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The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Thu Jun 18, 2026
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Back the dots before we get into theory.
So you got some sort of property rights story, Peter.
Yeah.
So there's a really viral set of YouTube videos that have gone out right now.
And this is how the story broke.
Interestingly, this may be a different podcast topic, but there's been a lot of citizen journalism lately.
I've noticed pumping up.
Got that Olivia, a guy, you have the guy who exposed the fraud in Minnesota.
And now we've got this character on YouTube named, he goes by Reckless Ben as his YouTube channel, Ben Schneider, I think is his real name.
And he's done a lot of videos like getting into and exposing cults and trying to like
help people who are victims of the cults like he he created like a Scientology sucks religion and like when after Scientology using Scientology sucks religion so he's could done that kind of thing and so his most recent set of videos which he got now really popular for
I was regarding Legos so his idea was I'm tired of getting into these like really serious videos I want to like do something more lighthearted so he basically just sent out a call to his audience saying like can you send me some people who need help and like maybe a lower stake situation and he heard about this guy
who his his dad is kind of old and assistant living and his dad spent his whole life collecting Star Wars Legos and the Star Wars Legos are now valued at over $200,000 by assessors and so the Star Wars Lego market is pretty expensive and so he's got tons of old sets that are good condition.
And so what this son did is he essentially gave the Legos to a consignment store to be sold.
He's still the owner of the Legos, but they sell the Legos, the consignment store, and they keep a portion and the family keeps a portion.
And this is going to help pay for his dad's medical expenses and all this.
And so...
the rub came in when Essentially the old franchise owner left the franchise and corporate installed a new franchise owner and this company's called Lego bricks and minifigs all these things are Bricks and minifigs.
It's the name not Lego because they can't use that.
I was gonna say go Justin
when you say the corporate.
Do you are you talking about?
the consignment store?
Yes, yeah.
So the consignment store has a corporate and has a franchisee system.
And so the stores, these franchises, basically they were put in place after the old one left.
And once the new owner came in, he basically said to the son like,
We don't know what you're talking about.
This is our inventory of Legos.
I don't
know what that contract is that you have there and essentially refuse to let him see them, is not telling him if they're being sold or what's happening with them, issued trespass warrant or whatever it is, not a warrant.
And so he's not allowed to go to the store.
And so this YouTuber goes and looks into it and what he is encountering is like all of these different
uses of lawfare in order to get him to walk away from the situation.
So, you know, they've, the police have said, well, this is a civil, not a criminal matter because this is a, you know, a contract dispute rather than an actual theft.
And so the police refused to do anything to help corporate people have to, or the franchise owner told the guy that if you go after us in court, we are going to counter sue you.
It's going to
cost so much money that your $200,000 Lego collection is not going to be worth a lawsuit.
So just walk away.
And so in the video, the video is very entertaining because this, the guy spends, you know, a really, really long time doing all these different avenues to get the Legos back.
It's actually something that's still going on right now to give you a few and then we'll get into how this ties into economics.
One thing that he does is he creates an official Oregon state lottery that's registered by the state.
And then he uses Brian, who is the son's Lego collection, as one of the prizes in the lottery.
And he has a bunch of people enter the lottery for a dollar.
And then he gives one of the Lego sets out in the lottery to the winner of the lottery.
And he has them go to the store to collect their prize.
Well, interfering with an Oregon State certified lottery is not a civil offense.
It's a criminal offense.
And so now by refusing to give the Lego set over, this is a criminal matter.
And you can see in the video that one of the police officers are like, all right, I guess we have to arrest these guys and take them in.
But then another one kind of shows up and whisper something as you're and they both just like leave.
And so this is one method.
Another method they went through is they said, OK, well, what if we just sell each of the individual Lego sets for $10,000?
And then we take all 20 or 10 or however many people they used, take the owners of the franchise.
Well, first the franchise itself, then the owners of the franchise to small claims court.
We can each sue them for $10,000 in small claims court.
Then there's not going to be heavy legal fees because it's small claims court.
And actually this happens.
The owners don't show up.
They win in small claims court.
But then the corporation shuts down the franchise.
People don't show up.
There there's no way to serve them any sort of like there's no way to get the money out of the franchise because it's not opening anymore They go to the owners the franchise the owners the franchise have them arrest for trespassing So there they refuse the service of the papers So it's a whole big thing and it's a fight that's going on right now the creator of the video actually fled to Mexico City because arrest warrant was put out on him So he was in Mexico as of last video
And so there's a lot of public now.
Why was there a arrest warrant on him?
Uh, trespassing or something.
Oh, it was part of his investigative work.
Yeah, part of he, but he didn't actually trespass.
He was sitting outside the house in the car waiting to serve papers.
But regardless, part of the big story is like the small town police seem to have handled this very badly.
There's some thought that maybe what's going on here is the police department is very heavily Mormon and so is the company.
Some people are claiming that this is like a Mormon mafia situation.
All of this is, of course, is alleged.
These are not except for the civil suits, which they were found liable for.
None of this has been, like, tried in court yet.
Partly because these people, a few people have looked at their backgrounds.
I haven't spent too much time verifying it.
But it seems like the owner, the CEO of the company, as well as the franchise and the new franchisee owners
all have a background in using law in order to claim property that you wouldn't think is theirs.
In fact, the company that they've apparently, and again, I haven't researched this too much, but they've been apparently connected to a company called Legally Mine, which I think is a company that literally tries to claim property using lawfare.
