Every Economic Collapse Starts EXACTLY Like This...

On December 7th of 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, sending much of the US's naval fleet to the seafloor and killing thousands of Americans. The next day, [music] the United States declared war. History would mark this infamous day as one of the starkest examples of around and find out. Admiral Yamamoto is often quoted as saying, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." Whether the quote is apocryphal or not, the statement is true. What the US did next is unparalleled in human history. On a dime, we pointed our incredible industrial base single-mindedly to winning the war. What followed was industrial shock and awe. American industry produced nearly 100,000 tanks, 200,000 artillery pieces, and a staggering 300,000 aircraft. All of that was in addition to manufacturing nearly 2/3 of all Allied military equipment. A feat of production so incredible that it buried the Axis powers and ensured none of us had to learn German or Japanese. America proved we had the will to fight and the ability to outproduce anyone on the planet. We mobilized like a command economy briefly, and then we unwound it once we were again living free. And what did we do with that incredibly well-earned freedom? We went back to sleep. We globalized. We decayed. And we have fallen behind, way behind. If you look at the numbers, China now looks far more like the World War II era US than the US does. China is now the world's industrial superpower. They outproduce everyone, and because they're a top-down command economy, they can move far faster than the US with all of its political gridlock. But they're a dictatorship. Let that hang in the air while you think about this. Right now, the stakes are sky-high. The US and China are on a collision course economically, politically, and militarily. They're stuck in a historical pattern known as Thucydides' Trap. This is where you have a declining superpower going up against a rising superpower, and the last 16 times this has happened in history, the two nations have ended up going to war 12 times. Each side will do virtually anything to win. The question is, does that include the US becoming authoritarian? We've done it before, and right now the US is starting to make the same kind of policy decisions that China is famous for. Right now, the US government is no longer just giving companies tax incentives, they're buying them. That means politics, not performance, could soon decide which businesses win and which ones get wiped out. That's the same as deciding which investors win and which ones get wiped out. So, the question we have to ask is, should America be taking a page out of China's playbook? And if we do, will the free market die? And will your investments be the next casualty? The answer to that question is anything but obvious. We're going to walk through the issue in four critical parts. Part four is my answer and what I think the right path forward is, but it will only make sense if you understand what's really going on right now between the US and China. So, [music] don't skip around. This one goes down straight, no chaser. Welcome to part one, the choice we have to make. As of 2023, China is responsible for roughly 29% of all global manufacturing value add. That's more than the next four countries combined, which includes the US. China makes over half of the world's steel, producing 76 million metric tons in December of last year alone, while the US clocked in at a measly 6.7 million metric tons for that same time period. As for shipbuilding, China controls over half of global commercial shipbuilding as well. The US is just 0.1%. [music] A number so grotesque, most mainstream think tanks consider it a national security threat, which it is. During COVID, it became clear just how many things, like masks and pharmaceuticals, were controlled by China. And they control 70% of the rare earth minerals that power every phone, drone, and EV on Earth. If global competition were a footrace, China [music] is sprinting while America argues over the rulebook. China plans. Our politicians do and say whatever they need to to get reelected. And right now, China is winning. Such is the power of a command economy. When you can marshal capital, labor, and infrastructure by fiat, you can move mountains. You can pick a goal on the horizon and just march everyone towards it. No shareholder votes, no focus group polling, no need to even build consensus. It's efficient, [music] disciplined, and ruthless. And that's why China can build a bridge in a month while we spend a decade arguing over the environmental impact statement. When a top-down system works, it is breathtaking. But when it fails, it fails spectacularly. The same centralization that lets you move fast also guarantees that when you make a mistake, everyone goes down with you. Mao taught us all that lesson in the most terrifying fashion imaginable. 