Transcript
The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Mon Dec 16, 2024
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Good Saturday morning on this icy trajectory of weather racing through Iowa this weekend.
Well, it is December in Iowa, but we're on the march two weeks from now.
Christmas and the celebration of the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
John Jacobson here, you're listening to the Jacobson Group on KXCL.
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the old Viking Danish spelling J-A-C-O-B-S-E-N.
And do we have a great show for you today?
Of course, we have Barb, James Bryant, great Iowa businesswoman who'll be joining us mid-show.
We will also have the free market enterprise economics think and teaching tank, the Gorton Institute Boys from Ottawa University of Kansas.
will be on talking about capitalism and democracy in the second half of the show.
And before I introduce our first two guests, a tip of the fedora to Mike Shane, our fearless engineer, neither rain nor snow nor sleep nor ice can keep him from his engineering device.
And he is recording this show.
We are at five, six different locations tonight, this morning and last night.
to put together this show.
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LifeRunners.org.
Well, let's with Trump and Fairbring in again today.
two old friends, although I'm older than both of them, so I guess I'm a really old friend.
But we're bringing back great pastor Sam Jones.
Sam has done so much for the pro-life movement in Iowa and the medical freedom movement.
He was one of my best, absolutely best testifiers at my medical freedom hearing when I was in the Iowa House of Representatives.
I had not met Sam.
He came up spontaneously and testified and was absolutely magnificent.
And then Jennifer Bowen, truly the matriarch of the Iowa Right to Life movement.
And she, the good Lord, is not done with her yet.
Jen has waged a ferocious, brave, courageous battle and is right now in remission with what was a grim cancer diagnosis.
She's more effective than ever in unfurling the banner for life.
Welcome back to both of you.
Sam, how are you?
John, I'm doing well.
It's good to hear your voice, and it's good to be on the radio with you today.
And I love this time of year.
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas out there, and that makes it really exciting.
Well, Sam, it does.
And Sam, you're kind of a biblical theologian.
We were arguing whether there were three or four Wisemen.
You have a story to tell about that, I believe.
Well, you know, the three Wisemen that were there, or at least the three gifts, you know, the first Wisemen, he says, you know, I've got gold.
The second one says, I've got frankincense.
And the third one came up, he says, but wait, there's myrrh.
And Sam, of course, I've always argued there's a fourth.
I always said,
He brought the food cake and was expelled and sent back across the desert.
So, Jen, what do you think?
What's our biblical exegesis score today?
Well, I just got back from a fast trip to Branson, Missouri, and I saw the Satan Sound Theater, the miracle of Christmas.
And while they didn't get everything quite right, they did a phenomenal job, and it was just a joyous.
reminder of just all of the things surrounding Christ's birth, what his family went through, and just really just an intrusion of why do we take this for granted?
The Savior of the world was born for us, and it's just an excellent, excellent reminder of who we can be in Christ.
I agree, Jennifer, and I think to some extent I've come full circle, because it was roughly December of 1966, 50 years ago almost, if you count 2024, you know, this calendar year, it's basically 49 years when a Charlie Brown Christmas debuted on CBS.
And Charles Schultz had a difficult time getting that gospel of Luke in there over the CBS sensors in the house.
but he pulled it off and I had the honor the other night at Ottawa University in Kansas, that great Baptist institution, as a Catholic Christian up there, and I was able to read what I call the Linus excerpt of Luke's Gospel that Linus did of the Charlie Browns, who I was able to start earlier on and read a longer passage.
But Sam,
They were using the NIV, but I went with the old King James because I wanted to hear the words, glad tidings, sore afraid.
And then at the end, I wanted those last words to be, save your, which is Christ the Lord.
And I still love that King James rendition, Sam, is very poetic in its own essence.
Amen.
That's right, John.
And you know, to go right along with that, this Sunday at our church, we've got our kids program.
And they're basically quoting a little bit expanded on that lioness passage.
But our kids are basically going through and quoting that.
And at the end, they're going to be singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
And then instead of saying, you know, Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown, they're saying Merry Christmas, Abundant Life.
And I'm I'm looking forward to that greatly to see that I've got, you know, two boys that are going to be in the program.
And of course, the other church children as well.
But I mean, that Charlie Brown Christmas special, man, it doesn't get much better than that, more American, and it doesn't get much more biblical either.
You know, I agree in one of the most profoundly poignant moments in that, and I missed this for many years until it was pointed out to me.
But you know, Linus is never without his blanket.
In the comic strip, in all of the episodic versions of Charlie Brown brought to animation, there is one exception.
If you watch that special, that Mendelssohn and Melendez were doing so much of the great animation and graphic blandishment, and you look at that, and when Linus is reciting the Gospel, he says, the angels were sore afraid, or he said, the shepherds were sore afraid, and the angel said, behold, and fear not.
And when he says fear not,
blindness drops his blankets for the rest of the reading of the gospel.
He does not cling to his blanket after he says fear not.
He has that kind of fit the word of Almighty God.
