Dems engage in their circular firing squad, the radicals versus the traditionalists versus the moderates, and it s getting ugly out there. Plus, more economic news from the Trump administration, what actually would provide affordability, Republicans fighting over H-1B visas, and why are some supposed traditionalists now embracing polygyne, like men marrying more than one woman? We ll get to all that, but first, join Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Claven, and me next Wednesday night, 7 PM Eastern on Daily Wire Plus.
00:00:00.000Democrats engage in their circular firing squad, the radicals versus the traditionalists versus the moderates, and it's getting ugly out there.
00:00:07.000Plus, more economic news from the Trump administration.
00:00:10.000What actually would provide affordability?
00:00:21.000But first, join Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Claven, and me next Wednesday night, 7 p.m. Eastern on Daily Wire Plus, as we do what we do best.
00:00:28.000Debate, discuss, disagree on the biggest stories in politics and culture.
00:00:31.000Plus, we're world premiering the first official trailer for the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin.
00:00:35.000Friendly Fire Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern only on Daily Wire Plus.
00:00:39.000Well, the Democrats' circular firing squad continues.
00:00:42.000There is a vast battle happening inside the Democratic Party, ranging from the radicals led by people like Zaran Mamdani and AOC and Bernie Sanders to the more traditional liberals who don't seem to have any sort of systemic immunity to that, to the moderate Democrats who are increasingly feeling out of step with their own party.
00:01:00.000Meanwhile, President Trump just keeps trucking along.
00:01:03.000Yesterday was Veterans Day, and the president of the United States spent Veterans Day speaking about the value of our veterans.
00:01:13.000This morning on these hallowed grounds where generations of American heroes rest in eternal glory, we gather to fulfill the sacred duty of every free man and woman.
00:01:27.000On Veterans Day, we honor those who have worn the uniform, who have borne the battle, who have stood to watch and whose ranks have formed the mighty wall of flesh and blood, bravery, and devotion that has defended our freedom for 250 years.
00:01:47.000Today, to every veteran, we love our veterans.
00:01:52.000We say the words too often left unsaid.
00:02:12.000That was the president at Arlington National Cemetery yesterday.
00:02:16.000And here he was, again, saying everything that we have, we owe to the military, which is something, again, the Radical Democrats do not believe this.
00:02:24.000Yet every captain of industry, every pioneer of science, and every star whose brilliance has lit up the lights of Broadway all share one thing in common.
00:02:35.000They only had the chance to soar because the veterans had the courage to serve.
00:02:45.000The stars that you read about wouldn't be here without our veterans.
00:02:49.000Everything we have, everything our country has achieved has been purchased by the muscle, spine, and steel of the United States military.
00:02:58.000We owe it all to the fierce and noble men and women of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, Space Force, Coast Guard, and the United States Marines.
00:03:10.000Well, contrast that with how Hassan Piker has been spending the last few days.
00:03:15.000Apparently, he went to China, and while he was in China, he decided that he was going to blather about how America is terrible in a country that legitimately censors everything you do, kills its opposition, runs them over with tanks.
00:03:30.000This was Hassan Piker literally in Tiananmen Square, where protesters against the Chinese government were murdered, talking about American patriotism.
00:03:41.000I don't have any sort of patriotism in my heart for any.
00:03:48.000I'm not like a very Well, I mean, if that is the choice that Americans are put to, and if Democrats continue to embrace this sort of radicalism, then, you know, I think the Democrats are in some real trouble here.
00:04:01.000And the fact is, Hassan Piker is, of course, fairly close with Zarmamdandi, the new mayor-elect of New York.
00:04:07.000He was at his party, his victory party in New York, where he was going around literally telling camera people that it was a tragedy that the Soviet Union had collapsed.
00:04:16.000And so radicals are, in fact, taking over the Democratic Party.
00:04:19.000There's no question that they are the ones with the momentum at this point if the Democratic Party refuses to stand up and say no.
00:04:27.000So again, it's sort of fascinating the dynamic here.
00:04:30.000Ryan Ennos is a political scientist at Harvard, and he argues in his substack quoted in the New York Times today, that Mamdani's significance lies more in the fact that there was enough enthusiasm for change rooted in dissatisfaction with the status quo and anger at those who perpetuated that voters in a major election were willing to elect a true outsider candidate and to work hard enough to do so in the face of enormous establishment resistance.
00:04:51.000And this, I think, is the common thread you're seeing it on the right also, is that anger at the status quo leads people to embrace radicalism.
00:04:58.000And when there are no leaders who are willing to stand up and either say the truth or at least to tell people who are lying that they are lying, then what you end up with is the radicals taking over the party.
00:05:10.000And the radicals in the Democratic Party and the people on the fringes of the Democratic Party, they are an increasing number of people inside the Democratic Party.
00:05:17.000This is presumably how you end up with continued violence from the left at, for example, TPSA events.
00:05:23.000In a second, we'll get to whether the left can actually stop its radicals, plus the economy, affordability, what's the Fed going to do at the next rate meeting.
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00:07:42.000On Monday, there was a protest that turned into a quasi-small riot outside a TPUSA event at University of California, Berkeley.
00:07:50.000A demonstrator whose name is Jihad, Jihad DeFrepalez, 25, who apparently snatched a chain necklace from one of the attendees, and that left him in a vicious fight that left the victim covered in blood.
00:08:23.000That's a fair bit of blood on the face.
00:08:25.000And of course, you know, this sort of thing has unfortunately become not particularly rare when Antifa radicals and their allies show up at events like the TPUSA event.
00:08:37.000So, are there enough normie Democrats to stop this from taking over the party?
00:08:40.000Well, the problem for them is that the sort of normie Democrats, the liberals, the not even the moderates, I'm just talking about like the mainstream liberal Democratic Party has no systemic immunity to this sort of stuff.
