Transcript
The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Wed Dec 10, 2025
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We're gonna have a wonderful show today.
We're gonna talk about free market enterprise economy.
And at the midpoint, some great entrepreneurs here in Eastern Iowa.
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So we're going to have the great free marketers from out of you and the Gortney Institute on then Barbara Hames Bryant from the Hames Homes people and then part two of Gortney.
Guys, we are making
free market enterprise, great again, and don't go away, we'll be right
back.
This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show today.
My name is Peter Jacobson.
I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Joining us today, we have Dr. Justin Clark, the Menard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics, and also Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics, the founder of the Gortney Institute.
And he's also going to introduce our guest for the day.
All right.
Yeah, it's fun.
We've got somebody here that is very well-versed in free enterprise and free markets.
And so we have Dr. Alex.
Takarev.
Oh, man.
I can't believe I butchered that.
Give me it, Alex.
Like the gun, Takarev.
So yes, and he is up at Northwood University currently, he's been a professor there for a number of years.
He's written dozen of articles on various outlets, a lot of popular media outlets, which I like that he's kind of speaking to the average Joe, but the American Enterprise Institute for Economic Research, the Detroit News.
He's also a member of the Free Market Roadshow.
So he's been here at our Ottawa campus when we hosted an event, the PPE
is our intercollegiate competition and he brought students from Northwood to participate in that.
Teamed up with the free market roadshow then and so I've heard him speak.
It's really fun.
He's originally from Bulgaria and grew up a Marxist so a very anti-market and then he came to the light and Did his PhD work here in the United States?
It's southern Illinois.
So you are a Saluki then if I remember, right?
Isn't that the Saluki's okay?
Yes, so did his PhD in economics there and Alex welcome to the show
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Well, what sparked this topic was you sent me an article you wrote about the amount of land that the United States federal government owns ends up being a lot.
And I've heard other people speak on this before, but you were tying it to the debt.
And so you were looking at the national debt thinking we're getting to levels that are
I guess at least uncomfortable, I would hope for most people at, what are we at, $37 trillion?
That puts us 120, 130% of our national income, the gross domestic product for the United States.
And so it's continued to grow.
So the debt has been added to for the last 40 to 50 years, regardless of if it's a George Bush or a Barack Obama or a Clinton or a Trump or whoever, Republican Democrats alike.
just continue to pile on the debt by not collecting enough taxes each year to pay for the spending that they have.
And so that is why the debt continues to climb and we're at where we're at today.
You know, I'm not a big fearmonger that, you know, we're going to go broke and that sort of thing.
I mean, it's manageable, but at some point, you know, I really press further, they're being a champion to get some sort of balanced budget.
Like if we essentially froze it at 37 trillion,
and then the economy continued to grow, that'd be great.
But I really like the insight you gave with this land stuff.
And so that's the area I especially want to go.
So Alex, talk to us about your thoughts on debt deficit and then land ownership by the United States.
Well, I learned about this from listening to my daughter working with John Stossel on a video.
about this.
She interviewed the guy who gave her a book and I read the book and I gave it to some of my colleagues to read.
It seems that we are sitting on top of a mountain of gold which does nothing to benefit us and we can easily move it.
The federal government is the owner of 640 million acres of land and that's huge.
It's 28% of the total landmass of the United States.
Wow.
There are states in the union like Utah, Idaho, Alaska.
where the federal government is hoarding over 60% of the land.
And Nevada is just amazing that less than a fifth of the land is privately owned.
This morning I was reading about someone discovering numerous
places where maybe the mafia had buried people, burned their bodies and I mean with so much land that is not owned by private individuals all kinds of funny things can happen and I was thinking about what is the value of this land and I used some numbers that my daughter discovered trillions of dollars
worth just the land and the minerals.
But I think that's just the start of it.
By most estimates, I looked at Kato, what they are calculating, they think we can probably pay about 18-20% maybe of the total debt that we currently have.
But I think that's wrong.
I believe that once we
Transfer this wealth, this huge potential when it gets developed, when companies turn this from resources into capital, into consumer goods, all the jobs that come with this, all the prosperity that's being generated, and all the tax revenue that comes from adding this huge chunk to the national economy, I think we can easily pay, not immediately, not only from the sales proceeds.
But within a decade or two at most, I think we can be down to zero national debt.
Wow.
So that's a lot of money.
And I'm not even sure zero is something I want the need to get to.
I would be, like I said, kind of in the opener, zero might not even necessarily be the optimal number.
But I am a little fearful of, you know, if this starts to be more common knowledge, the politicians just want to use it to spend more money.
And so the debt, the debt continues to climb and they have more access to funds to do other.
Thanks.
That's
what's problematic.
That's what I fear.
