KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – January 31, 2026

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We're going to have a wonderful show today.

We're going to talk about free market enterprise economy.

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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 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. Russ Mathola, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics, also founder of the Gortney Institute, and also Dr. Justin Clark, the Menard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.

All right, so we've talked a little bit about this before, maybe not directly, and I think things have changed.

Dr. Clark wanted to lead us and start us off with Ice.

And Ice, Ice Baby, it's not as good as the song is apparently.

So Justin, what do you got to say about Ice?

Hey, let's scrap that and start over.

Probably a good

idea.

Hopefully a few listeners got a chuckle.

Yeah, so I think it'd be good to kind of talk about what's been going on, especially in Minneapolis and with ice enforcement.

And this kind of came to a boil a couple of weeks ago when Renee Goode was shot by an ice officer.

Renee and her partner were engaged in like civilian disruption of ice activities, and she was fatally shot.

And in the wake of that, there's been even more protest against ice enforcement in Minnesota.

And I feel like generally people are kind of up in arms about it or applauding it.

But it would probably be useful to get in the context about where this is coming from.

Why is this happening in Minneapolis and not in other areas?

And what do we think about it?

Is it super dangerous, potentially dangerous, good, bad, etc?

Well, I'll just say I was in Minneapolis.

I can't remember if I said this on a couple podcasts ago, but I was there the morning it happened.

I was visiting my parents and so I saw it kind of right on the front end.

Some of the things that have been happening since then have kind of made me think twice.

I felt like when I reviewed the tapes many times that morning because it was on in Minneapolis more times than just, you know, seeing it

two or three days later on a video clip.

So, you know, she made a movement forward and I thought it looked mostly justified at that point.

The more I get into it and the training of officers and kind of the heat of the moment, it seemed like there's maybe mistakes on both sides.

I think we had Renee Goode who's, let's just say, probably more of a, maybe novice isn't the right word, but inexperienced at protesting and how far you can push and whether she thought

you know, fatal violence would potentially result from it.

And maybe the same thing on from the ICE officer standpoint of, you know, heat of the moment.

There's a car coming at me.

I've been trained to, you know, if that's assault with a deadly weapon under those circumstances.

And, you know, maybe I don't know if he has any regrets or not, but that just happened all kind of heat of the moment.

I think her wife was saying, go, go, go, and she's going and maybe she shouldn't have.

And then

that all happen.

So I see a lot of it as a unfortunate circumstances and heat of the moment that led to this and that's why I think a lot of people are up in arms with it is that these things can happen when when these protests are going on and people have a lack of understanding of the law on yes bullets can be used under certain circumstances when maybe they just thought I'm just protesting you know so that's my two cents there.

In terms of the specific incident, I pretty much agree with Russ that, you know, people were saying, oh, she turned her wheel, she wasn't trying to hit him or whatever.

But of course, like, she, A, she did hit him based on the video, but B, if a car is coming towards you, like, you don't necessarily think about that sort of thing.

And so it may just, it happened to be the case that, like, yeah, she didn't intend to hurt the guy, and he thought she did, and maybe he was reasonable for thinking so.

So I tend to agree with your assessment of the incident itself for us.

It's not necessarily like there was a right side and a wrong side, but rather like two people who were making mistakes.

Now I am a little reluctant whenever we talk about law enforcement to embrace like the shoot first, ask questions later thing.

But again, you know, if you put yourself in the position of a car coming towards you, it's hard to imagine otherwise, but.

In general, Justin, I don't know, you can give your assessment too, but my impression is that Minneapolis and Minnesota in general have become a hotbed because of a lot of the migrant resettlement that happens there, which seems to have created a network that's attracting both legal and illegal immigrants from certain places, so Somalia being the one that everybody's aware of.

So my view of the situation is it kind of seems like what has happened is

There was that guy who went around exposing the federal government fraud that was the fraud was not part of the government but the fraud in getting federal funds from a lot of these so-called daycare centers that either didn't have any kids in them or they were health centers too that weren't seeing patients but they were just collecting these federal you know benefits.

There was a guy going along and checking and he uncovered all this fraud that seemed to be in a large part being done by a lot of the Somali immigrants there.

And this, I think, kind of tipped off the Trump admin, not really a tip off, more of like a, it emboldened the Trump admin to step up enforcement, which has led us to where we are today.

I think that's my impression of the circumstance.

So Justin, I don't know if you had more to say about why you think here rather than, because you don't think Minnesota, when you think illegal immigrants, you think of like, you know, Arizona, right?

You think of like border states where people are crossing.