What about that, Sam?
Well, you know, John, I've never noticed that before, but now I know exactly what I'm going to be looking for next time we watch it, which having a six-year-old and a four-year-old, that means probably within the next week at least seven more times.
But it's...
I'm looking forward to checking that out and to watch that.
I mean, it's so true.
When God's word speaks to us, we don't have to fear.
Exactly.
It's one of the refrains most often seen throughout Holy Scripture, Old and New Testament.
Fear not, be not afraid.
Well, Jennifer, you're the most courageous woman I've ever met, and I wish some members of the U.S.
Senate either had the courage or maybe the
a sense of reading the room, or maybe could just park their egos at the door.
A president who wins a huge mandate should get his executive team.
The constitutional framers always believe that to be the case.
The Senate advisory consent provision was not supposed to be a nitpick organization of how to veto a mandate.
And I am disgusted, frankly, by eight United States senators
that seemed just giddy in being able to toss barriers in the road to Trump making America great again.
And I was just absolutely very frustrated at them taking out Matt Gaetz right out of the chute.
I thought Trump should have fought that, just recess appointed Gaetz.
And like Steve Bannon, I thought they'll smell blood in the water and go after everybody else.
And now they've done it to Hegseth, and I wouldn't be surprised if they tried it with Tulsi, with Cache Patel, with Bobby Kennedy.
This has got to stop.
And Jen, you can upgrade me if you want, but I am just terribly disappointed, terribly disappointed in Iowa Senator Joni Ernst in the game she was playing with Pete Hegseth.
I think she owes Iowans an apology, frankly.
I
think at the very least, I echo everything that you said.
From my personal perspective, and having worked so closely with her for 11, 12 years, disappointed is just not a strong enough word for what I feel.
I feel that she's been on this steady path.
We've talked about it in the past.
Since around 2019, maybe 2020, she just started cutting a path that was out of step with Iowans and our increasingly mounting Republican majorities.
And we soundly elected President Trump in 2016.
It was even more resounding in 2020, even more resounding than that in 2024.
She's never been put into place when she's stepped away and abandoned her pro-life promises.
She's never been held to account for betraying traditional marriage.
She's never been held to account for going against the Second Amendment rights and you know, she's always welcomed back with big hugs and selfies and
It's just been deplorable.
And, you know, here we are.
We've created this mess, whether it's Iowa NICE, you just go along to get along.
I don't know.
But we have allowed, I think she's encroaching on Liz Cheney Territories.
And when I go back and I think about meeting her at Bayless Park in Council.
Oh, Jen, I was thinking of this exact.
episode, I knew you were there.
It pains me to think of where we were with Joni was that 12 years ago.
Continue this thread please for us, Jim.
So it goes back for me personally anyway, when we were at that Bayless Park rally that- In Council Bluffs,
Iowa for our East Iowa listeners
and Council Bluffs.
Council Bluffs Omaha.
And the reason we were even over there is we would have locked in a long battle, longer than it should have been, to keep Leroy Carhart out of Iowa, who was a late term abortion
in Bellevue, Nebraska.
he wanted to pack up and move across the Iowa border.
And so at that time, Joni had just stepped into
the Iowa Senate seat
vacated by then Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds.
And I, you know, not to belabor it, I remember speaking and noticing a very striking woman in the front row in
blue suit,
know, which was out of, it was a Saturday morning in a park.
stood out in class and dignity, saw spoken, and she came up to me, introduced herself and said, I will do anything that we need to do to keep him out.
I went to end abortion in Iowa and beyond.
And from that moment, we became fast friends
we were flash forward to 2016.
And she's now in Congress a couple of years.
And President Trump was resoundingly elected on that night in 2016.
And she searched me out, and we just held each other and cried and laughed when Michael Grunstahl, then Iowa Senator, who was stalling everything, a horrible, horrible leader.
and we laughed and cried together because now we knew we were going to end late term abortion in Iowa and all of these things and I've watched this pattern now somewhere in 2019-2020 when I was unfortunately fighting to stay alive with this stage 4 cancer battle I missed this transition of who she is now and
you know, those of us who fought to get her into office and on the federal level in 2014, she had to overcome like five or six men in the primary.
Yes,
I moderated
one of those debates.
I was the moderator of one of those major debates out here near Omaha and Council Bluffs.
It was a huge slog to get her in and then through Bruce Braley.
And you know, I once will probably remember
I'm going to Washington D.C.
and I'm going to make them squeal.
That was the end.
It was this whole thing.
And you flash forward now, she's been there unbelievably already 10 years.
Yes.
Time just flies.
And at some point in the last five years or so, I realized, who are you going to make squeal?
We were under the impression it was going to be Ben Obama and Disco Ball.
And now you are carrying the toxic water for Joe Biden, every chance you get.
And almost
as badly for
Mitch McConnell.
Almost as badly for Mitch McConnell.
And, you
know, she promised- And then what's she gonna do without each other, right?
She's holding the
shadow.
Yeah, literally.
And then, of course, she promised to only run for two terms.
