Sean Dempsey Returns! A libertarian perspective on the election

Sean Dempsey is an acclaimed author, entrepreneur and Libertarian Party activist. 

In this conversation, Sean Dempsey discusses his background in the Libertarian Party, his views on the current political landscape, and the moral framework of libertarianism. He expresses disenchantment with the political choices available, particularly in the context of the upcoming elections. Dempsey emphasizes the importance of free speech and the dangers of censorship, particularly in relation to recent political events. He critiques both major political parties for their roles in curtailing individual liberties and discusses the insidious nature of corporate cronyism in America. The conversation also touches on employee rights, corporate control, and the historical context of child labor laws, ultimately advocating for a free market approach to these issues. In this conversation, Sean Dempsey and Kevin Maley explore the unintended consequences of legislation, the evolving nature of the security state, and the political polarization surrounding it. Finally, they make predictions for the upcoming election, highlighting the potential outcomes and implications for the future.

You can find Sean's new book "The Investor's Warp Whistles" at Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Investors-Warp-Whistles-Financial-Investing-ebook/dp/B0DFW58HNS

Twitter: @realseand

Chapters:

00:00
Introduction to Sean Dempsey

02:08
Political Disenchantment and Voting Decisions

04:35
Understanding Libertarianism

09:33
Libertarian Perspectives on Foreign Policy

14:31
The Importance of Free Speech

19:30
Censorship and Its Implications

24:20
Corporate Power and Libertarian Views

35:08
Corporate Power and Freedom of Contract

35:59
Free Speech and Employment Rights

38:58
Corporate Surveillance and Employee Rights

41:09
The Evolution of Labor Rights

45:53
The Role of Government in Labor Relations

48:02
Child Labor and Economic Policies

54:44
The Security State and Political Shifts

01:10:26
The Importance of War Declarations

01:12:10
The Consequences of War Authorizations

01:15:54
Historical Context of War Declarations

01:18:03
The Role of the Federal Reserve in War

01:21:56
The National Security State and Proxy Wars

01:25:02
The Nature of International Relations

01:27:19
The Future of American Politics

01:29:45
Predictions for the Upcoming Election

01:40:13
Closing Thoughts and Book Promotion


Transcript:

Show Info
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Twitter
@KevinAMaley
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Email
ZipcodeZeroPodcast@gmail.com
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Music
Urban Deer Hunt: https://linktr.ee/urbandeerhunt

Transcript

Kevin Maley (00:00)
Do you want to just kick us off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your background? are a return guest to zip code zero.

Sean Dempsey (00:08)
I am a returning guest. love the show. My name is Sean Dempsey. I am a author, a business owner, and a master of none. I have been on the show last, I think we were talking about the debate between Kamala and Trump. We kind of dove into the nonsense, no, excuse me, was Biden and Trump, what am talking about? The nonsense that that devolved into. And...

You know, my bona fides for the Libertarian Party is I was the vice chair in 2000 and would have been 19 and 20 or I was a member of the board, but then I became vice chair in 2021.

Kevin Maley (00:53)
of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party or the National Libertarian Party?

Sean Dempsey (00:55)
Yes, no, the New Hampshire version. And yeah, I'm just a guy who loves liberty. I'm a member of the Free State Project. I moved to New Hampshire because the goal was to create a homeland for freedom-minded individuals. And we wanted to centralize in one particular state, see if we could influence the politics there. And I think we've had some limited success there, certainly a lot more to go.

Ultimately, I'm just interested in raising my family, focusing on individual liberty for myself and my friends and my business. Take one day at a time. I'm not really interested in changing the world. As an author, though, I am interested in getting a lot of the points across that are important to me around liberty. So did write a couple, I'd say, freedom-based children's books, which I published in 2020.

But other than that, I kind of just stay to myself. I maybe rant every now and then on social media, but I'm not too involved on the political scene other than just having a really strong motivation to see the world a little bit more free than it is today.

Kevin Maley (02:08)
And so we were talking a moment ago that I wanted to get your thoughts on a few elections thing, related things, and then had a few libertarian questions for you. To off, this might be an inappropriate question, but do you know who you're gonna vote for or have you voted yet?

Sean Dempsey (02:24)
You know if you had asked me that question last week even I probably would have said I'm gonna sit this one out As much as that pains me I voted every single year of my adult life And I was after RFK dropped out. I was pretty disenfranchised with politics or certainly this political season, but I'll be honest There's a couple things that really I think changed my mind this week alone. I was I was

Physically shaking when I saw Kamala up there standing with Liz Cheney This week getting this endorsement that to her some confused world, you know seems to To her to make sense and that would somehow persuade freedom-minded or libertarians over to her cause I could not be further Unconvinced and quite the contrary I think seeing her championing with a lot, you know

behind someone who's the daughter of a monster who basically lied us into war and killed hundreds of thousands of people and making this endorsement as something that they're proud of has made me, I want to see this woman fail. prior to that, I was kind of like, I really don't care who wins. It does not gonna matter to me too much. But that was the nail in the coffin for me. I could not believe it was a bridge too far. And of course, the other thing that excited me, at least the one...

pale shimmer of hope in Trump's campaign that I really got excited about was the fact that he promised to free Ross, or Ross Obrick, which is a man who's been languishing in jail unjustly for almost a decade now, and he's made the promise to commute his sentence. So between those two things, I think I'm gonna go Trump this year, which is really, I hear it come out of my mouth and it sickens me, but I just, between those two things, I can't.

I can't just sit home.

Kevin Maley (04:23)
Well, and Dave Smith just said he was gonna vote for Trump,

Sean Dempsey (04:26)
I haven't listened to podcast yet, but I think I did hear that in my feed,

Kevin Maley (04:30)
So are there libertarian reservations against Trump though? Because he seems a very statist individual.

Sean Dempsey (04:35)
Yes.

Well, this is a political season, I guess they all are, of the worse, or the better of two evils. I mean, it's always the better of two evils. I mean, I think what RFK, for example, has realized that libertarians have known for the better part of 50 years is that we are in a very corrupt duopoly and there is no libertarian option. Even the libertarian option, think, is a, the formal libertarian option, I think, is a path on the wrong direction, but I don't want to go.

sidebar. guess I can if we will if we want to get into that but what we need to do I think in this political season is just look at the strategic side of it and I'm of two minds actually of this. is and by the way I should I should preface all this conversation with there is no quote-unquote libertarian position on any political season any you know politics in general everything is about the individual so what I say for today I'm representing myself Sean Dempsey

and no one else. If you get five libertarians that you sit down with, you're going to get five different answers on this question. And I think that's one of the beauty, beautiful parts about our framework is, you know, libertarianism is a, is a moral framework. Maybe I should start with that before getting into some of the, I think it's really easy to have preconceived notions about what libertarian is. Do you mind if I take just like a minute and explain it? At least, yeah. So libertarian is

Kevin Maley (06:02)
Yeah, what is libertarianism?

Sean Dempsey (06:09)
is not, so I'll start with what it's not, it is not a political framework. That's what a lot of people get really confused about and just hearing that I think kind of throws people for a loop. Libertarianism is a moral framework. Libertarian says, I control myself, I have complete autonomy over my body and my personal property and as long as I live and do not get in the way of other people's living, do not harm other people or commit violence against them.

I am free to do so. That is in essence the libertarian framework in a nutshell. again, it comes back to what you learn in kindergarten, which is things like don't steal other people's stuff. Don't hit other people. These kind of very basic premises are moral in their justification. They're not political. And so we see the state or the government as antithesis of that. This is an organization that basically exists.

to commit violence on other people and get in the way of their individual freedoms. So that, at the end of the day, is, I think, a really important distinction between why libertarians feel the way they do about a litany of issues. And sometimes we agree with those on the right, sometimes we agree with those on the left, but we're just consistent with our moral framework when we're taking a position on any particular issue.

Kevin Maley (07:35)
Yeah, it has been interesting to hear libertarians talk. One of the things that I have liked about speaking with or listening to libertarians in the last two years has been on foreign policy. And so I listen to Dave Smith's podcast a lot. He's a comedian who's also a libertarian. And he is one of the few people that I've heard really passionately talk about.

the war in Ukraine and then the war in Gaza. But to your point, he speaks about it from a very moral framework. It's not just that it's a terrible waste of money or that it's not in the United States of strategic interest, but that in Ukraine, there's a complete disregard for the life of the Ukrainians, including on the American side. It's just let's prolong this war as long as possible in order to degrade Russian power. But you never hear

really any thought given to what prolonging this war is doing to Ukraine. And to the extent that there's any acknowledgement of that, it's all the blame is on Russia and not the United States for thwarting diplomatic resolutions that might have helped end the conflict. And then in Gaza too, when I listened to Dave Smith talk about that, just it's the moral outrage on the sheer loss of life and the cruelty and disregard for life in Gaza.

And you don't when you hear mainstream Democrats talk about it, it's like Kamala Harris, for example. So say, you know, this is very unfortunate. We shouldn't have any loss of life. But then there's just a sort of pivot. But I don't see that moral framework being applied. Why do you think libertarians? Have that coming from more of a moral framework, because whenever I thought of libertarians, I always thought of gold standard and

you know, getting rid of the income tax and that sort of thing.