I have friends in the Fairtex proposal, a movement that is trying to get rid of the income tax, get rid of the IRS, replace everything with a national sales tax.
With a built-in pre bait so that the lowest income people will not be inconvenienced by this shift But I'm telling my friends be careful what you wish for because in Europe they have both they have the national sales tax the VAT And they have the income tax on top of that which is higher than here in the United States.
So
Absolutely, I totally agree with you.
We can only do this and should do this 100% only after we have inserted, maybe through a convention of the states, another major project that I'm supporting, if we can insert into the constitution restraints on the federal government on spending
even one penny on top of what they receive from current taxation, unless there is some kind of a major emergency like we had World War II.
Unless something like this warrants borrowing, which should be repaid within a few years after the emergency is over, unless we have this kind of balanced budget, limit on the federal powers.
the sale of the land is going to be just a temporary boost and nothing more.
It still is going to benefit the national economy, but the problem that I identify as in need of being solved is the debt.
And we can pay it off, but we need to make sure that future governments will not engage in the next cycle of pushing us deeper and deeper into
that.
Yeah, so I have a question, which is the first objection that I always hear, and I'm a big favor of your proposal, by the way.
So I'm also on board.
But the first objection usually here is that this would be a disaster that what this policy amounts to is you're advocating for turning
Yellowstone Park into an RV park and allowing people to defecate right into Old Faithful and people will be roasting endangered species over a spit.
So can you tell me a little bit about the land that we are talking about here and maybe is this separable from our national parks and the kind of
How do we achieve this kind of balance of protecting natural beauty while also selling stuff off?
And maybe that involves a discussion of what the Bureau of Land Management is currently doing with this land and
stuff.
took some time in this article to note that the proposal I support has absolutely nothing to do with building Disneyland rides somewhere down the Grand Canyon, although it would be fun to try one of those, turning the redwood forest into a toilet paper or drilling for oil in Yellowstone.
Now, what I'm talking about, what
my daughter's research discoveries, there are huge stretches of land, millions of acres of land in America's outback, which could easily be repurposed for housing, for farming, for manufacturing, energy production without losing any of those natural beauties.
We can we can boost our economic potential in a way that hasn't happened at any
particular point of history.
It has happened very gradually, but we can give it a tremendous boost in a very short period of time without sacrificing any of those areas that we care about, the forests, the national parks.
I don't think that these should be touched.
I'm talking about privatizing unused land that has no previous owners.
I don't think that's a radical idea.
It's something that we have done throughout America's history.
This is how America was made.
It is the foundation for the industrial boom that we experienced in the 19th century, early 20th century.
We've had the precedence, we have the land ordinance of 1785, the Northwest ordinance a couple of years later, and we set the precedence for the federal land to be sold, to fund the treasury, to promote the westward expansion at the time.
These days, I mean, it's all ours, it's all Americans, but for some reason we think that means the federal government should be in charge of this.
the Homestead Act of 1862.
Well, it gave away 270 million acres at the time that was about 10% of the US land to the citizens who were willing to live and to work on it.
We still have huge potential that is just wasted.
Nothing good comes out of it.
It's not a mass where we have endangered species or something that future generations would want to go.
and see in its current form.
It is land of the kind that we used throughout those 250 years to build things that benefit humanity.
We are the stewards over this creation.
We shouldn't trash it, but we shouldn't just sit on top of that and not try to develop it for human needs.
Alex had a question based on this.
A few months ago, the Trump administration tried to look at selling off some federal lands.
And I'm not sure if this overlaps with the category of land you're talking about.
But I remember a lot of the pushback that he got was from like generational like family ranchers.
And so is the land that you're talking about that same land that is like occupied by ranchers?
Or is it just like this totally unused?
My proposal is about land that is currently not being used.
in any way.
If those ranchers are using federal or state land, I think the ranchers would be much better off if they buy it, if they get it as their private land instead of leasing it.
If the government gives it to you today, tomorrow under pressure from some environmental not jobs, they may take it away, confiscate it and put it for some other use.
So the ranchers
I think would support it if they see that they themselves are the beneficiaries of this transfer.
Now, we have these no kings protests.
Well, I think what we see here is that Trump is no king.
He's been trying to make...
Tiny reforms in that area and he's being blocked, blocked by congressional procedures, blocked by activist judges.
So, yeah, we don't have a king.
It may have been better in accomplishing some stuff with a king, but we are a Republican, we are constrained in how fast we can move forward.
Yeah, I think it's actually working in that regard compared to what could have been.
Well, this looks like a good spot to head into our break.
When we come back, yeah, I definitely want to continue to explore the rights to be used and how could we be
overlooking this issue as much as we are and just maybe chalk it up as an embarrassment to government, but let's see where we go.
We'll explore a little bit more when we get back from break.
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Okay, so we're back here with Alex.