45 million people dead from policies that a could have told you were a terrible idea. But to tell him no was to be beaten to death, shot, starved, or exiled. And today, under Xi Jinping, China is relearning the same lesson, albeit more sophisticated. Ghost cities, a housing collapse, reeducation camps, forced labor, and entrepreneurs vanishing simply for questioning the party. The founding fathers of America understood this danger all too well. That's why the US was founded on the ideal of freedom expressly because they had lived under tyranny and they knew just how bad and arbitrary it could get. But freedom, the free market, and democracy also have their tradeoffs. And that's why we now have to make a choice. Do we embrace free market capitalism with all of its mess and chaos so that we can reap its never-ending innovation? Or, in order to catch up with China and make up for the mistakes of globalism, do we now begin copying China? We could go on for days with all of the ways that China has outmaneuvered the US in recent decades. And we are clearly no longer the World War II era America that could kick anyone's ass on the battlefield. We're now the soft, financialized America that tries to solve all of its problems with sanctions and tariffs. But that hasn't even stopped post-Soviet Russia, let alone the juggernaut that is China. And honestly, [music] you could make an argument that we chose long ago to abandon the free market. That we're already a command economy. We're just doing it poorly. We've got enough regulations right now to stifle innovation, enough money in politics to guarantee regulatory capture, and >> [music] >> in the past year, the US government has started taking direct ownership stakes in key American companies like Intel, MP Materials, and US Steel. And unlike in times past, there's no obvious plan to exit those positions once this crisis has passed. Backed by the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Defense, these ownership stakes mark a bold move from being a supporter of an industry to becoming an active player tilting the scales. For decades, economists and advisers alike warned against using government-controlled capital to guide sectors, pick winners, and crush competition. Now though, [music] the US has had its head turned by a new belle of the ball. Over the past [music] 40 years, China's economy has exploded, and America has gotten bogged down in culture war We got so convinced that we were the best, we forgot we climbed to the top by being the best, by outcompeting everyone else. We tried to take all of the risk out of competition. We tried to shame people for being aggressive. We prioritized safety over freedom, and we watched our lead erode faster than any economic lead that massive >> [music] >> has ever eroded before. And now that we're behind, we're open to changing the rules this country was founded on, the very predicate of our success, in order to catch back up. And make no mistake, this is all about your portfolio as much as it is about policies and politics. >> [music] >> Because when government capital distorts markets, valuations detach from reality. Companies look valuable because they're protected, not because they're productive. Everything becomes insider trading because when the political winds shift, so does a company's fortunes, and potentially yours with them. Once the state becomes a top shareholder, CEOs stop chasing consumers and start chasing congressional appropriations. R&D budgets turn into lobbying budgets, and the market shifts from who builds the best product to who plays the policy game the best. That's how you get fewer moonshots and more safe, [music] state-approved mediocrity. It's how you strangle the entrepreneurial impulse that made America the engine of global innovation in the first place. There's also a bigger threat lurking, the erosion of free market capitalism. When the government owns a slice of the economy, it holds power to influence outcomes, [music] which means insiders get access and outsiders get shut out. This leads to favoritism, rigged competition, and a system that rewards connections over creativity. But it can't be denied that it lets you move fast. [music] Now, I wish the dilemma that we face right now was simply a moral one, but it's not. We'll get back to the show in a moment, but first, let's talk about why you keep starting and stopping. Most people consume endless content, but never master and deploy the fundamentals. That's exactly why Shortform exists. Take Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's packed with proven systems for building habits that stick, but the book is 300 pages of theory, mixed with stories, [music] and most people read it, then struggle to apply what they learned. Shortform cuts through that problem. Their guides aren't just summaries. They're written by real human writers who extract [music] Clear's core systems and give you step-by-step implementation guides. Plus, they create master guides that combine insights from different experts on the same topic. And their AI browser extension breaks down articles, [music] videos, and even political analysis, so you get the key frameworks from everything you consume. Click the link below and get a free trial and 3 months off the annual plan to access the decision-making systems behind every major breakthrough. And now, let's get back to the show. So, welcome to part two, you got to give the devil his due, China's playbook and their incredible rise. China's GDP per capita rose from $180 in 1978 to over 12,500 in 2024. That's a 70-fold increase. In that same time period, China's pulled approximately 800 million people out of extreme poverty, the greatest poverty reduction in human history. As American wages stagnated, the typical Chinese workers' wages went up nearly 30X. As US life expectancy declined, in part due to deaths of despair, China's skyrocketed from 66 years in 1978 to 78 years today, a jump of 12 years in a single generation. It's not hard to see why America would look at what China is doing with extreme envy. But if we're not careful, we risk learning the wrong lesson. There's no doubt one must give the devil his due. What China has done since Mao's death has been nothing short of extraordinary. But as I go to great lengths