Bureaucracy, Plutocracy, and Hypocrisy

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and the namesake Victor Davis-Hanson, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he's also the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a best-selling author, a military historian, a farmer.

Hey, you can read practically everything he writes.

It's to be found at victorhanson.com.

There are also plentiful links there to Victor's appearances on TV, radio programs, other podcasts.

Subscribe, and you will read the exclusive content of which there is a lot of.

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Victor's away.

He's leading a trip to Israel.

We did not want to have a two-week absence of Victor from the airwaves.

So we've pre-recorded these podcasts that ask the questions that you want Victor to answer.

And one of these questions is: if Victor were king for a day, what would he do about education?

And we will get his answer, get King Victor's answer right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, my good friend.

Here's a question somebody asked.

I would love to hear more about education and how VDH would fix it if he were King for a date.

I would also like to hear a very practical guide to helping myself and my 13-year-old daughter learn more about the classics without having to read long tomes that might lose the interest of a 13-year-old.

She loved the graphic novel of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

We read a ton of great older books, but I want to find ways to get more classics into her world and mine.

I would love a very practical field guide, which is accessible.

I don't know if it can be accessible, but Victory, if you have thoughts on that, and also, yeah, if I were king for a day in education, what would you do?

Well, you know, if you want to look at the nuts and bolts of how to run a college, you could do no worse than just look at Hillsdale College.

I've been teaching there for 17 years for two to four weeks every fall, but there's not one course with studies there in the catalog or no books for such mythical courses in the bookstore.

So that means there's no gender studies, there's no Black studies, there's no peace studies, there's no environmental studies.

All those subjects are dealt with in things like science, language, and literature and history and philosophy, but they're not ideologically driven.

And then the teachers don't talk about themselves and they don't use their podium to weigh in on political questions of the day.

And you don't have any diversity, equity, inclusion, czars and all that.

And that sounds like it's just banal to say that, but what it does is you just take out an enormous amount of labor and capital invested into nothing.

In other words, when you get rid of all those therapeutic classes and all those worthless administrative positions, then you have a lot more resources for smaller classes, more faculty encouragement, and the level of students and the level of the courses they're taught are just superb.

On a wider frame, I would do the following.

I would get rid of tenure and replace it with three to five year contracts that are contractual.

That is, I, the faculty member, promise to write this amount

this

many scholarly articles, or I will have the minimum teaching scores.

I know people don't like student evaluations or peer evaluations, but among all of those different calibrations, you can find a bad from good teacher.

And if you don't do it, you're gone.

I would give every

person who wants to be a high school or public school teacher the choice of going an extra year and a half and getting a master's degree in an academic discipline rather than the teaching credential.

So if you want to teach high school history, get an MA and write an MA thesis on the Crusades or something rather than go and get that therapeutic school of education and learn who's the out group or who's the marginalized group.

That would be, it would just, I think that would really emasculate the school of education, which would be a very good thing.

I don't know why these endowments, Jack, these $55 billion endowments at places like Harvard or 30, why aren't they taxable?

Why are we giving these universities these enormous tax breaks when they're completely political?

93% of faculty vote left-wing.

They don't believe in free speech.

If I went across the Stanford campus to the quote-unquote free speech and I got up on a pulpit and I said, hey, everybody, I want to make an argument that there's only two genders.

And I want to make an argument that there may be global warming, but it's not really, it's more cyclical.

It's more natural.

I don't think the government can solve it with the draconian methods even that they're proposing.

If I did something, or I don't think we should ever look at race anymore, we should be content of our character, I would be booed down.

I would be on a watch list.

So they don't believe in free speech.

They've not honest, they've raised the rate of tuition and movement board higher than the rate of inflation because the moral hazard is shifted to the federal government.

And the student defaults.

The school has already got its money, so it increases all of its costs because the government's going to cover it.

And the student is never told, let's say Victor wants to go to, I don't know, Cal State,

Fresno, or to me, I want to go to UC Riverside, or I want to go to Smith, or I want to go to Amherst.

