the deals get worse. Now, and I've said this before on the show many, many times, folks, by no means do I think we are in a legitimate economic recovery. However, I think we are in the second part of that W that I've been predicting for many years. And the second part of the economic devastation is the inflationary part of the W. We went through the deflationary side of the W on the first downturn when the financial crisis started, and now we've gone past that midpoint in that W, and now we're going into the next part of that W. But the thing is, with our plan, the inflationary side of the W is actually the most beneficial side of all. So that's where we are. Don't miss the opportunity by having unrealistic expectations, folks. At the very least, if you're not throwing all your money on the table today and saying, I'm going to buy everything, I heard Jason say I'm not gonna. You know, I'm gonna adjust my expectations, okay? So I'll. I'll throw everything in and I'll buy every property I can possibly afford to buy right now. You know, I'm not saying do that, but at least start dollar cost averaging into the market and get yourself some properties. And if by chance in the future the RV ratio improves, then hey, you've dollar cost averaged. You started at this point at 1% and if it goes to 1.2 in solid markets, then, then great, you can get those. But don't miss the opportunity. That is the biggest danger you face right now is missing the opportunity. And, and you know, the ship, the ship is always leaving the dock in one form or another and sailing away and you just don't miss it. That's what I want to say.
Yeah, yeah. You know, we can't sit around waiting for the perfect deal. Even back in 09, you know, there wasn't a perfect deal. I mean, a lot of those came with, as we say, a lot of hair on them. You know, they were problems. It was the, the very beginning of this. But if you sit there looking into your crystal ball, trying to time this perfectly, waiting for the perfect deal, it could pass you by. And all you've got left is a crystal ball, you know, and no real estate.
There you go. And you probably have to sell that crystal ball to eat. So. That's right. Yeah. All right, well, hey Steve, thanks for joining me on the intro portion today. And folks, let's go to our guest Jonathan Em, back with us in just a moment.
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It's my pleasure to welcome Jonathan W. Emord back to the show. He is one of the nation's leading free speech and constitutional attorneys. He has defeated the fda, the Food and Drug Administration in a remarkable eight cases in federal court and that's more times than any other attorney in American history. Congressman Ron Paul says that all freedom loving Americans are in debt to Jonathan E. Moore for his courtroom victories. And today I'd like to cover some things on the recent Supreme Court decision on Obamacare as well as the TSA that is incredibly annoying to all of us. And talk about free speech as well. Jonathan, welcome. How are you?
Just fine. How are you, Jason?
Good, good. It's great to have you back on the show. And you're coming to us from the Washington, D.C. area, right?
That's right.
Fantastic. Well, what would you like to take on first?
Whatever you'd like. Obamacare is probably a good one.
Sounds good. Seems like the Supreme Court really skirted the issue there when they said, you know, the mandate's unconstitutional. I remember hearing that the moment the verdict came out. And then it was like, oh, well, wait, wait a few seconds. They did say the mandate's unconstitutional, but they called it a tax and Congress has unlimited powers to tax, unfortunately. What are your thoughts?
Well, this is a really awful decision and it's awful for a number of reasons. The decision is internally inconsistent because the court, in assessing the Anti Injunction act, determined that the individual mandate was not a tax but was a penalty. And then when assessing it under the tax clause, they determined that this individual responsibility payment was not a penalty but was a tax. Well, of course, it can't be both a tax and a penalty under the law. It has to be one or the other. And in 18 instances in the legislation itself, it is referred to as a penalty. And in no instance is it referred to as a tax. And it's plainly not designed to raise revenue. If you achieve full compliance under the act, then no revenue is raised. It's only when people disobey the law and don't obtain insurance that it is deemed capable of raising revenue. So there is no revenue raising intent or purpose. Its purpose is to be used as a penalty. So the argument that Justice Roberts agreed to with what would otherwise have been the minority lacks integrity in the sense that it's not logical and it doesn't arise out of what Congress intended. What this does as a presidential matter is extremely damaging to because it enables Congress, whenever they pass legislation that's regulatory and highly intrusive, to not have to justify the regulation under the Commerce Clause which is the regulatory vehicle in the Article one, but instead simply to include a penalty provision which will be viewed as a tax by the Court. And for some reason the Court will accept any manner of intrusive regulation from the federal government so long as the it's tied to a tax. It's another problem with the decision. The decision does not recognize a distinction in the provisions within Article 1, those that are regulatory and those that are intended for revenue raising purposes that are otherwise not regulatory. You see, Article 1's commerce clause was to be the means by which Congress would be allowed a limited role in regulating economic affairs to prevent anticompetitive barriers to entry into the States from one state to another. And so it has a commerce application that's regulatory. In the case of the tax provisions, it's solely designed, intended to be used as a vehicle for raising revenue. It's not intended to be a justification external to the Commerce Clause that could defeat or trump the Commerce Clause in allowing any manner of regulation to. So what we have is a. Basically the court has struck a wound in the Constitution that creates a fissure through which its lifeblood now oozes out. And that is there's no limitation after this decision on the power of the federal government to regulate any aspect of Americans lives or any use of their after tax dollars, more particularly if so long as there is a financial penalty attached to non compliance, it can be upheld in mass under the taxing clause. So it's a disastrous decision and it's unsound, intellectually unsound. And I think Roberts was attempting to accommodate both sides. He held it unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause and then he held it to be not justifiable under the Necessary and Proper Clause, which was. Both of those decisions were correct. But then with this weak rationale, he upheld it with the vote of the otherwise minority members on tax grounds. So this is a really horrible outcome.