to remind people, Deng Xiaoping, who replaced Mao, realized the catastrophe of Mao was in centralizing decision-making. to make all of the decisions for a country had led to mass murder and biblical levels of starvation. Ironically, Deng Xiaoping, the man responsible for China's true Great Leap Forward, looked at the devastation brought on by Mao's central planning, and then looked at America, her free market, and the prosperity that it brought, and decided to copy that. That was the innovation that actually propelled China forward. Capitalism, the very thing America is in the process of abandoning in favor of a post-Deng Chinese model that, thanks to Xi Jinping, is headed back in the horrifying Mao direction. People forget the timeline. Beginning in 1978, Deng Xiaoping opened the economy to private markets, private enterprise, and foreign capital. And the results of that were seismic. And he did it by inviting Americans to come in and teach them about the American system. From creating thousands of banks and decentralizing loan applications to the structure of venture capital itself, they took it all in and replicated our model and our success, and in many ways honestly surpassed it. But make no mistake, Deng's reforms came with strings. The Communist Party never relinquished ultimate political control. The state kept the levers of credit, land policy, and licensing. It would let private enterprises grow until it looked like private enterprise might grow into a rival. Fast-forward to Xi Jinping. He inherited a nation far wealthier than Deng could have ever imagined. And he had learned the lesson of Russia's collapse, and so Xi set out to prevent that from happening in China. He understood that once people begin questioning the party, stability weakens, and he was not going to let that happen in China. His tool set was blunt and comprehensive, an expansive anti-corruption drive that purged anyone who wasn't loyal and ensured corporations cooperated with the party. Hundreds of thousands of officials gone and a regulatory offensive that installed party officials into even the most successful and powerful private firms. He rewired party oversight into corporate boardrooms everywhere and made clear who ultimately decides the rules. That's the danger of a system built on authoritarianism and not freedom. When entrepreneurs publicly challenged the system or even just sounded too independent, the state responded aggressively. The most famous example was Jack Ma, one of the world's richest and most successful men. On the eve of Ant Group's $37 billion IPO, Jack Ma made the fatal error of criticizing bank regulators. The IPO was instantly halted and Jack Ma was essentially kidnapped and reeducated. Ma's public disappearance and Ant's enforced restructuring served as a vicious warning to the entire entrepreneurial class. Companies were told to align with state priorities or face severe consequences. Fines, restructuring, and reeducation were all on the menu. These moves were not subtle. They conveyed an unmistakable message, the party will allow markets only to the extent markets remain politically useful. The government also allowed, and in many cases engineered, huge economic bubbles, most famously in real estate. For years, local governments relied on land sales for economic progress, and developers were incentivized to borrow cheaply, ultimately building entire ghost cities on speculative demand to please Xi. The model blew up spectacularly when credit tightened and buyers began to balk. That led to the 2021 collapse of Evergrande, a company with roughly $300 in liabilities at its peak. That failure exposed just how leveraged and brittle China's property economy had become. The fallout was immediate. Frozen projects, distressed homeowners, and a contagion of developer failures that punctured confidence in that growth model. The state has since tried to manage the damage, but the era of easy finance growth is clearly over because markets operate on physics. Now, there are moral costs as well. Alongside economic control, the party has deployed coercive measures against minorities, most notoriously in Xinjiang, where reeducation camps and mass detentions have drawn international condemnation and documented human rights abuses. The same political machinery that builds superfast rail and industrial capacity is also capable of mass lockdowns, mass coercion, and what some have called concentration camps for the Uyghurs. That duality, breathtaking development on one hand and brutal repression on the other, is the devil's bargain of a command economy. The thing people always seem to lose sight of is the fact that when you're telling people what to do and how to do it, eventually someone is going to disagree. In a free country, you have to convince them. You have to use persuasion. In an authoritarian system, you just use guns. And in the end, boys and girls, the guns always come out. So, when choosing that system, you are choosing violence. So, when America looks at that system and swoons, every alarm bell I have goes off. China imitating elements of the free market, that made sense. But here's the playbook we'd be copying if we decide to ape China now. Step one, centralize political power. Step two, embed the government inside of companies by buying up state-owned shares. Step three, drive enormous gains in output, incomes, and capacity for a chosen set of winners. Step four, when private power threatens political control or when speculative bubbles form or when people just disagree, step in with force. The result is a system where market incentives run on an authoritarian chassis. It produces the kind of scale and speed that democracies can only envy, and I get why it's seductive, but boy, oh boy, does it have a downside. But despite that, I think this decision is a lot harder than I'm making it sound because history has proven in times of crisis, even America, the land of the free, has set freedom aside and folded under something approaching a temporary dictatorship. So, before part four and my path forward will make any sense, we've got to go through part three. America has some China in its past. In 1942, the US government created the War Production Board, giving Washington the power to tell companies like Ford, GM, and Chrysler exactly what to build. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, revived for World War II, issued more than 35 billion dollars in government loans direct to the private sector to build refineries, synthetic rubber plants, and shipyards. Cold War era R&D was basically corporate socialism. In 1964, the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, spent federal money >> [music] >> to wire universities and defense firms together, which is basically the prototype for today's internet. In the 1980s, when Japan threatened US semiconductor dominance, Washington formed Sematech, a government-funded consortium of chip makers backed by the Pentagon, the first public-private partnership of the digital age. Post-9/11, the federal government a direct investor again. DARPA, In-Q-Tel, and the Department of Energy's loan programs financed the early research behind Google Earth, Palantir, and even Tesla's first factory. And today, the CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act have Washington allocating hundreds of billions in subsidies, equity stakes, and tax credits to micromanage everything from chip fabs to EV batteries, the very definition of hybrid state-sponsored capitalism. These are the same kind of state-backed capital plays China is making. Hard reality is America abandoned true capitalism a long time ago. We like to think we only do it in times of war and crisis, but in all honesty, government interference in the free market has been at a fever pitch ever since 1913, a year that should truly live in infamy. As they say, remember why you started. >> [music] >> And the founders didn't fight to found a new country just so, once again, the government could control the economy. They wanted government to secure property rights, enforce contracts, mint sound money, and then get out of the way. Alexander Hamilton argued for a national bank, but only to stabilize credit after the revolution. His goal was not to try and direct industry. Jefferson and Madison hated even the idea of that much involvement and fought him on principle. Jefferson said banks were more dangerous than standing armies. Madison warned that concentrated credit power would enslave the people under monopolies of paper, and they were right. The ultimate compromise they struck was to put strict limits in place and a term on the bank's charter of only 20 years. When Congress tried to renew the charter in 1811, Jeffersonians killed it on the floor. Their fear was very simple. When the state controls the money, it controls the men. They wanted a marketplace of competing enterprises, not a command economy hiding under a powdered wig. For roughly a century, that's how America ran. The federal government stayed small. The dollar was gold-backed, and markets, though often brutal, self-corrected fast. Entrepreneurs built railroads, telegraphs, and oil empires with almost no federal direction. Boom, bust, rebuild, repeat. That was the chaotic cycle that forged the richest [music] industrial society in human history. But then, slowly, Washington began tightening its grip. Now, please note, this is how you protect the rich from losing their money and begin to stagnate the class structure. When wealthy people can't lose, because the entities they're invested in are too big to fail or too systemically important, you now have a caste system and an economy that never self-corrects. If rich people can't become poor through a series of bad decisions, you have a sick economy. And that is what we've done to ourselves. In 1913, the diabolical Federal Reserve Act was passed, creating a permanent central bank. I did a whole video on it, which you can watch right here. For now, just know that it created an unelected committee with the power to print and price money. And this is why most young people today can't afford a house and why socialism, the historically murderous economic system, is gaining in popularity. Not to be outdone, in 1933, FDR's New Deal installed wage controls, a wave of agencies that turned crisis management into permanent bureaucracy, and the disastrous industry codes of fair competition, which turned the US economy into a top-down command economy inside of a democracy. We'll get back to the show in just a second, but first, let's talk about something that should terrify you every time you go online. You're being tracked. Your browsing habits, your location, your personal data, it's all being collected, sold, and exploited. And if you think incognito mode protects you, think again. That's where a VPN like Surfshark comes in. This is about more than privacy. It's about taking back control of your digital life. Surfshark encrypts your internet connection, so no one can track what you're doing online. Not your internet provider, not advertisers, not hackers. You become invisible. Plus, it lets you access content from anywhere in the world, and one account covers unlimited devices. Here is the deal. Surfshark