Do I sit down at a table and I said, okay, I'm your consumer.

How much is it per class for four years?

What's the number of people who graduate in four years, five years, six years, seven years with a bachelor's degree?

What percentage drop out?

You list 18 majors in your catalog.

Can you give me the average employment rate within three years upon graduation of that major, that major, that major?

Can you give me after 10 years the average income and that major?

They don't give you any of that information.

So you go to a class, the professor's late, he just pontificates, he's off topic, and you're paying for it.

And then what I just said, they sneer out and say, oh, we're not corporate people, we're not business people.

Yeah, you are in a way, because you're not teaching students the inductive method.

And it's not me saying that.

When you look at objective test scores or SAT scores of the number of the average number of people in school, they're going down.

And anybody who's a professor knows that the quality of instruction is eroding geometrically.

Each year, it's fewer, fewer books you can assign, fewer, fewer standards you can enforce because it's the tyranny of the majority.

And now we have equity grading, we have equity attendance, we have equity everything.

So it's a mess.

And I think it's the online alternative where you get brilliant lecturers, they can download it.

I really like that.

These online universities and vocational training, I think the university is going to, it's so overpopulated with administrators and people who don't teach.

It's not a sustainable economic project.

It's going to start to erode.

Yeah.

And it's the hothouse for ideas that destroy America.

Every bad idea, you can trace it back to the university.

Yeah.

Victor, I have another monarchical question, but before we get to that, you just mentioned inductive and we have another question.

Hi, Victor.

I would like to hear more of your insights into deductive versus inductive or abstract versus concrete.

This came up on an episode several months back.

Would you like to take that on?

Yeah, you know, etymology is a very helpful tool

when you want to know what a word means.

So duke.

in Latin means to lead.

And you add, of course, de means from

and in

means into.

So inductive, you're leading somebody somewhere, and deductive, you're leading somebody from something.

So a deductive person, and that's what most education is today, starts with a premise.

So let's say you sign up in a gender studies class.

It's going to be deductive.

By that, I mean it's going to say that women have been oppressed since antiquity.

They have to

unite and lobby and against men, that men are pretty bad people.

And they're probably going to say gender is increasingly socially constructed.

And once you have that deductive premise, all the reading, all the argumentation follow from that.

If it was an inductive class, you would go in there and you would read something about the bankruptcy of the feminist movement in the 60s.

You would read.

Betty Frieden, how wonderful it was.

Then you would read something about transgenderism, that it's sexual dysmorphia or something.

And then you would read about, you know, an advocacy.

You read all different views, and then at the end of the class, you, the student, once you were given those inductive tools and showed how to read and criticize and analyze, you would come to your own conclusion based on that evidence.

And the professor would not mind.

I had professors at UC Santa Cruz that said, if I have everybody turns out to be a right-wing nut or a communist, I don't care.

All I ask you is to support your inductive conclusions with analysis and evidence.

Thanks, Victor.

Back to

royalty.

Well, let's get another reader question in here.

How about we do that right after this important message?

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

By the the way, Victor, at the beginning, I was just mentioning the website, your website, victorhanson.com, and subscribing.

And earlier today, I was reading this exclusive series

you are in the midst of writing.

It's called The Old Breed, and it's just, it's beautiful.

And I can read it because I'm a subscriber.

And those who are not cannot read these things.

I really want to commend you for this series.

It's part of your child's garden of animals, or I forget exactly what child's garden of animals.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, it's a beautiful.

Your writings about your early your life, growing up on the farm, and things like that are sort of cataloged there.

It's beautiful stuff.

Anyway, anyway, let me move on.

Here's a question.

Kind listener asks: I've heard Victor speak a lot about democracy and oligarchy, but not much about monarchy.

I'd love to hear his thoughts on Europe's tradition of monarchy and any lessons it can teach us.

Victor, if I can add a little permutation here, I guess, you know, current monarchy, which is essentially constitutional monarchy, I mean, they exist in Europe still in some nations.