Yeah, yeah, it most certainly is. Well, you are fighting at least one case in I guess one of the circuit courts, right?
Yes. In the Sixth Circuit we have a case, United States Citizens association vs. Sebelius in which we are challenging Obamacare not only on the Commerce Clause grounds, which is now a moot part of the case because the Court found in our favor on Commerce Clause, of course. But the other aspect of the case that we present that was not presented in the Obamacare case before the Supreme Court is that in the case of our individual plaintiffs, it violates their civil liberties. In particular, it violates their freedom of association and intimate association. It violates their right of privacy, and it violates their liberty rights. And to state what those violations are in a nutshell, in the case of the intimate association right, you are said under the First Amendment to have a right of freedom of association, which includes a right of freedom to intimate association, ordinarily characterized as your attorney client relationship, for example, that the government may not abridge. And that relationship is characterized by certain characteristics that equally apply in the case of a physician, so that you have an intimate physician relationship. And in this case, the plaintiffs have relationships with doctors who do not take insurance and who accept payment out of pocket. They prefer that relationship because they believe this insures them the best possible care. There's no second guessing by insurers about the prudence or compensability of the provision of care so the physician can choose the best possible care for these well healed patients. And in addition, it violates their right to liberty because the Supreme Court has recognized that you have a liberty right to refuse medical treatment. If you have a right to refuse medical treatment, you have a correlative right to refuse payment for unwanted medical treatment. And that's what this is for them. Insurance covered care is unwanted care for them and they wish not to pay for it. So they have a liberty right not to pay for it. And they also have a right to privacy. By choosing to pay out of pocket and avoid the second guessing of insurance companies, they've also made a decision to impart to their physicians the intimate details of their medical history in the confidence that their physicians can keep that confidential, even from an insurance company, a third party, to get insurance, as is required of them, they would have to divulge all of these confidences for the insurance company to make a risk assessment about what they should be charged for the care for the insurance. And they wish not to divulge that information. So forcing them to do so by law violates their right of rights.
It just seems like maybe the bigger view of the Obamacare disaster is just a way to be for government to be far more intrusive into our lives, for them to dictate more and more of our behavior, for them to say you know, you can't buy a large soda pop. You can only get a 16 ounce one anymore. And when you take on the issue of health, I mean, and it just gives the government an unlimited ability to say what we can and can't do and what they can and can't know about us.
This is gross state paternalism. It's the first time in American history in which the Congress of the United States has presumed to be able to dictate to private parties what private purchases they make does not involve the taxing power. It's not for the purpose of raising revenue and then expending the revenue raised to perform some function. It is instead an order to you to buy a private product to pursue a government mandated interest. And that makes you a mere functionary of the federal government. It means that the freedom you have enjoyed through expenditure of your own after tax dollars without government interference is gone. It means that if the government next year wants to mandate that everyone purchase an electric car to avoid carbon pollution, they can do that. It means that if they want to compel you to avoid eating carbonate drinking carbonated beverages or sugarized beverages and instead to devote your resources to the purchase of other kinds of things, they can do that. It means that the government has the power to regulate the most intimate aspects of your lives, but most importantly to control all your after tax dollars. People object to the fact that they think, and rightly so, that that if they kept the tax dollars that are taken from them, they probably could do a better job in helping their own families and their communities than giving it all over to the federal government. Well, what if the federal government no longer has to tax you in order to play with your money and determine how to spend it in ways that the government thinks is in your own interest more than you think is in your interest, and can instead just dictate to you how to spend your own money without having to tax it to tell you. Okay, of your after tax dollars, 90% of it must be expended for the following health insurance. You know, people don't realize this, but those who are uninsured, who are required to acquire Insurance as of January 1, 2014, are going to experience a bill in the range of between 5 and $15,000 a year for each person who has to be insured. And so this is the biggest tax increase in American history. If we're to view it as a tax.