Sean Dempsey (09:33)
No, mean that's the, certainly the, I would say, economic side of the libertarian persuasion, at its core, when you define libertarianism as a framework, it is a moral one. Which is again, one of the reasons why, again, a lot of libertarians tend to be, say, not all, but certainly those in my camp are constitutionalists, because one of the greatest parts about our constitution,

sets the groundwork for a lot of these moral issues. mean, again, every man is born free. Jefferson talks about liberty throughout the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. We define the limits of government very, very clearly. And so when you see us, for example, going into Ukraine, going into, or at least arming and hoping a genocide take place in Gaza, what you're seeing is a

bastardization of the Constitution because the premises that we should never be there to begin with, it's not our role, it's not the United States' role to play a role in foreign affairs and entangled alliances. was outlined very clearly what our role is as a country and it was not to be involved in these foreign entanglements and to be sending our money abroad and trying to be the policeman of the world. These are things that have become

much more Western 21st century political constructs that did not exist 200 years ago. And so that's why you see a lot of libertarians rail against these things. And again, also from the moral side, which I explained earlier, which is, I would hope that most people coming out of, again, kindergarten can understand that the NAP, or the non-aggression principle, just makes sense as a moral framework. We should not go and...

fight, implement a war, unless we ourselves are attacked. We should not be the ones aggressing in foreign nations unless we are responding and defending our rights and our liberties. But it's surprising to me that this is not the common way of viewing the world's landscape.

Kevin Maley (11:51)
One of the other issues that I've libertarians talk about, it's kind of come up on the margins in this election. It's something JD Vance has spoken about is the idea of free speech and censorship. And it's been disappointing to me that it's not animated people on the left more, but you've had this movement by governments all over the world to rein in tech companies for how they're moderating quote unquote hate speech.

or we have these terms disinformation and malinformation. And the response seems to be from governments that we must get tech companies, whether it's Twitter slash X or Facebook or whatever to crack down and limit people's ability to make what they deem false statements. It feels like some of it started around COVID where there was a big push

Including from the Trump administration, not Trump himself, but I think his people at NIH or other parts of the government reaching out to access to stop people from saying the vaccines don't work or the vaccines are bad for you or the virus started in Wuhan. There's actually in the 2020 election that push from

X to limit the ability for people to share stories about Hunter Biden's laptop. And it but it's slowly kind of spreading. You have in England right now under Keir Starmer's government, there were some riots that had started because there is a rumor that spread online, you know, because everything spreads online because it's an information mechanism. There's a rumor about a migrant.

killing people, killing a bunch of children at some Taylor Swift dance party. It turns out the person wasn't a migrant, they were a child of a migrant, but it led to these riots in England. And so Kier Starmer's government is trying to criminalize misinformation. And you see this developing in Brazil and France, all over the world. And it seemed to, a lot of it seemed to be from the left initially.

Again, talking about malinformation and hate speech and stuff like that. But then when the issue of Israel comes up, it's all from the right. mean, all the people on the right, the Barry Weisses of the world who had talked about the importance of free speech, it all goes out the window when you're talking about Israel and you can't criticize Israel at all and that must be censored.

Sean Dempsey (14:20)
Mm-hmm.

It's definitely a third rail. There's a lot of third rails, this country and others.

Kevin Maley (14:37)
Yeah. So what's your take on that? I mean, it's something that is it's not the main issue of concern for me right now, but it is very concerning. There's also legal mechanisms that they're working on where we have judicial rulings like New York Times versus Sullivan, which protects newspapers from frivolous liability lawsuits that people like Justice Thomas are trying to get rid of. And it just feels like there's this deconstruction of

our ability to have free speech. And free speech includes the ability to be wrong, to say hateful things in some circumstances, to advocate violence. I mean, we have a very high threshold, currently a high legal threshold for free speech in the United States. And it feels like there is a bipartisan effort to deconstruct that and give more control to the state for their ability to shape information, especially online.

Sean Dempsey (15:35)
Yeah, and I don't think it's unexpected, I think, in this.

postmodern world that we live in today. It sounds just the way you're describing this, that you have a pretty good passion, a lot of passion for the free speech, as I expect that you would. think free speech, curtailing free speech, I think is a very dangerous precedent to set. It's basically fire that either the left or the right can start to yield, but then it quickly spreads and gets out of control, and before you know it, it's burning down the entire Constitution.

and why we put the First Amendment as the number one most important thing that we want because everything else derives from it. We need to be able to say divisive things, things that are anti-government, things that are frankly run in the face of sometimes cultural norms because that is so important to

getting truth to surface. think the best way you can debate bad ideas or misinformation or disinformation is with truth and debate. Having good ideas usher out bad ideas. I don't think, obviously, I'm saying anything controversial there, but you see this rise in culture nowadays, again, stemming from postmodernism, which is a deconstructive...

philosophical movement which is tearing down the norms that we've presented as a society from modernity and one of those norms is free speech. And when that happens...

you have powers constructs from both the left and the right vying for that control. And so like you said, it started under, I don't think it started, but it certainly made itself very evident under COVID. And some things that have since been very easily debunked since like I personally, I lost my Facebook. Again, not that Facebook is the litmus test, but I lost my account for almost three weeks because I posted some very compelling evidence to me that said, this probably did not originate from a,

wet market in China. This looks like it probably points to the coronavirus lab that is a couple miles away. And that was defamatory and racist according to Facebook and I wasn't able to get on.

Kevin Maley (17:52)
They suspended your account just for saying that?

Sean Dempsey (17:54)
They suspended my account, but go back into my record, yeah, I lost my account for about six weeks, five and a half weeks, something like that. I had to appeal and I'll go through this process. And now you can say that sort of thing because it's basically all but proven. It became very mainstream when Jon Stewart came out and pointed out this very obvious fact.

Kevin Maley (18:10)
Yeah, I just wanted to I just want to take a pause. And that's pretty much the consensus opinion. Now, even the Biden administration has said they're unsure either way. I think Biden himself said he's unsure either way. But there are various investigations by different parts of the government that like the DOE, for example, for some reason, they did investigation said it's the most likely origin point was from.

the lab in Wuhan that makes coronaviruses. You know, it wasn't just a coincidence that there's a lab in Wuhan that people got sick at in October. They came with a flu-like virus. were making coronaviruses in there. And it was, you know, but you're crazy to think that the lab in Wuhan making coronaviruses was the origin point for the coronavirus. And the idea that

Sean Dempsey (18:37)
Yeah.

Well, it's laughable, yeah.

I think looking back on it, yeah, it's a laughable kind of thing that these sort of topics, mean, to go into politics more, mean, look about what they did when I say they, the CIA working with both Facebook and Twitter completely wiped from the internet the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the presidential election. Now, again, I'm neither pro-Trump or pro-Biden or Kamala, but...

You cannot deny that these sort of anti-free speech mechanisms had a huge, or very likely had a huge impact on the election and who's to know what that censorship resulted in. I think censorship is very, very dangerous and I think it's a Pandora's box that once unleashed.

by either side just takes over and consumes us and there is, that's one of reasons why our founding fathers and our framers laid this as one of the linchpins of our country's backbone. we really need to be careful before we have either side really take the mantle on this stuff.

Kevin Maley (20:09)
Can I?

Just to go back to that Facebook incident for a moment, do you remember what year that was?

Sean Dempsey (20:19)
You know, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna, ugh. Yeah, I'm not, I can't remember.

Kevin Maley (20:23)
Well, the reason I'm asking and it doesn't fully matter, but I would guess it would be in 2020 when it was more controversial to say that. And the reason I just want to highlight that is that would have been under the Trump administration, not saying that the Trump administration had told Facebook to do this. We know there was effort by people in the federal government under the Trump administration, not at his directive, but

to reach out to tech companies to get them to take off that kind of, those kinds of claims. But it just goes to show that this can happen under either it is not just from the left or from, you know, when Democrats are in power that this sort of thing happens.

Sean Dempsey (21:05)
I think that's one of the most divisive parts about politics is you have if you have a Republican or a Democrat on your show or on any sort of media They're gonna staunchly defend their side with a ferocity. That's just disgusting in my side It's like from my point of view because it's like watching two sports rivals go at it and you Push for your team no matter what errors they make and what they do I think you need to have objective people on the on the sidelines that are calling, you know the

balls and strikes correctly, which I think, you know, toot my horn and say that's what the libertarians are doing. We can have a very objective way that we look through the political landscape and say, listen, what Trump did was 100 % wrong. And I'll, I could point out a thousand things, especially during 2020 that just disgusted me, not least of which was just the, six and a half trillion dollars in debt that he got the country and the inflation that he unveiled that was now Biden and Kamala being blamed for, but frankly,

that was 95 % Trump ushering in the largest debt spending in our country's history and creating the most inflation ever. mean that's on the fiscal side certainly on the COVID and freedom side yeah he did nothing to stop the no no absolutely the most inflation our country has ever had has happened as an outcome of the six and a half trillion dollars that Trump printed in 2020.

Kevin Maley (22:19)
Probably not the most inflation ever.

Sean Dempsey (22:33)
Because it's all coming to bear now. I mean, you're seeing rent increases go up by as much as 50 % in the last five and a half.

years, you're seeing grocery prices go up by 33%. You're seeing the typical basket of goods guy gone up. That's direct result from the Trump spending and the Trump inflationary policies. Of course, again, it's not like Biden has his hands clean. I he's continued those policies and he's finding it funny because he gets on there, used to get on TV and be like, I brought inflation way down.