00:08:51.000They are perfectly willing to go along with this sort of thing, which is why presumably they're so angry about the end of the government shutdown.
00:09:00.000What Chuck Schumer did here in allowing a vote, essentially, and eight Democrats in moderate states joining with the Republicans to end the government shutdown.
00:10:24.000You know, someone jokingly, or maybe it was serious, described me as a backbencher calling for Schumer's ouster.
00:10:31.000Some people who liked me came to my defense saying, no, he's not a backbencher.
00:10:34.000I said, no, the problem is those of us in the back need to get to the front.
00:10:37.000This party needs a change in the leadership.
00:10:43.000Okay, so again, what you now have inside the Democratic Party, you know, to look for a historical analogy, go back to the Russian Revolution, where you basically had some soft socialists, the so-called Russian whites, led by a guy named Alexander Kerensky, who are trying to hold off the Reds.
00:10:59.000And the Reds actually started off in an unenviable position militarily, and they ended up winning because eventually there wasn't enough systemic immunity to stop them.
00:11:08.000And that's basically where it seems we are right now.
00:11:11.000J.B. Pritzker, who also wants to run for president, the governor of Illinois, who must be lowered into the state capitol by Crane, he says that the government should have remained closed.
00:11:20.000Look, I have enormous respect and always have for Senator Durbin.
00:11:50.000I think that more could have been done here.
00:11:54.000Okay, so, you know, again, this is where the Democratic Party is going.
00:11:57.000They're following their radicals down the rabbit hole.
00:11:59.000And the Democrats who refuse to do so increasingly do seem out of touch, as Rocana says.
00:12:04.000Hakeem Jeffries, the would-be Speaker of the House, the House minority leader, is still out there praising Schumer, despite the fact that he actually disagreed with ending the government shutdown.
00:12:25.000And of course, Senate Democrats who voted no have made that clear.
00:12:30.000And what we've seen from Senate Democrats over the last seven weeks has been part of a valiant fight that we have waged together to stand up in defense of the health, the safety, and the economic well-being of the American people.
00:12:46.000So, again, does he seem as though he is in touch right now?
00:12:52.000I'm not sure that gap is particularly bridgeable.
00:12:54.000Maybe the last honest Democrat in the Congress is Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who points out that a basically normie position in America, just to be generally pro-Israel, which by the polls is a fully normie position, that is the mainstream moderate position in the United States.
00:13:11.000Doesn't mean you have to back everything Israel does, doesn't mean you have to love the prime minister of the state, but to just be generally supportive of Israel.
00:13:17.000That has now become incompatible with being a proud Democrat, according to Fetterman.
00:13:21.000I've met with widows, their husbands were lost in the Gaza War, and they have eight children raising eight children by their own.
00:13:36.000And that's been what's so difficult for me is like being devotion to Israel becoming increasingly incompatible with being a proud Democrat now, too.
00:13:48.000And so we'll see how long this current Democratic Party can last without splitting into pieces.
00:13:52.000Now, meanwhile, the biggest threat to the Republicans at this point is indeed the economy.
00:13:56.000This has been true for a very long time.
00:13:58.000The reality is, I've been saying for legitimately months, that an economy that is on the precipice, that feels uncertain, that is not a growth-oriented economy, is going to have some problems.
00:14:11.000And so there's been a lot of angst properly over affordability in the United States.
00:14:16.000It is true, as the president says, that there is some hangover here from the Biden years, obviously.
00:14:21.000Massive inflation during the Biden years.
00:14:23.000And over the course of the last year, moderate inflation would be the best way to describe it.
00:14:27.000Inflation clocking in on an annualized basis, like 3%, which is too high by about 50%, but it's not like the 9% or 10% or 11% we had during some months during the Biden administration.
00:14:38.000Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, he's blaming Joe Biden for the affordability crisis.
00:14:45.000I think that we inherited an affordability crisis.
00:14:52.000We have slowed the price increases down, and they are going to continue to slow down, and that real working class wages will go up, and that that will address the affordability issue.
00:15:04.000Okay, so again, that is the theory, and hopefully that is correct.
00:15:09.000Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the National Economic Council, he says that the inflation that we're seeing is actually coming down.
00:15:20.000He was asked why inflation has increased for five straight months.
00:15:24.000Well, I guess if you look at it from January, there's ups and downs and seasonals.
00:15:29.000But yeah, we have surprised on the downside.
00:15:32.000People were expecting it to accelerate, and it didn't.
00:15:35.000And I think that that is because this growth that we're getting is not from printing a massive amount of government debt and sending checks to people like Joe Biden did.
00:16:20.000I do not think that the current rate cuts are designed to actually do what the Federal Reserve is supposed to do, bring down inflation.
00:16:26.000Again, I've always been critical of the idea that you can have an agency with two mandates.
00:16:31.000For example, when you look at the Homeland Security Department, that department has been tasked with both facilitating legal immigration and ending illegal immigration.
00:16:58.000It should not be a function of inflationary government policy.
00:17:02.000Using the central bank as your policymaker of first resort is a mistake, and it leads to mistakes that tend to be inflationary in nature.
00:17:11.000Pretty rare that you get a Federal Reserve since the Great Depression that is deflationary in nature.
00:17:16.000They tend to favor inflation over deflation for obvious reasons.
00:17:20.000Well, now, apparently, the Federal Reserve is torn over an interest rate cut.
00:17:24.000According to the Wall Street Journal, officials are fractured over which poses the greater threat, persistent inflation or a sluggish labor market, and even a resumption of official economic data may not bridge the differences.
00:17:33.000The rupture has complicated what looked like a workable plan less than two months ago, though investors think a rate cut at the Fed's next meeting is still more likely than not.