But that's not what's going on here

Yeah, so I'll I'll give my two cents on the shooting to and then do the same thing and back way out.

I think that it's really important to realize that There are a bunch of situations in life and I think I stole this from somebody I can't remember who that consists of essentially pulling the lever on a slot machine where there's a chance you're gonna die and

it's knowable going into those situations.

And aggravating a law enforcement officer is one of those situations.

If you try to flee law enforcement, that's that kind of situation.

What every parent needs to tell their kids is when a law enforcement officer asks you to stop, you just have to follow directions and see if you think you're wrong, right?

If you think they're wrong.

Just seethe, internally seethe, and then go fight it in the court or whatever later.

But there's no possible way.

99.99% of the time, it's not going to turn out in your favor if you don't follow law enforcement's orders.

And when you point this out and you point out that, yeah, being shot is a predictable outcome of not obeying a law enforcement officer, people think you are saying that people deserve to be shot for not.

I'm obeying a law enforcement officer's orders.

And that's not what we're saying, right?

We're saying that you shouldn't pull that lever because there's a chance you're going to die.

Not that since you pulled the lever, you deserve to die, right?

Those are two different things.

And I think that it's reasonable to point out that this is a situation where if you are interfering with a law enforcement officer, there's a chance you're going to die.

And I think too many people have this kind of Marvel movie brain where they think that since I'm indignant and.

I think that I am morally correct.

Nothing bad can happen to me.

And actually, the police have to follow my orders because I think that I'm in the right.

And that's kind of insane.

But the reason they have that attitude, I think, is because during the George Floyd riots of 2020, protesters were treated with kid gloves and were not, for the most part, charged when they burned down a bunch of cities across America.

And I think you can contrast this with the way that, for instance, the January 6th protesters were treated, who I think expected to be treated like George Floyd protesters were, where instead, if you marched into the Capitol after being waved in by officers, you were thrown in solitary confinement for three years or whatever.

So I think we just have this large group of our citizenry that think that somehow they have sensed they believe that they're

morally in the right that they have carte blanche to just do whatever they want and not obey law enforcement's orders.

And that's turning out the way that I would have predicted that it would turn out.

And it's also important to note that, you know, when I've heard a lot of people say, well, the officer shouldn't have shot.

Maybe he was, that was too quick.

That same officer, I think nine months before,

was in a stop where somebody grabbed him and dragged him over 300 yards in an automobile.

So not only do automobiles get used as weapons against police officers, I mean, under the law, they're a deadly weapon.

But that same officer had had one used against him very recently.

He had to get an enormous amount of stitches because, you know, he almost died.

So I just think that this was

predictable and understandable.

And I think that Renee Good and her partner made some really, really terrible decisions.

And so I can stop there before I pull way back and say kind of what I think is going on in Minnesota too.

Yeah.

And this, this might be a good spot for a break.

So I ended up having a discussion with students in Arizona when I was down there about this.

We started with Venezuela and then we gravitated over to ICE, but

I was a little bit surprised.

The student was very respectful, by the way, and I really appreciated that.

I hope he'll join some of our other Gortney events.

And he was from London, and he hadn't actually watched the video.

But he had heard a woman got, you know, killed, and so he was kind of taking a stance.

He wasn't taking a strong stance, but...

A stance kind of against ice and and then the other student we were with he's like you haven't seen the video here Let me show you and and then it's like for the first time.

He's like seeing the car You know moving towards that it wasn't just ice killed a woman.

So Boy that just opened my eyes that even on such a big event We can have these misperceptions because people aren't even really evaluating all of the evidence.

So so when we come back, I definitely want to hit

the number of arrests.

But at the same time, there's been some people that have been harmed that I don't think should have been harmed with some of these ICE raids.

And so that's the part that's been bothering me a little bit more lately.

We should get into some good topics.

We'll be back in just a bit.

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Okay, so we're back and Justin, you want to give us kind of your big picture view of how things are shaking down, especially up in Minneapolis?

Yeah, so I think that this all, you know, this is downstream from

the kind of battle over immigration and border enforcement that's actually been going on for the past 15 years.

And this goes, I mean, there were fights in both the Republican and the Democratic Party about whether or not we should have an open border policy.

Famously, a lot of neocons who switched to the Democratic Party were big fans of having a more permissive border.

And if you look at the Democratic side,

you can pull up a quote from Bernie Sanders in 2016, where he goes, no, no, no, open borders.

They're terrible.

They're a Koch brothers invention to try to keep laser costs low, right?

And for whatever reason, now Republicans have pretty for the most part settled on a

if not closed, secure the border position, and Democrats seem to have more of a any border enforcement is a moral crime position.