Continue to pick on, you know, what is this land being used for?
I visited Alaska and learned a little bit more about the Alaska credit and lands up there with mineral rights.
Being a real estate guy myself and having my broker's license for about 20 years, I'm familiar with the bundle of rights is the way we kind of teach it in real estate class, that it's more than just possession of the land that you own, but it's out access to the airspace.
access to the ground and the minerals that are in the ground, the right to sell, the right to use, so you kind of think of this bundle of rights and so people are able to pick off that bundle and to some degree that apparently goes on where I don't know if the federal government is getting money somehow from you know leasing the ground so that a private company can come in and grab the oil.
We've talked about the ranchers where they might be
leasing the ground to allow their cattle to graze on the federal grounds.
All of that still could call into question of whether it's the highest and best use for the ground.
And I think that's part of what you're challenging, that there could be additional value beyond simple ranching.
Like it's not good enough to just allow a small lease for ranching.
So can you speak to that?
Like how much of this land is it going far enough to get to extract something beneficial or is there just a lot of government waste?
the vast majority of those 640 million acres of land that the federal government currently sits on.
This is not used in any productive way.
It is not leased.
We are not talking again about national parks.
We are not talking about protected forests.
We are talking about areas which are unused, underutilized or grossly mismanaged.
And if we are really a capitalist country, as we both should be,
as the world sees us.
And one thing that you mentioned is that when you buy land, you also become the proud owner of any mineral resources that you discover later underground.
This is unique.
I don't know how many countries, if any, in the world respect and protect the private property rights of their citizens in this fashion.
In most places in the world, if you buy the land and you discover oil, that oil still belongs to the government.
So here we are talking about a huge potential and we are talking about a very important question that Milton Friedman was raising about government.
Government is just a tool, it's instrumentality, it's something that we have to figure out how to use and the government is definitely has proven it time and time again that it's a terrible owner.
of productive resources.
It may do a good job on occasion in protecting our rights as property owners, but the government is a property owner.
That sucks.
We have to end it.
I keep talking to my friends, family in Bulgaria every time I go back every summer.
And I noticed that we have been now what almost 36 years post the fall of the Berlin Wall.
and they have been trying to reform the economy.
But it's still not fully capitalist.
There's so much socialism left over in terms of the government telling businesses how they should run their businesses, the government still having interest and ownership rights, setting prices, the wages of labor, the prices of different health care services and medicine and so many other things.
The government controlling education.
That's not capitalism.
We have to clean the system.
We have to fully privatize everything.
That's when we can really unleash the potential of our entrepreneurial people.
Justin, did you ask?
Yeah, I have a statement and then a question.
So one of the things that we've seen within the past 15 years get brought up a number of times is a kind of desire for a wealth tax in the US, which is the claim that, you know,
billionaires and even large corporations aren't paying their fair share.
And so what we ought to do is seize part of that wealth.
And I think that's kind of predicated on this false view that wealthy individuals are kind of hoarding assets in an unproductive manner.
When you study economics, you know that the actual wealth that private individuals control is actually invested in creating jobs for other people.
And there's actually no way to seize this kind of wealth without
destroying part of that wealth creation process.
But it seems like what you're talking about is something, what we're saying is something like, oh, in this case, the government actually does have all these assets, which they are sitting on in an unproductive manner.
And what we're talking about here is selling some of those assets that are being completely underutilized in this unproductive way,
to pay down the debt, which is economically indistinguishable from, say, raising taxes to pay it for it, right?
So it seems like insofar as anyone was in favor of a wealth tax, this is actually a more economically productive and even more morally just version of a policy that does what people erodiously thought the wealth tax was going to do.
So I guess that's my statement.
And my question is something like, is the federal government's underutilization of this land here?
I know land typically isn't considered capital, but is this just the same problem as that in centralized economies, capital assets aren't effectively, we don't know how to distribute capital effectively, or is it a slightly different problem because it's land?
I love the way you put it.
I'll use it for my next article.
Uncle Sam is the wealthiest entity in the United States.
And yes, we have to take away all of that wealth and transfer it to the people.
I think if we put it in this way, maybe we can even win the left to support the idea.
We have to be careful how we...
To the left, it's all about how it sounds.
It's not about consequences.
Does it sound right?
Does it capture the imagination of people whose moral compass is, well, maybe confused, but they definitely care about justice.
And there is nothing just about a federal government sitting on top of wealth when your goal is to help needy people.
The question was about...
The difference between misallocation of land versus misallocation of capital goods.
Yeah, the problem that was explained by...
starting with the Austrian economists, people like Mises and Hayek, explaining, and even before that, the previous generation like Don Bavrak, explaining why the Marxist idea of running the economy on central planning can never work.