She said she would terminate herself to two Senate terms.
If she runs again, she will break that promise.
But some of the other votes you've mentioned a few, but wanting our daughters who could be mothers to have to sign an up for selective service, I think is gravely immoral and total confusion of gender roles in terms of voluntaryness.
I obviously, in support of women in the military, I have students that I'll write letters for.
of recommendation, but girls should not be forcibly conscripted and Joanie did vote to have what I would call our girls to at least get their name in with selective service.
It's not the draft yet.
It's not formal registration, but I thought that was, that was a bad sign of not understanding how important our daughters are for marriage and keeping home and hearth and
nurturing children in warfare that there should not even be a question of whether they could be Forcibly conscripted but beyond that her allotting of George Floyd her attempts to honor George Floyd who is not an honorable person a man who Put a pistol to a pregnant woman's belly That to me is not a hero under any circumstance
And then she's waffling on reparations.
But it is really disappointing to me.
The only way to drain the swamp is to get in some aggressive people from outside the swamp.
Matt Gates would have been phenomenal.
Hey, we all have warts.
We all have sands.
Gates would have been great.
Hegseth, we absolutely need in there.
Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Cash Patel.
Sam Jones, what say you?
You know, Jen and I did go back.
12 years ago with Joni, I'm sad to see her kind of drift.
What's your take, Sam?
Yeah, you know, DC seems to be a lot like Davy Jones' locker.
The longer you're there, the more you become a part of the ship.
And I think that we're seeing that with Joni Ernst.
And, you know, I just think of, you know,
Pete Hegseth, he's probably one of the best cabinet members that has ever, or at least in modern era, has been produced as potentially being on there.
And of course, you know, you've got RFK Jr.
And one of the things with Pete...
which I know RFK Jr.
hasn't been turned down yet, I guess.
But with Pete though, you know, one of the first controversies that came out is the Jerusalem Cross.
And
where are the
Jerusalem Cross?
And they're trying to say that.
I endorse and embrace that.
I'm thinking to get the tattoo to match his, the Jerusalem Cross, Deis
Volt.
You know, John, you might be past the days where you should walk around with your shirt off, but.
Well, maybe on my ankle or maybe by my elbow on my lower forearm.
There you go.
There you go.
But, you know, I look at that and I think of, you know, with what you're saying, with where she supported George Floyd.
And she's against the Jerusalem cross.
She doesn't have a fundamental Christian worldview or at least a practical Christian worldview.
And because she doesn't have that, it's coming out in all of these poor things.
And it doesn't matter what her intentions are.
Her foundation seems to be wrong here.
And it's leading to bizarre decisions that's betraying the base that instead of making those squeal in DC, it's making those of us in Iowa squeal because.
We're sitting here going, we just want some common sense.
We just want some common sense and she seems to be against that.
It's against the will of the people.
It's just absolutely a crying shame.
What what she's doing and what she's been doing.
And we really need a change of scenery when it comes to the Iowa Senate in both positions there.
I think that both have probably overstayed their welcome, even though it's only taken Joni 10 years and it's, you know, taken Grassley about 10 decades.
Well, Sam, I think that's a great point, and I'll go further.
There is a cancer on the Republican Party in Iowa, and I don't know if it's due to the two-family political machine that's been in scams for half a century.
I actually think that in an ironic twist of fate that the Iowa presidential caucuses are corrosive and corrupting of Iowa itself, and after Governor Reynolds
put her thumbs on the scales and endorsed Ron DeSantis.
Guys, you know, I'll go with Sam and then I'll go with Jen.
If Joni continues to incur the enmity of the MAGA movement, and we have a governor now who, I'm just telling you right now, not only are they not going to take her calls to the Trump White House, she'll be lucky if they let her leave a message on the switchboard.
We could have two prominent leaders of Iowa because of their disrespect for President Trump.
It could actually be harmful to Iowa.
Sam, I'll get your take with about three minutes left and then Jen's.
Yeah, you know John, I think you're absolutely right this this could be quite harmful to Iowa and I think that they are harming Iowa and the interesting thing that's that's going to be is that you do have Donald Trump in the political sense is a is a sleeping giant here in Iowa if he were to endorse some people He could probably unseat just about anybody he wanted to with a little bit of capital agree and
I think that there's been some significant political miscalculations on some strange stances that have been taken by some of these seats.
And I think that it's probably going to cost them.
Well, in the sleeper lawsuit that Dr. Hartsich has against the Iowa Board of Pharmacy and the Iowa Board of Medicine about their behavior during the COVID crisis.
Very interesting.
case to watch that could have some significant ramifications.
Jen Bowen, you get the final word here with two minutes.
Does this hurt Iowa when we've got both the Senator Ernst and Governor Reynolds sometimes picking a fight in unforced errors with our mandated president, who's even the Time Magazine man of the year, person of the year?
I think they have done a gross
disservice, not only to all of the Iowans who have continued to install them in power.