Now, the way that has played out since then is that there have been at least two cases, one in Arizona and one in Texas, where the Arizona governor wanted to enforce border security more stringently.

under Obama.

And the Obama administration told them that they couldn't do that, that border enforcement was a federal prerogative.

You are not allowed to enforce it at the state level.

And if we tell you not to enforce it, you can't do it.

And the same thing happened under Biden in Texas.

And we have those pictures where the feds are lifting up

barbed wire fences that the Texas troops had put out to try to secure the border, and the Biden administration not only didn't help them, but actually cut through the wires and stuff like this, and said, and with I believe the Supreme Court's approval, that no, no, no, this is the federal government's purview, we are the ones in charge of border immigration.

Now, it seems to me that the left is kind of trying to play this both ways, where when the left has the executive branch,

They say, haha, we're going to prevent states from doing border enforcement.

I mean, the left doesn't have the executive branch.

What they say is we are actually going to institute sanctuary cities.

And what we are going to do here is, you know, people think a sanction sounds like just a nice city.

But what that means in practice is that when somebody who has a order of deportation and they get arrested.

that the police do not report that to the feds and do not hold them long enough for the feds to come and get them and deport them.

And this is an explicit policy in sanctuary cities.

Now, that's all going on in the background.

So that is when Biden's in office, he prevents Republican states from enforcing the border security.

When Trump is in office, the blue states prevent federal law enforcement from picking up, not just people who are here illegally, people who are here illegally and have been arrested for another crime, right?

Now, in the wake of that, in the fall, in like November-ish,

My favorite periodical county highway had a really long story about fraud in Venezuela, fraud in Minneapolis.

It was called like the shame of our cities and it pointed out that there's between between one and nine billion dollars in fraud going on and specifically in the Twin Cities where there's a large Somali diaspora and in fact it seemed something like those Somali and Somalis were

between one or two percent of the population more than 90 percent of people convicted of fraud in the state have had the Somali connection and something like 700 million dollars in cash has gone through the Somali airport back to Somalia in the past two years that's a million dollars in cash every single day essentially and they have

had a bunch of whistleblowers try to step forward and say I think there's something going wrong with the way these funds are being distributed because for instance there's the rates of autism claimants in Minneapolis was way higher than the national average if you know me you know that I'm.

Very crazy about the autism rate being super high anyway What a lot of these whistleblowers pointed out was that families who were signing up for these were also in on it and were receiving sometimes between 11 and 18 thousand dollars a year and Waltz was turned not only turning a blind eye to this but was actually punishing the whistleblowers up until right about the end of November when this started to come to a boil after all this

kind of came out in November, then you had, I can't remember his first name, his last name's Shirley, it's Nick Shirley maybe, do his video where he's walking around going to all these daycare centers, famously there's the Leering Center, right?

The Learning Center that misspelled learning, so there's no end in it, it just says Leering Center.

And it seems like these are just obvious cases of fraud.

And so there was this gigantic backlash to, hey, how come all

there's this enormous amount of fraud again between one and nine billion dollars worth which is an astounding amount of money you know that's as I like to point out that's more money than I make in a year and and people were very angry and saying why is this happening and then there was this push from the Trump administration saying we're going to do something about it and the way they decided to do something about it was to at least do some kind of immigration crackdown and that's why you saw this

I think arise in Minnesota because Minnesota was on on the hot seat for the amount of fraud and when the federal troops went in the even investigate they were essentially.

got pushed back not just from the citizens but from the actual law enforcement agencies up there too who would refuse to cooperate with ICE.

So that's all going on in the back burner when you have the Renee Good situation erupt where you know Renee Good was not just driving through, she was part of a group

You can hear all the whistles going off in the background.

That's because citizens are on this kind of ice watch where they all get together and they start blowing whistles whenever they would see an ice vehicle.

And then they would take their own vehicles and try to box these people in to make sure they couldn't move.

That's a really stupid game to play.

And it seems like, again, I think this is this kind of Marvel movie mind scenario where people don't understand because protesters have been essentially treated with kid gloves.

that if you actually want to protest against the status quo, you know, these people, I think the view is often like, I'm just like the civil rights marchers.

Look back and look at what those civil rights marches were like.

People were getting attacked by dogs and hit with fire hoses.

You need to know that if, you know, whether or not your cause is just, if you're actually protesting real power, there's an enormous amount of risk involved there.

Yeah, and then with some bringing their kids out there to the protests, heard of some people getting hurt or pepper spray or something backlash, I mean, it's just the type of environment you should never bring a kid to.