That's essentially the company.
the way the company operates.
I think you just kind of did it, but just for the
listeners, how would you define lawfare?
Yeah, so lawfare is kind of the use of the law in order to gain resources.
We might say illegitimately, even though it's like technically legal.
Almost immorally.
Yeah, Justin, you could probably think of a better definition.
That was just off the top of my head.
Well, I just thought that I think maybe you're the examples that you were giving of the way that this journalist was Trying to rearrange the claims so that he could get what do you what do you wanted?
Which is a value-neutral way of saying what he's doing, right?
Cuz I think of course that the person deserves the Legos but this idea Okay, what if we run the lottery instead?
Yeah,
we can like that to me constitutes lawfare even
though I don't think it's
immoral it's this attempt to kind of like
to recognize that the law get that there are many different paths to a certain goal or whatever and to
use the
law as a tool to get what you want rather than as an impartial adjudicator of objective disputes with clear and distinct lines or something like that.
I don't
know.
Yeah, yeah, and I think the key to recognize and the eye-opening thing to me as an economist watching the video is
You kind of don't realize in daily life how much of our system depends on people playing by informal rules within the formal system, because what I came to is there's actually a lot of ways in the legal system to kind of leverage law in order to get things that you want, but do so in an immoral or an illegitimate way.
And so listeners, another example might be
Like if you have a neighbor you don't like and you're constantly like for example calling the police on them or filing reports on them for like unsanitary health conditions, right?
So maybe they don't like trim their lawn for two weeks and you you get the health department out and you're like, hey We're supposed to do it every week according to this code this code, right?
Or you know, they've left open water container like there's all sorts of like little regulations that exist out there that
You know valuable or not the point of them is to enforce like some sort of like standard But you can sort of like leverage these things to just impose costs on people until they do the things you want them to do Did you were you
referring it all to the video short?
I just happened to watch within the last week of the guy who mowed this elderly woman's lawn It was totally overgrown.
She got notices from the city this guy I think just being kind-hearted Went and started mowing it for and the neighbor across the street called the police on him
Huh, no, I didn't I didn't see that to the point where the so they had the interview the police officer came up and said, you know, what's going on?
I'm just helping out this lawn and he's like keep going the officers that keep going and what it was kind of that Similar to what you just said.
So
yeah, I
good
just back to like the example the Lego case I think this is interesting because It seemed kind of arcane, but this is an argument that I have to deal with multiple times a week when Dean has friends come over
and they argue about which Legos are whose.
And
I
just
think this is really good for me to know how to escalate these into felony proceedings so that I can let the courts figure these out, right?
Yeah, yeah, no, it's definitely...
funny that like from uh small age to older like we have these sort of nightmare disputes over property.
Well and this this gives a new twist to legal plunder that Bastiat came up with back in the late uh 1800s right um or 1854 I think.
So legal plunder the way I
taught it and other things was just that you're using the law to your advantage in terms of changing the law to maybe get a subsidy or to get some favorable treatment and you're effectively taking tax dollars.
But this is a little bit different where these people are intentionally using it to steal, bending the law to their way.
Because of information, they know the law better than the other person and then
the whole idea of well you're going to spend more than 200,000 in attorneys then you know we can out
You know and listeners
best routine that happens a lot
You've
probably heard that on all sorts of like TV show media or whatever like the classic thread of we're a giant company You're an individual like we've got a team of lawyers on retainer This is gonna cost you more money than it's worth and there's also this time aspect of like their dad is older and declining help or whatever
Yeah,
and from from last I heard they also haven't told him this has happened because the Sun feels really bad that this has happened So like they don't want to let him know going to court would mean you so there's all sorts of reasons they don't want to go through like the big
civil case
when you said the civil suit lost or something you said somebody got
Favorable their direction or something or did I misunderstand when you were talking slated to the Lego?
So what they did is because the civil suit would be really expensive they had Brian sell Legally all of his Lego sets for like $10,000 a piece which is max you can take some of this all that was
born part
and all of the small claims court cases They didn't show it one against the franchise
And so the franchise then legally owed, I think it was, they got up to $100,000 to these different claimants, but they closed the franchise down.
And so after that, they pursued the franchise owners, but the franchise owners essentially, I think they have been served now, but they got these, the video creators arrested to avoid the service, right?
And you can see that in the body cam footage, like they're just lying to police officers, they're saying things like,
Oh, the papers that they're serving us right now are actually made up.
Those aren't real court papers.
And then the police officer will go back to their car and they'll call the court and the court's like, no, these are real papers.
But for some reason, the police officer still arrests these guys who are just parked outside waiting to serve papers, which is obviously it's legal to wait to serve someone papers.
There's just craziness
involved
with
this.
So do you think the franchise itself was kind of legit or always set up in the first place to be
a mechanism to do what they did.
So the first off this is apparently like as a company the number one like Lego consignment reseller.
So
like this is a business that's can at least to this point was considered to be trusted and the story that's told in the video whether it's true or not of course like we don't have 100% of the information is that the original franchise owner was honoring these agreements but
She was right.