has plans starting at less than two dollars a month, and if you're not satisfied, they've got a 30-day money-back guarantee. Click the link below to get four extra months. And now, let's get back to the show. Created under the National Industrial Recovery Act, NIRA, of 1933, these mandates were one of the centerpieces of FDR's New Deal. Here's what the act entailed. The NIRA empowered industries to form government-approved cartels that set prices, wages, production quotas, and even hours. These weren't guidelines. They were legally enforceable codes signed by the president [music] and carrying the force of law. The idea was to end cutthroat competition during the Depression by coordinating business behavior from the top down. Over 500 such codes were written, covering everything from steel and oil to dry cleaning and dog grooming. The Supreme Court, however, struck them down in 1935, ruling that they amounted to unconstitutional delegation of legislative power. Attempts to control our economy didn't stop there, however. In 1971, Nixon closed the gold window, severing dollar from any gold backing whatsoever, and ending fiscal restraint once and for all. From then on, money became little more than a political instrument, its supply being dictated by policy, not the production of additional valuable goods. By the 1970s and 80s, a maze of regulation from the EPA to OSHA to price and interest rate caps had crept into every major sector, throttling risk-taking while entrenching incumbents who could afford compliance lawyers. This is known as regulatory capture, and it's another brick in the wall that keeps the rich rich. Economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek sounded the alarm when regulation and monetary manipulation replaced competition, capitalism mutates into corporatism, where profits are protected by politics >> [music] >> rather than outperforming the competition. Today, we might call that industrial policy, but the founding fathers would have called it tyranny. The way America was designed around freedom was radical precisely because it trusted that innovation would flow from the creative chaos of man [music] pursuing his own self-interests, curiosities, delusions of grandeur, and passions. By giving people the right to be wrong, man is freed up from the overbearing will of those who are convinced they know better, but who rarely do. Freedom is driven by the belief that the individual is divine and therefore worthy of sovereignty, that markets are self-correcting by nature, and that trusting man's innate desire to compete for glory and riches will lead to far more innovation than tempers, centralized control, or safety. There is no doubt that freedom brings with it the unsettling creative destruction of mistakes, overexuberance, greed, and plain stupidity, but it also allows for merit and productivity to steer the ship. When you try to remove all of the danger and risk from freedom, you make docile, anxious people, and innovation stagnates. The moment we decide safety matters more than freedom, we begin engineering our own decline. And that's what's happened over the last 40 years. [music] As China allowed for more freedoms, they rose. As America strengthened its centralized control, we declined. We've lost sight of the fact that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. And now, we need to consciously decide what trade-offs we're willing to accept. Since the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913, we have lulled people into the belief that they can have a command economy to protect the little guy, but in reality, it has come at a huge cost that has already led America into a cold civil war, which you are in right now, and it risks pushing us into a hot revolution. We already have political assassinations and states warring against the federal government based on party lines, and it's only going to get worse from here if we don't have a unified vision for how we march forward. So, welcome to part four, the dangerous path forward. Throughout the entire 19th century, federal spending averaged less than 5% of GDP. Almost all of it went to defense, the postal service, and infrastructure. From 1820 to 1900, US real GDP per capita roughly tripled, vaulting America from a frontier economy to an industrial powerhouse in just two generations. From 1870 to 1913, America's share of global manufacturing output jumped from roughly [music] 23% to 32% surpassing even the entire British Empire. >> [music] >> Real wages rose about 60% between 1860 and 1913, while prices stayed flat or fell thanks to relentless innovation. [music] Prices should go down over time. Despite Gilded Age tycoons, upward mobility in the US was extraordinary. By 1900, they had the highest worker wages in the world. [music] By 1900, the US rail network stretched 190,000 miles, a continent-spanning logistics grid built largely by private capital. Roughly 25 million immigrants arrived between 1880 and 1913. That's the largest voluntary migration in history. And they came chasing opportunity, not government handouts. The United States' most explosive, world-beating growth happened under extremely limited federal [music] government. By 1950, with just 6% of the world's population, America produced roughly 27% of all global GDP. Liberty, not dictate, built the richest society in human history. But as government spending, regulation, and central planning rose through the 20th century, the growth rate, dynamism, and social mobility that defined the American miracle steadily flattened. The freer the economy, the faster America grew. When Washington's