Unbelievable. Well, hey Jonathan, let's switch gears if we can. Just in the interest of time, I want to ask you about the good Old tsa, because I heard you talking about it on another radio show coast to coast. And what is the latest and ugliest, I won't say latest and greatest on the TSA's massive invasion of our privacy and control of our ability to travel. You know, all under the guise of safety, of course, which I don't know. I think the people they're harassing the most, I've never seen any of those types of people hijack any planes, but that's where we are. What's the latest with tsa?
Well, the TSA is perhaps one of the biggest boondoggles in American history because you have massive amounts of money being expended with virtually no basis upon which to show that the American passengers any safer than if none of that money was spent at all. And instead we relied on local law enforcement, on the FBI and on the National Guard to safeguard the transportation systems in this country. The TSA is an institution that is riddled with corruption, riddled with abuse, and is constantly making extraordinarily costly errors that interfere with airline transportation and cost businesses millions and millions of dollars atop what the taxpayers are having to pay for this massive infrastructure. There are tens of thousands of TSA agents despite that fact, and they're operating in every public airport despite that fact. There are over 17 instances of people who are on the terrorism watch list getting through the security of TSA and flying through the country without molestation of any kind. Yet at the same time we have a large number of people who are law abiding citizens who have been detained for extensive periods of time, have been asked questions about their intentions or the amount of money they're carrying and so forth, when they've committed no crime and when there's no probable cause that they are about to commit a crime. We have elderly people that are being subjected to humiliating search. We have infants being searched and we have pregnant women being searched. And we have people with disabilities being searched and being forced to be detained for periods of time to be searched. And this is done over and over again. You've got someone who has no criminal record, who has no tie to any organization that advocates the overthrow of the United States, and has been an honorable American citizen who may have even served their country and the military defending the nation from hostile people, even from the terrorists that this is supposedly aimed to prevent. And they're all forced to undergo these intrusions. And to what end? I mean, the successful interventions that have taken place to date have been driven by individual Americans, Americans taking matters into their own Hands and stopping terrorists. That has not been a result of the tsa. That has been a result of conscious Americans aware after 911 of suspicious behavior, jumping into the fray and taking over and stopping the SHU bomber or other people who have attempted to hijack planes. Moreover, even if we could achieve, at billions and billions of dollars of cost, a highly restrictive system for protecting airports at the point of entry into those lines leading into the security zones, you would still have a terrorist being able to blow people up before they get into a pass through the security in the lines themselves or in the parking lots or in other modes of transportation. I mean, it's just futile to.
No question. Yeah, it's not just airplanes, but I mean, I think there is, and I'm going to play defense of the TSA for just one second. I mean, there is an element to saying that if you get control of an airplane, you can do a lot more damage than you can, you know, I mean, I think it would be frankly, pretty easy for terrorists to attack trains and light rail systems and so forth. But certainly, I mean, people have gone into airports and done terrorist acts and put car bombs and so forth, but getting control of an airplane, I think they look at as kind of the holy grail.
Yeah, well, I think they think of other things these days, but they haven't been able to pull them off. And that is due to the interdiction. A defensive strategy, one that depends upon a defensive strategy, is bound to fail. An offensive strategy, you know, using intelligence to identify people who are. Who are conspiring to engage in these acts and then taking action against them is the most effective means of law enforcement, whether your enemy is the mob or whether it is another group of hoodlums such as these terrorist groups. And the problem with relying enormously on defensive systems is that it's bound to fail. And you simply cannot stop someone from exploding a bomb where people are present or if they're dedicated to committing suicide, to wreaking havoc anywhere in an airport, on a train, in any place where public people gather in a stadium, football.
Stadium, whatever shopping mall.