It can't work because when it is in the hands of Uncle Sam or any other government entity, when they use the political mechanism to control it, to allocate its benefits, in our case, they are not
even generating any benefits, they're just quandering that potential, but they are in the dark, as Mises explains when it comes to...
what should be done with those resources.
There is no market prices that would inform the decision makers what to do, how to do it, for whom.
These questions can only be answered when you have private property owners, when they compete against each other for the spending of the consumer.
If you don't have a market, if you don't have private property rights, none of those decisions can make any sense.
It is all speculation.
You can never convince anyone applying any scientific methods that this or that is the right course of action.
So if there is something that the private owners currently are not using, it is because they are conserving it for a time when it will generate more benefits for future generations of consumers.
So any untapped potential when the resource is privately owned is informed by the current
prices by the trends, by the expectations of future profitability.
And I'm not saying that the market will always be right.
But when individual entrepreneurs make mistakes, those damages are localized and they pay the price personally for their bad decision.
When the government is making those decisions over 640 million acres of land, well, then we all suffer.
They are doing it in the dark and the chance that you will hit the bullseye when you don't know where the target is, well, next to zero.
Yeah.
So yeah, Justin, well done for the philosopher of the four of us on here.
You put it out nicely.
I'll just add that we've been talking about opportunity costs the whole time.
And so in your question to capital versus land, it's really the similar that what you could have done needs to be factored in and that's not being done.
And so
uh with interest now above the interest that the government's paying on the debt above what we're spending on national defense hopefully the general public will start to see real dollars now you know we're not just sitting on it but it is no different than somebody who owns a you know some sort of piece of real estate with a storage facility but it's sitting vacant and they're like well it's not costing me anything except taxes or whatever
So I just like to hold it.
Well, you could be leasing it out.
Those missed opportunities from an economist standpoint are all part of the true cost.
So yes, the government wasting our money by not doing something more productive with this underutilized or unutilized land.
There is a true cost.
And we're starting to see that with the interest payments, I think.
And people can really visualize that, I hope.
You're absolutely right.
Think of all the decades when this land was kept
away from the American people.
The current national debt will be dwarfed by the amount of prosperity that could have been generated if it was originally transferred to entrepreneurs, to homeowners.
Unimaginable.
I mean, I don't know if there is any mechanism to calculate the opportunity cost of Uncle Sam staying for such a long time, the biggest landowner in America.
Yeah, overall, I really kind of enjoy the argument and think it's generally right.
I'll give my biggest reservation on
privatizing federal land in general.
Though in the case of land that's completely unused, I think that there's no argument over that.
So I agree with the primary thrust.
In terms of like the question of underuse, especially when it comes to, again, like the the large amounts of land that are used by these like, you know, rancher groups, because Russ's point is true.
It's like just because someone's using it doesn't mean we're using it for the best thing.
My big concern, though, is I wonder to what extent
if the lands were sold by the government, that it would be allowed to flow to its highest value to use anyways.
And
so what I mean by that is, I think both with respect to the process of the sale and with respect to the way that our legal frameworks tend to benefit large groups, especially like well-established groups with respect to access to capital, I think it's easier for
government-favorite institutions to access capital than anybody else.
I do have a little bit of a worry that the privatization and sale of land that's used by ranchers might go to companies who, we'll say, politicians have favorable attitudes towards, and I'm specifically thinking about big lobby groups.
So what I really want to avoid is, especially corporations,
whose political interests are maybe even opposed to the American people, but maybe in favor of American politicians.
That's the one drawback that I could see.
But again, in general, I agree with you that certainly unused lands, like it's better for somebody to own that, right, than nobody.
In the case of the...
like barely used or minorly used rent lands with respect to the ranchers.
I can see some argument for maybe preferencing the current owners a little bit in that sale.
So that way we can strain politicians from rent seeking too much.
But in general, I agree.
And I think it's a good argument for sure.
Yeah, it's a great argument against the government getting itself involved in any economic decision in promoting the interest of this corporation over that agri business.
For example,
But I mean, even if we just give the land away, don't sell it, just give it to the ranchers.
Let the ranchers decide whether they want to keep it and produce beef for my tacos or whether they want to sell it to someone for other commercial purposes.
Now, I am well aware that we have to be careful in a world where not all countries are normal.
economic competitors when we are facing adversaries such as, I mean, the biggest one is the Chinese Communist Party, much worse, than Nazi Germany or Stalin's USSR because of the economic potential that is fueling the policies of the Chinese communists.
So we have to be careful when we transfer that wealth that it doesn't fuel the enemies.
prospects to gain advantages over us.
So that's the only thing that I believe should be a concern, whether it goes to renters, to those who grow soybean to export to China, whether it is developed into condos or some extraction of mineral resources.
Well, who better to judge what the land should be used for than ultimately the consumer?
through the market prices that are set for the various things that we can do with the land.