If you choose to do this one thing, but yeah, there's just some things.

And again, it might be just due to the not either naive that this is real power and there's real potential harm.

It just seems like they're naive to that.

Can I say two things to that?

Because I saw some of the literature that they were distributing to protest groups, like training these people to protest.

And a couple of the things that said absolutely blew my mind, one of which was one of the best ways to stop ICE is once they detain somebody, circle ICE and start yelling at them, and you can actually unarrest people this way.

That's insane.

That never happened.

Please don't just let people go.

If you, like me, are kind of a critic of the militarization of police, one of the things that you're a critic of is this idea that police never deescalate.

They don't.

They're not trained to deescalate.

They don't.

Thinking that you're going to get a bunch of people around them

yelling at them and that's gonna make them say, oh, okay, you're right.

That's an insane thing to tell people because it won't work.

And the other thing I saw was that what you should do is put white female bodies in between brown bodies and police officers because, and ICE officers because we know that ICE officers are white supremacists and therefore they won't hurt white females, but they're really after those brown people, which is also insane.

All of the data suggests that police are racially equal opportunity offenders when it comes to overuse of militarization tactics.

This is what the economist Roland Fryer got fired from Harvard about.

Roland Fryer, who was an African-American economist, he said, I didn't start out liking the police.

I assumed they were racist.

I went on all these car rides.

I pointed out that when you control for the amount of interactions that police have with every ethnicity, there's statistically no difference between the use of force on any races.

And my point here is that

The problem is that you have a bunch of people who have been saying for years that the police force is systematically racist.

And not only is that not true, but they have believed that past lie about this.

And that past lie informs them to make really, really imprudent decisions on the ground.

Not only people bringing their babies to these things, which is absolutely insane.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

That was really long.

I think Peter wants

to say something.

Yeah, well, you know, it's been a few years since my point was relevant, so.

Yes, we have.

We told Justin had the lead today, but we didn't.

He's ready.

He's ready.

Yeah, no, the last thing that I would comment on, and it's something that comes out of what Justin said, is that one of the typical flashpoint arguments in more, you know,

classically liberal libertarian spaces is this argument about like open immigration in the welfare state.

And so, you know, Friedman has that line, I think, that you can't have open immigration in the welfare state.

And so a common response by libertarians is to say, okay, well, then we need to get rid of the welfare state.

And that's probably what Friedman's answer would have been too.

But I do think what all this highlights is actually like a deeper issue.

which is actually that the welfare state maybe not just like it's it's not just an accidental issue that comes about with immigration like if you got rid of it then there wouldn't be an issue rather it seems like it's endogenous to immigration to a certain degree with respect to the way that a lot of these democratic governors are handling things in other words

Based on what we know, it kind of seems like Tim Cain was purposefully allowing fraud to go on to attract a lot.

Tim Walls.

Tim Walls.

Yeah.

What was Cain Hillers got?

Don't want to bring another politician.

Yeah.

The other VP, the failed VP.

Yeah, it seems like Waltz, and he resigns, if my memory's

right.

He hasn't resigned.

He's not running.

Oh, yes, he's not.

And that happened when

I was there.

We had

all these events happen.

Which it's like, well, yeah, I mean, he's hoping that they don't investigate him too hard for fraud.

But it kind of seems like what he has done is he has allowed all this fraud to go on so that informally

these groups of immigrants would communicate with each other and you would have a larger influx of immigrants and a larger voter pool.

So it's not just like, oh, it happens to be the case that a welfare state is bad when you have immigration.

It's like actually, and maybe this is like a unique moment, maybe it could be different, but it seems like immigration policy itself is a means of directly impacting the welfare state.

In other words,

the ability to do this sort of thing is causing there to be not just different policies, but different utilizations of the policies for off, right?

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah.

And so it's not just that like, oh, it's bad to have open immigration if you have access to an unmitigated welfare state.

It's also that it seems like the politicians are the ones that are using the immigration to fuel the welfare state and vice versa.

So it's not two distinct things that can be uncoupled.

It seems like

you know, what would that be, a vicious cycle?

Yeah.

And the one ingredient though that you need is it also has to be a democracy.

Yeah, that's

right.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, and the places where the fraud was is exactly in these kind of hot button welfare state issues, autism, daycare, housing services, food programs.

It was all kind of these exactly social safety net, you know, welfare state things that ended up being

Big time corrupted.

So I think that's an interesting part of this, too, that supports your argument, Peter, that they kind of go hand in hand and work together, unfortunately, is what we're seeing.

It might feel like we're bashing on Minnesota.

You know, my wife's from Minnesota.