And what that's akin to is basically, you know, Trump started basically eating, let's say 10 boxes of donuts a day. And then now Biden's cut that down to now he's only eating six boxes of donuts a day. Well.

you're still a fat ton of large. It's not like you've done a great service for our country. We're still spending somewhere around 16 times more than we did pre-COVID. So once that, again, that Pandora has been let, box has been opened, we've never got that genie back in the bottle, which is very frustrating. But going back to the privacy side of it, you're right. mean, Trump has certainly no paragon of virtue there. mean, he, not directly, but he helped

Kevin Maley (23:22)
You

Sean Dempsey (23:50)
facilitate locking down our entire country. The two weeks to spread the curve became six months. He certainly supported all the governors and their lockdowns and mass mandates. He pushed.

for the warp speed for this vaccine rollout and cut out all the stops from FDA approvals that usually take place over the course of years. He's shortcutted that in months, so we have no idea what the vaccine injuries are gonna look like in the VARS. Reports have been basically put on the sidelines, so we don't know.

to this day, what kind of impacts that this this shortcut environment and then course by by Biden taking this ball and running with it, he didn't hold Trump accountable for his egregious actions. So it's like both parties are equally culpable in in curtailing freedoms and liberties for the American people and it's unforgivable what what both of them have done. But frankly, I put a lot of the blame on Trump's feet on for most of what happened during COVID.

Kevin Maley (24:46)
What's your take on JD Vance?

Sean Dempsey (24:49)
He's a, again, he's a, he's a political pick. He is put in place basically to try to maybe bring the moderates over to Trump because I think there's a lot of never Trumpers out there in Republican party even to this day. And so I think JD was brought in to maybe stabilize or galvanize the party a little bit. I don't know if it's had any desired effect, but I think both leading candidates have picked very boring.

vice presidential candidates to as their running mates just to try to maybe de-extremify their movements. Not that I ever saw either of them as very extreme, but I would have loved to have seen him pick Vivek. I think that would have put me and Trump much further ahead in both the polling today as well as just certainly for the libertarian appeal that Vivek has. But I'm no fan of JD Vance personally.

Kevin Maley (25:48)
Well, see, one of the reasons I asked is I for some reason, everyone seems to not like him and there's a lot not to like about him. But I think there's some interesting things that he has talked about and he seems to represent a small body of thought within the Republican Party that is looking at corporate power differently. And that's something I've always sort of wondered about with libertarians in the United States is they, you know,

There's this idea that we should be against centralization of power, which is something I very much agree with. But it felt like to me that a lot of libertarians or at least people who say they were libertarians look at centralization of power only in the federal government. But if you deconstruct the power of the federal government, the vacuum is filled up by multinational corporations who have huge power. There's a book I was reading by Sohab Amrami. I think his name is

who's a Republican talking about, I wish I could remember the name of the book, but talking about just the mass power of corporations over the lives of Americans today. And the traditional Republican, not Libertarian, but Republican approach when they're in power is to deregulate corporations, regulations being a restraint on corporate power and to give them tax cuts to make them more rich and powerful. And so JD Vance,

it speaks to this idea of curbing corporate power. He talks about Lena Kahn, the head of the FTC, who's got a big antitrust agenda and she's been doing a really great job on it. He talks about her as one of his favorite or his number one favorite Biden appointee. And, you know, so there's just a few things he said. I don't know how much principles behind it.

He doesn't have too much of a history as a politician, but it feels like there's some Republican talk about looking at corporate power differently. It sort of started with the tech companies and some Republicans are only concerned with tech power. And it feels like that's mainly because tech companies had been populated by liberals and affiliated with the Democrats. That's kind of changing now. But I don't know, have you seen any of this from J.D. Vance or other Republicans, Orrin Cass, I think?

Sean Dempsey (28:02)
Yeah.

Kevin Maley (28:09)
talks about this a little bit, but just this idea that they need to just not be solely devoted to corporate power, but really look at ways to constrain the ability for corporations to basically run over Americans individual liberties through forced arbitration, through monitoring everything that they're doing, including outside of work, you know, really finding way to run a ground of constitutional liberties because you.

sign something when you're hired that really gives up all your rights and because it's the private sector and not the government, they're allowed to do it. Is there any attention being paid to that from the libertarian perspective?

Sean Dempsey (28:50)
Well yeah, mean it's one of the things that we probably trumpet loudest of anything. Of all the problems that we have in America today, I think the topic that you're kind of dancing around is corporate cronyism. It is the number one most insidious element of politics today.

Kevin Maley (29:08)
Well, can I just pause you there? And we might have definitions of what corporate cronyism is, yeah, that would be good because I don't it's not I think corporate cronyism is bad. But I think just even if you had a non cronyistic massive corporation, it is still just an absurd amount of concentrated power that may have the ability to legally really constrain the individual liberties of an American citizen.

Sean Dempsey (29:11)
Yeah, I'll define the term, but yeah.

Well, that's where we might probably disagree. And we can dive into this. I think that'd be a fun topic. Actually, Kevin, one of the things that you and I were talking about, I think it was about a month or two ago, is I'd love to maybe even debate, like pick a topic. At some point, doesn't have to be this show, certainly. Because we agree on, I'd say, 95 % of topics that you and I have talked about over the...

year or so and you know this might be an area of debate but let me just describe what I think corporate cronyism is and how I think it is actually quite a bit more insidious and much more devastating than just say power dynamics unfolding in a more natural fashion. So corporate cronyism is when you have you have basically corporations and businesses vying for power through special interests

and going and getting that power granted to them through government appeal. So they're able to get laws passed, they're able to push for regulation, they're able to push for elements that pushes aside their competition out of the picture, allowing them to take huge swaths of power and huge amounts of attention and money diverted to their cause through the heavy hand of

government and so that's where corporate cronyism is really really pernicious because it allows the free market not to work and it used to be a smaller problem in America but it's become I think our number one challenge to this day because now you can have government working in concert with businesses

pushing out free market commercialism and pushing out the ability for new entrants to enter the market, pushing out prices to be able to lower, and it creates huge problems. Now where that differs from, let's say, just free market enterprise working and just having, say, Starbucks just happens to become the best coffee in the world, and so everyone rushes to Starbucks and to the point where they become the bohemoth that just takes

over and puts Dunkin Donuts out of business is that's a free market exercise of allowing supply and demand to do its work, allowing the consumers to have their voice at the table. You don't have government playing a role in that picture. You don't have government, rather regulations or...

business licensing laws or just laws in general curtailing one side of the equation or the other. So I have no problem, don't, so much to the point that I don't even believe that there is such thing as a natural monopoly that, I don't believe there's any need for antitrust laws, for example, to play any role whatsoever because I think the free market would solve that problem itself. And so you can have as much power take place in a particular industry or with a particular company, and if those companies are making money, then new

entrance would enter the marketplace. mean this is again I don't need to explain say business or economics 101 but that is the general idea is that you'll have new entrants into the market whenever there's profit motive and allow that to take place but that's not what we have today in America just to be very clear that does not happen you have instead huge power brokers go to the table and appeal to government for regulation and to keep people out.

and to allow one, two, or maybe a small cartel to develop. That's why you see the oil companies in the position they are. That's why you see the energy companies where they are, the pharmaceutical companies where they are. You see big tech where it is because you have government in bed with these big power brokers and the laws are being laid out and the tax regulations are being laid out to keep entrants from entering the market. That's why, again, you see...

the having a direct line of sight to Twitter and Facebook. I mean, that's just unheard of 50 years ago.

Kevin Maley (33:27)
Which should be horrifying for any for all Americans, but I would have hoped that liberals would actually do want to come back to the issue of the security state. So I'll I'll rescind my interruption because I want to dive deeper into that later.

Sean Dempsey (33:40)
I'm done. I just think it's an interesting it's a good distinction I think it's one that you won't hear on the left or the right libertarians kind of scream this from the rafters all the time is that Corporate cronyism is what's destroying America today? So and what's particularly frustrating to me and to many libertarians because when you see especially the left rail against Capitalism and the horrors that it has the dangers that it has they do so by pointing fingers at corporate cronyism They don't not no one has

pointed a finger at true capitalism for the last 30 years because it just simply hasn't existed in a viable way other than at the local level. So all these big companies that are running rampant and a foul of

from the big banks to big tech to big pharma and certainly the military industrial complex. mean the idea that we can go to war and it's being seen as a good thing because we are creating American jobs is everything you need to know about the corporate cronyism in America. We are putting trillions of dollars and making people beyond obscenely rich.

by the on the backs of and the blood of America's who are sent overseas to quote-unquote defend our liberties and Anyway, I'll just I'll just shut up but that that is the that is the ultimate evil that needs to be put down in America today it's the corporate cronyism and it's the it's the the merger and the marriage of business big business and big government

Kevin Maley (35:08)
Let's go to the ability to,

exercise your free speech online about a particular topic and then get fired from work because you said this or that issue. Even if you say something racist, for example, on Twitter, should your company have the ability to fire you if you said it outside of work? Because you hear examples of that kind of thing happening. And that seems to me, I don't know, maybe you signed a contract as part of your job saying,

your moral character is part of your work, but if you're just working at Starbucks or some just random company and you're not a celebrity where your association with a brand matters that much, should a company have the ability to fire you just because you said something they didn't like outside of work?