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.
A five-star rating helps other people find us.
Otherwise, just pass this along to friends and family that might like to take a listen.
Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.
Thanks.
If
you're enjoying this KXEL podcast, then we invite you to listen to KXEL's great programming in real time too!
You can hear us on the radio, statewide at AM 1540 and in the Cedar Valley at FM 100.5.
We stream live on the web, not only through KXEL.com, but also through our free KXEL mobile app.
And Alexa knows how to find us too.
It's where Iowa comes to talk, News Talk 1540, KXEL.
Welcome to the Jacobson group here at Mid Show on this beautiful December Saturday as we arc toward the Christmas season and as always it is a joy to be with Barbara Hames Bryant the matriarch of Hames Homes the Homes people and you know your great father
was a saintly St.
Nicholas type of character in his own right, Barbara Hames Bryant.
He was a giant of a man, both physically imposing and generous spirit.
And he brought a lot of joy and comfort to families for many years, not just descending the chimney, but giving them home heating and air.
and comfort and space and beauty and safety and aesthetic charm.
Welcome to the program, Barbara.
Well, thank you, John.
And it was both Kurt and Norma Haynes that developed these beautiful, manufactured home communities where people can live in safe, lovely environments.
Indeed, if there was a Mrs. Claus type of figure in her senior years, it was the lovely and gracious.
Norma Haymes.
Current Norma were such great patriots, but more importantly, they were great Christian people.
They were big fans of Christmas.
Norma loved hosting Christmas for kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids.
Well, and what a generous spirit.
it has been in eastern Iowa for so many years.
And Barbara, you guys have got these wonderful communities, and I call them communities.
Summit View and Grand View are nestled there in southwest Cedar Rapids in a very nice area, a pastoral landscape in many ways, rural, but yet so close to everything from the eastern Iowa airport to retail.
And these are
Very aesthetic, new streets, new lights, dog parks, Frisbee parks, you've got food pantries, you've got emergency shelters, you've got extra security.
I can't think of a greater gift that a family could give to their children and to their spouses or to their sons and daughters than one of these beautiful manufactured homes from Hames.
You were so surprised if you came out here, John, to see how beautifully clean our streets are.
In spite of all that snow that we had, our outside managers have done a terrific job plowing snow, sanding and salting.
In fact, we get a lot of comments that the private streets here in Grandview and Summit View are cleaner than the city streets.
Oh, I think that's apodictically true because I've trod both and I can testify to that and avert to that from my visits to your beautiful villages there.
And you know, Barbara, we're about to head into a new calendar year.
A lot of people are making budgetary plans for the year of our Lord.
2026, 2026, and the tea leaves as they read them are that rates will continue to drop.
This current Fed Board composition is looking at yet another potential rate drop here at year's end, but with certitude, the next Fed Board chair that will be appointed by the president is going to be someone who believes the president's vision of a looser money supply, which means rates will go down.
mirror those of Europe.
We've been running consistently about 200 basis points, 2% higher than Europe.
That's going to open up a lot of opportunities for people to move, literally, to move their domicile and to finance more readily apparent.
And you have a great blog site, Barbara, where you talk about the advantages of Hames Homes Beating apartment living every time.
Would you address that generally for us, please?
Happy to.
Would you like to live in a box that's stacked on top of another box which is directly adjacent to another box?
Or would you rather live in a beautiful one-story home with a small yard and great neighbors?
Would you rather live in an apartment building with a parking lot where you come in from the cold you don't know which parking spots you're going to get?
Or would you rather be in a manufactured home where every home has off-street parking?
Would you rather be in a
apartment where you have to go to a cluster mailbox to get your mail, or would you like to live in a manufactured home where your mail is delivered directly outside your front door?
I think that the choice is obvious.
We think manufactured housing beats apartment living ends down.
Barbara, I think you've nailed it on the head.
I mean, think about it.
No shared walls, that's more privacy.
Your own driveway every single day.
One floor living, that equals comfort and convenience.
You've got laundry day without the workout, and it's a locally owned community that cares.
And if you read those testimonials from the folks that live in your communities, those speak for themselves.
The law we say, race, it's a locator, it's
speaks for itself is the testimonials from the people who live there.
Barbara, you guys get five star ratings from everybody.
If you're out there and you're a big fan of Haynes' homes, we hope you'll go on Google and give us a five star rating too.
Our homes are definitely lovely.
Just as you talked about, John, we've got people of all ages and demographics that live here, everything from families with kids going to school to singles.
to couples starting out, to retirees.
We have every demographic in Cedar Rapids living here in our communities, and that's why we call it a community.
It's because we all live together, we have a common set of goals.
We get along, neighbors look out for each other here.
Indeed, Barbara.
Well, it's a multi-generational family as well.