But maybe if you'd address that as you see fit, but also maybe monarchy as we still think of it traditionally, pre-World War I,

more empowered monarchy, maybe you can address that too.

Well, monarchy is, again, etymologically, it means mono, one.

So it's the arche, the rule of one person.

Democracy is the rule of the demos, a lot of people.

and oligarchy is the rule of a few people aristocracy is the era story the so-called best the best born so there there's about eight or nine alternatives for government you can see it in the modern world and the complaint against monarchy is that it's entirely not merucratic that in the give and take of politics supposedly we get battlers or innovative people or crusader, whatever term we use, bad or good, and they filter to the top and they become approved by the people.

But with monarchy, they're born into power and they can be very good or very bad.

But it's one person exercises that power, at least originally it did.

And that means you roll the dice when you only have one chance.

The ancient support for it, and there's a great passage in Herodotus where Herodotus makes Syracuse call in his advisor and say, you tell me the argument from oligarchy, you tell me the one for democracy or monarchy.

But the argument is you get continuity.

You have a one family, and the family understands its responsibilities.

A good example is Elizabeth II,

the Queen of England.

She's done a superb job.

She's united the people.

She has a face of Britain that's very helpful to British people.

People admire her.

And then the downside is this face of Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Prince Harry, all of them, right?

Royalty.

I thought you liked liked Prince Harry, Victor.

Oh, excuse me.

I was thinking of, is Prince Harry the one married to Megan Markle?

Yeah, our favorite.

Did I say something positive about him once when he was fighting in Afghanistan?

Maybe.

Yeah, even a stop clock is right twice a day, right?

But that

you just roll the dice.

And our country was formed, what,

an antithesis to monarchy, to King George.

But you can argue in both ways.

You can say that in the critical end of the 19th century, we were confronted with two or three choices.

We chose a constitutional republic.

France chose a radical republic, but it was really a radical, anything goes democracy, which turned into autocracy, rule of the self with Napoleon.

And you had a constitutional monarchy in Britain.

And if you read what Edmund Burke was writing about in the French Revolution, they would have been much better off after they got rid of the Bourbons to create a constitutional republic and keep the Bourbons around and slowly, slowly transition to a full-fledged republic rather than just turn it over to Robespierre and the Jacobin.

Well, Victor, we're going to move in a different direction here back to America.

Let's see.

Do you have two or three questions?

Well, here's the first one.

How can such statistically insignificant minority populations, such as the trans folk, hold the entire nation and corporate America hostage.

And then a related question from someone else.

I think it's in the same general category.

That's the kind of question you would have when you bump into a friend at a bar.

How the hell did we get here?

How did such a tide of progressivism sweep over us?

So that's a broad question, but then I think separate, but still related.

How can the trans community in America have such outsized power and influence?

Well, you know, power is just there and people take it.

But in a democracy that's under the auspices of a constitutional republic, the people have the power, 51%.

Doesn't mean minorities don't have rights.

It doesn't mean we don't have checks and balances, but the people.

what Lincoln said, by the people, for the people, of the people.

And when you give a tiny fragment of the population veto power over

what an illustrious history of women's sports and you say that 0.015 of the population is going to decide in the year of our lord 2022 that a biological man can destroy all the records of prior wonderful female athletes and if you object

you're a fill in the blanks well how did they get that power because you didn't object and you were worried.

And so, how did the Bolsheviks take power?

How did the Jacobins take power?

How did Mussolini take power?

How did Hitler take power?

They understood human nature.

And, you know, it's sort of like getting around a lot of people and shooting the first person and said, anybody want to swarm me?

And that's what was so good about the Western, you know, when they were swarming the jail, the old marshal get out with the double-barrel shotgun and said, I can't stop all of you, but you right there are the ringleader, I'm going to shoot you.

And so that's how power works.

And we gave it over to people.

I know that I was once in a university, I won't mention which one, and I had a student who would say the following, Jack,

I don't want to talk about Homer as a Latina.

Okay.

Okay.

And then she'd say, Why are we reading through cities?

It means nothing to me as a Latina.