She both needed to leave but also was kind of weirdly pushed out too and there's like it's funny There were some claims that she was like using like heroin in the store after the fact and that it the video creators also get arrested or pulled over and they have their car search for heroin It's like the franchise owners have one story that they tell everybody's like that these guys are using heroin And so
She kind of gets pushed out, kind of leaves, and when these new guys come in, who apparently are connected to the CEO through this legally mined company, again, that part I'm not, like, spent too much time verifying, they're the ones who refuse to talk to the Lego owner son, they refuse to let him see the inventory, they tell him that.
That's what that's a conch.
They do the thing of sorry, you've got to talk to corporate and corporate says you have to talk to the franchise.
And also this guy is very entertaining.
He's very funny.
So one thing he does is he sets up his own company that's called we steal from old people.
And the tagline is bricks and mini figs.
And you're actually legally allowed to reverse the name and tagline like it's not
against the law
for him to use.
And that was on
figs.
Yeah.
Yeah, and and so like they they try to contact him about like because he's setting up like signs and booths outside their store selling like we steal from old people shirts and they contact him and he said, oh, well, you know, actually we're a legal franchise.
He said it's not the legal franchise.
He says I'm the I'm the the corporate owner, but you're gonna have to talk to the franchisee like this
is the
franchisee.
So he like does that, you know, and then you can actually there's a great video where the CEO is talking to him and he realizes what's going on.
He's like, I'm glad that you think you're really clever right now.
Like he
he realizes the same things I've done.
So anyways, the point of this is not to have a fun discussion about legal cases.
And this is still ongoing, like I said, like there's, you know, currently still stuff.
Like the police department just came out the other day and made a video where they tried to defend themselves.
It's a whole big thing.
But this made me think of Ronald Coase, because I'm an economist and economics infects everything of my being.
And so when we come back from the break, I think it'd be good to talk about property rights, what determines ownership, maybe talk a little bit about trial by combat.
I think there's a lot of ways we can go.
And maybe solutions on how we can mitigate situations of what happened with the Lego case.
But I don't know if we'll be able to solve all the world's problems.
So we'll be back in just a bit.
This made me think of Ronald Coase, because I'm an economist and economics infects everything of my being.
And so when we come back from the break, I think it'd be good to talk about property rights, what determines ownership, maybe talk a little bit about trial by combats.
I think there's a lot of ways we can go.
And maybe solutions on how we can mitigate situations of what happened with the Lego case.
But I don't know if we'll be able to solve all the world's problems.
So we'll be back in just a bit.
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You can capture assets, essentially.
And it's almost like a very expensive auction, right?
Where these Legos actually kind of economically exist in the open domain.
They don't belong to anybody.
Again, morally they do.
But then you've got on one side, you've got this franchise.
On the other side, you've got the sun.
And they're essentially like spending resources to capture the Lego set, which is kind of like an auction.
It's worse than an auction.
You don't get a lot of the resources that are spent, right?
So the police have been called like 50 times in these videos, right?
That's a lot of resources gone.
You know,
the
companies invest in lawyers.
They've purchased like small claims court entry.
Like all this money is being spent to capture
the Lego sets that are basically sitting in the public domain from an economic perspective.
And what's funny is this is a very similar system to how it was done in medieval times, which is trial by combat.
And so there's a lot of economic papers that examine trial by combat and why it was not so bad of a system.
And if you look at some of the features of trial by combat, basically how trial by combat works is when you had property disputes,
Over like a certain piece of land the two people claiming the property would hire champions and these champions would fight
for the right for the owner to keep the property, the claimant to keep the property, whoever one got to keep it.
And so people are like, ah, this is crazy.
This is like
a
medieval nonsense.
It's
like in one of our books that we did for book club.
But if you look at the rules, it actually makes sense because what are the rules?
Well, you can't, it can't be a super rich person taking a super poor person to trial by combat.
So what that means is these people are going to have similar economic plans.
This is a classic Solomon, like cutting the baby in half
The person who actually cares about the resource more is going to be willing to hire
the better champion and spend more money to get the better champion and win.
Now.
you and I might say, well, I don't want the person who cares about it more to get it.
I want the person who owns it to get it.
That's a great first best option, but if it's impossible for us to know who the real owner is, like we don't have the information, then a good second best option is, okay, well, who is willing to let the baby live, right, at the classic solemn
way.
Okay, we gotta be careful as we wrap this up, but you're saying you're in favor of bringing back trial by combat to overcome some of this.
You know,
as our legal system gets worse and worse, trial by combat does become more and more favorable.
I'm not saying that it's perfect, but what I'll say is it seems to be clearly the case.
Part of what I wanted to bring up in this episode is that our law system has gotten so labyrinth, so complicated, so bogged down because one of the issues here is it would take four years for this to go to civil, the dad who knows if he's gonna be alive in four years, that was a big part of it.
Our legal system is actually losing the ability to justly allocate property because of, again, it's getting bogged down, there's all these difficulties, you've got like professional fees are going up and up and up, bureaucracy is going up.
And so as this happens, I'm gonna expect more allocation of property rights of people who have a lot of resources taking from people who have few because they can affect the variability of the value of the asset more.
And the legal system is not gonna be there to correct that.
I see that as a really negative thing.
I think this is one example of that happening.
Thankfully, this blew up into like a big viral YouTube thing.
But in reality, there's probably hundreds of these sorts of things going on all the time where like big corporation takes away things from small person.
small person does not have the means to go to court.
And some people probably just throw up their hands and be like, I guess that $200,000 is just gone now, which
is awful.
And we got like the Kansas Justice Institute that litigates stuff like that to help the little guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Justin, you want to?