And I was so impressed seeing you and your husband and your children celebrating at your tremendous accomplishment of many decades of marriage, as well as, we'll just say, a landmark birthday that you and I essentially are sharing these days here.
Certainly to quote from Dickens, the best of times, Barbara Hames.
It is my husband and I just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary with the Big Milestone Party.
And I got to thinking about it that that is like nowhere close to Kurt and Norma.
They celebrated 60 years together.
Amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
Well, and at Christmas time, we remember so fondly those have gone before us.
And I have such fond memories of your father and mother.
I remember Kurt periodically would stop into my father's dental office in December for appointments and what great times.
You still have that wonderful legacy.
Marion Iowa phone number.
Another reason I'm so fond of you, because it goes back to our Marion Iowa days.
Barbara, what's the best way people can phone you, look you up on social media, or drive by to see what you've got going there?
319-377-4863.
That's 319-377-4863.
Most people check us out on the website.
first and that is HaynesHomes.com.
H-A-M-E-S-H-O-M-E-S.com.
But what we really like is for people to come and visit us and just see these beautiful neighborhoods.
Our sales office is at the corner of Wilson Avenue and West Post Road Southwest.
So Wilson Avenue, West Post Road Southwest, that's where the Haynes office is and we're open seven days a week to show you your next beautiful home.
Indeed, guys, we love showcasing the Hames Homes people.
Always a pleasure to speak with Barbara.
Of course, we rotate around other members of this great multi-generational family.
And as a point of personal privilege, I just want to say that on a recent trip a couple of weeks ago to Cedar Rapids, I was very struck.
by people who came up to me indicating that they listened to this Saturday morning show live, had a handful of people unsolicited come up and mentioned that and we sure appreciate your listenership, your loyal following on these Saturdays and
Of course, I give a shout out to the great Ben Benkowski, Bruce Benkowski family at the passing of Yvonne.
Yvonne was 90 years old and she was a loyal listener of this show.
We will miss her dearly, but we know Bruce, the gang, will still be chiming in another great Marian family.
Barbara, we look forward to having you or Curtis on again next week as we arc even closer toward a visit by Jolly Old St.
Nick.
And in the meantime,
What a fortune, since I saw you a few weeks ago, the Hawks were back on the winning track two huge football victories.
Turn around the season now heading to a great bowl game, Barbara.
Oh, my household is so happy right now.
The Bears are winning, the Hawkeyes are winning, and life is good.
Go Hawks, Merry Christmas.
Go Hawks, Merry Christmas, and half of my household is rejoicing because I'm the Iowa fan and, you know, I married that cornhusker girl and it was a brutal game for them last Black
Friday.
I know you have a mixed marriage.
Oh boy, sure words were never said.
But you know, we love our Hawkeyes and it's so great.
Kirk Farrance is going to be back again next year in a year when the coaching carousel is going to be hard to find a good coach.
There are so many vacancies.
I'm glad we've got Kirk, his steady hand at the tiller, Barbara.
I
feel very blessed that we've got a long-term, solid, sensible coach here in Iowa.
The amazing stability is that I can say this.
Barbara and I are of a certain age where we qualify for social security in theory.
And yet, from this point in time, all the way back to high school, we have only had two head coaches.
Hayden Fry, my senior year of high school, all the way to Kirk Farrance.
No other school can boast of that to continuity.
We're very fortunate, very blessed, Barbara.
Oh, I would love this incumbents.
We're very loyal to winners and people who are loyal to us.
We are.
Always a joy to have Barbara on.
Barbara, keep fighting the good fight.
We'll talk to you or Curtis again next week.
Great to visit with you.
Hey, Ms.
The Homes people, go out and see them.
We'll be back.
Economics 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 Gordney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show today.
My name is Peter Jacobson.
I'm the Gordney Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Joining us today, we have Dr. Russ McCullough.
He's the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics, and also he's the founder of the Gordney Institute.
We also have Professor Dr. Justin Clark.
I'm an art family professor of philosophy and ethics.
All right.
Well, Dr. Clark is good at finding movies and series that bend the mind on things.
What was the one with the...
Well, the one that I loved.
Severance.
Severance, thank you.
Yeah, that one was great.
And so he's got another one, Pluribus, that is out.
And with all this talk of AI, it really highlights some interesting things with people engaging in technology and otherwise.
And so what's this all about back to Claire?
So this is a show called Pluribus.
It's on Apple TV and, you know,
Russ mentioned severance and we talked about, we had a couple episodes of severance.
And one of the things that we talked about when we talked about severance is we're talking about this idea of personal identity.
Vision where in one body you essentially have two personalities and you know seven splits you would go a work person and a not at work person.
Yeah, maybe two minds even.