They have tremendously harmed our reputation, I think specifically of Joni and what's happened to this last week with her defying Pete Hegcett for I have my own reasons why I think she's doing it.
But I think that it is quite possibly irreparable.
with President Trump because how can you get a mandate from the entire country and you have the arrogance and the hutzpah to think that you or or eight or whoever or her and Lindsey Graham how who do you think you are exactly against such a slacking of the woke
men in dresses and lipstick in our military.
And she's out there as recent as a week ago saying we don't have a woke military problem.
And I have no problem with more trans men in the military.
And I'm watching TikTok videos of said men complaining because they can't wear their false eyelashes and lip gloss in combat.
This is what we went to the polls in November, and it was so resoundingly too big a rig that we knew it that night.
And who do you think you are working behind the scenes to defy your own voters and the American people because you don't like what President Trump has promised and promises kept.
promises delivered and I would be quite shocked if Kim and Joni have not, hopefully not irreparably, but I have a hard time believing President Trump is going to forget all of the times they have covertly and overtly worked against him.
And I think it's a horrible shame.
Jennifer, you've made some just spot on comments.
I'll go further.
The problem also includes Tom Tillis, John Cornyn, John Thune, Mitch McConnell, and Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski.
We have major problems in the U.S.
Senate, and the Republican Party needs to go through a Reformation.
How's that, Sam?
You know it's bad when the Catholics call for the Reformation.
Well, listen, it is always a joy to have you guys back on the show.
Sam Jones with Jennifer Bowen, sponsored by Jim and Cindy Jenner, the great folks at Life Runners.
Go to LifeRunners.org.
Get your clean shirt walked for life as we protect life in utero, after birth, and helping the mothers along the way, as well as Midwest Renewable Energy, LLC, ethanol, renewable fuels for a strong America.
It's lean, it's clean, and it's green.
With a great engineer, Mike Shane, we will be back in just a moment.
Sam and Jen, thanks for joining.
We're going to catch you again sometime either Christmas, epiphany, New Year's.
We're going to get you back on to preview the legislative session in Iowa.
How's that sound, Sam?
That sounds great.
And Jen?
Let's keep forward to it, Jen.
If
you're enjoying this KXEL podcast, then we invite you to listen to KXEL's great programming in real time too!
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And Alexa knows how to find us too.
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an icy December
weekend in eastern Iowa.
It is that most wonderful time of the year, sometimes a little inclement, but we are two weeks in the celebration of Christmas, the celebration of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and we are delighted to be with you on this Saturday morning from KXGL Big Blow Torch, America's original blow torch emanating from 1540.
as well as 100.5 FM, and you can also grab this podcast online on KXEL slash Jacobson.
We are here mid-show with the great Barbara Hames Bryant, the matriarch of Hames Homes, beautiful, safe, affordable, spacious, manufactured homes
in the Sea Rapids, Iowa area.
Barbara, are you surviving the elements?
We certainly are, and our homes are surviving them well too.
They're well-installated, well-installed, and they can survive a nice storm for sure.
Arbor, I'm so glad you segued into that perfectly.
Your homes
are the best for everybody in the Durecho going back several years,
while other traditionally constructed homes had roofs off.
and Fighting Peel the Way, your two communities there in Southwest Seattle have both a summit view and a grand view literally flourished during that bad weather episode.
It was absolutely amazing.
We knew that our homes were sturdy and we knew that they were installed correctly according to a National Strict Installation Code.
But the roof was in the pudding.
I mean 140 miles an hour for 45 minutes and
none of our
homes tipped over or blew away like the naysayers predicted they would.
A few shingles came off, a little bit of siding, but all in all our homes bared amazing.
Even our brick office, we had a solid brick office, the roof came off.
That didn't happen in any of our homes.
This is how far we've come with the
excellence that was pioneered by Curt and Norma Hughes, going back over half a century ago, these great veterans that teamed up with that beautiful and fruitful marriage of well over, I believe, 60 years, Barbara, and they were the great innovators and dear athletes to make hearth at home for so many families from the generations.
Barbara, your spot on about the safety of the homes.
I think part of it is because what's underneath your home, the belly of the mobile home, you do such a good job there in making sure that the underbelly or the bottom board has moisture protection, energy efficiency, pest prevention, and debris shielding.
We're the experts on what makes a manufactured home a great place to live.
We've been doing it for 55 years, and we've sold and installed over 14,000 homes.
We know what works, and we're very, very good at
it.
And I would say right now, if you go to that great, great, wonderful, splendid website, apeshomes.com, you can find the homes ranging from 40,000 up to
$150,000 right in their price ranges with very, very good, excellent financing opportunities.
And, you know, nothing is like testimonials from customers and from owners.
And Barbara, your folks really, really love and can't say enough good things about you.
Great place to live, says Eric Davis.
Beautifully kept mobile home parks very friendly.
Staff 2.
Check out their awesome home saves.
This is the best for Maria Cabros.
Of course, their manufactured homes is what I like to tell her.
And Sharon McBride says, I love living here.
Staff, the office are always friendly.