And she went on and on.

And I just finally said, you can't do that.

Don't self-identify.

Everybody has a unique personality and heritage.

Yours is just as good or just as bad, but you're drawing undue attention to us and distracting the class.

And she said, as a Latina, I'm not going to.

And I just said, okay, that did it.

So for the rest of the class, I said, as an old white guy, I want to tell you as an old white guy, why you should be reading Thucydides.

There's a big disbate over the Melian dialogues, but as an old white guy, and I did that.

And of course, the dean called me up and said, Victor, have you lost your mind?

You self-identified as a white male.

I said, Yes, I did.

How else to stop that?

But the point is, all of us, according to our station, let these people direct our lives.

We were afraid of being canceled.

We were afraid of being embarrassed.

We were afraid of having our name in the paper.

We were afraid of even losing our job.

And you had a lot to be afraid of because these people control all the levers of influence and power.

And we gone over them ad nauseum from NFL to academia to the corporate boardroom.

But they don't have the people.

Their ideas don't sync with nature.

So all of us, again, each according to our station, some more bold than others, have a duty to say, not this pig, non hick porkus.

You're not going to intimidate me.

I'm sorry.

You do your worst.

I do my best.

And we'll see who wins.

And so.

I shudder sometimes at the letters that I get.

I get kind of spooked when I go to an airport and somebody comes up and wants to quote unquote, can I just have a moment of your time?

Nine out of 10 times, it's friendly.

The 10th time, it's, oh my God.

Or when I walk across campus and I see particular Stanford professors that have said things about me, you know, it's not easy, but I think that we all have a responsibility to speak out.

If we all spoke out and said to Disney, you know what?

I'm never going to go to your damn park again until you behave,

trying to destroy people's lives.

How do you like that?

And if we said to Coca-Cola, if you go after the state of Georgia, or is it Pepsi?

I want to make sure I don't get the wrong or American Airlines,

you're going to pay a price.

You're going to pay a price with my pocketbook.

Or we're going to speak up.

I know I just wrote an article about BLM, what a fraud it was, and how they misused their funds and bought mansions.

And then they were racist, and they cheered on that BLM activist from Milwaukee, they cheered on the mass killing in Kenosha and all of that.

So I got so much hate mail from that.

But we got to speak up because they don't have any, they don't have the people.

And this woke thing is going to disappear.

And believe me, they're going to be embarrassed when they look back at what their lives, the people who did this to the country and created this reign of terror.

Your picture on that point about speaking up, and we may have mentioned this on a podcast, but that whole Leah Thomas, the swimmer.

And when it was all said and done, right, the last race was raced and he, and he is a he,

stood on his final, you know, platform.

It was at that point that really the parents of these, of the girls who were swimmers who were being, you know, squeezed out of competition by a man in a woman's sport.

That's when they spoke up.

That's when they started to attack the, you know, the NCAA, et cetera.

And the time to do it would have been

the true women athletes themselves.

When the gun went off, they all should have stayed on the platform and let that clown swim all by himself.

But the time to act was, I think, ahead of time, as opposed to after the fact.

May feel good.

You can say, oh, you know, we protested, but not when you could have really maybe have made a difference.

So I just, my long-winded way of.

No, it's absolutely right.

You have to speak out.

You have to speak out.

And

if you don't speak out, I know that when one, I won't mention his name, when one of my advisors and graduates called up and said, you're not going to get a job.

We've got too many white males.

And I looked around the department.

These are all well-paid white males that were telling me this.

And I had interviews and they said, sorry, we're not going to hire you white males.

And I said, well, this isn't fair.

Well, this wasn't fair to people who weren't white.

I said, if it wasn't, if our grandfathers were not fair to

Black classes, why don't you resign?

You've had 30 years.

So I'd said to myself when I was 25, I'm never, ever going to be quiet about racial preferences, whether they're against black people or brown people or for them, but I'm not going to ever.

And I've tried to speak out.

I did again and again.

I remember I had, I wasn't even tenured.