share of GDP was tiny, innovation, immigration, and mobility exploded. As the state grew larger, however, with the addition of central banking and income tax, both were added in the same year, the explosion of the alphabet agencies, massive entitlements, and immoral deficit spending, growth [music] slowed, volatility increased, and inequality stabilized into a permanent caste structure. Said as plainly as possible, America didn't rise because government managed the economy. It rose until >> [music] >> the government started managing the economy. So, if we're going to stop our managed decline and get back to being an unparalleled economic [music] powerhouse, what do we need to do? Especially now in this unique moment where we're going up against a rising power like China. Do we take a page out of their playbook, or do we get back to a true free market, the thing that powered our initial rise? Whatever we choose, it's not going to be a utopia. It will be risky. There is danger, no matter what we choose. Everything is a trade-off. But here is what I think is our best path forward. One, [music] build a strategy based on first principles. Economies operate on physics. This is why patterns occur over and over again in history. >> [music] >> Every time you run the experiment, you're going to get similar results. Here are the rules to remember. Nothing [music] comes for free. Everything is paid for by someone. Economics is a PvPvE game. Everyone is competing against everyone else in a highly complex, chaotic environment. [music] Cooperation is a strategy to win, not an outcome in itself. The government should be a referee, not a player. Economic systems are too complex to predict, and therefore too complex to control from the top down. It can work for brief periods, but on a long enough timeline, rapid, decentralized decision-making will always be more efficient [music] than a command economy. Governments tend towards tyranny, so their power should be checked relentlessly. The rules of the game need to be fair and transparent. The government should therefore secure property rights and enforce contracts and the rule of law. Economies must be compatible with human nature. Humans pursue self-interests far more reliably than altruistic ones. So, the system should be designed to take advantage of that. Said another way, the system should optimize for [music] freedom and fairness. Two, focus on infrastructure and innovation. The government has never been, nor will it ever be, the home of innovation because the government doesn't have to compete. Because of that, [music] it does not have the necessary stimulus it needs to innovate. Its focus should be entirely on laying the foundation for the private sector, which does have to compete, to innovate on top of it. Whether that's building roads, the internet, or giving the kind of tax incentives that welcome all comers, the government should see its job as creating the soil in which the private sector can work its distributed, albeit chaotic, magic. Three, let creative destruction take place. The markets are designed to foster competition. If no one can fail, then bubbles form and the losers never get out of the way of the potential new winners. You clog the system with ideas that should have died and been killed off long ago. Market signals get all confused, and therefore progress stalls. You have to let people lose and lose big. Stay out of the way of the markets, and they will correct themselves. Get involved, you may smooth out the pain, but you make growth far less likely. Four, focus on national security and national dominance. Every country should believe in itself enough to play to win. Remember, the game is PvPvE, whether we want it to be or not, so we might as all well be going for broke. When deciding what soil needs the most nutrients, the government should focus obsessively on being the highest growth economy with the largest middle class. It does not make sense to grow fast if you're just accelerating an excessive level of inequality, but some inequality is the point. People work hard to get ahead of others. You don't spend your entire life training for the Olympics hoping to end up in the middle of the pack. You do it to win gold. Economics is the same [music] way. It is the sport of money. It doesn't mean you don't have alliances. You do, and you should, but it does mean that you're still playing to win, and you accept that you might fail, especially at the individual level. The only time the government should directly involve itself in the markets [music] is if there is a national security reason to do so. Right now, for instance, where we have made the catastrophic error of globalizing to the point that our largest rival basically controls our entire way of life. It's absolutely suicidal and needs to be rectified urgently. We must bring advanced manufacturing back to the US. But it should be done in a way that adheres to the principles laid out in steps one through three [music] above. Five, if the government must intervene, restrict it massively. If government money is going to be invested directly in private companies, for example, to secure chip production, critical minerals, or defense tech, we should do it through one small, specialized fund that's tightly controlled, totally transparent, and extremely temporary. Here's how it would work step by step. A, a single backstop, not a bureaucracy. Think of it like a national emergency fund for industry, called something like the US Strategic Capital Facility, run by professionals, not politicians. It would be independently audited and legally shielded from