It leads work with us when issues arrive.
The Zons say, Grandview is a clean, well-capped and safe community.
Problems that may arise are handled properly, courteously, and efficiently.
Management has always been very helpful and polite, and the gear family says we appreciate all of you for helping us whenever help was needed, also for being cheerful and outgoing, for taking care of Grandview Park the way it's taken care of.
And John Elliott, from the time I purchased my home, they've been nothing but super great people to work with, they care about you.
I would recommend them to everyone because of their care.
that they devote to each person.
Barbara, you can't top testimonials like that from your consumers.
Oh, that does my heart good.
And listening to you read through those reminds me that we don't sell houses.
We don't sell manufactured homes.
We sell neighborhoods.
We sell lifestyles.
We sell communities.
We sell fellowship.
That's what we're in the business of doing is bringing communities together.
providing a just really great place for people to live.
Barbara, you said it very well and very humbly, but I'll go farther.
You've been recognized in the community.
Everything from corridor magazine to other civic honors.
For your reinvestment in the community, you folks are patriots who honor our veterans.
You can tell that by the flagpole that stands proudly.
and your premises there, but also where you've done the community.
You've got food pantries and feeds, countless people.
You folks really do believe in giving back to the community.
Oh, let me tell you about Santa Claus.
So Santa Claus was at Summit View Community yesterday on Friday.
And he talked to 125
kids.
We had some amazing donations from churches and residents.
Every child got a toy.
There were cats and mittens and games and backpacks and all kinds of stuff for the kids.
Oh, you should see the pic.
It's going to be posted on Facebook today, so take a look at it.
I'll show you some pictures of the kids with all their cool stuff in some of you.
This is wonderful and it just undergirds as I teach free market economics and talking about the great Adam Smith today This is precisely what the father of capitalism and free markets Adam Smith was talking about, you know, he was not a mere economist He was a moral philosopher deeply rooted Christian from Scotland
and
Adam Smith knew that free markets were really at their apex
When you have a sense of virtue among those that are responsible for bringing those markets together, Barbara, you and your family, I think represent everything good and decent and upright about free market enterprise economics.
You are the sunny side of American capitalism.
Well, thank you.
We like to believe that and we know that every day and every way God is in charge.
It's a business, but it's also a mission for us.
Yeah, we make a profit because we're business people, but our main concern is just making people happy and giving them a great place to live.
It's all that really matters when we leave this earth that said we left it better than
when we came.
to this day is born in the city of Bethlehem, a savior, which is Christ the Lord.
And I keep thinking of watching the Charlie Brown Christmases where Carl Schultz was able to get that accessible across despite those higher-ups in CBS that did not want that.
That was in the late 60s, just about the time of another advent, the advent of James Hogue's.
When did Kurt Norma
roll open the doors of the business, Barbara.
1969.
Wow.
I remember it because I remember those nascent commercials on WMT and now technology has evolved.
Barbara, what's the best way for folks to find you in person via phone, via social media?
There's so much good news you have out there.
This is a great time to finance folks.
We're going to have a revving economy.
This is the time, guys.
We've got an inauguration and we've got American consumers already feeling better about the economy.
Barbara, there are folks that are going to be interested.
Let's show them how to fight you guys.
in seven days a week at the corner of Wilson Avenue and West Post Roads, Southwest.
So that's Wilson Avenue, West Post Road.
Come and see our beautiful model homes.
Or give us a call at our old Marion Legacy phone number, 319-377-4863.
319-377-4863.
We're
here with the great, great Barbara Haynes Bryant.
It's a family business, folks, multi-generational.
And we are Hawkeye fans.
It is amazing how the women's basketball team has barely lost a step in this transitional year.
Jen Jensen, who in her own day have reached 66 points a game in high school.
She's got those Hawkeye women knocking in the top 20.
They're pretty proud of our women Hawkeyes, aren't we, Barbara?
We sure are.
I think Hawkeye fans are the best in the country, and this is another proof of
it.
Absolutely.
Well, folks, the Ames homes people are the best in the country.
And again, we're not afraid of any ice storm.
These manufacturing homes by Ames, they are built.
They are built strongly.
They are built like fortresses, and they weather the weather in many ways fastly.
Economic is the
study of human choice in the world
we live.
Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.
This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show today.
I'm Christopher Sugiento, producer and graduate assistant for Gortney Institute.
Joining us today, Dr. Russ McCullough, the founder of Gortney Institute and Wayne Angel, Chair of Economics, Dr. Justin Klopp.
Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics, Dr. Peter Jacobson, the Guarani Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Finally, the Guarani Institute Assistant, Kevin Urgadej.
All right.
Well, we got a special guest today.
Dr. Chris Boudreau is joining us, and he was our special guest speaker at our PPE Fest.
So this was a fun thing we did in November, mid-November.
We had high school students come to Ottawa University to learn some things about
philosophy, politics, and economics, and they were led through some fun, I call them, edutainment and activities that were active to engage high school students.
And then we had a dinner event, and Chris was our speaker at that event.