Yeah, and interestingly also on the Apple platform Pluribus is a show I think there's a three or maybe four episodes out right now So I can't vouch for the series as a whole but I thought it was the episodes I've seen were really interesting and interesting in ways that I thought might
shed some light on philosophy and economics.
And the show, instead of severance, which consists of personalities visioning, Pluribus is essentially a case of personal identity fusion.
So there's this signal that gets beamed from outer space and people soon realize it's in some kind of base for notation.
But when they figure that out, they realize it's a kind of DNA sequence, like AGCTA or whatever, because it's for components to DNA.
And once they create this compound or whatever, and they inject it into our rat, the rat bites a doctor, and then we're off to the racist, because these doctors start intentionally infecting each other, and then eventually they're spraying this chemical over the whole population.
And what this amino acid or whatever it is does is everybody has this kind of violence.
seizure and when you awake from the seizure, if you awake from the seizure because certain people die during the season, everybody shares the same mind.
So there is no longer any difference between you and anybody else.
The giant hive mind has all of your memories, all of your knowledge and instantly, you know,
Anybody you talk to is the kind of mouthpiece for this mental organism that comprises at least humanity.
Maybe it does the aliens as well.
I'm not far enough into it.
The premise of the story is that this happens but there's like eight individuals on earth for whom this process doesn't work.
So they are still individuals and they have to interact with
this giant hive mind and you know they can talk to anybody anybody else that they talk to is essentially a representative of the hive mind but there's only eight of them eight people for whom they were immune to this
oh they were immune that's why i was wondering how if they were off the grid or something or how they avoided becoming part of it so okay
no and so uh the first couple episodes are you know the hive mind saying we want to study get you guys all together to study you to figure out
how we can fix you how we can make you better yeah join our group exactly it they go no we want to fix you so that you can join it's so great to join everybody who's joined has been happy that they did i have all the memories from your
spouse who died during the transition, during the seizing.
But before she died, she did join us briefly and she was extremely happy.
Remember your honeymoon.
They gave you a bunch of details about that you didn't remember.
One of them turns on the TV and it's just somebody in a suit and tie standing behind the presidential seal of the United States at a podium.
And it says, like, call us Carol or whatever.
So she calls a number and on TV, the guy picks up and goes, Carol, you know, we've been waiting for your call.
It's like, this isn't the president.
They're like, no, but he was standing at the podium and he wore a suit and we all share the same mind.
So we thought, you know, you'd want to see this person.
And the protagonist doesn't want to join the hive mind.
And one of the things that I think is really interesting about the show is that
I think it correctly points out that it doesn't seem like if you join the hive mind, it seems like death in the same way that we talked about in the discussion around severance, where recombining or whatever might seem like a kind of personal
So the two things that I think are interesting about the show is first, that this is presented as kind of dystopian.
And there are some of the eight survived eight immune people who say, no, I actually want to join the hive mind.
My wife and children are still alive.
They're part of the hive mind.
I would like to join with them, right?
Yeah.
And then the person who so far seems like the hero of the show is the one saying, like, no, no, no, this is a disaster.
This would this is death for you.
This is this is a dystopia, not a utopia.
and what's interesting is that we are we are constantly told and the whole idea of like creating the new soviet man is once we are able to get rid of our individual cares and i'll join together that that this is the kind of correct way to live and i think that this show one of the things it shows is that this actually seems more dystopian than we want to give it credit for and it does seem like it entails the kind of individual death and that it's unclear that anybody whose body is still walking around that they
anything of the personal identity other than that this giant mega mind can access memories that were once had by
the person or soul or whatever you want to say that inhabited that individual body.
And those people have access to everybody else's mind likewise as well?
See, the way you're saying
this is those people have access to everybody else's mind.
They are the mind.
There is no
everybody else.
There is now just one giant mind that has access to what used to be every individual's memories.
Like a brain that's remote controlling billions of bones.
Exactly.
And one giant mind that's controlling individual human bodies as
if they were via remote control from one giant mind.
A lot of this show, if you watch it, it's kind of eerie to watch because so much of it is silent.
And what they're doing, and it's obviously intentional, is they're showing the way the world is working, where everyone is remote controlled via hive mind, and you realize nobody has to talk to each other.
ever.
And a bunch of the travel that we normally do doesn't need to be done.
There's no sense in which I need to go on vacation because I want to be in Mexico.
The whole point of me going to Mexico is like, I know there are people in Mexico now, but I'm not there.
I want my body to be in Mexico.
But if
There's just one giant mind that's controlling all of us, like individual apparatus or whatever.
There's no sense in which we need to move the finger that's
simultaneously in Mexico.
It's simultaneously in
Mexico and Ottawa.
So the airports are deserted?
when the person actually has to fly when they need to get everybody together to have a meeting of eight people.
They're walking through the airports.
It's all deserted.