political meddling. B, a clear job description. The fund would have just three ranked goals in the following order of priority. First, protect national security and keep essential production onshore. Second, step in only when private investors can't or won't fill a critical gap. Third, make sure taxpayers get their money back, and ideally with a profit. C, small ownership on equal footing. The government should never take over a company. It should only be allowed to buy a minority stake, let's say less than 20%, maybe going up to 25% during a formally declared crisis. [music] Its investment terms must be the same as private investors. D, taxpayers should share directly in the upside. [music] If a company later succeeds because of public support, the fund should automatically get warrants or a small share of profits, so taxpayers benefit, not just the company or its executives. E, there should be built-in end dates. Every deal needs a timer. The fund must sell its stake within 5 to 7 years, and the entire program expires automatically after 10 years unless Congress votes to renew it based on an independent audit and >> [music] >> extreme circumstances. All of those things should happen only in extreme circumstances. >> [music] >> Otherwise, the government should secure rights, enforce laws, and otherwise stay the hell out of the way. In short, government intervention should be small, rare, and temporary, not a permanent bureaucracy. Help America move fast in a crisis, protect taxpayers, and then [music] shut itself off before it turns into the next Fannie Mae. Six, unclog the real economy so private capital can win. Execute regular regulatory spring cleaning. Sunset old rules unless rejustified every 5 years. Have a competition policy. Target regulatory modes, not scale. Mandate data portability so switching is easy and companies have to continue to please customers to maintain their lead. Kill off monopolies wherever they rise up and threaten legitimate competition. Seven, implement strict fiscal and monetary guardrails or nothing else matters. Balance the budget. Set strict statutory debt-to-GDP rails that are mapped to annual growth. If you're growing by 3%, then barring war, you can't deficit spend beyond 3%. Put all of those together and that's the path. Return America to the core of freedom that made it the most successful engine of broad prosperity the world has ever known. >> [music] >> Acknowledge that there are tradeoffs on both sides, but what corrupts empires and brings them down is always excessive governmental involvement. The market is simply too complex to plan from the top-down despite [music] its apparent utility in moments of crisis. China's model may seem to be working now, but it's real engine of prosperity came from copying America's economic freedom. And all of China's current woes are born of its top-down mandates, not its bottom-up billionaires trying to outcompete each other. That's where the innovation comes from. It is precisely the bottom-up chaos that gave us the microchip, the internet, electric cars, and private spaceflight. I'm not saying the government doesn't have a role in trying to make sure that the soil is prepared for entrepreneurs and private companies to come in and make use of. But the private markets is why a nation with 4% of the world's population still creates roughly half of the world's billion-dollar companies. Freedom to be wrong and to fail is the very oxygen of innovation because it lets people bet against the consensus, which is required to avoid stagnation. China's system can sprint, sure, but ours can self-correct. Freedom is inefficient, I get [music] it, and it's messy, but it maximizes access to human creativity and ingenuity unburdened by bureaucrats who will never be able to outperform the free masses. The path forward isn't romantic. It's practical and it's competitive. There will be major failures and people will suffer in the short-term from time to time. But as the history of America proves, in the long run, the entire world prospers when the world's best and brightest are given an even playing field on which to swing for the fences even when people think they're stupid. Many are going to fail, but over times, the wins will stack up into something undeniable. When the state is used like a scalpel, incredible things happen. When it's used like a sledgehammer, people learn to be quiet, hold their hand out for a give me, and while you may remove risk, you also remove reward. We don't need a 5-year plan. We need a five-point compass. Freedom, competition, [music] sound money, limited regulation, and a government that knows how to leave when the job is done. [music] That's how, instead of trying to out-China China, we will out-America everyone else. That's how you turn the next century into the century of progress instead of the century of tyranny and control. In the end, it really is simple. We must choose between a future run by bureaucrats and one run by builders. The choice we make right now will determine whether America remains the world's innovation engine or becomes yet another creator of the oppressed who can only long to breathe free. All right, if you want to join me as I explore ideas like this live, join me Wednesday and Friday at 6:00 a.m. Pacific on YouTube, Twitch, X, and Kick. You can join the debate or just chill in the community. I hope to see you there. Till next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. In 1933, under the veil of the Great Depression, the US government did something unthinkable. They made it illegal to own gold. Executive Order 6102. It didn't just