College students joined us along with some other faculty, and it was a real nice nice evening.
And so Chris, we certainly appreciated you joining us there, and we're happy to have you here for the podcast.
Dr. Boudreau is an associate professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University and a research fellow at the Phil Smith Center.
Teaching and research expertise are in entrepreneurship and innovation.
He's the author of more than 40 peer reviewed articles appearing in such outlets as entrepreneurship theory and practice and the journal business venturing.
Dr. Boudreau is one of the most number one frequently published authors in an ISI ranked journal.
So we've got an expert in this area of entrepreneurship and economics.
And today he's going to lead us through some thinking about, you know, public policy, entrepreneurship, capitalism, democracy.
We're just going to have our hands full.
So Dr. Boudreau, welcome.
Oh, thanks for having me.
It was a pleasure to be there last week and it's a pleasure to be here in this podcast.
Yeah, you're right.
It's a handful because today I want to talk to you about capitalism.
I want to talk to you about democracy.
I want to talk to you about development as well as entrepreneurship, policy, and there's a whole bunch to discuss.
And I guess the starting point can be
You know, why are some countries more prosperous than others?
Why do we seem to have some benefits in some places that don't exist in others?
And this is an old question that dates back to the father of modern economics, Adam Smith.
who explored these questions in the wealth of nations, which he's most known for.
And he talked a lot about division of labor and specialization and the market.
He was most well-known for his conception of the invisible hand and the market process.
And if we fast forward that to today's thinking, still, markets are very, very important for our course allocating resources, but sometimes we take markets for granted.
In the United States and Western Europe and a lot of these places, we have what we call institutions.
Institutions that really can facilitate market transactions, at least getting into our topic now, maybe capitalistic type institutions.
Those institutions which are things like the rules or regulations, even social cultural norms, things that will facilitate productive exchange.
rather than unproductive work like you might say rent seeking or cronyism or politics as normal.
And so that leads us kind of into this discussion of the different types of institutions that I want to talk to you about today, capitalism and democracy.
So it's always perplexed me, maybe I shouldn't say always, at least in the past five or ten years, that there's a different perception of capitalism and democracy.
If you ask most people on the streets, if you ask anyone, you know, do you like democracy?
Of course people are going to say, yeah, we like democracy.
You know, what's the alternative?
Autocracy, a dictatorship, certainly that's democratic institutions are going to be
valued over that.
If you ask the same question about capitalism though, I think you tend to get a much more mixed response.
Sometimes people are generally supportive of capitalism, but a lot of times there's a lot of negativity towards capitalism.
When I was going to graduate school in the late 2000s, early teens,
The big focus there was with Thomas Piketty's work on inequality, and it was a big focus on yes, capitalism maybe is beneficial, sco's the argument, but it has all of these problems with the allocation of resources and inequality.
And so that's always perplexed me though in a sense because
If you look going back to Adam Smith and what's actually responsible for prosperity, I would make and do make the argument that it is capitalism that is first and foremost that is responsible for the differences in prosperity.
The question of why are some countries much better off than others?
Why are they more prosperous?
And the argument here is that it is based on capitalism, not democracy.
So Chris, I think your observation is correct that people generally have a pretty negative view of capitalism, at least relative to what maybe they should if they care about flourishing,
and they generally
have a pretty positive view of democracy.
What do you think is at the root of that?
Do you have any sort of feeling as to what the cause is behind people's general distrust, at least of capitalism, and sort of adoration for democracy, even though it seems like the two either go hand in hand, or at least capitalism seems more central to development.
Yeah, no, that's a great question.
And I'm not sure what the main culprit is.
I think on one hand, democracy is hard to kind of challenge.
As I said, you know, if you don't have democracy, then what do you have?
A dictatorship?
I think most people can agree that you don't want to live under some type of dictatorship.
But yeah, so there was a similar discussion, of course, in the 20th century about capitalism versus socialism.
But
Even after the fall of the Soviet Union where we all recognize, okay, well, maybe socialism isn't so great, then it still hasn't, then the discussion hasn't revolved then to capitalism.
It's been, okay, well, if we don't have capitalism, maybe we have some sort of moderated capitalism, sort of pseudo markets where we have capitalism, but maybe there's still, we leave some room for government control.
So there's government-oriented capitalism that I think
Today, as many people aren't arguing for socialism, but they are arguing for a lot more controls on capitalism.
They're not a fan of unfettered capitalism, let's say.
I think it's a
combination of those things.
And this unfettered capitalism, and I think that's people's thought like, oh, it's just it's too scary.
There's just people doing their own thing.
But really, we're just talking about free exchange and limited government involvement, but not throwing out the rule of law.
I think that's where a lot of people get misplaced.
Justin, what did you want to add?
Yes,
you know, I'm very sympathetic to your thesis.
I was hoping that maybe we could get just a little more clear on what our terms mean when we're having the discussion about capitalism and democracy, because I think that
Maybe one of the reasons people have a great view on democracy and a bad view about capitalism, just in terms of connotation, is that most people use the word democracy to mean stuff I like.