00:17:41.000When policymakers agreed to cut rates by a quarter percent in September, 10 of 19 officials, a slim majority, penciled in cuts for October and December.
00:17:49.000Cutting rates at three consecutive meetings would echo the downward adjustments that Powell last made in 2019.
00:17:54.000You'll remember that what came after that was a gigantic inflationary spiral tapped off by COVID, but then radically accelerating under Joe Biden.
00:18:02.000A contingent of Hawks has questioned the need for further reductions.
00:18:05.000The resistance hardened after officials reduced rates again in late October to the current range between 3.75 and 4%.
00:18:13.000Hawks are challenging the presumption of another rate cut.
00:18:17.000And that is why presumably Jerome Powell has been sort of downplaying the expectations that there will be another rate cut in December.
00:18:23.000Again, it's hard to see why there should be a rate cut given the fact that liquidity conditions in the United States are not actually all that difficult.
00:18:29.000They're worse than they were a few years ago in terms of mortgages, in terms of car loans, but in terms of business loans, in terms of the ability to access capital for startups.
00:19:43.000Any attempt to do anything else is going to be at best a band-aid and at worst radically counterproductive to the cause of bringing down the prices.
00:19:51.000And so intervening with government-backed programs is more likely to lead to inflationary policy than the opposite.
00:19:58.000One of my favorite charts is a chart showing the differences in prices between government-subsidized products and non-government subsidized products over the course of the last 40 years in American life.
00:20:09.000Every single government subsidized product from education to healthcare has skyrocketed in terms of cost.
00:20:15.000Because when you increase demand and subsidize it, you end up with higher prices.
00:20:20.000Everything the government does not subsidize, the prices have gone down because that's how markets work.
00:20:24.000And so my advice for the Trump administration is to move less toward government solutions and more toward government getting out of the way.
00:20:34.000Deregulation, yes, lower taxes, less subsidies, fewer interventions in the market economy, more growth innovative policies.
00:20:46.000This is one of the reasons why I'm not a huge fan of this idea of now like a government-backed 50-year mortgage.
00:20:51.000All righty, coming up, we'll get to affordability.
00:20:53.000We'll get to President Trump with Laura Ingram talking about H1BVs.
00:21:58.000Also, in business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two of those.
00:22:02.000What if you could have all three at the same time?
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00:22:51.000There's been talk about trying to make housing more affordable by bringing down essentially what you pay on your monthly payment by extending your mortgage out from a 30-year mortgage to a 50-year mortgage.
00:23:03.000Now, one of the questions is why there aren't sort of natural 50-year mortgages.
00:23:07.000Why don't private lenders just offer a 50-year mortgage?
00:23:09.000And the answer is that private lenders don't offer 50-year mortgages because, in many cases, they are illegal, because the amount of money that you end up paying over the course of 50 years is so much more than the actual sticker price of a house that it's insane.
00:23:23.000If you're paying a fairly low interest rate on an $800,000 loan over the course of 50 years, you'll end up paying many times the original price of the house just in the interest because the loan is so long.
00:23:39.000So you're actually losing money every month.
00:23:42.000Beyond that, the gamble that is being made by the lender at that point is that if you default, your house will be worth more than it was.
00:23:49.000Okay, well, maybe that's true, but the problem is you are setting yourself up basically for a second subprime housing crisis.
00:23:55.000If ever the housing market drops off in terms of prices and all those banks then foreclose on the houses and have valueless assets in exchange for money that they lent out, then you have a major banking crisis that actually ends up eating the system.
00:24:10.000That's a point being made by the Wall Street Journal editorial board.
00:24:13.000High home prices are a problem, having soared 56% since January 2020.
00:24:17.000Two reasons are excessive government spending that fueled inflation and historically low pandemic era interest rates, which, of course, is right.
00:24:24.000Again, when you lower the interest rates, that is a subsidy to demand.
00:24:28.000Because maybe I wasn't thinking about taking out a mortgage at 7%, but I am thinking about taking out a second mortgage at 2%.
00:24:34.000The Federal Reserve then had to raise rates to bring inflation under control.
00:24:37.000The result, average monthly payments on a new home have climbed some 80% over the last five years.
00:24:42.000This means fewer young people can afford a home.
00:24:44.000The median age of first-time buyers this year reached an all-time high of 40 compared to the late 20s in the 1980s.
00:24:50.000Public surveys show the cost of housing is an acute worry for young Americans.
00:24:53.000So President Trump has now been sold, apparently, on the idea of a 50-year mortgage by Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
00:25:01.000The aim is to reduce monthly payments by amortizing the loan over a longer period.
00:25:04.000So instead of paying down the principal over 30 years, which is already a super long loan, by the way, most countries do not offer 30-year mortgages.
00:25:10.000Borrowers would now have 50 years to do it.
00:25:14.000So again, a 50-year mortgage, as I've said, it would cut monthly payments, but it would also radically increase the amount of interest that borrowers pay over the life of the loan.
00:25:23.000Also, borrowers may have to pay higher interest rates to compensate for the enormous risk that sometime over the next half century, you're going to default.
00:25:32.000And as the Wall Street Journal points out, this has happened before.
00:25:35.000As the housing bubble inflated, Fannie Mae began buying more four-year mortgages, which let borrowers take out bigger loans than they could otherwise afford.
00:25:41.000Borrowers were slower to build equity.
00:25:43.000Many walked away from their mortgages when the home prices collapsed.
00:26:09.000It turns out that government invention, intervention into the economy tends to create inflationary policy, not affordability.
00:26:17.000Okay, the president is, in fact, however, pursuing some policies that are supply-side policies intended to bring down the prices.
00:26:27.000One of those, for example, is the president's push for more oil drilling off the California coast.