This
reminds me of like when police sometimes confiscate your stuff and then you have to take your own stuff to court.
To get your goods or your money back like the cops can take money from you in a traffic stop And you have to actually take your own things to court you have to sue your Like your possessions to get them back and one of the things that this reminded me of is that I think peter's right that and I think the way that this kind of Gets put usually in philosophy is something like there's this thing that we think is one thing which in this case is property rights, but actually
it's composed of a bunch of different things.
And we often think all these things go together, but they can come apart.
And it's very interesting to note what happens when they come apart.
So, you know, philosophers do this with like ethical views, right?
We often think, you know, what we mean by right action, you know,
trolley
problem
et cetera.
they can come apart.
And then I think it's really interesting to note that when they come apart in this case,
Oftentimes, legal ownership is a really important part.
If we're dealing with a legal system, legal ownership is one of the things that can decide some of the other types of ownership.
And then also, that possession is nine tenths of the law.
And that when, no matter how much you own or let you have the moral right to your Legos, there is risk involved in
having somebody else custom to your Legos.
Yeah, surrendering possession.
Yeah, there's a good lesson to be learned for Legos there.
There's a good lesson to be learned for Bitcoin there.
There's these are like, yeah.
Yeah, I think towards the end, you've brought up a really good point that this idea of like, you'll own nothing and be happy that we've talked about in previous podcasts of like the, this was like the world economic forum tagline until it got very unpopular and you were upset about it.
But part of our culture, one of our problems, I think, is that we're moving away from a possession culture and moving towards a renting culture, and you can see that.
Video games, you know, you're going to buy a disc for a video game, you get it on your console, and they can ban your console, which means you lose all your games, or they could like revoke the rights to a game, you know, they could shut down servers for your game and shut it down.
I'm hearing another podcast.
Yeah, I think I have something else too.
Yes,
we
might need to go to
parts.
Same thing with like movies, same thing with, you know, renting houses versus it being in
your
possession.
So.
I think Justin's exactly right.
What this hones in is that a lot of the ability to affect the variability of the value of an asset is in actually possessing it.
And once you let that possession slip away, the person who possesses it now has a much higher ability to affect the value of that asset, which means they're more likely to be able to seize it than they
need to be, unfortunately.
Yeah, that's that's a good good way to wrap this up and maybe lead us into a part two.
So 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.
Five Star rating helps other people find us.
Otherwise, just pass this along to people that might like to take a listen.
Other than that, be fruitful multiplier.
Thanks.
You can be broken up into all these smaller concepts.
Is that my correct so far?
Smaller concepts and some of the concepts are evocable.
In other words, they can be attenuated.
Are the smaller divisions binary?
It seemed like when you were doing the food thing, you were saying that is binary, like you can't.
Well, so I think the use thing is always the case.
Like someone always has use.
So it's not binary.
It's like single, nary.
I don't know, singular.
In other words, like someone always has use rights over a thing.
I think
binary means you either have it or you don't
or somebody else does is what I was saying right you or another person The answer to the
question of whether or not you own it is yes or no
Maybe it's so let's get into the next
two because I
think the
next
two like let me just quickly add on real estate since that's my thing You know, we always teach a bundle of rights and so that's part of what you're getting at that you can lease out your property if you're a farmer you can
give the mineral whites away everything subsoil can be sold to somebody else but yet you still own the parcel of land so there's i think that's breaking it down into these bundle of rights
yeah yeah yeah no i i agree with that the other two aspects are the right to sell uh and the right to drive income from and so when people talk about property rights they actually usually mean all three of these things in other words if someone says i own my home
And you say, oh, okay, that's awesome.
Like, you know, would you ever want to sell it?
And they say, oh, well, I can't sell it.
The long, the bank is the only one who has the right to sell it.
I just get to live in it.
You'd say, well, you're not, you don't own the home, you're renting, right?
So usually when people have...
the bank would be a bad example but you could say oh my landlord could sell it but I
can't
sell it you would say well that's not ownership you don't own that thing but in a sense there is some ownership there when you're a renter again you control the value of the house as Russ can tell you tenants can change the value of the house even within the law uh extremely yeah and so that's the right to sell and then the right to right to drive income from and so
If Russ owns a property, he is allowed to rent that property out and drive income from it.
You could do the same thing with your car, right?
In other words, you can use the assets to generate income.
That's the third.
And the reason that this camp says that property rights aren't binary to Justin's points is that usually when people talk about ownership, they're talking about all three of those things together, but you can attenuate some of those things.
So in a communist system, you cannot sell
capital goods to derive income from them.
But you can use capital goods still, right?
So this is, we call this attenuated rights.
And so I don't know why the bundle of sticks has been used to talk about property, but
it
has been.
And so sometimes people say, oh, property rights are a bundle of sticks, right?
There's several sticks together.
And I don't know how this relates to the, like, many sticks make property strong.
I don't know.
So all this to say.
The economic perspective on this is that ultimately the owner is going to be the person who maybe has sort of the ability to seize these things.
One other example of this, one strange implication here, is that in a certain sense if you live in a car or an area where cars are stolen a lot, the thieves of the area are part owners of your car.
And you could say, well, why would that be?
And the answer is, well, if you're in an area where cars are stolen a lot, that means thieves in general are going to be having relatively higher wealth because they're stealing cars.
And cars are going to be relatively less valuable.