A philosophy professor came in.

I said, we've got a brilliant person.

And if we had him in classics, he's going to publish.

He's a great teacher.

The students love him.

And he said, well,

you know, you don't have enough white males in your department.

And I'm the University Affirmative Action Officer.

I just can't buy into this perpetuation of the white male creed.

I said, okay, well, you're in the philosophy department.

There's seven of you.

There's not one, anybody but a white male.

Yes, but we're very progressive and we're doing our best to diversify after we're gone.

I said, why wait?

I said, you're very undistinguished.

You haven't written a book and you've been here 30 years.

But why don't you just fall on your sword and say, you know what?

I was a mediocre white male, true, and I got hired without what we call ABD, all the dissertation, when you never be hired today, and your mediocre dissertation was not publishable, and you were a mediocre teacher.

That's you.

And so why don't you get out and let's get some talented Hispanic and Black people.

But you, you.

Oh, this is chaos.

This is nihilism.

You're crazy.

Next thing I knew, somebody came up to me and said, did you tell Professor so-and-so that he was mediocre and you should quit?

And you can go too far.

My dad was kind of, I mentioned him before, but my gosh, he did that his entire life.

And my mom, my poor mother, he'd come home and she said, oh, my Bill, what did you do today?

She was a lawyer and, you know, had legal, what do I have to do today to patch up the mess?

It was always the guy who was unemployed, teacher, they fired him.

They fired him without cause.

He went to my dad, was an administrator and said, can you help me, Mr.

Hansen?

And he thought he was on mission number 41 over Tokyo.

So yeah, we'll go over there and we'll get through the B29 somehow.

And the next thing I know, he was teaching bonehead English, my dad was, as punishment for helping somebody.

My mom goes, oh my God, you just lost four years of raises, Bill.

Why did you do this?

So you got to be careful, but you have to speak out.

Yeah.

I guess the Dale Carnegie's book was not to be found in the Hanson House.

So, hey, Victor, quick, let's make this a very quick answer, and then we'll have one final question.

Someone writes, while I deplore the current administration, we're talking about the Biden administration,

I believe the current inflation was already baked in by decades of overspending.

Any solution will be extremely unpopular.

Do you expect a defeat of the DNC, Democratic National Committee, let's just say the current Democratic field, do you expect a defeat of them will will cause classic Democrats to re-emerge?

I remember Proxmire, Bradley, Moynihan.

Will a moderate Democrat political class emerge out of what we expect to be a forthcoming political, biblical obliteration, Victor?

I think it will.

I mean, they did this before.

As I said earlier in a podcast, Hubert Humphrey was kind of an old-fashioned liberal, but he wasn't, he was a hawk on defense, he was an anti-communist.

And he lost to Nixon.

And so the idea was, well, he only lost by 100,000 votes.

So next time we're going to get out the vote and we're going to win.

And so, oh, no, we're going to go way, way socialist left.

So they nominated, it was part of it was the death of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

But in 72, they nominated a leftist, George McGovern, and they got one of the largest, second largest landslide in history.

And out of that, people said, we're not going to do this again.

So then they had a southern obscure governor, and they thought he was going to be a moderate.

And it turned out Jimmy Carter was not a moderate.

And so he lost to Reagan.

And then Mondale was not a moderate, and he lost.

And Dukakis was a liberal.

And they finally said, we're not going to do this anymore.

We're going to get a guy who either can fake it.

or is a moderate and up came bill clinton and he won two he never won 51 of the vote but he won.

And then Al Gore had that, he wasn't the nutty Al Gore of today.

He had the southern accent and they thought he was a, he won the popular vote.

So there's always a reaction.

So yes, they are going to get creamed in the midterm.

And then people are going to say to AOC, you did it, and shut the blank up senator war.

And Bernie, it's time for you to go out to pasture.

That will happen.

If it's big enough repudiation, I think it will be.

And so that Democratic Party that the questioner reference doesn't exist.

They keep saying, I don't recognize the Republicans.