And a lot of people in the zeitgeist will use the word capitalism to mean whatever I think is currently oppressing me.
So I was wondering if we could get pretty clear about, like,
When we're talking about democracy, do we mean just a particular decision procedure or a particular political decision procedure with a couple of additional political rights in there?
And then by capitalism, we want to say something about markets.
Maybe Russ just did what I was asking for about capitalism.
So what exactly do we mean when we say democracy?
Yeah, no, that's that's a great question.
And so yeah, I think people do confuse the two, maybe accidentally, maybe even purposely.
So I'll come back to that in a second, but let's define them first.
So by capitalism, I mean, we have economic institutions.
And I mean,
strong well-protected economic or market-based institutions.
So a great example of this is the economic freedom indices and the one that I've used a lot is the economic freedom of the world index that James Gordney has voted a large part of his life to.
So for the the world index at least this covers things like the size of government so it looks at things like taxation but
consumption and transfers and subsidies and makes the argument that a smaller government can facilitate more freedom.
Doesn't say the absence of government, doesn't say anarchy, but a government that is in more of a protective state rather than a predatory state.
The second area of that would be the kind of the rule of law and the protection of property rights.
So it looks at kind of the legal procedures and things, the courts, things like that.
And again, if your rights are protected well by the courts and the legal system, you would have more economic freedom.
then the third area is things like the sound monetary policy, which is generally perceived as low inflation, but as well as a low variance in the inflationary.
So something that's money value is not changing a lot from one year to the next year.
There's less uncertainty there.
The fourth component of this index
is things like free trade, the freedom to trade, in particular internationally, because this is a country focus, but just freedom of exchange.
So the absence of any of these trade barriers, quotas, tariffs, subsidies, and those types of things.
Under the premise that, of course, more free trade, more exchange is going to be beneficial.
you know dating back to Adam Smith.
And the fifth area here is on sound regulatory institutions.
So again kind of like in area one here it's not saying that we don't have any regulation just like it's saying we don't have any government but it's saying that the regulation that we do have should be sound, should be well in principle, shouldn't have too much regulation that would be very disruptive to businesses.
and it shouldn't be too little regulation to where maybe there's a lot of uncertainty in those problems.
So I think if you look at something like the economic freedom indices, and there's other variations of them too, but they all have a lot of overlap, that will give you a good idea of I think what is meant by capitalism.
On the other hand, then we have democracy.
Where democracy, if capitalism is a focus on economic institutions, democracy is a focus on more the political institutions.
where political institutions, when you ask somebody about democracy, it's basically about voting.
It's whether there's electoral participation, whether there's checks and balances on the procedural rules, things like that.
Now, it could also involve civil liberties as well, sometimes involved included in these indices or things like free media, free media exchange, freedom of expression, and even things like the rule of law.
And so I think coming back to your question, Justin, that's where there's some overlap.
On one hand, sometimes both of these indices will talk about things in common, like, you know, the freedom of rights, whatever that means, or the rule of law.
And so there's some shared commonalities there that I think certainly makes discussion a little confusing.
And going back to what I said, sometimes maybe this is just people not knowing the differences, but I think sometimes
Well, maybe I can't say they're completely on purpose, but I think people know better.
So I'll give you an example.
Recently, Darren Asimoglu, Johnson and Robinson, they won the Nobel Prize, or the economic version of it, based on their work on institutions.
And most of their impactful work has been on economic institutions.
It has been looking at, their most famous paper was on colonial origins and of economic development, and they looked at kind of productive institutions and extractive institutions and so well-known
research paper, but the premise there was more on the economic institutions.
Later in their career, they focused a lot on democracy and some of these other types of institutions.
But after they win the prize, they get interviewed a lot by these news networks and radio, and they ask about this.
And of course, one of their main responses to reactions was, well, let's tie this to the election.
Their focus was a lot on
at the time, you know, the former President Trump, now President-elect Trump, who was, you know, running for elections.
And a lot of discussion around that had been about, you know, democracy.
Democracy being challenged.
If he's elected, is this a threat to democracy?
So there's this big discussion of democracy, conflating that with freedom.
Whereas, again, to your question, Justin, I think that's more with capitalism.
I have more to say, but I get the sense that maybe I should stop talking here, so.
No, you're all right.
You're all right.
You know, I think some of the negativeness to capitalism comes from looking at what we have now and people thinking that's capitalism.
So to me, we have a very cronyist system.
So cronyism listeners is the idea.
This is the Russ McCullough special of big business and big government playing kissy face with each other.
So basically, they're a little too intertwined, which is and creates a lack of competition.
So if there's anything that
Adam Smith and the other people that promote free enterprise and capitalism is that there has to be a healthy dose of competition.
And right now in many industries, not all industries, but in many industries, we don't see that, especially in big business, right?
We see the COVID shutdown, but then big business being protected in there, the ones that are able to sell us stuff, the healthcare industry, the banking industry.