Sean Dempsey (35:59)
It's an interesting question. mean, like you said, if you're not like Scott from State Farm where your face is directly related to the brand and you're just an employee, a cog in the wheel as it will, I think that that would certainly be very...

disingenuous of the business to fire through that. Now if you're talking from like a legal framework or from even a libertarian or freedom based framework, I would say that frankly, and this may sound little callous, but a business should have the right to fire or hire whoever they want for whatever reason they want. And on the other side, the customer...

you know, the business should have the right to take in whatever customers they want or not take in those whatever customers they want, which is actually a very interesting, this is not exactly the point of your question, but there was a, it's kind of a philosophical or libertarian argument that happened a couple years ago when you had a, I think a baker, was it New York, Colorado, thank you, who would not bake the cake for a gay couple. Now, and again, you have all the civil rights activists come out of the woodwork.

Kevin Maley (36:59)
I think it was Colorado.

Sean Dempsey (37:08)
or something like that. But it really gets to the heart of one, who's, like you said, are you a slave or do you have the right to have control of your own business and who you want to serve? So there's that component of it from a freedom-based perspective. And there's also the perspective of, you want the bigot to live in the shadows or do you want them to out themselves so you can...

put them out of business and not serve their business accordingly. But if everyone's forced to cater to everyone, then you don't know the people whose businesses you want to cater to and whose you don't. So I think that there is both a moral and freedom-based perspective of how you view these sort of things. But yeah, ultimately answer your question. think a business has the right to fire whoever they want, hire whoever they want, serve whoever they want.

And it's kind of up to the individual to be as vocal as they want to be online or elsewhere. Now, I think it becomes more of a pragmatic discussion of if you're going to be just a jackass and it doesn't matter what your affiliations are, your business should have the ability to look at you and be like, hey, listen, you're really not representing yourself. That's not the kind of person that we want to hire, that we want to associate with.

But if you're just saying, I'm a Trump guy, or I'm a Kamala guy and your employer is on the other side of that ticket, then that's certainly not right that they would be able to fire you over that. It's certainly not moral, I would say, but it is their prerogative. They have that prerogative.

It's kind of a talking out of both sides of my mouth. I get that as an answer, but hopefully you see where I'm coming from on that perspective.

Kevin Maley (39:06)
What about these companies that just sort of monitor every single thing that you're doing? And I guess from a libertarian perspective, you could say that's fine. You know, you're an at will employee. You don't have to work there. But just the sort of coming from a philosophical perspective, you have, you know, Amazon workers where it's every move they make, they're being monitored on these cameras to, you know, they get very quick bathroom breaks. And if they take more than one, then they

get repercussions for that. There are some companies that are everything that you do online on your phone, every keystroke that you have. It's almost like totalitarian practices in North Korea, being utilized by corporations. Again, you could say you're an at-will employee, which is fine, but it just feels to me that there's something totalitarian.

about how some companies exercise control over their employees.

Sean Dempsey (40:10)
I guess the way I would answer that is in theory every business should be trying to create and foster the best working conditions for their employees as possible. Now if they're implementing Big Brother or a mini or quasi totalitarian state within the confines of their business like you just described, I don't understand why half the workforce wouldn't walk.

again unless they're and

Kevin Maley (40:39)
Because they would starve. These are not people who can just easily get a job somewhere else. They might be people without a college degree. It might be a tough economy. They are struggling to put food on the table and they applied for 20 different jobs. They got no answers and they got one from this. And so I think that's another thing that that a lot of critics of corporate power have talked about is that in the modern industrialized economy, it's very new in human history.

that we had basically people renting themselves like this to big corporations where they are basically, it's do everything they say or you'll starve to death. It's had been described as a form of slavery, not as bad as chattel slavery, but a form of slavery when the Industrial Revolution was taking place in the United States in the middle of the 19th century that you no longer have the kind of freedom.

that you used to when we didn't have big corporations.

Sean Dempsey (41:38)
It's certainly no secret that things have evolved over the last 10 years and we've moved in the direction of industrialization. Certain sectors are certainly going to be more, say, worker friendly than others.

I think where there's a challenge and a lot of times in these conversations it becomes, wouldn't this be better if this worked that way or that worked that way? There's always going to be a broken system. There's always going to be short, limited supplies, limited resources and how do you kind of handle things in the best way possible is...

is the, and find that Pareto optimization curve is always going to be the direction that we went ahead. Now some systems are going to be better than others and I'm going to be an advocate of those. But I don't believe that you need government basically to come in and say you need to put certain provisions in place to make it better or worse for the employees, for the customers, or for the staff.

or the management, these things are going to work themselves out. And like I said, in theory, I know what you're saying, there is no other job. mean, in your scenario, there is no other place that they can go. But just as an exercise in theory, if there is a business and they're treating their employees like garbage, their employees are going to leave. So it's in the best interest of both the employer and the employee to find that optimal spot where they're both able to

be benefited and create value through the symbiosis of the resource, which is the labor that's at play.

Kevin Maley (43:17)
Yeah, I feel like that just assumes there's an equality of power between capital and labor. And I would say that the important thing is that there isn't that you have this huge concentration of capital in the form of these corporations that have a massive disproportionate amount of power vis-a-vis the worker. And it's not like there's just some equal bargain between the employee and the corporation. And then you also have the judiciary will often

Sean Dempsey (43:35)
Well, let's,

Kevin Maley (43:45)
almost always roll in favor of the corporation when issues come up, even on when workers are trying to organize. It's still an uphill battle where the corporations are able to do anything in their power to interfere with that. so it's, you know, I think maybe the libertarian perspective assumes this perfect world where there is inequality power, but it's just not there.

Sean Dempsey (44:08)
No, I would say the opposite, the libertarian position. So let me back up. I'd say the left.

comes their position is hey there's this inequality that constructs that exists in this particular situation we want to use the power of government to equalize that power and make things more fair and equitable and understand where that's coming from and then the right will often do the other side of the pendulum and they'll say we need to come in here and cut all regulation and we need to let the workers be damned let's just say and then you have you know maybe the things

go the opposite direction. The libertarian position essentially is there is always going to be, let's just call it inequality of power, of a finite number of resources. There's always gonna be a non-perfect system at play. You're never gonna have everybody in every situation working exactly the way they need to. But what you wanna try to find is what is the best case scenario for having employees and the employers

the resources together and allow them to work in some sort of symbiosis. And that is basically the economic driver for a lot of...

human action that Ludwig von Mises talks about, how do you find the parade of distribution that makes the most sense, where do you find the equilibriums that make the most sense, and we're talking about again, about labor specifically and Big Brother and maybe there's an underpaying component of this, maybe the workers are being underpaid, but it's always going to be driven by the resources that are at play and trying to find the right optimization curve for the two.

work together. I don't know if I'm explaining this properly but I do say that the free market is almost always going to find a better solution than either bringing in government and trying to micromanage that scenario through the heavy hand of government.

Kevin Maley (46:08)
But let's look at what it looked like when we did have more of a free market. And you may argue that we never fully had it in this country, which is fine. But we can say that there was a time period when we had far fewer government regulations against corporations. And so the turn of the 20th century, for example, you had people working 16 hour days in brutal conditions. had people in the, you know, factories that I think it was the

Triangle shirt waste factory or something like that where people were burned alive because there was a fire in a factory and there was no there were no fire exits There was no fire safety stuff, which would have been mandated by the federal government. You had children Working in factories children as young as five years old because there's no federal government that banned child labor You had people working for pennies a day

because there's no such thing as a minimum wage. And even when New York State tried to institute a minimum wage, the Supreme Court threw that out because it said it interfered with freedom of contract between the employee and the employer and the ability to kind of set the floor of the wages for yourself. And, you know, this is also a time when there is no welfare state. So there's nothing for people to fall back on in terms of

unemployment or food assistance or, you know, SNAP benefits, that kind of thing. So it seemed like a very brutal environment when there was far fewer federal government dictates on corporate power. Is that environment you think we should go back to? Or do you think the free market could rectify that to prevent something like child labor or workplace safety where people burn alive in a factory because there's no fire exits?

Sean Dempsey (48:02)
Well, it's a very interesting topic. Have you ever read any Thomas Sowell, by any chance? So he's an economist. I think he's 90-some years old right now. But he's written a lot about this African. So he's an African-American economist who writes about all of the policies that took place, say, in the 30s, 40s, and 20s during the

Kevin Maley (48:08)
I don't think so.

Sean Dempsey (48:31)
that took place in the American industrial era. And a lot of the policies that were put in place to try to solve a problem, let's just pick on one of them, and I could go through a list, but you mentioned minimum wage. So minimum wage was put in place to try to solve a problem, which is that there is people being working for slave labor, as you put it earlier. What has resulted from a lot of the minimum wage laws in America, for example?

is it's actually cut the rungs out of the ladder from those that are most inclined in being able to use those rungs, namely African Americans and youth. And so you find jobs that where you would, say for example, hire somebody at $6 an hour, $5 an hour to do some menial labor because they just don't have the skills to do that yet, are now no longer able to even employ those positions.