00:26:33.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is poised to unveil a plan that would allow oil drilling off the California coast, according to people familiar with the matter.
00:26:41.000And of course, Gavin Newsom is eager for this.
00:26:57.000If you're worried about the price of oil, then actually increasing the supply of domestically produced oil is a very, very good thing.
00:27:04.000President Trump has said he can rapidly cut Americans' energy costs by 50% or more by expanding oil and gas production.
00:27:12.000Now, again, it'll be interesting to see who takes him up on it because there is, in fact, a supply-demand equilibrium where at a certain point, it costs more to actually drill the well than you will get by selling the oil.
00:27:23.000With that said, are we anywhere near that at this point?
00:27:27.000In April, Interior Secretary Doug Bergham directed his agency to begin to plan to develop a schedule for offshore oil and gas lease sales.
00:27:34.000The plan was part of the administration's focus on responsible offshore energy development.
00:27:39.000Again, this is good supply-side policy, and I hope that the president continues to pursue it.
00:27:43.000Meanwhile, one of the fascinating things that's happening on the right is that there are a lot of people on the right who seem to simultaneously complain about affordability, but also want to restrict the factors that lead to affordability.
00:28:07.000Living close to family might be one of those things.
00:28:10.000A beautiful sunset might be more important to you than affordability, right?
00:28:14.000There are lots of things in life that are more important than affordability.
00:28:16.000However, if you are simultaneously complaining about affordability and also seeking to restrict the supply of an item, then what you are saying is logically and economically incoherent.
00:28:29.000If you want the president to create more affordability in the United States, you need the prices of things to go down.
00:28:34.000The way the prices of things go down is with more supply, right?
00:29:06.000H-1B visas are a U.S. immigration program that allows employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations that require at least a bachelor's degree or equivalent expertise.
00:29:15.000Around 85,000 new H-1B visas are issued annually.
00:29:18.000The total number, including renewals, exceeds 400,000 per year.
00:29:21.000That means somebody got an H-1B last year and now they got it renewed for this year as well.
00:29:26.000So you're bringing in foreign workers mainly in tech.
00:29:30.000Something like 50% of all H-1B visas are coming in the tech industry.
00:29:34.000They're people who are coming over to work in computer engineering or computer science or something.
00:29:38.000They're working for Intel or they're working for Microsoft or they're working for Google.
00:29:43.000This has become a point of contention on the right, not because of the usual reasons that the right is concerned about immigration, but for economic reasons.
00:29:50.000So there are lots of reasons to be concerned about legal immigration in the United States, not just illegal immigration, legal immigration.
00:29:56.000So for example, if you are bringing in people who are low skilled, don't have jobs, are going to be dependent on welfare and be more of a net draw on the treasury than they are a benefit economically.
00:30:06.000That would be a reason not to let somebody into the country.
00:30:08.000Cultural differentiation, a massive reason not to let in certain people from certain countries.
00:30:13.000They might be qualified in computer science, but if they're coming here and they don't like American values and they like terrorist groups, for example, we shouldn't let them in.
00:30:23.000You can make the case that there are a lot of people who are being let in who are actively Chinese agents, infiltrators at our tech companies who are stealing IP.
00:30:32.000That would be an amazing reason not to let somebody in.
00:30:35.000However, the case that's being made right now against H-1B visas is that H-1B visas are bad economically speaking in general for the American population.
00:30:44.000Now, in order to make that case, you have to make the case that they are artificially driving down the price of labor, which we can argue about in a second, and that there are no externalities that are beneficial to bringing them in, that the country is better off banning them and using quote-unquote domestically supplied labor than bringing in people on H-1B visas.
00:31:05.000Now, if we're talking about pricing of labor, there's no question, obviously, that you bring in more people who are applicants for a job and the price of the labor goes down.
00:31:15.000Just in terms of affordability, it makes products more affordable.
00:31:18.000If labor is cheaper, products are more affordable.
00:31:20.000For the people who don't get those jobs, life is worse.
00:31:23.000For the broad American public, life is better because the affordability went up.
00:31:27.000Again, all economic policies have beneficiaries and have people who are harmed by those economic policies.
00:31:36.000The question is, how widespread are the beneficiaries and how discreet are the people who are being hurt and vice versa?
00:31:43.000Let's be adults about how we discuss economics when we're going to talk about these big issues.
00:31:47.000Okay, so here is the case for importing certain types of labor.
00:31:52.000One, there are, in fact, certain positions in the United States that require a level of expertise that may not be reachable in the numbers that are currently being turned out by American universities.
00:32:01.000That is a shortcoming of our educational system, and it is a problem.
00:32:05.000And so you can say we should up our game, education.
00:33:13.000The H-1B visa program is fatally flawed.
00:33:15.000It's not bringing in enough of the best.
00:33:17.000I will point out that many of our best founders in the United States are either immigrants or the children of immigrants who came in on H-1B visas or who came in just generally without an H-1B visa through other forms of legal immigration as students.
00:33:32.000And the reality is that maybe our screening procedures should be different, but we need to see specifics on what the screening procedures you're applying are that would allow for there to be, for example, an Elon Musk American citizen creating tens of thousands of jobs.
00:33:47.000Or the head of Google, Sinder Pinchai, creating tens of thousands of jobs.
00:33:53.000Or the head of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, creating tens of thousands of jobs.
00:33:57.000Now, you can say that maybe if those people didn't exist, there would be an American who just did that job, but that is now living in the realm of theory.
00:34:05.000It's not living in the realm of reality.
00:34:07.000Brain draining other countries is also a good thing for America in terms of our own global competitiveness.
00:34:12.000I'd rather bring all the smartest people from around the globe if they are going to, again, this is assuming the precondition that they are going to assimilate to American values, that they like America, that they are American patriots.