In other words, if we have two of the exact same type of car, one exist in an area where there's very little theft, one exist in an area where there's a lot of car theft, the car is going to be more valuable in the area with
very little theft and a lot of thefts.
My only small argument to that is that it's mobile.
So you can take that car and sell it to somebody who's in the good part of town and that changes the nature of that.
Well, I'll say countries, right?
No, one
country with a lot of that.
Something immobile.
Immobile resources are immobile.
And so the point is that the thieves in a way have sort of stolen some of the value of your car just by engaging in the thievery.
And so the implication here is that
Property is not like this thing that you either have it or you don't by law or by morality, which is how we generally think of things.
The law says this is mine, therefore it's mine.
I made this so it belongs to me.
Those concepts could be true in a legal sense, they could be true in a moral sense, but in an economic sense, that sort of thing is relatively unimportant.
Instead, what really matters is essentially who can capture the resource using other resources, who can affect the variability of the value.
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.
Five Star Rating helps other people find us, otherwise just pass this along to people that might like to take a listen.
Other than that, be fruitful multiplier.
Thanks.
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It's where Iowa comes to talk, News Talk 1540, KXEL.
Well, welcome on this beautiful Saturday in Eastern Iowa.
We are at our midpoint break, John Jacobson here on the original United States and North American blowtorch, KXEL, a century at 50,000 watts of clear channel, the first.
in the Western Hemisphere, 1540, 100.5 FM, and you can always listen live and cast the podcast.
Folks on kxl.com slash Jacobson, Sean Torres and Blake Griffin are engineers.
We welcome back the great Clint Alderman, the next generation of leadership at Hames Homes.
Clint, welcome back.
Great to have you back in rotation with us today.
Great to be back.
Thanks for having me.
And when I say third generation, I want to take you back to when I was a little boy about the age of Barbara Hames Bryant growing up in that Marion Cedar Rapids area when we were just about 10 years old, going back to 1970 and this great blast from the past.
Listen.
If you're looking for a home, a home that fits your style of living and your budget,
A home that's easy to live with.
Practical and affordable.
An attractive home that you can own with pride.
This is the one.
You've come to the right place.
Curt and Norma Hames can show you just the home you're looking for.
Help with financing too.
Hames Mobile Homes.
Marion, Iowatha and Iowa City.
The Homes People.
With Neil Diamond music in the background, just like we replicate for this
time period here.
Clint the Great, Kurt and Norma back then when KGAN was WMT television there at Broadcast Park right across some Collins where it still is today.
Those were awesome commercials.
They blank out of the airwaves and you know what the tradition continues.
It sure does and I still like going back and watching those old commercials.
It's cool to see what the homes look like and it's always fun to see the salesmanship of Kurt and Norma.
They were absolutely one of a kind, true national trailblazers and great American patriots.
So you guys have these beautiful communities.
Tell us about Summit View and Grand View, Clinton, the location and what kind of beautiful, affordable, safe manufactured homes you guys showcased there with great landscaping and street light infrastructure and amenities.
Man, there's a lot of time packed there.
We have between the two, between the two communities, we have about 400 home sites.
We've got a range of homes, 14 by 70, so about a 900 square foot home all the way up to 1800 square foot homes here in that Grandview location.
So there's a little bit of everything.
We've got walking trails, parks,
We've got a food pantry in our summit view location, 24-hour on-call service.
We do background checks and all adults that live here.
Homes with garages, homes without carports, decks, covered decks.
I mean, there's about anything that you can think of.
We've got it.
You know, we're here with Clint Alderman and Clint's the kind of guy or Curtis Haymes that you can talk to there for all of that onboarding and purchasing.
needs that you have.
I love your blog site and Clint and Kurt keep very active with that.
We've got a relatively new entry on manufactured home insurance in Iowa.
Homeowners should know.
I'd love you to touch on the financing and the insurance ends today because you guys make it easy.
One stop shop essentially Clint, but insurance is important.
We've had so many weather issues all across the Midwest this spring.
And there's always that sad possibility of other things happening, such as injury or fire or whatnot.
Now, you guys have had superb safety records, but I find it ironic, even with the terrible weather, you guys have held up better than most other homes.
During the derecho, the manufactured homes held up the best, but insurance is always prudent.
Talk about manufactured home insurance in Iowa.
Right, so it's mean vacation home insurance It's really just similar to what we would have on on real estate home type of insurance, so There's some carriers don't carry mobile home insurance, but we're I'm an agent through foremost So I can get you a quote here.
So you talk about one stop shop
I can do it all right here.
So I can set up the policy.
I know the homes in and out in our communities.
I know what Foremost expects as far as coverage is.
And like you touched on when you mentioned the derailleur, we saw what Foremost was able to do for homeowners during that time.
We didn't have any any type of damage that you wouldn't have on a real estate home I think the only difference is you know our homes have skirting and just about everybody lost their skirting but siding roof damage things like that are just something that everybody's gonna incur and Even if you don't you don't buy a policy from me again I know our homes in and out and I can work with your insurance agent to get them all the information about the home you're considering and and what they need to cover
Clint Alderman here with Hames Homes the Homes people They are in Southwest Cedar Rapids there and guys you need to go on site But if you can't go on site that legacy Mary and Iowa phone number 377 4863 377 4863 in the 319 area code as well as the wonderful website HamesHomes.com H-A-M-E-S H-O-M-E-S dot com you know Clint folks
My wife's in my age, I'm 65, she's not terribly far behind me.