In our best defense, as a secondary measure, the best defense is an offense. Finding the sources of the breeding of these terrorist groups and eliminating them overseas, principally. But to the extent that there is evidence here at home of conspiracy to engage in some criminal activity, taking measures to put them under surveillance, and then arresting them if they are revealed to be terrorists, that's the kind of thing that works. You have to be very respectful domestically of the rights of people, and you shouldn't be wiretapping, using the Patriot act to wiretap people's phones without a court order, that's outrageous. We still need to use legal process and should domestically, whenever we are dealing with American citizens, they are entitled to their rights being protected. But when it comes to a defensive strategy, the thing that no one wants to talk about, but the thing that's essential to it is training the citizenry to be mindful of it, to take measures for their own defense, to be mindful of suspicious behavior, and to be willing to do and be prepared to do what is necessary to stop it. And despite the fact that there's been no attention addressed to that, the great American people have come to their own conclusion that that's the best way to deal with it. And so when you're on an airplane and there's suspicious behavior, whether it's simply a steward going nuts and being brought down by passengers, whether it's a pilot becoming flaky and having another pilot on board take over the reins or whatever it is, we've shown ourselves to be very resilient and very capable of handling a crisis now that we are aware that people are willing to commit suicide to bring down an airplane. So I think that greater consciousness is our best defense, second only to offensive measures to seek out, find terrorists and eliminate them.
Hey, we'll be back with you in just a moment. Take a listen to this.
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Well, is there any truth to the rumors I keep hearing about how TSA or some similar organization will try to control other forms of travel, maybe even on roads with checkpoints like we've seen in dictatorships.
Well, I don't know about that, but I do know that they have been successful in getting municipalities to kick out of the airports. Private firms that have been more effective in protecting passengers, demonstrably so, even in checks on the TSA system, more effective than the TSA agents And they've been successful in identifying those effective groups and then getting rid of them by lobbying local governments to revoke the contracts and discontinue the use of those programs. So they're defending their turf already and have been for many years. And they are defending inefficiency. And they bristle at the notion that improvements can be made fundamentally that require drastic changes. You don't need the number of people that they're employing by a long shot. You don't need the stupid methods of use of equipment that does nothing to ensure protection. You know, the scanning devices that are used and the contracts for the scanning devices, which cost the nation hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a fiasco because the devices were supposed to be able to identify the kinds of explosives that were used by the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, but they can't. And the sniffing devices.
Have error rates of as much as 70% or more. And a lot of the devices that they use are not even, that they purchased, are not even out being used. They're just sitting in warehouses. And the contracts have gone to companies that have, as they're represented as one of their principal representatives, the former head of the tsa.
Yep, more crony capitalism.
And this is, you know, this is the kind of thing that you get from government. This is the kind of thing that you have to expect. If you are going to ask people to have, without a clear mission, an amorphous security mission, and you give them massive amounts of money and say, fix it, fix it. Then they'll take that money after they realize that they can't fix it. And they'll end up deciding that it would be better to put that money in certain pockets than in others, because for your individual long term financial benefit, it'll redound your benefit if it goes in certain hands rather than others. So this is a typical story of government corruption. You look for a crisis, one arises, use it as a justification to create a massive new bureaucracy. You staff that bureaucracy with more people and more supervisors and more employees than you've ever seen before.
All people that will vote for your administration over and over again.
And those people then end up being poorly trained, incapable of stopping anything. In over 17 instances, terrorists getting known, people on the terrorist watch list who were to be stopped, got on airplanes and flew about the United States without being molested in one iota. While you have someone's grandfather or grandmother who's in a wheelchair being detained and carefully scrutinized to determine whether or not they're carrying an explosive this is why this type of thing doesn't work. It does not work. And it really just creates new opportunities for terrorist activity. Instead of having the bombs blow up inside the airplane, chances are they're going to blow up inside the airports, wherever they lines are formed, in front of the TSA stations. This is the kind of thing they're creating new risks. So stupid. The method is so stupid that they've adopted that it actually creates large group groupings of people who are stationary for extensive periods of time and enable someone who wishes to do something harmful to have a new opportunity to do that.
That they wouldn't have had before because the line wouldn't have been there.