00:34:21.000If they're not, they shouldn't come in, period, no matter what industry they're in.
00:34:24.000But if they're going to be good American patriots, creating tens of thousands of jobs is a good thing while depriving those jobs from China, from other countries.
00:35:28.000But again, pretending that we can just go autaric, that is a mistake.
00:35:33.000The reason this comes up is because yesterday the president of the United States was on with Laura Ingram and he was asked about H-1B visas.
00:35:40.000And he's being ripped up by a certain portion of the right for his answer here, which, frankly, I think is mostly reasonable.
00:35:46.000There's never going to be a country like what we have right now.
00:35:49.000The Republicans have to talk about it later.
00:35:51.000And does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration?
00:35:55.000Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.
00:36:09.000No, you don't have certain talents and people have to learn.
00:36:13.000You can't take people off an unemployment, like an unemployment line and say, I'm going to put you into a factory where we're going to make missiles or I'm going to put you in the middle of the money.
00:36:50.000I mean, I know you and I disagree on this.
00:36:52.000You can't just say a country's coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant and going to take people off an unemployment line who haven't worked in five years, and they're going to start making missiles.
00:37:07.000The president happens to be right about this.
00:37:09.000When he says there isn't talent, again, people are reading that, I think, wrongly.
00:37:13.000He's saying there's not enough talent in particular industries at this time.
00:37:16.000You need a transitional skill set force to come in and sometimes teach Americans to do something.
00:37:20.000I'm not sure what's totally unreasonable about that.
00:37:23.000I think, frankly, there's a lot of demagoguery of these issues going on because people don't want to acknowledge the realities of how economics actually works.
00:37:29.000It's more fun to rail against the idea that there are any shortcomings at all anywhere in the American labor force, or that it's actually good to brain drain other countries, or that we should have the best and brightest from other places come here and engage in our economy.
00:37:46.000When Laura says, if you go back to the 1950s and 60s, how did we do it then?
00:37:49.000The answer is there were a lot of foreign-born people who actually were founding some of these companies and were involved in the production of some of our most sophisticated technologies.
00:37:58.000I mean, she's talking about missile technologies, for example.
00:38:01.000I mean, it was an ex-Nazi Werner von Braun who was heading up a rocket program in the United States.
00:38:07.000And that's on a defense of Werner von Braun's Nazi associations.
00:38:10.000That is a recognition that importation of talent actually matters when you are crafting a dynamic economy, of course, of course.
00:38:18.000But it seems that when it comes to affordability, people are more interested, again, in demagoguing the issues than actually talking about solutions to the issues.
00:38:25.000And if you do that, what you'll end up with is a lot of people who are angry about affordability, but get no actual answers that provide affordability.
00:38:32.000When Laura says she's interested in raising American wages, everyone's interested in raising American wages.
00:38:37.000If you raise the American wages and you raise the American prices faster than the wages, then the wages get eaten up by the price increases.
00:38:44.000This is what happened during the Biden administration.
00:38:46.000You need two things, increased wages and lowering prices.
00:38:50.000And the way that you do that is with innovation and with increased supply.
00:38:58.000I can artificially raise the wages in the city of Detroit in 1950 by unionizing the entire workforce and negotiating extraordinarily lucrative contracts.
00:39:06.000And by 1965, the American auto industry will be getting its lunch eaten by the Japanese.
00:39:14.000Again, there are ways to artificially increase the price of labor.
00:39:18.000What you end up doing is increasing the price of the product that the labor produces.
00:39:22.000And that ends up making that product non-competitive.
00:39:24.000And then eventually the industry dies.
00:39:28.000Short-term thinking here is the enemy of actual economic health, robust economic health in the long term, which requires innovation and malleability of labor supply and movability of labor is a big thing here.
00:39:40.000And again, none of this is to argue that we should have free, unfettered immigration or the United States is just in economic form.
00:39:46.000I started this conversation by acknowledging full scale.
00:39:49.000The H-1B visa program may be letting in too many people.
00:39:51.000It may be letting in the wrong people.
00:39:53.000But the argument that is being made against the H-1B visa is an argument that proves too much, as we used to say in law school.
00:40:00.000And it basically says we should simply shut our borders.
00:40:02.000And again, if what we are worried about is quote unquote the price of labor in the United States, and we are saying that we need higher wages, then we probably should go all the way and just ban tech.
00:40:13.000I mean, these arguments, these are not good arguments.
00:40:16.000The argument that economic health comes, for example, from artificially increasing the price of labor by restricting supply, that applies just as much to tech developments themselves, to robotics, for example, as it does to importation of labor.
00:40:31.000If you want to maintain manufacturing jobs in Ohio, and that's like the only thing you care about is increasing the actual wage paid for a manufacturing job in Ohio, you probably should ban all robotics.
00:40:41.000Because if you take a look at where all those manufacturing jobs went in the United States, manufacturing productivity did not go down in the United States.
00:40:47.000It has increased since NAFTA in the United States.
00:40:50.000The number of jobs went down, not because they were shipped to Mexico, but because robots are doing a lot of those jobs.
00:40:57.000It'll just make you globally and domestically non-competitive and make everybody broad spectrum poor.
00:41:02.000Because again, it's not just about the amount of money in your pocket.
00:41:05.000It's about what you can buy with that money.
00:41:07.000If the price of all the goods goes up and your wage goes up, but the price is going up faster and you have worse products, you don't have a better life.
00:41:14.000And that's the thing that everybody is seeking when it comes to affordability.
00:41:17.000Well, speaking of affordability, I did an interview last week that aired early this week with Trigonometry.
00:41:21.000That's Constantine Kissen and Francis Foster talking about the affordability debate in New York.