You always wonder, ah, what about a fixer-upper?
But you know what?
Buying a refurbished home from Haymes is smarter than taking on a fixer-upper for a variety of reasons, isn't it?
Almost, definitely.
I've been here long enough to see it happen in real time where folks have bought a fixer upper and ended up spending as much or more than what they would have with a reconditioned home.
And we have five service guys.
They're experts.
A lot of them have been with us for over 10 years.
They know what they're doing and homes that have aged HBACs, your furnace, your air conditioner, water heater, roof.
Anything like that that needs to be replaced, we're going to replace it.
So you're going to get a good solid home.
You're also going to get a limited warranty with our pre-owned homes as well too.
Clint Alderman from Hames Homes.
Clint, I'll finalize my remarks with this.
You know, we've talked about the fixer upper and for goodness sake, it's so vastly superior.
to get into a Haymes Homes versus apartment living every single time.
Think about it, guys.
There's no shared walls like you'd have with an apartment.
You've got more privacy with these manufactured homes that they're summit and grand communities.
You've got your own driveway every single day, no community parking, your own driveway.
You've got one floor living, which equals comfort and convenience.
No stairs, no long hallways, no hauling groceries or kids, up multiple flights.
You've got laundry day without the workout because you've got laundry there, washer and dryer at the same level as your living space.
You're not trekking up and down floors like an apartment.
And you might want to just zero in on this as we conclude here, Clint, but a locally owned community that cares.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I mean, we've trained Barbara in here with us every day.
Cynthia's here helping us with the titling.
We've got office managers at both locations.
We have outside managers, and we're here.
We're hands-on.
Curtis and I are here to help with sales.
We're here to help with service.
We're just, you know, we're very active in what we do here, and we want to help the people who live in our communities.
Yeah, ask for Clint Alderman or any of the great people from Hames homes this great third generation family and of course The best thing to do is to drive it and see it with your own eyes.
These are beautiful homes beautifully landscaped on just pristine streets nice paved streets excellent lighting It's just it's a wonderful aesthetic beautiful pastoral landscape on the rural edge of town and yet five minutes from
from almost any great retail and 10 minutes the airport and the hospitals.
It's really an outstanding venue.
How do they reach you?
Remind us one more time and how do they drive there, Clint Alderman?
Well, I think the list is shorter of ways you can't reach us.
You can get us by phone at 319-377-4863.
Our website is heinzhomes.com.
And you can come visit us here at either some of you or Curtis and I, and most of us are here in our Grandview location, which is on the corner of West Post Road and Wilson Avenue.
This is great.
Clint, always great to have you in the rotation here.
We may hear from you next week or maybe Barbara Curtis.
It's always, I call it an embarrassment of riches.
You have a great weekend as we arc toward America's 250th coming up on July 4.
Yes, I can't wait.
Clint Alderman from Hames Homes, the Homes People.
Go to HamesHomes.com and we'll be back after
this.
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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 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 is Dr. Russ McCullough.
the Wayne Angel chair of economics at Ottawa University.
She's also the founder of the Courtney Institute and I think Russ is going to bring us in talking a little bit about the middle class.
All right, so I was with my father-in-law recently and he was asking about, you know, whenever we get into economics and what do you think about the economy and somehow the...
the shrinking middle class got brought up.
And it almost everybody takes it as a given that it's shrinking.
And I basically always push back to that a little bit like, well, I don't know if it's really shrinking depending on how you're measuring it.
But honestly, I had never really looked up much data on it.
So I decided on a day off here to put it into chat GPT and see if I was right or not.
And again, it does depend on how you're
at it.
So anyway, ChadGPD says yes by most common statistical definitions American middle class has shrunk.
over the last 50 years, Pew Research says about 61% of Americans were in middle income households in 1971 by 2023 that had fallen to 51%.
So
I mean,
right away, I'm kind of like 61%, 51%.
You know, in absolute numbers, the population is substantially higher in 2023 versus 1971.
So in absolute terms, we're certainly easily, if there's only been a 10% drop,
But yet we have that big of a population going.
In absolute terms, there's still plenty of middle-class people.
So that didn't seem to hold.
And so then it goes on to say the shrinkage happened in two directions.
More households moved into upper income status, so 11% up to 19%.
Upward mobility is another thing we talk about.
So that's really a good reflection in a sense, right?
So I was middle income and now I'm upper middle income or however they're defining it.
So movement away from the middle class in that direction certainly could be viewed as a positive.
And that's part of where my gut was in my response to that.
I knew that was at least part of it.
However, then it says some households fell into lower income status.
So 27% moved 30%.
So that's only a 3% change there according to this research study.
So the middle class has...
become less dominant while income distribution has spread out more.
So that's the general, you know, arguments that are there.
So I don't know, let me, I'll pause there and I mean, do you feel like people take that as as given about shrinking middle class or not as much?
So there's a lot of comments I get.
No, definitely not as much.
Honestly, some of the work by the economist Piketty over the last few decades
I think it's given a lot of people, frankly, the false impression that in general, the rich are the only ones who are benefiting from the last 20 or 30 years of economic growth.
But again, as Russ pointed out, if you look at the numbers, again, the middle class is shrinking, but they're shrinking for the good reason, right?
Like there's two reasons the middle class could shrink.
Either people are becoming poorer, they're becoming richer.