And so what happens is you find that when minimum wage laws are implemented, and certainly as the minimum wage increases, what it does is it cuts the bottom rungs off of the ladder. And you find individuals that you're trying to help are the folks that you're actually most harming in those scenarios. And that often turns out to be those that are in certain socioeconomic areas.

that are the most deserving of that leg up.

Kevin Maley (49:59)
What about child labor? I mean, are we denying five-year-olds the opportunity to work in an automobile plant?

Sean Dempsey (50:07)
No, I don't think that at all. mean, again, there are libertarians that might have an argument with me about that, but I think that there are just common sense rules that, but I think that that would be so egregious if you saw a factory today's day and age, you know, hire quote unquote a five or six year old to do intensive labor, that place would be put out of business so quickly and be so quickly,

vilified by the media that would never stand. So a lot of these things again are taken care of.

Kevin Maley (50:41)
But couldn't you argue that that is because we haven't seen children work in factories in a hundred years. And so we've become culturally attuned to having children not work in factories because we did have them work in factories for many, many years during the industrial revolution up until the 1910s. And the, know, there wasn't that much of a moral outrage to the extent that there was, they pushed for laws to ban it. But I would argue that the outrage that you say would happen now probably would.

Sean Dempsey (51:04)
Well,

Kevin Maley (51:08)
but it's because we haven't seen children work in factories in a long time because of the federal government laws against it.

Sean Dempsey (51:10)
Well, I just think it's a straw man. I think it's a straw man because I don't have the data in front of me, so feel free to slap me if you want. But I can't imagine that even in the worst period of our country's history, that we were just throwing children into an environment where they were getting killed left and right. I think that there would be out.

Kevin Maley (51:30)
Not killed, but abused. mean, like Charles Dickens level stuff. I mean, they shouldn't be working factories or, you know, they were going into the coal mines and...

Sean Dempsey (51:37)
I agree. No, I agree, but here's where the laws, so let's just pick on that one. I think that's a good topic actually. So let's just say child labor laws. if I wanted to, as an employer, hire my daughter who's eight years old to clean my office. Now legally, I can't, but.

You know, think it would be a, I mean, it's either that or the office doesn't get cleaned and I maybe lose a client because they come in here and they see how slovenly I'm living in my home office. Again, ridiculous example, but like, whenever you have government put a law in place instead of letting common sense and reason and the free market dictate it, you have unintended consequences. And that's one of the things that I think that, again, libertarians and a lot of folks that practice certain levels of economics.

notice is that you can see what happens when you pass a law. What you can't see is the unintended consequences and the things that are unseen. And that's where premises like the broken window fallacy come into play. This is happening in the Ukraine conversation, for example, where

Well, let me bring it back to the broken window fallacy. So for example, there's an economic misnomer which goes, hey, if a little kid goes through a neighborhood and takes a rock and throws it through the window pane and breaks the window of a cobbler that's living in town, everyone gathers around and everyone's sad and it's disappointing that the window's broken. But then someone speaks up and says,

Well, actually this is actually good because now the cobbler needs to go and hire the window repair guy and gonna have to get hired for the job and he's gonna get paid and now that guy's gonna go and have 200 more dollars.

in his pocket, maybe he's going to spend it on the baker and the grocer and the grocer is going to have more money. so this, this great, it's actually in retrospect, it's a great thing that that window got broken because now we've created all this work for our economy, for our people in our town.

But that's a fallacy because what you're not seeing is the unseen consequence of that action. So that broken window actually is causing the person whose window was broken, think I said a cobbler, to now he's out $200. And maybe it's what he would have spent his money on. Maybe he would have bought his wife a mink stole or he would have bought shoes for his children or whatever. But now he has to repair this window. he's less, so the entire community is now less

$200 it's not like we put money into the economy and so this kind of fallacy is used to explain government interaction in our in our economy very often is used to explain and Promote war too because we go to war and we devastate communities and look at Gaza. I think I heard this on them CNN just the other day I was watching and I was just like baffled

Kevin Maley (54:39)
Ugh, why were you watching CNN? Was it accidentally on? Were you in an airport?

Sean Dempsey (54:44)
I flip around. the commentator, I forget who it was, maybe it Lester Holt or somebody, saying things like, but they're going to be rebuilding Gaza for the next 40 years. And think of all the jobs that's going to create for the world economy.

I'm just sitting there holding my hand, Yeah, great. So you and I can see that, and look at that and see how audaciously stupid that is, but that is the defense that a lot of folks who put, say, laws in place that prevent certain activities or promote certain activities, that they don't look at the unintended consequences of the action. And again, not to bring it back to child labor, because I think that that is a really difficult one to defend.

Kevin Maley (55:00)
Gravediggers, yeah.

Sean Dempsey (55:28)
But it's just the overall point that if you put a law in place that's going to curtail freedom in any way, what you're seeing is the impact of that law, but you're not seeing the unintended consequences that it creates. And I think that that's a miss. And it's very difficult to have those conversations in a political framework because it's really hard to argue over phantoms and ghosts that can't be seen, where it's really easy to see, hey, we got that bridge created. That bridge doesn't go anywhere, but look at all the jobs that we

But it's really difficult to see all the jobs that would have been able to be put to better use and how the community could have really cultivated under proper management of those funds.

Kevin Maley (56:13)
Felt like a sort Keynesian non sequitur.

I'm sure I know Keynes is not the beloved by the libertarian folks

Sean Dempsey (56:19)
I think I do love talking.

Yeah, Keynes was a big advocate of overspending or trying to stimulate an economy through spending. Yeah.

Kevin Maley (56:29)
Yeah, through demand. Yeah, he had said something, you know, in a sort of low demand, depression level economy, you should pay people to you should bury money and pay people to unbury it or something like that. But basically the idea that you just need to get people to do stuff. I do want to circle back on something that we touch on briefly because I am interested in the libertarian and your perspectives on the.

Security state we it's Something that is concerning to me it's also concerning to me as someone who's on the left who came of the age during the George W Bush years and we saw this huge abuse from the CIA the FBI the NSA illegally spying on Americans and the CIA illegally spying on Americans the FBI going after

Muslim Americans and non-citizens in very egregious ways. Just this whole thing. It felt like for a very, very long time that the security state had been very popular among those on the right, not necessarily libertarians, probably just more Republicans, but kind of despised by those on the left. And now you see this just very deep well of support among people on the left. And I should say,

mostly Democrats, so center left, who think the FBI is great and they're so mad if Trump criticizes the FBI. They think the CIA is great, the NSA, all these things. And it's kind of horrifying to me. the only explanation I can have for it is that it's associated with Trump derangement syndrome. know, these people are people on the left really hating Trump and viewing the FBI as a counter to him or something like that. Like they worshiped.

James Comey just because he got fired and thought Robert Mueller was great. Robert Mueller was a terrible FBI director, but he's great because he was going, he was leading an investigation for Trump. How do you see this playing out? Has it come full circle? Do you see the right really drifting away from the security state or what's gonna happen in the future with this?

Sean Dempsey (58:43)
find the whole thing very curious. In many ways as a libertarian I feel, and again it's very isolationist, all libertarians are their own island, their own individuals. So again, I'm trying very hard not to say we libertarians, it's me as a libertarian, we're very individual about this stuff. I see it, I'm an island basically out there and I've seen the tides from the left swing to the right and the tides from the left swing to the right and you see these two.

Kevin Maley (58:58)
Yeah, so what do you think?

Sean Dempsey (59:14)
Everything is basically topsy-turvy of where it was 10 years ago. So on the security state apparatus, you're absolutely right. It seemed to be at one point that the right was the one that was pushing for more, it was obviously under Bush that we saw the advent of the Patriot Act and the NSA and the CIA. It seems like everyone on the right was pushing very hard.

America to lock down and focus on spying on its own citizens. I mean, then they wouldn't come out and say it that way, but that seemed very the right modality. And the left, we had common cause with because they were very civil rights focused. We had a lot of focus on anti-war. We had a lot of focus on not spying on our own citizens. So personal privacy was a big area we had common cause.

And now, again, was 15 years ago, now fast forward to today and everything's on its head. And now you have to figure out where people are in the political arena because the left now seems to be very much more focused on creating or leaning into the security state apparatus and the right is now going anti-war. you're finding Kamala.

Kevin Maley (1:00:37)
Well, but not Republicans when you say they're right. don't I don't know if Republicans are anti-war. I know there's more criticism of Ukraine on the Republican side, but the House of Representatives still passed a big Ukraine funding bill in the spring.

Sean Dempsey (1:00:43)
Well, maybe not me.

Yeah.

You're absolutely right. I shouldn't speak in such a broad brush. Again, I think it's just, I think you understand the point that I'm trying to make is that things used to be much more black and white 15 years ago. And today it's almost like the roles have reversed from the Democrats and Republicans.

and you see a lot more, I mean, I think what's more indicative of this than again, Dick Cheney supporting and endorsing Kamala Harris. I mean, that should tell you everything you need to know. It's like.

Kevin Maley (1:01:21)
and her thanking him for his service to this country.

Sean Dempsey (1:01:24)
Yeah, these are people like Dick Cheney and...