00:41:26.000And one of the things that apparently went viral is somebody taking, like clearly taking something I said out of context and then pretending that what I'm saying is that the solution, economically speaking, to affordability is people just leaving their houses, which is not what I'm saying.
00:41:40.000So I want to play the full clip so people can understand what I said.
00:41:42.000And then I'm happy to explain what I meant about general affordability and about the decisions that we make in our individual lives.
00:41:50.000And so the fact that everyone's flattering Mamzani by saying, well, you know, he did talk a lot about affordability.
00:41:55.000And what I keep saying to people is, well, affordability is not like Beetlejuice, where if you just say it over and over, it suddenly arrives.
00:42:01.000You actually have to pursue policies that are likely to alleviate an affordability problem.
00:42:06.000But if your solution is always give me more power, and it does seem like that is the solution of the day from both sides, actually, then you're likely to just continue penduluming one side to the other because people don't want to learn the actual lesson, which is if you actually want affordability, then either you have to change policies or change locations.
00:42:26.000And also, I think more broadly, it's not about affordability.
00:42:30.000We have trained an entire generation of people to believe that if their lives are not what they want them to be, it's the fault of systems as opposed to decisions that are in their own control.
00:42:39.000And politicians absolutely have a stake in selling that.
00:42:42.000A lot of people in our industry have a stake in selling that.
00:42:44.000It makes people feel good about themselves and bad about the world.
00:42:47.000And the reality is, if you want a better life, you should feel better about the world and worse about yourself until you actually go do the right things.
00:42:53.000I broadly, generally speaking, as a matter of principle, agree with you.
00:42:56.000But I mean, I was looking around at property prices, real estate prices in New York.
00:43:34.000I know that we've now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up.
00:43:38.000But the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that.
00:43:42.000The history of America is you go to a place where there is opportunity.
00:43:46.000And if the opportunities are limited here and they're not changing, then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities.
00:43:54.000Again, that's not saying that public policy can't change.
00:43:56.000I think it can, but I think that the solutions being offered are untenable.
00:44:00.000Okay, so I agree with me, as a famous man once said.
00:44:03.000So as you will note there, I'm offering two specific things for people to do.
00:44:08.000One is change the public policy where you're at.
00:44:10.000If you're in New York, change the public policies that the public policy is better, alleviate some of the problems that you have with affordability by doing all the things that I'm talking about right there.
00:44:19.000And then I say that as an individual, as an individual human being, if you are upset with the public policy and you feel like it's not going to change anytime in the near future and that your life is being ruined by that public policy, you're left with two choices.
00:44:32.000One is to sit there and be miserable and fulminate against a system that is not changing.
00:44:36.000Again, if you can change the system, great, do it.
00:44:39.000Vote out Mom Donnie, vote out the bad city council, vote in somebody who understands basic economics and isn't a third worldist socialist.
00:44:48.000And then there came a point where I realized California was never going to provide me the public policy backdrop for a successful life, the kind of life that I wanted to live.
00:45:11.000A couple of sisters were able to move.
00:45:13.000We were able to take our entire family, which at that point was actually geographically disparate and move into the same area.
00:45:18.000No one has talked more publicly about the importance of having a supportive family structure near you than I have.
00:45:25.000It is also true that if you're a young person, a 20, 21-year-old, 22-year-old, and you're not finding successful conditions in the city, and those conditions are not likely to change.
00:45:35.000If you want to seek happiness, you can either get angry at the system that's not going to change, which will not make your life better, or you can do the things that are in your control, like maybe looking outside of New York City.
00:45:49.000That is not an argument for, quote unquote, abandoning the city or abandoning your principles or anything like that.
00:45:55.000Every individual has to make their own decision about what level of bad policy they are willing to undergo in order to maintain their status in the city.
00:46:05.000But simply shouting at the moon doesn't solve problems.
00:46:09.000David Harsanyi has an excellent piece over at the Washington Examiner talking about this.
00:46:16.000And he quotes one of the very online people saying, quote, if we want Democrats to have a supermajority, this is the message for the GOP to adopt.
00:46:44.000If you get married, there are two of you in New York City, likely both of you have jobs now sharing one space.
00:46:51.000So it is cheaper for you to get married and live with your working spouse in that same apartment complex than it would have been for you to do it by yourself.
00:47:00.000Okay, the reason we have a marriage crisis in America is not because of economics.
00:47:05.000There are places all over the world that are poorer than the United States that have much higher marriage rates.
00:47:10.000In fact, one of the bizarre things about the way that the developed countries work is the more developed the country, the fewer people tend to get married and the fewer children they have.
00:47:19.000So, this notion that broad speaking, Americans are not having kids because they're too poor is silly.
00:47:53.000Okay, but as Harsanyi says, if there's a better way to worship a bank than borrowing 800 grand on a 30-year mortgage at 6.5% for a 900-square-foot home in Park Slope, I've yet to hear of it.
00:48:03.000Though no one, as far as I can tell, is arguing that the GOP should adopt moving as a central message.
00:48:08.000I'm not saying that that's the central message.
00:48:10.000I'm saying that you, in your personal life, when you're talking about what makes your life better, be accurate about what are the things that you can do to make your life better.
00:48:19.000As Harsanyi points out, it should be noted it's a myth that all or perhaps even most people grows about housing costs in expensive metros are native to those cities.
00:48:29.000Most of these people would not surrender familial and communal bonds if they relocated to less expensive cities.
00:48:34.000So, again, the idea that like you're living in New York because that's where your family is.
00:48:37.000For the most part, that's not true of a lot of these people.
00:48:39.00070% of the population in Washington is not native to DC.
00:48:45.000A huge percentage of New York is not native to DC.
00:48:50.000The average home price in New York is $735,000.
00:48:53.000It's not much better in the outlying suburbs or even exurbs.