Well, the most of what's driving the shrinking of the middle class in our country is that people are becoming richer.
Now, I do want to put sympathetically out there that I don't think that necessarily means that those people who are dropping out of the middle class, that their concerns are not important, the fact that there are a smaller number.
So it may still be the case that our economy
is systematically changing in such a way that certain people are worse off in a way that maybe isn't even their fault.
And that's worth talking about.
But if we want to just be honest about...
The stats, it's true that the reason the middle class is shrinking is mostly driven by people gaining wealth knowledge.
Yeah.
So then this goes on to say, here's a few points, economists emphasize middle class incomes did rise.
So inflation adjusted incomes for the middle income households are still substantially higher than they were decades ago.
The issue is that upper income households gained even faster.
So now we're back to relative, relativism again.
Yeah.
But here, housing, health care, child care, and education costs rose sharply.
And so with that, notice that housing interest rates influenced by the government.
Health care, big time government.
Child care.
Not so much, but I would throw a government intervention that's so harmful is all the regulations to open up a date.
So, I mean, that really restricts the number of children.
There's a
reason that it's tens of thousands of years of dollars to send your kids to date
in a
large populated city.
And it's not because there's not a lot of people at home who could watch your kids.
Yeah.
And they're just, you know, quick to shut down and whatever.
It's really government.
And then education costs, government, total government there.
I mean, between obviously
the case of 2012, but the college system and student loans dominate everything.
So my point in bringing that up is, you want more middle-class income?
Get the government out of some of these things.
But that's kind of my knee-jerk reaction to a lot of things.
Yeah, so this is an interesting point for listeners, too, to consider is...
the contrast between wealth and...
Okay, great.
The wealth accumulation became more unequal was the next bullet point that I wanted to bring up.
So one way to think about what it means to be in the middle of a country, or yeah, the middle of a country in terms of class status, is to think about it in terms of income.
And I think that's usually how people think about what the middle class is.
They think about income.
And so in general, people probably think, well...
If you're a household and you're making, I don't know, 70,000 plus, you're probably middle class, right?
Maybe even like a little bit of flexibility to be lower middle class at like 60 years, probably not 50 anymore.
At
least Kansas here.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going colloquially, of course.
It could be as high as a household of 130 for California, something like that.
Right.
And obviously, you know, you get into the upper class, I don't know, a quarter of a million dollars seems very clearly to me to be upper class, especially at least at Kansas.
Maybe less so again, if you're like super expensive Los Angeles.
household income of $250,000 actually isn't that big of a deal.
I just
happened to look
just to add on to that a little bit.
The top 20% of income earners nationwide is about $130,000 of income
or
more.
So that'd
be $260,000.
Yeah, so you're in the top 20% and really two, you know, like I say, middle income people that we view as maybe middle income,
they're in the top 20%.
If you take like the middle 50% of the country, that'd be 25 to 75 in terms of percentile.
So yeah, the very high end of that
that would be 200,000.
If you're over that, like Russ is pointing out in terms of income, you're in the top fifth, which by no means is middle class in terms of income.
Now, where this gets a little more complicated, because we were qualifying all Kansas, Los Angeles, is that you don't eat income, right?
You know, you do eat income actually, it's the better way to put the problem.
That is, income numbers are not what determine how wealthy you are.
If you have a really high income number,
and a really high expense number.
You do not have very much wealth.
Likewise, Russ is a big Dave Ramsey fan.
I like Dave Ramsey a lot too.
And one of the things that Dave points out is most of the people who
become wealthy, they become wealthy by having a decent, sustainable, consistent income and keeping their expenses low.
And so they're not all, most millionaires aren't making a million dollar incomes.
They're making incomes around $100,000 and just saving over a really long time.
That's how people gain wealth.
Second way to think about middle class is not just what's your income because that, you know, maybe it doesn't really explain the changes over time because of inflation.
In fact, even attempts to track inflation don't always work perfectly.
And geographically, it becomes confusing.
250,000 in Kansas.
You're living large, 250,000 in LA.
You might be living more like somebody who's on 100,000 in Kansas.
So that brings up the wealth conversation.
And Russ, you were saying that you had that next as a point.
Well, you pretty much nailed a lot of that.
But yeah, that wealth accumulation, I guess the thing that my father-in-law pointed out that is probably true to some extent or perceived anyway, is like the stock market.
I think in his perception lower income and I think this would be very lower income not so much middle class that's where my pushback would be that you know they don't have a 401k they're not investing so they haven't been able to get the advantages of the
rise of the stock market over the last 20, 30 years.
But I think when we really get into the middle income, a lot of those people do have those types of retirement accounts, whether 401k.
So the other part is with a house.
So if you look at all of your assets, of course, your house is the largest and housing prices have gone up.
And apparently, I think a combination of
poor budgeting decisions and higher cost driven by the government.
Again, that's where people don't point to the government.
Why are housing prices high?
Well, a lot of what's gone on over the last 20, 30 years and even today with Fannie and Freddie and the way the mortgage market runs, it is part of the problem.
And so then they look for other.
fingers to point, like corporations buying houses or whatever is the latest thing, but at the root of the problem, I think it's there.
So wealth accumulation being more unequal that the wealthy are getting wealthier.
Again, I hate that argument too, because it sounds like the the rich are getting rich because they're stealing from the poor type of
thing,
the zero sum mentality.