So let me just also say that if you think that what, you know, ripping the lid off what's going on in Minnesota is bad.

just wait until they rip the lid off California, which is where I'm from.

This isn't just a Minnesota problem.

Yeah, there's other states that this will probably kick up something on.

All right, well, my prayers are with Minnesota.

Again, my family and friends are up there and we hate to see people getting hurt and especially innocent people.

I guess I'm a big believer and no...

person should just have somebody walk up and you have to be forced to show your ID.

Just maybe it's because you're brown-skinned or otherwise.

That's kind of the stop-and-frisk stuff that we talked about years ago.

That's part of being an American is that you don't have to willy-nilly pull out an ID.

And so I hope that's not going on.

I hope that's a lot of fake news coming out.

But you know, that's where these these issues are kind of thorny and mistakes are made.

Like say the optimal amount of mistakes.

really can't be zero for and so hopefully the the number of successes will far exceed the unfortunate mistakes that happen every now and then.

So well this has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.

I'd like to thank you all for listening.

Bios 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!

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It's where Iowa comes to talk, News Talk 1540, KXEL.

Last day of January.

Guys, I'm feeling springtime.

That means 28 days till March.

and folks we are caroming from America's original 50,000 watt clear channel blowtorch the only 1540am along with 100.5 FM auto seed rapids as well as listening live on KXEL.

John Jacobson here at the Midway Point on our Jacobson report this week and as always our tribute to the great entrepreneurial family.

of the Hames's.

The founders, Kurt and Norma Hames, now with that multi-generational leadership at Hames Homes, the Homes people, and who better to have back with us after a few weeks with the boys than the girl, the daughter, Barbara Hames Bryant, the matriarch of the operations.

And Barbara, it's so great to have you back with us this week.

Welcome to the show on a cold Iowa day.

Hello, John.

How are you?

It's so good to talk to you.

I'm afraid I'm down with a little bit of a scratchy throat.

They call this my husky Lorne Bacall voice.

Yes.

I think it's all right.

Well, it's got a little bit of Suzanne Plachette from the birds in it too, you know.

So we like those mezzo voices, mezzo-female voices on radio.

We also love Hame's Homes because they're safe, they're affordable, and they're beautiful.

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As per usual, Barbara Hames Bryant nails it as the Curt Norma founded operation has since 1969.

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That's what they started out with on those great TV commercials on channel too.

Barbara's right guys.

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Barbara, shout out that legacy Marion phone number one more time.

You guys are in Southwest CR, as you just said, not far from all retail, a pastoral rule setting, the airport and healthcare, and even the Hawkeyes.

What a deal.

Yes, but we took our Marian phone number with us.

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We've had that number since 1969.

A lot of folks know it.

We're not letting it go.

I love it.

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I love it is the great Jim Zabel would say, Barbara, I can't wait till the weather gets a little better because we have some exciting plans at KXEL to do some live radio remotes there on site at Grandview and Summit View and at your headquarters to further burnish the turnout and the sightseeing on what will be your

greenery and beautiful landscaping uh frisbee uh dog uh pantry uh park areas you guys have just got such a beautiful campus so to speak two small cities really people need to get out and see it we're going to host some remotes live and it's going to be a lot of fun coming up here in spring and summer barbara

yes please be sure to look at our homes that we have for sale at

HamesHomes.com.

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And John, you can look at all of those when you come out for the live remote.

You know that sounds great, Barbara.

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trying to move a growing family in.

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People for over half a century guys, they love Hames, the Homes people.

Barbara, it's been great to have you on.

You'll be back in even better voice next week.

I sure hope so.

I hope the flowers will start blooming and the sun will start shining.

And oh, by the way, go Hawks.

Go Hawks and guys, if you're watching Casablanca or the birds on TCM tonight and you hear Lauren Bacall and Suzanne Plachette and you start thinking of Haymes Homes, it's all subliminally planted in this ad.

So it'll just be even more perfect advertising, subliminal advertising Barbara for Haymes Homes.

John, you are so funny.

I love you to

pieces.

Back at your Barbara and say hi to Clint and Curtis.

They do great radio work too.

It's great to rotate these wonderful family members in truly worthy custodians of the mantle founded by the great Patriots Kurt and Norma Hames.

I can't think of a better vocation.

business as a calling than what the Hames family does, providing hearth and home safely, affordably and beautifully for families.

Guys, these aren't residences.

These are homes.

And you make it truly a home experience.

Thanks, Barbara, for being with us today.

Thank you, John.

You have a great rest of your weekend.

And guys, hopefully the Groundhog won't see a shadow.