And rather than have the free flow of people with people who are in more clandestine mode, observing them and reporting upon unusual behavior and activities, and talking with people and interacting with them and gathering information at random or based on clues or hints, and using technology to identify people who are potential terrorists and tracking them and doing it lawfully with court orders, they've chosen this other dumb method which says, okay, go through everybody, hello out there terrorists. You are going to walk through an electric gate, a radiation source gate that's going to view your body and we are going to identify you then. And what do you think? They're not going to. I mean, are they that stupid? Maybe. Maybe they'll blow themselves up while everyone's in line, or maybe they'll use some other way to get onto the plane. Or maybe they will shoot at the plane from the ground at a distance using a surface. So do we really think that every airplane is perfectly safe? No. Will it ever be perfectly safe?
No.
Was it perfectly safe from other hijackers and other people?
No.
The reality is it's not. How do you increase safety? You go out, you find the terrorists and you eliminate them. You go to foreign countries with special teams and operative, identify them and eliminate them, interdict their communications, disrupt their operations, disrupt the financial flow, all of those things that we're doing. But when it comes to the defense of the nation, each of us has to be a minute man. And that's our best defense.
What's the latest with your work on the area of the First Amendment and free speech?
Well, we are. The Food and Drug Administration has this thing called an evidence based system of review which they have created in an effort to try to get around the court of appeals decision in the landmark case Pearson v. Shillelagh that we won in the Pearson vs. Sholela case. The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit held that FDA must favor disclosure over suppression of nutrient disease information, and may not censor outright information that is backed by credible evidence, but instead must rely on reasonable qualifications to reveal the presence of inconclusive science. And so what the FDA has done in order to get around the decision is come up with a new system for evaluating evidence. And this new system, the evidence based system of review, is unscientific and offends scientists because it excludes a significant amount of evidence that scientists oftentimes find persuasive. So, so it eliminates all animal testing data, it eliminates all ex vivo scientific data, it downgrades all case studies it regards only as dispositive randomized control clinical trials, of course, the most expensive and difficult to obtain and ones that are very hard for chronic ailment risk reduction to show approve. And by saying that that's the only credible evidence and no claim may be allowed except that which has this sort of evidence, they have created this false paradigm. And so what they'll do is they'll say in a disclaimer for a nutrient disease claim, there is very limited scientific evidence supporting this claim, or there are only three studies that support this claim, or something to that effect, when in fact, truthfully, there may be hundreds of animal studies, there may be dozens of epidemiological studies, there may be numerous other ex vivo type tests and studies that indicate mechanisms of action and so on. All of which, combined with the data the agency is willing to consider, leads the scientists ordinarily to conclude that it's more probable than not that the evidence supports the association. So fda, by truncating the universe of science, is deceiving the American public and is continuing its regime of censorship of nutrient disease information. As if the eight decisions that we won from the courts against FDA on censorship of these types of claims never happened.
So what would be their motivation for doing this? Potentially?
Well, it's a very corrupt institution. It protects the drug industry from competition, and the drug industry controls the shots at fda. So what they're attempting to do is maintain a monopoly on the right to communicate therapeutic information to drug companies. By having an exclusive right to communicate therapeutic information, the drug industry can induce Americans to believe that the only way to prevent and to treat disease is to go to a physician and get a prescription, as opposed to engage in any kind of self help. So rather than treat chronic constipation with prune juice, you would go to a physician and get a prescription for a prescription drug that would treat constipation and that sort of thing so that you view with skepticism and little reliability natural methods of healing and you view as validated and government supported therapeutic claims for drugs. And as we know, the FDA has approved numerous drugs that its own medical reviewers have deemed too unsafe to enter the market, not least of which is Vioxx, but, but also Avandia and other drugs have been approved over the objection of FDA's own medical reviewers because as the associate director of the FDA Office of Drug Safety, David Graham has said, that FDA is a captive of the drug industry and the American people are virtually defenseless against the agency's approval of unsafe drugs.
It's just like the sec. You know, it's like a similar idea is that a lot of these securities laws, in my opinion, are set up just to limit competition and to keep the club small so only the big players can play and the small players can't get in the game. That's what always happens with government with this regulation. It always creates more and more monopolies and those monopolies are the ones that are in bed with government and in bed with certain administrations at any given time.
I couldn't agree more.
Yeah. Well, Jonathan, give out your website if you would and tell people where they can learn more about your fantastic work and just all the stuff you're doing to preserve individual liberties and protect the Constitution and keep the government in check.
Website is emoordemord.com and look forward to talking to you again. Jason.
Fantastic. Jonathan Emoord, thank you so much for joining us today.
Take care.
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