And so I think it's hard, though, I've learned it's hard to get people off of the inequality.
perception that that's bad, that we can live with that.
So I think that's just part of the human nature.
Yeah.
To speak to that.
So one of the things Russ mentioned is, you know, baby boomers having a very large share of that wealth.
But part of the reason for that is they've just been around longer, right?
If you've been paying on your mortgage for a long time, if you've been putting in your 401k for a long time, like you accumulate wealth over your life, the trajectory is upward.
So I would expect every older generation to have more wealth than
the
younger generations per capita.
at least for this very reason.
And actually we do have pretty good data on that.
If you look at generational wealth per capita per generation at particular ages, what you see is that actually millennials are doing pretty well.
And so if you look at age 30, we don't have data for baby boomers at age 30, but I'll qualify that for a second.
But we do have data for Gen X. And so at age 30, and this is inflation adjusted, wealth per capita
well for
Gen X was about $52,000.
For millennials, it's about $118,000.
So more than double.
Now, again, we don't have for baby boomers, the baby boomer data, I think starts at like 32 or 34.
But if you just look at the graph that's in front of me, the millennial wealth is already as high as baby boomer wealth at age 34, at age 30.
In other words, millennials are basically...
Is that normalizing for the population, like per capita or not?
Yeah, that's per capita.
per capita wealth of millennials is if not higher than a baby boomers it's on par with baby boomers at the technically at an earlier age uh but you know we could say at the same age if we're being conservative here and again that's not to say that there's not a difference in generally generational challenges and again inflation we sometimes have difficulty properly adjusting for and all that stuff so that's not to say that
The one you'll face no complaints and baby boomers actually had a bit hard or something like it.
Yeah, but
the complaint that like the baby boomers have all the wealth, that that's really just an accounting fact.
It's not really true in the sense of we've gotten worse off wealth wise per generation.
So point number two here says many people feel less middle class.
So even households with decent incomes often feel financially squeezed because necessities consume a larger share of income than previous.
Housing is especially important here according to Brooks and Brooklings, but our Brookings institution.
But again, I mean, that's
The budgeting thing and the feeling is something that you can grapple with by getting yourself under control and not going out to eat.
I guarantee if we take the average...
middle class, lower middle class.
I was raised lower middle class.
And so I saw a restaurant when I was little once a year on Christmas Eve, we went out to Burger King or McDonald's.
And I'm talking when I was in grade school and I had my two brothers.
So we were definitely lower middle class.
My point is, I think everybody goes out to eat like multiple times a week, no matter what their income is.
And they don't feel middle class because there might not be spending, they maybe should make a few more meals at home.
So here's maybe one place where
I start to drift because I think there's two extremes.
The two extremes are the millennial extreme, which is that baby boomers stole everything from everybody
and our life is
miserable because of them.
And the stats just don't bear that picture out.
But the other extreme is that millennials ruined everything.
And if they just had more work ethic and like didn't get coffee, then they would live.
I don't think that's quite right either.
One of the reasons that I think millennials are in kind of a weird, unique situation is that
In the baby boomer generation, there was still a very large, not all, but there's still a very large group of people who were essentially or
group of households that were one-income households, right?
And so you could say, well, look, baby boomers have the same per capita inflation-adjusted wealth, but it's like, well, were they doing that with only one person working?
Because that's actually really impressive.
That would mean they would have, like, double the wealth, actually, in real terms.
And so I actually had a similar upbringing to you, Russ, in that we barely ever went to restaurants.
And my mom did work.
She worked as a school teacher, so not like a, I mean, full-time during the school year, but she was off the other time.
She wasn't doing 40 hours a week, unless she was grading and those sorts of things.
My point is that this is a lot of people who grew up with like, we never ate out, also grew up with someone whose job it was to cook for the house.
And that might not be your situation, but that is a situation for a lot of baby boomers, right?
I think about my dad.
I can't remember what age my grandma retired at, but it was very young.
Like she didn't retire.
She stopped working because grandpa could support them completely.
So this is the one place where I think the millennial gripe is maybe a little bit stronger in that there's just less professional housework now because now we've got these two income earner situations all the time.
Yeah.
All right.
So the last thing before we go to break and then tease what we're going to do after break here, but there's disagreement about what quote unquote middle class means.
Sure.
So, you know, purely on income or, and we've talked about some of this already, home ownership, like whether you own a home or not, economic security, lifestyle expectations, and then wealth or net worth.
And so that's why many Americans identify as middle class, even though if they fall outside of formal income definition.
So they're, they're not feeling middle class, even though from an income standpoint, they are.
or something, I don't know.
So anyway, those are some of the definitions.
And so chatGPT summarizes by saying, the short answer is yes.
Statistically, the middle class is smaller than it used to be.
But the story's not, everyone got pork.
The US has become more economically Polaroid with growth at the top and bottom of the income distribution So to me that seems to be the headline buzzwords and kind of the doom and gloom if it bleeds it leads Shrinking middle-class woe is us, you know, so then I Responded back to chat to you and said what sources argue that the middle-class is better now than it was before so not not just the same but or worse but actually better and so when we come back from break we'll go through some of those are
that I think are pretty compelling.
A lot of the stuff we've done here at the Gorton Institute in various ways, maybe not always so much focused on the middle class, but it should be some good stuff.
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.
Five Star Reading 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.
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.
Until we meet again, have a great weekend and
bye-bye!
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