Until then, we'll be back after this message.

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 Gorton Institute at Ottawa University.

Welcome to our show today.

My name is Peter Jacobson.

I'm the Courtney Professor of Economic Education and Research.

Joining us today we have Dr. Justin Clark, the Menard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics, and we also have Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and Founder of the Courtney Institutes.

All right, well, I'm traveling to Phoenix Surprise Campus and planning to do an activity with students talking about Venezuela.

And so I wanted to pick the brains of my colleagues with some of the things that have been going on with Venezuela before I had there to have a discussion with college students.

So there's a long history that I don't think really has been played out in the media with the recent events that you're probably familiar with listeners of Maduro being plucked out of his house in his pajamas basically by the US military in a pretty unbelievable way of being able to swoop into somebody's house like him and be plucked out that way and brought to the United States for

trial of some sort.

So I wanted to kind of cover a lot of what's been going on with Venezuela.

I have a number of colleagues that were from Venezuela and we've had some college students from there.

So I've had bits and pieces over time and do some things in class.

So I thought it'd be valuable to get some insights and kind of throw some of that.

on the table.

Right now, Venezuela is the poster child of what not to do with your country, according to the Economic Freedom Index put out by the Frasier Institute.

They are dead last in terms of economic freedom, the ability for people to, you know, kind of live their lives, trade with who they want to trade with, trade barriers, money and inflation, the five different avenues that get explored for

ultimately creating the number that shows how economically free individuals are in there, including regulations and other things.

And so they are literally rock bottom.

And now it's hard to say whether we'll be getting any good data, but in theory we had data coming from there that was decent.

And so I wanted to back up the story a little bit to how it got to where it was, because it's interesting that they had, I don't know if I want to call him a benevolent dictator, because I don't know that much about him, but at a minimum, if he was a dictator that didn't really care that much,

about what went on in the country because he was trying to build up infrastructure.

So if we go way back a hundred years in Venezuela's history, the leader really kind of left the people alone.

And of course it then and then was true and still today that it's an oil rich country.

And he ran the country in such a way that he left people alone and he built infrastructure.

And he was pretty well regarded by the people as my understanding.

And of course, like everybody, he got old and his great succession plan was to turn the country over to the people and go into democracy so that a new leader could come about.

And ultimately that led to a new leader and slowly but surely some of those freedoms

started to disappear and they went to a more populist the person who got elected is who gave out the most handouts and so year by year the 60s the 70s the 80s eventually led to

Chavez and Chavez again was a populist leader giving handouts and ultimately when oil prices went down the economy started to collapse and that led us to this Maduro regime that has been called into question on the legitimacy of the elections and whether he was the rightful person in place.

I just want to pause there that might have been too general of things Justin or Peter Do you have any comments to add from what you're understanding of Venezuela?

I didn't know who it seemed like you were talking about well They had this guy who's kind of good and then this other guy who is not as good Do you are you talking about so there's like Betancourt who was?

what you're

saying.

I didn't do my research.

I'm just going to fess up right now.

I've

been

told the name before, but if you've been diligently doing some computer work ahead of time, please feel free to fill in some of my vague gaps there.

So

Venezuela and I think Bolivia got independence together from the British.

And then the oil deposits were discovered in World War One.

Okay.

And once they discovered the oil deposits, that's when they started industrializing.

And that was, I think, under Gomez.

Okay.

That does ring a bell.

Yes.

I think Gomez is that first guy that you're talking about.

Yes, I think that's right.

So it was corrupt, but most industrializing economies allow for

there's corruption there just because the optimal amount of corruption is probably not zero.

Right.

And then I think you're right.

So it's like Gomez, then Betancourt, Gallegos.

That takes us through the 70s.

And then there's coups, though, like, because I don't think I think Chavez came to power through a coup.

I think you're right.

Yeah.

Or at least maybe his predecessor did.

And then there was this huge depression.

But it wasn't.

So it wasn't like a slow, like they just slowly increasingly voted themselves for this.

There were some coups in the late 20th century that just to throw that out.

Yeah, that's fair.

I was definitely skipping over a lot of details that I'll try to brush up on prior to talking to my college students.

So thank you, Justin.

This is exactly why I have this talk.

because I heard this from people that really were on the brink of tears on what's happened to their country, the way it's had these ups and downs that kind of live through some of that turmoil and like you say, coups and other things to overtake, but ultimately always having some sort of fairly firm hand or larger size government,

yes.

And Chavez was the big change, right?

So Maduro was Chavez's successor.

And Chavez was the big change that happened in 99, I think.

He came into power.