Kevin Maley (1:01:28)
That should be so, I find that so insulting and I get, I'm so frustrated about people my age who grew up, Democrats my age, who grew up in the George W. Bush years and remember how horrible Dick Cheney was and how horrible he was correctly positioned by Democrats is just this Darth Vader, this mastermind behind the Iraq war and the torture regime and all this stuff, the illegal spying, which he was. I mean, he was the driving force behind

All of that, and it was commonly accepted that he should be sitting in jail, which I very much think he should be. And for her to go around campaigning with his daughter and venerating him as someone who's done great American service is just, I don't blame her for getting an endorsement for him, although I would question myself if Dick Cheney endorsed me for president, what am I doing wrong? But you can't help who endorses you. But for her to go around venerating him.

is such an insult and the fact that few people on the left are bothered by that is very upsetting and mind-boggling to me. I find it disgusting.

Sean Dempsey (1:02:31)
We have, I think we have as a society collective amnesia for anything further than five or ten years ago. we can't, another example, John McCain, mean, a man that if there is a hell, he is surely burning in it for his rampant genocidal behavior for potentially millions of deaths are on his hands. And men like John McCain are venerated by Kamala and Biden both.

as being great men and represented with civility at a time of great national pride. forget the exact quote. It's just like what kind of postmodern world are we living in where we can look at and eat the most evil people as possible and because they're not Trump, they're now...

Kevin Maley (1:03:17)
Yeah, that's the key because they're not Trump and they criticize Trump. It's all revolves around Trump. There is this Trump has been so destructive to the left and that they've all gone mad and now have embraced these any they will embrace the devil clearly, literally Dick Cheney, as long as that person is anti Trump. And I just want to say to the collective center left, I should say the Democratic Party, like your hatred for him has destroyed you.

Sean Dempsey (1:03:22)
That's right.

Kevin Maley (1:03:47)
I mean, you have become all that you hate because you're so motivated by this passionate desire to destroy this person. I don't like Donald Trump, but it is like he has destroyed them in a way that I don't think they recognize. The same thing with the media, which is obviously bad before Trump, but totally destroyed themselves because of their own hatred for him. It is like a poison. You know, they tell you.

You know, when you're, don't know, in therapy or just talking to a spiritual person, like it's not good to just be animated by hate. It will end up destroying you. And. Yeah, yeah, yes, exactly, yeah. And it's just become so clear to me that that has just destroyed everything in the left. is he is one in that sense.

Sean Dempsey (1:04:21)
I learned that lesson from Star Wars, Hates is thrilling.

Kevin, I gotta tell you, you're gonna scare a lot of people. You're sounding very libertarian right now. Because these are the things that we've been saying for the last five, six years. mean, the devolution of the media and just the entire left apparatus, which is controlled by the media, which controls the media, not to mention the collegiate environment. The well has been completely poisoned by this almost clouding.

overshadowing hatred of Trump so that you've lost the plot on what truly matters and what differentiated, you know, the left of what I thought the good parts of the left were from the right and you no longer have it. I mean, you have a couple great, you know, reporters out there like, you know, Glenn Greenwald and others that are actually continuing to stand for what they stood for 10 years ago, but collectively speaking, you have a complete pivot.

away from what really mattered. mean, again, not to pick on the left, I can pick just as easily on the right, but you have the left, which you stood in Wall Street in New York and championed and screamed against the 1%. The 99 standing against the 1%.

And then fast forward not even 18 months and they're licking their boots because they throw, you know, flow a trans flag out there for them. And then all of a sudden they're the good guys and you have Lockheed Martin out there. As long as they're hiring with a diversity inclusion program, you know, they're completely given a pass. mean, so the left has lost the plot. It basically has been taken over by an anti-Trump.

pro-woke mentality that has allowed them to completely miss out on what truly matters. And the libertarians have been kind of staunchly, haven't moved. Again, we're the islands in the middle that we're seeing the waves break against the shore and the winds going back and forth. we've been saying the same thing for the, which a lot of the progressive movement I think really stood for. We really stood against, you know, the...

the surveillance state, we really stood against overreach of big business and corporate cronyism. And we stood against wars and overindulgence of our powers overseas and getting involved in these entangling alliances. And these were things that we really shared and had common cause with. But again, you can count on maybe two fingers the number of people that are really standing for these things anymore. Ten years ago,

it seemed like there was a lot more integrity on the progressive left than there are today. But I don't mean that to be demeaning. I'd love to have you kind of, because you're sounding more and more like a libertarian every time I talk to you. Sorry, no offense. like.

Kevin Maley (1:07:17)
I'm not offended by that. would love to be libertarian, but I just don't buy the idea that the free market would solve environmental issues that we have. You know, before we had the EPA, we had massive amounts of pollution that the free market did not solve. We had rivers catching on fire before we had the FDA, which I think the FDA should probably be deconstructed and reconstructed, but we rancid meat and stuff like that. think there there is a role for government regulation. I wish there were.

a better solution to that kind of thing. But I just, can't wrap my head around how we deal with industrial pollution in a free market because before any environmental regulations you had just disgusting levels of pollution everywhere. you need to, and I think we talked about this a little bit last time because we had talked about maybe it goes to the States, but then air pollution goes across state boundaries and rivers do too. And so it needs to be.

federal approach if you're going to do it. mean, ideally it would be great to be an international approach but because air moves but that's one of the things that I just can't wrap my head around. But otherwise most of the and then some of the monetary stuff but otherwise it I very much like libertarians.

Sean Dempsey (1:08:25)
I utter.

If I got you as far along as I have, or guess your own research has gotten you there, then that's great. If there's individual disagreements on something like that, to me that's trivial. That is so trivial. As long as we agree on the most important stuff, war, the NAF, non-aggression principle, the moral framework that I talked about earlier, that's where the rubber meets the road. If there's...

Kevin Maley (1:08:54)
And the like, I agree with the general and I think it's so important principle that concentrations of power are just very destructive to individual liberties. And I think the individual is paramount and important. And the biggest danger to individual liberties is concentrations of power, whether that's in the form of the federal government or a corporation or back in the day, the church.

Sean Dempsey (1:09:19)
Well not to sideline this conversation, one of the things that just continues to just annoy the hell out of me is our founding fathers had a solution framed up. I it is our Constitution. If we just followed the Constitution as it's written, the problems that we see in the...

confusion of power and government intertwining government and corporate interests would go away overnight. A lot of people say, we need to get money out of politics and we need to do this and do that. But all of this has been laid out very clearly. And if we just followed the Constitution and listen to what it says, mean, Article 1, Section 8 describes the powers and the limited powers of the federal government.

you can read it in one or two paragraphs. It's not something that's that complex. But then when you look and see what the actual government is going and doing today, it doesn't resemble anything like it. So if we really did believe in the Constitution, we would just open it back up and have it implemented. We wouldn't be in...

overseas. We wouldn't be going to war without a declaration of war. So some of these things are just so simple and so easy and we just need to have the kind of political will to to go back to our roots as it were.

Kevin Maley (1:10:41)
Well, what about the changes to the Constitution, like the income tax? think that's the 17th Amendment, the regressive income tax.

Sean Dempsey (1:10:49)
Well, I mean, if you read my book, I think I talk a little bit about that. I would, know, I'll even give you the 17th Amendment, even though I don't agree with it. If we could go back, if we could stop going to war without declaration of war, there's basically nothing else. I would give you everything else. I'd give you every...

Kevin Maley (1:10:51)
Do we stop after 10 or 11 on the amendments?

Why do what is that matter that much because in 2002 we passed an authorization for the use of military force for push to attack Iraq wait, what difference would it make if Congress had declared war against Iraq? I mean either way Congress is passing an authorization to invade another country which was a disaster which is based on lies You have people on the record in the Congress making votes for it. I think

You know, making it an AUMF allowed people like John Kerry to pretend they weren't voting for war. I was only voting to give the power to go to war and that sort of thing. And I get the legal technicalities of it, but it's the same outcome. doesn't change the whether the war was legal internationally. It doesn't change that it was an act of aggression that killed a million people, that it was based on lies. You still had to vote in Congress. I mean, I get there is some difference, but largely speaking, what what what does it matter?

Sean Dempsey (1:11:58)
Bye.

I think it's easy to say that, to say, what's the difference if we had a declaration of war and went to war or we just did it through fiat?

Kevin Maley (1:12:19)
Not Fiat, they took a vote in Congress.

Sean Dempsey (1:12:21)
They did the War Powers Act.

Kevin Maley (1:12:25)
No, was 2002, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in October 2002 to go after, it basically said we are giving the Bush administration the legal authority to attack Iraq. And then the individual Democrats would make statements saying like, only if diplomacy doesn't work.

Sean Dempsey (1:12:28)
Yes.

Well, the difference I think is actually very far reaching in that the Congress having to formally declare war is a very important step in order to have the entirety of the Senate

and House of Representatives get together and decide that this is the will of the American people. Whereas if it happens through a piece of legislation that can be then bastardized and used as precedent to get us into Libya and Syria and now Israel and Ukraine, it puts the camel's nose under the tent. And so that's the reason I have a problem with some of these things that I still consider it by fiat. I know like you said it was passed, but it was very directed and I have to go back and read.

exactly what was said, but it was like, we're going to go and allow the president to make these very specific war-based decisions in the heat of battle, or what it were. But it should have gone back then to the House of Representatives and then be ushered in as a declaration of war. If we are going to go to war, we need to have the American people behind that decision. But if you

Kevin Maley (1:13:50)
I think they were behind the decision. 70 % of the country supported that authorization for the use of military force. They supported the idea that we should go to war with Iraq. And there was a big debate, not as much as I would have preferred, but there was a debate in the House and Senate. You had people like Ted Kennedy railing against it and Robert Byrd railing against the idea that we should go to war. I would argue that the people who were making the votes at the time were saying they were representing the American people.