We see a revolving door of rich executives going through cabinets, regardless of whether
it's a Democrat in office or a Republican in office.
And so what do you think about that being part of the problem is that it's hard to, for me, I've tried to shy away a little bit from the word capitalism and started using, even since I've come to OU, more and more like free enterprise or voluntary exchange.
And certainly in my economics classes to the students, I'll try to highlight, no, that's not capitalism, but to the general public, using more words of free enterprise or something along those lines, think about that.
Yeah, no, I think that's a good idea in some ways because, yeah, capitalism has taken on this negative connotation in the civil discourse.
And so I think people argue a lot less with free enterprise than they do with capitalism.
But I think on some level, you have to correct people.
If they're conflating capitalism with crony capitalism, I think there's a role to be had to correct them and say, no, actually, this is not what we mean by capitalism, to Justin's point.
So I do agree with you, though, that those terms or they have those perceptions of capitalism.
What you made me think of was the following.
So you might come across this podcast as thinking, okay, Chris, this guy likes capitalism, doesn't really like democracy.
And maybe there's some truth to that, but that's not really the whole truth.
It's a little bit more nuanced than that.
Of course, as I said, I like democracy.
I don't like the alternative of dictatorship.
I don't like not having democracy in some sense, but
There's a problem with democracy.
Of course there's problems with capitalism, but I think this is where the discussion comes in.
We never really question democracy, but we always question capitalism.
And here's the problem with democracy, actually we never do, but Mansur Olsen questioned democracy years ago in several books, but one of his books was The Rise and Decline of Nations.
I'm
so glad you, I'm so glad you mentioned that one.
That was one of my favorite books.
Yeah, yeah, very fascinating.
Master Olson probably would have won the Nobel Prize had he been alive to be rewarded.
But the way that the reason this is relevant is the following, right?
And so one of his thesis is, you know, what we are attributing of crony capitalism
he makes the argument that actually is the role of democracy.
It's democracy that's causing this crony capitalism, not capitalism that's causing
crony
capitalism, because what he says is that over time, yeah, democracy is great when they're first founded and they're started, but over time they become more and more run by these special interest groups and these special interest groups will dictate policies and for those listeners who might not know what that means, it means that you have
Basically a highly concentrated interest of minority groups that have specialized power, but have so much power that for collective action reasons, for free ridership, various economic reasons.
the large populace may or may not pay attention to certain issues, but the special interest groups do, they can get legislation passed that benefits a minority interest that gives them very localized benefits, but the costs are dispersed to everyone else.
And what happens is that as democracy has developed over time, there's more and more room for these specialized interest groups for politics to take hold.
And I think that's why we end up having crony capitals, and that's what
Mancer Olson talks about, he talks about the age of democracy.
And as these democracies really become cemented over time, become very old, I guess the term political sciences consolidated, once they've been consolidated for a while, that's when we start having these issues with crony capitalism.
So I think that is, if you want to know why am I not as positive about democracy as others, people might be.
Again, I'm not it.
I'm not a fan of dictatorship by any means, but it's because democracy has this tendency to create this crony capitalism, which is detrimental.
All right.
Well, this looks like a good spot for a break.
And yeah, I think that's where we build on the second half.
I have, I love this part of, from that book from Ansar Olsen, he called it the sclerosis of collective action.
And I just love that.
It's just like this
cancerous growth that you can't quite stop and it's organic and it's just, it's going to happen.
And I love the way you made that connection to the way we, you know, use democracy currently in the United States ends up leading to some of the sclerosis of the system we have.
So after we get back from Brave, we'll continue on from there.
We'll be back in just a bit.
Ottawa University has an exciting new major.
PPE, which stands for philosophy, politics, and economics.
Each of these fields is interesting in their own right, but they intersect in ways that are important to understand both individually and for your community.
If you find philosophy fascinating but want to make sure that your study of the subject is practical, if you enjoy economic analysis but want to see how economic laws interact with more principles, if you are interested in politics but want to explore how economic and ethical realities constrain our political choices,
You should consider the PPE program at Ottawa University.
This spring, Ottawa University is organizing a PPE league competition or Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.
Students in this competition will compete leveraging the ideas of philosophy, politics, and economics in various events.
If you're a professor or an advisor of college students and you're interested in your school competing in PPE league this spring, contact Peter, Justin, or Russ today.
By 2030, the Gorton Institute will be known for its alumni, supporters, and participants who incorporate economic understanding with their faith in their careers, vocations, communities, and personal lives.
We have some great programming going on for high school students.
We have an online microeconomics class.
Yes, you can earn college credit for $200 by taking an online class.
It's affordable, flexible, layered with support.
Our new online micro is optimized for you.
If you'd like to consider some events for your high school students or that class, please contact Justin, Peter, or Russ today.
Chris, it was great to have you on the program.
Thanks.
It was a pleasure being here.
All right.
Well, this has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.
I'd like to thank you all for listening.
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Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.
Thanks.
Wow, what a fast hour that was here in December on KXEL.
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