And Lee and the Bolivarian Revolution.

And that's like Chavismo.

And Chavez is very close to Cuba.

Right.

And Castro was still alive then.

Yeah.

And so they were forging those relationships during that time.

And he was held up as the kind of the poster...

child for some of our let's call them democratic socialists or whatever they want to call themselves here in the United States with celebrities you know praising Chavez that oh this is the way the country is supposed to be run this is you know he's good and he was favored among the people until things didn't work anymore when other people's money or the oil money actually in this case more so ran dry.

It's interesting to go back because I've done this and there's a big philosophy.

There's like the lighter reports, which is like this blog about, you know, Brian Leiter runs it.

He's a very influential philosopher and he's a, you know, a democratic socialist.

And you can go back and look at what these people said about Chavez's rise to power and how it was going to be, you know, a thousand flowers were going to bloom in Venezuela because of Chavez nationalizing oil and that kind of

thing.

Yeah, that's a good point to bring up the nationalization of the oil.

Yeah, well, I think my general view on Venezuela is that I'm sure things will be better for them as a result of this.

So I think Maduro as a successor to Chavez was necessarily negative for the economy there.

I mean, they most famously after oil issues and things like that, like they just

paid for things by printing money, had to hyperinflation because of that.

The thing that I first heard about Venezuela as a high schooler was that a lot of people from Venezuela played the video game RuneScape because it was more lucrative to earn money in the game RuneScape and sell it for dollars than it was to earn Venezuelan money.

So there would be huge bot farms of Venezuelans if there's somebody who is like repeatedly doing a task in the game and you talk to them, oftentimes you get a response in Spanish.

And like you can look this up, there are people who have written articles about this, but so the point being is the economy was very bad.

I tend to be of the minds that I'm happy for the people of Venezuela, but I also am not particularly happy about the decision by the Trump administration.

because unlike many of my friends who are kind on the Trump side of things, I don't see this being particularly important for the United States.

I've heard a few like base arguments.

One is like people just say the words Monroe Doctrine.

And I think that we could get into that a little bit.

The other argument that I've heard is that they were selling oil on the cheap to the Chinese.

that's the other thing that I hear and so to start with the second one first I don't think it's any secret that like I am not particularly worried about the Chinese as a geopolitical enemy for the reason that if I were Chinese I'd be very concerned which is that they've got a

totally messed up population pyramid.

And their small youth population, especially men relative to women, that proportion being off, means that they're going to have a lot of issues taking care of the elderly in their country.

If they choose to do that, they might choose to just let them die.

But regardless, it's not a good thing for the long-term health of a country for it to be shrinking rapidly.

South Korea, Japan, these countries are barely going to exist in 100 years on current trajectories.

And China is appearing to

be that way.

So, and my second thought is I actually am relatively skeptical of that whole claim that like they are selling oil on the cheap to the Chinese.

Like how big of a discount are we talking?

Like this is an extremely poor country.

I can't imagine that they're totally giving away all of their wealth to China.

You know, maybe Maduro is receiving some kickbacks to do that at the expense of his own people.

So it's possible.

But my general thought is like the whole like

Chinese fear thing has been going on since I was a kid.

Like people have been worried about China since, you know, my parents were telling me that they were starving people in China when I was like in 1995 or 1999, 1995.

Anyways.

So I wasn't particularly worried and the fact that I've also never heard like no one's ever been like oh the Venezuelan and they're deal with the Chinese it's like I just heard about this after we did things it's like why wasn't this a problem before maybe it was and it's just like a niche policy circle thing but so that's one the Monroe doctrine being another argument so one

Big thing, and this maybe could be its own podcast, that people are claiming is that Trump is currently shifting some more towards a Monroe doctrine world.

And for those who don't know listeners, the Monroe doctrine, I believe by President Monroe, I assume that's why it's named after him, but I haven't looked it up, is the idea that the United States should basically control

the hemisphere that we're in, the Western Hemisphere.

And so it originally, I think, goes back to maybe British dealings in South America and us basically kicking him out and saying, no, this is our hemisphere.

We don't want foreign influence over here.

First of all, if the thought was we're going to pivot west and we're going to stop worrying about the east, then actually I would be somewhat favorable towards that idea.

But since Trump is currently talking about overthrowing the regime in Iran, I don't think that's what's happening.

At least we're not we're not pivoting away from the east.

In terms of whether we need to totally control the west, it's like, well, there's two issues I think with this way of thinking.

The first issue that I see with this idea of like we need to control the west is

In the year since the Monroe Doctrine, your position on the globe has become increasingly less important when it comes to warfare.