00:48:55.000None of that is considering the sky-high cost of living in the area, says Harsanye.
00:48:59.000Years ago, a couple starting out could comfortably live in many towns on Long Island.
00:49:03.000You're paying three quarters of a million dollars for a new house, not to mention outlandish property taxes in any neighborhood with a decent school district.
00:49:09.000For that kind of money, a young couple could get a veritable mansion with a pool, parks, low taxes, more opportunity, and a thriving school district in a Dallas or Indianapolis suburb.
00:49:17.000There is nothing wrong with pointing that out.
00:50:03.000And this is why you get more and more radical politics in these unaffordable cities.
00:50:07.000But none of these politicians are going to solve that problem.
00:50:08.000Number one, the solutions they are applying are not actual solutions.
00:50:12.000And number two, they are lying to you because they don't even have solutions to these things.
00:50:17.000There's an article in the Washington Post today talking about affordable cities.
00:50:22.000And there's one in particular they point out: Pittsburgh.
00:50:25.000As real estate prices and interest rates shot up in recent years, the prospect of homeownership moved further for many Americans, especially young adults in large metro areas, where the median home price can run well over half a million dollars, but not in Pittsburgh.
00:50:36.000After dropping $10,000 to rehab a bathroom and decrepit kitchen cabinets, Isaac Ray and Liam Weaver bought their first home for $163,000.
00:50:47.000Though the housing market has tempered since the frenetic days of 2020, prices remain relentlessly high.
00:50:52.000The U.S. median topped $410,000 in the second quarter.
00:50:55.000That's more than 50% climb in five years, which of course is due to government inflationary policy.
00:51:01.000For people on the coasts, it's even higher.
00:51:51.000We're not talking about singles who are living in rent-controlled apartments with a couple of roommates.
00:51:56.000New York is like the center of American familial life.
00:52:00.000The reason I'm pointing this out is because if you want to have realistic expectations of how politics works and what it can achieve, your life will be better.
00:52:10.000And if you want to have realistic expectations about how you can make your own life better, which is what we all want, our own lives to be better, we want the lives of our families to be better, then recognizing baseline realities is the key component to happiness.
00:52:25.000Ignoring reality in favor of political utopianism is a recipe for personal unhappiness.
00:52:32.000And it's not something that, honestly, people on the right should be promoting.
00:52:37.000All righty, meanwhile, speaking of idiocy, Vogue has now decided in a piece by Shante Joseph that having a boyfriend is embarrassing.
00:52:45.000Again, these are the people complaining about affordability in New York.
00:52:48.000The people complaining about affordability are the people who write pieces for Vogue about having a boyfriend is embarrassing.
00:52:56.000I'm amazed by conservatives telling me that ultra-liberal New York and saying, hey, maybe you might want to consider moving to Nashville or Florida if you can, that somehow this is an anti-conservative point.
00:53:09.000According to this columnist, there's been a pronounced shift in the way people showcase their relationships online.
00:53:15.000Far from fully hard-launching romantic partners, straight women are opting for subtler signs, a hand on a steering wheel, clinking glasses at dinner, or the back of someone's head.
00:53:31.000Are people embarrassed by their boyfriends now, or is something more complicated going on?
00:53:34.000To me, it feels like the result of women wanting to straddle two worlds: one where they can receive the social benefit of having a partner, but also appear not so boyfriend-obsessed, they come across as culturally loserish.
00:53:45.000They want the prize in celebration of partnership, but understand the norminess of it, says Zoe Samudzi, the writer and activist.
00:53:51.000Women don't want to be seen as being all about their man, but they also want the clout that comes with being partnered.
00:53:59.000Apparently, some people believe in the evil eye, which is that your happy relationship will make your near friends upset or something, or people being icked out.
00:54:10.000Okay, a society that doesn't champion partnerships, that doesn't champion having a wife or a husband, is a society doomed to failure.
00:54:17.000Turns out the post-religious society is pretty bad.
00:54:20.000I also say that the post-traditional religious society is pretty bad.
00:54:26.000There is a movement that is, shall we say, post-traditional biblical that is growing in size.
00:54:36.000People who are sort of reinterpreting their religious tradition in order to, I would say, tickle their fancies.
00:54:45.000There is a pastor of a small non-denominational church in Canton, Missouri, who's now making a big deal out of the fact that according to his website, he has now taken a second wife.
00:54:57.000I don't mean he got divorced and then got married again.
00:55:01.000And so he looks at the biblical text and he says he has two beautiful wives.
00:55:05.000My second wife is expecting my eighth child.
00:55:08.000We're thrilled for what the Lord has done for our family.
00:55:12.000And then he says, in 2019, I discovered the surprising fact that God not only never prohibited polygamy throughout the entire biblical narrative, he divinely ordained it in several cases, including David, Jacob, and Joash in the book of Chronicles.
00:55:27.000God lawfully regulated the practice of plural marriage.
00:55:32.000And so, first of all, if you just got familiar with the Bible like six years ago and you read it for the first time, you're like, hey, look, there's polygamy in, you know, 3,000 years ago, 3,500 years ago.
00:55:44.000Congratulations on being able to read.
00:55:46.000And also congratulations on knowing nothing literally about the subsequent biblical tradition in Catholicism, Judaism, and Protestantism.
00:57:39.000Number two, basic rule of sort of interpretation of scripture, at least in the Old Testament context, which is the one that I'm more familiar with, obviously.
00:57:49.000Just because the Bible talks about people doing a thing does not mean that the Bible is happy with people doing the thing.
00:57:55.000God orders you in the Bible to do particular things or bans you from doing particular things.
00:58:01.000But if the Bible just gives quote unquote permission to do a thing, that doesn't mean that the Bible is celebrating the thing.
