Ep. 379 Crossover: Trump’s Inauguration and Elon’s Nazi Salute
Adam Haman and Bob discuss Trump’s whirlwind first day in office, as well as Elon’s intriguing hand salute.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The YouTube version of this episode.
- Bob’s analysis of The Purge.
- The Haman Nature page.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
This dialog with you and Adam was too much fun–even more so because of the information in it.
thanks!
Unfortunately, both Bob and Haman were wrong as can be on pardons.
“We don’t want a Hatfield and McCoys situation”
Firstly, you’re already in the feud. Democrats were prosecuting Trump’s people both during his administration and Biden’s, and there’s no evidence that they’re going to stop. Bob might make a moral argument that we shouldn’t reciprocate, but the argument that reciprocating could lead to a feud doesn’t work.
But most importantly, the metaphor just grossly distorts the reality of the situation, because we’re not talking about reciprocation. It’s incredibly frustrating the way people have redefined lawfare. Lawfare is when spurious, unwinnable, indictments are used in order to damage someone’s reputation, drain their resources, silence them with gag orders, bog them down in court, etc. The person bringing the charges know they’re trumped up, or entirely bogus, but they can still use the indictment process to destroy or cripple their enemy. Prosecuting your political opponent is NOT lawfare, unless it’s a bogus charge. In Trump’s case, the charges WERE bogus; his opponents were admitting it when they referred to the “novel legal theory” that informed them, and every indictment was dismissed down to paperwork crimes.
But in the case of Biden or Hilary or whoever, their people committed serious, substantial crimes, like Fauci who conducted illegal experiments, which ended up killing millions of people, and doing incalculable economic damage to the entire globe. Biden’s people censored American citizens and covered up corruption scandals. Obama illegally spied on his election opponent (something which Americans used to find shocking), Hilary destroyed government property to cover up evidence. It is NOT lawfare or reciprocation to prosecute actual criminals.
The most insane thing of all is when people act as though they are taking the moral high road by forgiving those crimes. This is completely backwards. The moral high road is enforcing the law justly and evenly. Refusing to enforce the law against people because they’re influential politicians or because the optics might be inconvenient for your politician is THE DEFINITION of corruption. It is both pragmatically stupid and immoral.
Also backwards is arguing that the people who favor prosecution are being short-sighted. What’s short-sighted is thinking we should continue to have a system of escalating corruption, criminality, and casual treason with 0 consequences for the perpetrators. People respond to incentives.
Excellent points. It won’t stop if there aren’t consequences for prosecutorial misconduct.
Birthright citizenship is not in the Constitution.
There are TWO criteria to be a natural born citizen according to the 14A, one is being born here and the other is “being subject to the jurisdiction” of the USA. Trump’s EO clarifies what he thinks “subject to the jurisdiction” means, and now the courts will be forced to actually make a ruling on it.