We have missiles that go up into the highest level of the atmosphere and rain down from the sky.

I actually don't think it matters very much when your enemies are in your hemisphere versus not.

China has this capability and this technology too.

Once we have ICBMs intercontinental

intercontinental ballistic missiles.

I think the whole idea of like geographic positioning loses its importance pretty significantly.

Doesn't mean it's totally unimportant, but it loses importance significantly.

Here's the last downside or the last negative that I will put up here is we have been playing this game in South America for decades.

Like, believe it or not, I don't think we are one South American dictator away from fixing South America.

Like, that's what the United States has been doing for decades.

It's, you know, the CIA goes and causes a revolution in a country, overthrows some communist, this destabilizes the area, other communists rise up.

It's been a game of cat-mouse since the Soviet Union.

Overall, I'll say I'm happy for the people of Venezuela.

It is probably good for them.

I don't think that the United States interests are very well forwarded by doing this.

I think this is just another intervention and a series of interventions that will cause us to spend a lot of taxpayer money on

providing more things for the military.

I think that we will be involved with Venezuela for a long time now because of that.

We don't have boots on the ground right now as far as I'm aware, but I think we will over the next 20 years.

So I'm a pessimist on the whole thing.

I wish Trump wouldn't have done it.

I tend to be a non-interventionist.

There's my two cents.

All right.

Well, that looks like a good cliffhanger.

Well, let's go to break.

So you got a number of things to get into.

And I also want to touch more on Maduro being a direct leader of the drug cartel, as opposed to maybe some sort of indirect player.

So I don't know where that one's at.

And we'll be back in just a bit.

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but they intersect in ways that are important to understand both individually and for your community.

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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.

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If you'd like to consider some events for your high school students or that class, please contact Justin, Peter, or Russ today.

All right, so we're back and Peter laid out a number of different things and things we can dive more deeply into.

Justin, what did you want to pick up on first?

Yeah, so I think what Peter said is really interesting and it brings up a bunch of different topics.

And not even what Peter said, but even in the beginning,

There's so many different questions around Venezuela.

One is, how did Venezuela end up with Maduro?

And that's kind of what Russ was getting at the beginning.

And then there are questions about like, well, will removing Maduro help the Venezuelan people?

And Peter Pierre addressed part of that.

The second question related to that is, is removing Maduro in the interests of American citizens?

And then there are questions about like,

whether or not intervention is always bad or whether or not it can be done better or worse.

And then I think there are fascinating questions too, just about the actual technicalities of the Maduro operation, which I think that this kind of a break from the way in which the US has been doing regime change.

And you can think that's a break for better or worse.

The question about whether or not Maduro deserved to be removed, if he deserved to be removed, are we obligated to remove him, permitted to remove him?

And what's the claim there?

And if we are either obligated or permitted or forbidden, right?

But if we're permitted or obligated to, are there better or worse ways to do it?

And then it's the way that we did it in the better or worse way.

And so just to put my two cents,

here.

If you look at the way the raid was conducted, it seems like the US lost zero people.

And the Venezuelan protector, you know, whatever their version of the secret services was completely decimated.

And there's a sense in which that's anytime there's like death on that kind of scale, that's sad.

But it's also, it shows that there's a kind of like a cemetery, which I don't think maybe

they expected.

And if you listen to at least some of the reports, it looks like the strike force that was called Operation Absolute Resolve, the Delta Force took it out.

And it seems like they completely blinded the Venezuelan security forces, they completely blinded apparently Russian security forces who were meeting with Maduro earlier in that day, and then used some kind of sonic weapon

If the reports are correct, which is like

oceans 11 type of thing, right?

The the zapper kind of that's what I envisioned when they described it.

Yeah, like it seems like it immediately reduced people to laying on the ground thinking their own heads are going to explode from the inside.

It just like very it seems like stuff out of a sci-fi movie.

Right.

And so that's interesting.

And this idea that the United States government, it used to be, you know, we can bomb your cities.

We can kill all the civilians.

We could bomb Moscow or whatever.

Our missiles can get there quickly.

But this idea now that, no, we can actually go insurgically and just remove you and your security forces.

And there's absolutely nothing that you can do about it.

I think that marks a change in the way in which, you know, the kind of strategic

alliances with regard to defense, like mutually assured destruction and stuff.

That kind of changes the calculus.

So I just wanted to throw that out there.

All right.

Well, any other last thoughts on this?

This looks like a good spot to wrap.

This has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.

I'd like to thank y'all for listening.

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Thanks.

Thank you.

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 bless us.

everyone till we meet again have a great weekend and bye bye