If you took the Republican agenda of the last five presidents and you compared them to the MAGA agenda, there's about five differences.

Huge overlap, though.

Yes, absolutely.

There's China and trade.

There's the border is different.

There's optional military engagements are different.

We don't do that.

And you could argue that there's not

physical discipline, although George Bush almost doubled the debt.

And then everything else is the same.

Trump, gosh, I mean, most Republicans would have fool bore ahead on energy, deregulate, cut taxes, that kind of stuff.

And so it wasn't the Republican Party that changed.

It was a Democratic Party that didn't exist anymore.

And so, yeah, there's going to be some changes.

And I wish I could tell you that it's going to come because of a principled disagreement.

It's not.

It's going to come from a repudiation of hard left dogma.

These people are not Democrats.

I keep saying that.

They are,

I know them in the academic world.

I've met them.

I have friends like that.

You can't argue with them.

You can defeat them in the polls.

And people, you know, we've said this before, the majority are not ideological.

They will go with a winner.

Once these people bring down the Democratic Party and they destroy it at a local and regional level, they will be held accountable by their own people.

And so I think it'll already start happening and we'll see.

Well, Victor, the last question for today's podcast is going to be about arguing with people on the other side.

And we'll get to that question right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We thank our listeners who sent in questions that we are using to populate four episodes while Victor is gallivanting over in Israel.

I'm now in Israel, everybody.

I picture myself at a bar.

This kind of question comes up as someone's asking you for advice.

So here's what the listener submitted.

And I know this person is from Australia.

I'm a conservative, but I have family members in the U.S.

Rust Belt who often boast about the fact that they are quote unquote single-issue voters and will quote only vote for someone who is enthusiastically pro-union, end quote.

Translation, a lifetime of voting for democrats only the same family members ironically then spend a considerable amount of time lamenting the fact that there are too many immigrants gas prices are too high moral decay is rampant crime is increasing and that there are too many job shortages in blue-collar industries now here victor the sage

advising Victor Davis Hansen.

What is the best strategy for speaking with them about the politics and the path forward?

Should I persuade them to simply simply hop off the single issue voting train and hope they see a broader picture at play?

Or do I go deeper and somehow politely reveal the ugly truth that the leftist politicians they help elect are indeed the authors of many of the problems that they experience as everyday citizens?

Yeah, I'm afraid it's the latter.

I mean, I know so many never Trump people

and they were so sanctimonious and they bought into

good old Joe Biden from Scranton's going to unite us.

They still are, by the way, Victor.

I know they are, but when I see them, I can't talk to them.

I thought, you brought us $7 a gallon diesel fuel.

You brought us $100 a sheet for one inch plywood.

You brought us Afghanistan.

You brought us that.

whatever it is, it's not a border.

It's something else.

It's revolving.

I don't know what it is.

You brought us woke critical race theory.

You brought us this 11% wholesale inflation.

And I have no sympathy for them.

I can't, they knew what they were doing.

And so it's not encouraging because it's going to bring all of this down.

But, you know, one of my favorite blogs, you read powerline.com, you know, Powerline.com.

Oh, yeah, no, I love Scott Johnson and Steve.

Yeah, great.

It's a great website.

And John, and all three of them are wonderful.

Yeah.

And today they had, I mean, it was a one, two, three punch.

It was just spectacular about Biden's latest Dear in the Headlights moment as indicative and emblematic of what these people did by putting him in there, knowingly, knowingly putting a person that wasn't full control of his mind.

And then there was something on the homeless in San Francisco and putting them in these hotels and what it has done.

It's created sort of a lord of the flies.

they're going down the record of the Biden administration.

And it's just devastating.

And this is just, Jack, these are the political consequences, but we're not even talking about the cultural consequences that fiction, you know, Disney didn't used to be Disney.

And Netflix got famous because they were providing quality movie-like series on Netflix.

And

CNN used to be not just in the airports, but it was, it gave you global news.

I used to watch it because I could find out what was happening in Europe and stuff if you wanted to.

And they've destroyed all of these cultural institutions have been destroyed by the left.