Sean Dempsey (1:14:00)
Well.

Well, I guess I throw the question back at you is if that's the case, I don't think that's correct. Why would we not have a declaration of war in that case? And then why would we go to war with a country that wasn't even the one that attacked us? So I think there's a lot.

Kevin Maley (1:14:34)
Well, I don't think we should have gone to war. was out in the streets protesting against it. But I think, you know, if you were to ask them, they would say probably at the time that we don't necessarily want to go to war with Iraq. What we're voting for is to give the Bush administration the legal ability to go to war once they've exhausted all diplomatic options, because at the time the Bush administration was building up this pretext that they really didn't want to go to war. They wanted to try diplomacy. They had to get Hans Blix and the UN inspectors.

all over Iraq. And I remember John Kerry later when he was trying to make excuses for this vote, he said, I thought it was important that we had this kind of sort of Damocles over Saddam Hussein because that pressure point would force him to relent and open up his weapons depots to inspectors or stuff like that. There's all sorts of holes in that argument, but that was the argument that they were making that we're not necessarily voting for war now. But this is if he has the authority

to go to war from us when he chooses that will put more pressure on Saddam Hussein. And thus, in a way, it is a kind of anti-war resolution because it will help us prevent war. It's total bullshit, but that was the argument that I heard many Democrats making at the time and then later when they tried to pretend it wasn't a clear authorization for war.

Sean Dempsey (1:15:54)
I guess as my late grandfather used to put it, the proof's in the pudding. The fact that we've gone to so many wars without declaration of wars since Iraq and prior to Iraq. I mean, can throw Korea and Vietnam in the mix. mean, these are foreign involvement, boots on the ground, hostile engagement with an enemy territory that should have been prefaced with a declaration of war by the United States. I mean, that is what our founding fathers outlined.

the process. And I think any efforts to circumvent or shortcut that defined process are an abomination. again, as a libertarian, I don't think that that's very controversial. think that if you go back and you ask any of our founding fathers, had George Washington or Madison or Hamilton today, and just say, hey, did you know that we're in 19 countries right now without a declaration of war? think that would horrify them.

Kevin Maley (1:16:48)
Yeah, no, I think that's that's awful. And a lot of that stems from, think, the 2001 authorization for the use of military force, which they passed after 9 11, which is a pretty much a blank check to go after terror. that. Yeah, I know, I get your point, but I just think, I mean, I was surprised by you saying that's the kind of like the most important thing, because I think if we had that, I mean, before Vietnam, for example, we had the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

Sean Dempsey (1:17:03)
just saying, you get my point though, right? mean, I just...

Kevin Maley (1:17:18)
So there was a debate in Congress. It was also based on bullshit and lies. But you know, you have these things go through Congress. I don't think it would have changed the outcome one bit if we decided to declare war in Iraq. Then we still it still would would have passed. It would have been a terrible war. It would have been based on lies. It would have killed a million people. And that would have been that. So I think the only thing that might have been different is the 2001 authorization for the use of military force, because that was just a blank check against

Sean Dempsey (1:17:40)
Alright, let me amend my...

Kevin Maley (1:17:46)
terror and that's been abused. hasn't been repealed and it's been used to go after Libya and Syria and you know, all these other countries. We're in Niger and stuff like that. When we draw in Pakistan, they all cite the legal authority in that resolution.

Sean Dempsey (1:17:59)
What?

Exactly, and that's the one I thought you were referring to earlier. But yes, you're absolutely right. And let me amend the record too. I would actually, now thinking back, the number one thing, if I was president for the day, for example, I could snap my fingers and put certain things in effort into action, I would get rid of the Federal Reserve. think that that solves, I think that solves the problem of going to war, because if you can afford war,

Kevin Maley (1:18:23)
Yeah.

Sean Dempsey (1:18:29)
then you're more likely, excuse me, if you can just print money with reckless abandon and allow us to just get involved in these foreign entanglements without any real fiscal discipline, you're gonna be much more likely and incentivized to print the money and go to war. And exactly it's the reason that's allowed us to go into the last 12 of the 13 probably entanglements overseas.

because we can just print the money and there's no there's no impact to the american people there's no raising money there's no war bonds there's no efforts involved there's no negative externalities other than the fact that we're inflating our currency away but you get rid of the federal reserve that goes away and now you actually have to pay for it and you make people feel it

that would solve the problem with quote unquote a free market solution. So I like that slightly better than just rewriting a couple of pages or adherence to a document that I think is very important. I still think it's important to adhere to the Constitution, but that would solve most of the problem without.

Kevin Maley (1:19:30)
Yeah, but you know.

But we were a pretty aggressive military power before the Federal Reserve, especially in this hemisphere. mean, A, you go into debt. For certain wars, you're going to go into debt either way. So the Civil War, for example, we, you you just issue bonds and you go into a healthy amount of debt. The British in the middle of the 19th century, before they had a central bank, had a debt to GDP ratio of 200 percent stemming from the Napoleonic Wars. You can still fight.

wars without a central bank. It does make it easier. But then also throughout the 19th century, the United States was using gunboat diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere and setting up our banana republics and, you know, intervening all over.  you know, we became a global power later, but we were still an aggressive power. You know, we attacked Mexico and took half their land on on bullshit pretext. And that was all before the Federal Reserve.

Sean Dempsey (1:20:24)
We-

I'm not suggesting in any way that there be no war. I'm saying that we'd have honest ways of funding the wars and you'd have the ability for the American people to actually choose to engage in war as opposed to it being done basically behind our backs without any of our approval. There is no declaration of war. There is no raising the money for war. mean the wars that you mentioned, civil war, revolutionary war.

We engaged in these because we were able to raise the money for them honestly. We were able to either borrow the money from our individuals or from foreign governments, but I think that there is a pernicious incentive to go to war when A, it benefits the military industrial complex and it enriches people. Again, some of the richest men in this country are rich on the blood of the soldiers that go to fight and the bombs that they're creating.

Well, mostly they're enriched by the blood of the children that they kill overseas with smart bombs. And the money that's printed to fund them is printed out of thin air. It's not like it's raised through war bonds like it was done, honestly. So I think that that solves most of the problem. And again, there is no panacea. mean, it is mankind's plight to constantly be at war with other...

men, so we will continue throughout history to fight one another, but at least we'll do so without the incentives in play that we do today. And I think that that would be a huge step forward for our country.

Kevin Maley (1:22:10)
Yeah, I think that's a fair point. I mean, I think I would like to see a kind of deconstruction of the national security state, which is very, a very dangerous element, I think, of our society. And that enables things like secret wars, like what was going on in Syria, where I think most Americans probably have no idea that we're in Syria or anything that we did there. And yet we helped kind of deconstruct that country and still have people in Syria guarding oil wells.

Sean Dempsey (1:22:37)
Yeah, and we have proxy wars just to placate other countries. mean, we got in, we were funding the war in Yemen as a, how did Obama put it, to placate Saudi Arabia.

because of what we did in Iraq. we gave them a mea culpa and we said, well, we're sorry about that. We went into war and you're back on your doorstep. We'll help you fight the Houthis for you in Yemen. And so we created probably one of the biggest genocides in the last century, at least until Gaza. And we did that just on a whim, just because we felt like if we're not committing war and genocide, then we're not being productive.

So these sort of things, these proxy wars that we fight, these hidden wars, these shrouded wars, all these things are happening without any of the American, like you ask anyone today, like, hey, will we have war with Yemen? And you get one out of a hundred people will know even the vaguest thing about it. Well, that's because again, we don't have declaration of war. We have these wars that are done in secret. We have these proxy wars that we do to placate other countries. We give, not to mention the foreign aid that we send over the war across.

the globe to countries that are many of which are our enemies. We send money to Israel, send money to Egypt, to bribe money basically to guarantee they don't cause problems in Israel. These are things, these are powers that have been given or never given to the federal government but they've been taken and they're frankly they're done mostly in secret and they're just, they're...

shadow line items on our budget as a country and they do nothing but make the world less safe and it creates massive amounts of blowback every single year and allows us to further push for nuclear annihilation because we are constantly stoking the bees hive wherever we can instead of having the incentives in place for peace we have the incentives in place for more and more war.

So that's the biggest problem we have, I think, as a country that we need to overcome. We overcome that, then I'll give you the income tax. As much as I'm against it, I'm just saying let's have a pecking order. Let's triage this thing. I think the blood of innocent people needs to always take precedent.

Kevin Maley (1:25:02)
Yeah. And the other thing, I mean, you had mentioned giving money to enemies. know sometimes when I hear that term, it's very popular on well within the political establishment and corporate media. But I don't know the idea that we have like enemies in the international sphere just feels very. And this isn't like a critique on you, it's more a critique on the political establishment. Like we don't we don't need to have enemies like.

Sean Dempsey (1:25:23)
think it's fair though. Pakistan.

Kevin Maley (1:25:27)
I don't think the US really does it, know, though I think they ask Kamala Harris, like, who's the biggest enemy on 60 minutes? And she said, Iran. Like we could live in a world where we don't have enemies. I don't know. It feels like high school politics or something like that. No one actually really wants to mess with the United States where the largest military power in the world. To the extent that people do, it is, as you mentioned, blowback from things that we've done. And so it might be terrorist attacks, but.