00:58:06.000It's usually a transitional rule, which is why in the year 1000 in Judaism, famously, there was a rabbi named Rabbi Nutam who banned plural marriage, like man married to more than one woman.
00:58:17.000In Christianity, as early as the sixth century, there are people who are already moving to ban plural marriage.
00:58:23.000It took another thousand years for that to be made official, but the reality is it fell out of common practice long before that.
00:58:55.000And when you just free yourself of all tradition and start freewheeling it, you end up in some pretty bad areas, whether that's secular or whether it is pseudo-religious in this way.
00:59:02.000Well, joining me on the line to discuss all of this is an actual expert on the other half of the Bible, the New Testament.
00:59:26.000So let's talk about polygyne, because apparently this is now a topic that is emerging once again.
00:59:32.000And one of the things that seems to happen fairly regularly is people going back, looking at the Bible, reading it without any sort of gloss, without any sort of interpretive background, and then simply saying things that have been basically obliterated by several thousand years of religious history.
00:59:48.000There's a pastor who calls himself a pastor who's now quoting the Bible to the effect that a man should be able to marry more than one woman.
00:59:54.000What do you make of this from a biblical perspective?
00:59:57.000Yeah, well, I would agree with what you said earlier, that just because something is described in scripture, it doesn't mean that it is commended in scripture.
01:00:06.000So I think it is the case, right, that we do see polygamy in the Old Testament, but that is far from saying it is somehow celebrated as a good.
01:00:16.000I think we could realize in a similar way to how adultery, sorry, not adultery, divorce was permitted in scripture.
01:00:28.000This was permitted, Christ says, because of the hardness of people's hearts.
01:00:33.000So this is the problem, I think, when you take the scriptures and you interpret it without the magisterium of the church.
01:00:38.000Forgive me, but I have to give you the Catholic answer.
01:00:40.000Now, I think most Protestants, right, the majority of Protestants are going to condemn this as unbiblical, and they'd be right too.
01:00:47.000I don't see polygamy popular among Christians ever, even today, and it won't be in the future.
01:00:54.000But one thing I think that the Catholic has that the Protestant doesn't is a teaching office to help him interpret sacred scripture.
01:01:02.000So just because we see polygamy, it doesn't follow that polygamy was God's idea.
01:01:07.000And Christ points us back to the beginning where it was not so.
01:01:15.000You know, one of the points you make here, and obviously for Catholics, you're talking about the authority of the Catholic Church, that the sort of Jewish equivalent would be the oral tradition, which is the idea that there is an interpretive tradition that's carried down over the course of thousands of years that actually, you know, you can go look it up, right?
01:01:29.000You can actually see what people have been saying about this sort of stuff for a very long time.
01:01:33.000You know, that is why one of the answers, one of the questions that's asked very often by secular atheists is they do the same thing, right?
01:01:40.000Richard Dawson will pick up the Bible and then he'll say, here's a verse I don't like.
01:01:46.000And you'll say, well, that's because you've never looked at any of the interpretive traditions surrounding that verse.
01:01:51.000And they'll say, well, you know, but if God's eternal, then why would he definitely, why would he have given this scripture?
01:01:55.000Why wouldn't you have just said the thing I want him to say?
01:01:57.000And the answer, of course, is that God was giving orders to a group of people 3,000 years ago who had a different set of priors than you or I have.
01:02:06.000Again, I'm going to use a Jewish reference here because that's the one I know.
01:02:09.000But for example, there is a section of the Bible where it talks about the war bride, right?
01:02:13.000Where the idea that there is a, you go out to war, there's a woman in the war, you bring her home, you shave her head, and then she sits in mourning for her family, and then you can marry her.
01:02:25.000And you read it and you say, this is really bad.
01:02:27.000And the rabbis, if you look into the tradition, thousands of years ago, they were talking about the idea that this was basically a temporary attempt by the Bible to stop people from engaging in mass rape.
01:02:39.000But now that we've moved beyond that, now that we've developed beyond that through a moral tradition, now we don't do that anymore.
01:02:44.000And that's not something that we should say is okay or engage in.
01:02:47.000The same thing would be true for indentured servitude, right?
01:02:49.000There are lots of things in the Bible that are pointing toward a way forward as humanity interprets the tradition, because what biblical living is, and I pronounce, you know, I put the emphasis on living there, is the interaction between human beings who have an interpretive capacity and a God who is trying to provide them a text with which to work.
01:03:09.000And ignoring either side of that equation is a mistake.
01:03:14.000Yeah, I mean, in Catholicism, we talk a lot about natural law.
01:03:17.000And one way to kind of describe natural law would just be to say when you use it in accord with its nature, it will flourish.
01:03:23.000And if you use it against its nature or in a way that's contrary to its nature, it won't.
01:03:28.000So if you take a tomato plant and put it in a closet and feed it only beer, it will die because you're treating it contrary to its nature.
01:03:36.000And I think the same thing is shown in the Bible with polygamy.
01:03:41.000You know, every narrative involving polygamy is marked with jealousy, like you mentioned earlier, heartbreak, rivalry, Sarah and Hagar, Leah and Rachel, etc.
01:03:50.000And so, again, as a Catholic, I think there are many, this is, forgive me for harping on this, but I mean, there are many sexual acts in scripture that are condemned by the church that the scripture is silent on.
01:04:04.000So the scripture doesn't directly and explicitly condemn self-abuse or masturbation, nor does it condemn masturbation, sorry, pornography or IVF, obviously.
01:04:16.000Even the scriptures that do, I think, condemn homosexual acts are quibbled with those who would like to reject it.
01:04:25.000In other words, if you're not going to submit yourself to the word of God as your master that knows more than you and is there to direct you so that you can flourish, I think what we all have a tendency to do is to be the master over the word of God and make it say what it wants us to say, but the results are disastrous.