And I used to know a lot of professors that were liberals that I liked, but they don't exist anymore.

And students, I avoid a lot of students where I work because they're not even reasonable people.

And so this is the cultural social manifestations of this left-wing political dogma, and it's everywhere.

Yeah, but Victor, two things about Biden.

He didn't create it.

These ideologies have been marching through the institutions for years.

But anyone who thought he wasn't going to try to supersize it as president was a fool.

And

we're talking about never Trumpers among them.

Yeah, we knew what we were getting and we got it.

And you should have known it too.

And then he was also, as a public official, one of the main culprits in the cultural destruction or the ferocity of our partisan politics.

That was Senator Joe Biden played a central role.

He did.

And he had a despicable character, despicable, despicable, what he did to Clarence Thomas in those judicial hearings or Robert Bork or the lies that he promulgated about the unfortunate circumstances, how his first wife died, blaming an innocent truck driver for years, or his relationships with his daughter or his son.

I don't need to get into that.

Everything about or his plagiarism or his out-and-out lying.

When he said again and again, I have never met any of Hunter's partners.

And now we hear that, what is it, Jack?

Maybe $5 million he gave in legal help to Hunter that he either didn't report his income or he didn't report.

If he did, he didn't report it as a gift tax.

Hunter didn't.

Where did he get the $5 million from?

Where did he get it?

Maybe a senator's salary?

I don't know.

Yes, inflation has been there forever, but the way you can deal with inflation is one of two things: the fear of inflation.

You either restrict the money supply or you create an enormous amount of supplies so that even though you're increasing the money supply, you're doing it in accordance with population growth or increased productivity.

And that means more goods are out there always than there is available people to buy them and the prices stay moderate.

But you do what Biden did, and you vastly quickly increase the money supply four or five trillion dollars, and you do it with a pent-up demand on the horizon of post-COVID, you know, people being free to go vacation or fix their homes or whatever.

And then you restrict supply by cutting energy and pipelines and leases and more regulations and your power, then you're restricting supply where you're increasing the money.

And we've never had this in 40 years.

This is exactly what Milton Friedman spent his whole life warning us about.

Yes, Trump was dissolute on the budget.

And even before COVID, he ran a nearly trillion-dollar deficit.

But we only had one or 2% inflation because he turned to the other side and gave so many incentives for people to bring money back to the United States that had been offshore or outsourced and so much energy development, encouragement, and so much deregulation that people went went out and they created a heck of a lot of goods and services.

And the money supply did not increase enough to cause inflation for that.

And it was just the opposite with Biden.

So that's what he did.

He owns it.

And he'll talk about anything.

but what he did.

It'll be Putin's war, Putin's inflation, Putin's gas prices.

And then the weird thing, I'll just end on this rant.

Have you seen these articles that people are writing now on the left?

They're thinking, why expensive homes are really good for you?

Why $6 gas is not all that bad?

Why Joe Biden's economy is underappreciated?

It's just like Orwellian.

It is.

And so this is again locomotive called the voters coming down the tracks.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris tied to the tracks with their own ideological handcuffs, can't get out.

And what do you do when there's no way out?

You scream, January 6th,

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, guns are growing legs and walking around shooting people, white supremacy, white supremacy.

And that's about it.

You know what's coming.

And then maybe there'll be another multi-billionaire or two that will infuse some dark money.

But we pretty much know what they're going to do from now in November, but it's not going to work.

They're trapped.

I think I'm going to come out to Selma on November 8th and watch the election returns.

You'd be very welcome.

My new office and you're welcome to stay there.

I'm building a little office.

Absolutely.

That might be fun.

Hey, I want to thank you, Victor, for all the wisdom you shared today.

Thank our listeners for listening and for spreading the news about the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

If you happen to listen through iTunes, please consider leaving a review and leave a comment also.

If you wish, we do read the comments.

That's where we got many of the questions from with the iTunes comments.

So that's about all the time we have today.

Thank you for listening.

We'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you for listening, everybody.

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