The person who flies a plane just looks like a normal guy they grabbed and threw in the cockpit because of course they can do that.
There's no such thing as like training to be a pilot.
Everybody knows how to do everything.
And there's a point at which the character wants food and goes to her supermarket and the supermarket's closed and she goes, well, you know, she
calls the president or whatever you know i want my sprouts back because of course it sprouts which is my favorite grocery store but uh and they get like okay and so they immediately fill the sprouts back up like within an hour they just have trucks arriving and filling it up like realizing like the point of a grocery store like you really don't need a grocery store in a world where
There aren't things like individual tastes to satisfy.
You just need a food distribution, but you don't need things like grocery stores, which are low-key for prices.
There is essentially no need for the kinds of so much of the communication that normally goes on.
And I think this points out something that I was reading a book.
Knowledge and decisions by Thomas Sowell and one of the things he says is like what markets really are is clearing houses for information between individuals That's what individuals are trading.
It looks like they're trading money.
They're just trading information in a world where the loci of consciousness isn't in individual human beings bodies But it's somewhere else.
I think that this showed us a really interesting job of showing what you wouldn't need in that kind of world what kind of weird hell that is At the same time
Well, I think this looks like a good spot for a break.
I've got some questions like, I kind of want to challenge like whether they portray it as personal taste are gone, but would it have to be that way?
And so we'll kind of push the envelope here on different ways this and then I'm anxious to apply it to contemporary society with all of our noses buried in a phone and are we the current AI system
is it just missing human bodies at this point?
And so that's just a natural evolution of where we'll go is having the hive mind eventually take over our bodies.
I don't know, hope not, but we'll see.
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 three 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 moral 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.
The Boarding Institute at Ottawa University is the best place in the Midwest for free enterprise education and its contribution to human flourishing, faith and economics in action.
We have some great high school student programs like PPE Fest.
This is an event where students get to listen to some world-renowned speakers and then participate in competition geared around philosophy, politics, and economics.
Our everyday economics program is just a half day on a Saturday and we will have an integrated discussion about common sense economics.
We have a college credit microeconomics course that runs every eight weeks.
Your high school student can earn college credit for the special price of $200.
If you know some students interested in programs like these, contact Peter, Justin, or Russ today.
All right, so we're back and I just, I don't know from the movie or otherwise, but I thought a system like this, couldn't it preserve your taste for certain things?
Because otherwise it seems like the hive mind is changing physical things that might have been present.
Maybe this was part of your DNA thing, but I just thought it's possible to have kind of the similar premise to the show.
but allow people to preserve their liking for pizza or not pizza or broccoli or not broccoli and that we could still have some sort of uniqueness to us other than our physical bodies, which I presume would remain the same according to the premise of the show.
So why couldn't some of our taste and stuff be there as well?
The premise of the show is X and you're asking, but why not X?
Yeah.
So what's wrong with that?
I mean,
From what you've seen of the show as a possible that they could have done, did we have to trash that?
I guess is what I for their show to have meaning.
Did we have to get rid of that?
I guess the first is we don't
write the show.
We have to see what the show.
I get it.
Yeah.
And
second is look, I think that minds are individual in the sense that what we mean by individual is a mind.
And so I don't think I think they did a good job of
saying, well, if we want to take this idea seriously, that everybody is part of a hive mind, that does mean that all these individual things are going to disappear or they are going to be count so little in the aggregate that they become essentially infinitesimals.
So you could say something like, well, maybe the hive mind does feel Russ's taste of the pizza, right?
And maybe that counts for something.
But think of everything that it's counting against, which is everybody else's sensation in the entire world at the exact same time.
So there's a sense in which, well, it doesn't look like it does count.
But even if you did make it count, it's unclear how it would make these personal attributes count in a way that would even move the needle as to what the hive mind is doing.
Maybe another way to characterize what I'm trying to say is that
Then the hive mind basically made you a robot.
Is that more of what the premise of the story is?
I mean, you've basically turned in, you've lost all of your identity and you are now just a functioning arm of the mass.
Your body.
The story is.
Your body.
Yeah.
I don't think there's any you there anymore, right?
Right.
Yeah.
Your body is now just a remote control apparatus.
That's right.
A robot essentially of the hive mind.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I think that's all we've got for today.
So this has been a production of the Gorton Institute.
Feel free to follow the Faith in Economics podcast on any platform other than that be fruitful and multiply.
Thanks.
Thanks again, guys.
Tell your friends about the podcast, kxel.com slash Jacobson, J-A-C-O-B-S-E-N.
In the meantime, listen to all the wisdom of Jeff Stein during his weekday news and commentary.
And folks, always remember and never forget to be safe, be smart, be good, be strong.
Love Jesus Christ.
And God blesses everyone.
Till we meet again, have a great weekend and bye-bye!