The idea that we have to view Russia as an enemy, this is something Trump says, which I agree with him on. We shouldn't look at Russia as an enemy. It's better if we're friends with Russia. It's better if we're friends with China. It's better if we're friends with North Korea. We don't have to agree with their internal politics, but I just wish we could get to a world where we don't look at other countries as enemies. Certainly, going back 100 years or 70 years, when...

Japan, Germany, they're enemies. But other than that, we're not, I don't think we should be looking at countries as enemies, even using that kind of worldview, I think helps us get to more wars and more interstate violence where we shouldn't, I don't think we should have any interstate violence, any war, and we shouldn't look at the world in that kind of Hobbesian perspective.

Sean Dempsey (1:26:47)
Kevin, you're sounding more more lucid every day. It's sounding like a libertarian, I gotta tell you. But yeah, you're absolutely right. The nature of that we need to live in this constant state of brinksmanship with other countries, Ukraine, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran.

Kevin Maley (1:27:03)
North Korea, and it justifies a bloated military budget. If you convince the American people that they should be scared of everyone, you're surrounded by enemies, and again, maybe if we were like some small power, but no one's gonna wanna mess with the United States.

Sean Dempsey (1:27:07)
yeah.

Well, there's probably a quote there. I'm sure someone smarter than us have said it. Like, if you constantly put boogeymen at your shores and you keep the American people in fear, then you can justify a bloated military state. That's just the way it is. think that countries have learned that simple axiom for probably thousands of years. I mean, it's probably what kept the Persian Empire or the Roman Empire.

as strong as they were for as long as they were because they're constantly in the state of epic vigilance. But what it does, I what happens to these empires? What happens to every single empire that's ever existed is they crash and they burn because they overextend their military, they overprint their currency or deflate their currency, and then there's a rise and fall of another empire on its heels. So mean, we're just living through...

You know, and who is it that wrote, that actually is a great book about this very topic, Rise and Fall of the American Empire. Anyway, it goes through that exact same premise, which is we are just living through probably the third semester of what will be the collapse of the American Empire, because we are overextending ourselves, because we are living in this over heightened, over vigilant sense of making everyone our enemy.

in order to justify the fact that our military spend is so large. the moment we take the foot off the gas, we realize that we're all bluster and we don't have an actual economy that can support the...

the lifestyles that we have built on debt and inflation. that's probably the saddest part of the state that we're in is that we have built up this economy that is probably largely supported by a lot of our military spend. And once we get rid of it, we're going to face a major depression, or least a recession. And maybe that's one of the reasons why the powers that be has kept the candle on the road for as long as it

and have been pushing all these military interventions in other countries.

Kevin Maley (1:29:33)
Yep. All right. So I know I've had you on for a long time, so just had a few more questions in the final stretch here. I wanted to pivot back to the election and thank you for I think I'd scheduled this for an hour. So appreciate your going over.

Sean Dempsey (1:29:45)
I always love talking with you Kev,

Kevin Maley (1:29:47)
Yeah, same here. So do you have any predictions for the election, both presidential, house and senate?

Sean Dempsey (1:29:55)
Not for the House and Senate. really actually, as much as I like to keep an eye on politics, I really don't like to, I have no real horse in that race, so don't really care, probably. But as for the presidential race, I'll give you a bombshell here. I do not think Trump is going to be president.

Kevin Maley (1:30:17)
really? Alright, that's interesting because I have come to the strong belief that he will.

Sean Dempsey (1:30:22)
I believe that he will probably win the popular vote and maybe in a free and fair election. I don't want to try anything to get you censored here on YouTube, but I think in a free and fair election, he will win the popular vote and probably will win the election. But I think A, there'll be some sort of shenanigans in the 11th hour and or B, I think plan B for the power brokers in Washington, they'll find a way to get him out of.

There's no way that the power brokers in Washington DC are going to allow another Trump presidency. And so they're either going to do that through legal means, they're either going to, again, put him in jail, which they've tried to do. They're either going to make sure he doesn't win through whatever means possible or see they're going to take him out, you know, Kennedy style. And I just do not see any practical world in which Donald Trump puts his head down peacefully on a pillow and, you know,

Washington DC and the White House.

Kevin Maley (1:31:21)
feel like C would be a little hard given that he survived three assassination attempts that if, or I'm sorry, two assassination attempts, I think, that if one succeeded, I think almost no one would believe that it was just some crazy guy and it was a mistake by the secret service. They let their guard down. I think that maybe could have passed if it was the first one, but with everything that happened,

I think it would be really hard to swallow the credibility on that. You know, it's, it's someone got through the net.

Sean Dempsey (1:31:57)
will never lose faith in the gullibility of...

Kevin Maley (1:32:06)
Yeah, it is weird how everyone kind of moved on from the, especially that first shooter. That should be the front page of every paper is looking into his background. I don't understand why that just disappeared. And we never found out anything about him. He had no social media. He...

Sean Dempsey (1:32:11)
We didn't even look into that first shooter. my gosh.

Well, I do.

His phone just happened to tick when they did a report on it. It happened to show up at Washington DC and the CIA headquarters every now and then. mean, is this just randomly? I mean, there's all sorts of conspiracy theories about that, which I will not, again, bring up on your show. I don't want it to get banned, but it's just, this stuff's just too weird. And the fact that it's not still to this day, the number one story, and it just got quietly buried and moved on and then.

Trump's attitude just happened to become a lot more placating following that. I think the man's spooked. I think he knows that if he doesn't play ball, they're gonna take him out. Now whether or not he agrees to do that, think is-

know, it reigns to be seen. But the reason that Trump is a danger is nothing, is none of his policies. That's what I think is so important to maybe leave you with is like Trump, let's just say he becomes president or he at least on paper he does. The reason that the deep state does not like Trump is nothing to do with his policy. It has everything to do with that. He has made it clear.

that he is not going to play ball. is his own man. Trump is an egomaniac. He is not like other people telling him what to do. And the presidency for the last probably 50 or 60 years or ever since, you know, probably, I'd say Nixon or maybe Kennedy has always been more of a puppet master that is being or puppet masters or puppet master are basically influencing and allowing the president to make the decisions that he does.

Trump entered the scene and has showed just an absolute vitriol about being controlled by any force other than Trump. That's the reason they hate him and that's the reason they'll never let

sit as president, in my opinion.

Kevin Maley (1:34:15)
Yeah, I think I don't I hear that sometimes. And I think the perspective of Trump being this anti establishment figure will shake things up is.

a somewhat exaggeration because when he came into office the first time and you he says it'll be different now, but when he came into office the first time, first thing he did was try to repeal Obamacare. tried. I mean, he basically gave it was the Paul Ryan domestic agenda. He pointed all establishment people, know, tax cuts for corporations. It did not really. His rhetoric was crazy, but he didn't. He's kind of a normal Republican president and many.

many regards. think the neoconservatives hate him because he has attacked their mythology around Iraq and, you know, says they're warmongers. And it's very important for neoconservatives to not have that mythology pierced and not have a mainstream because even Democrats won't say like, you know, Bush failed on 9-11. He should have protected us. That that's like you're not allowed to say that, but he would say that.

And so I think the new conservatives are afraid that he won't be a warmonger the way they want him to be. But other than that, mean, he doesn't seem that dangerous to the establishment. And I think a lot of his supporters think that he will be. But I don't know, like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, like these are the people that he put in office. Again, he says it'll be different this time, but.

Sean Dempsey (1:35:43)
Yeah, I think he's just an idiot though. I think that's the problem with that's maybe his biggest benefit.

Kevin Maley (1:35:48)
So then why are they afraid of him? If he puts establishment people in, if he follows a normal Republican agenda,

Sean Dempsey (1:35:53)
If he does all those things, I'm saying, then it helps. If he plays ball...

Kevin Maley (1:35:56)
But he did that last time.

Sean Dempsey (1:35:58)
I think that's why he's probably allowed to serve his term. But when you go back to Obama, you look at his cabinet, don't fact check me on this, but I'm 99 % sure. When you look at his cabinet that he appointed, was the exact man to man and woman to woman that was given to him as a recommendation from the CEO of Bank of America.

three months before his candidacy. So these puppet presidents who get into office basically do what the power brokers tell them to do. And if you play ball, then you're gonna be beloved and the media's gonna be behind you and everyone's gonna be your best friend. As soon as they see you as being your own man or...

and doing what you want to do and not following the powers that be, putting the, not staffing your cabinet with the people that they want you to, not going to the wars that they want you to, then you become a dangerous person. And again, I think that's what took out Nixon. I think that's what took out JFK. It's the same mentality of thinking that you as president get to call the shots when you do not. I think that that's underlying. That's been very clear over the last...

40, 50 years that the president is a figurehead only and if you play ball you're going to be great, you're going to do well. If you don't play ball then you're going to be ousted. And again I know we're revering into the conspiracy land there but I think the evidence is pretty...

pretty firmly in the camp that there are significant power brokers that are calling the shots when it comes to the presidency. And as soon as you try to sway outside the lines of that, you are quickly vilified and quickly turned into a pariah. And you'll leave office one way or the other.

Kevin Maley (1:37:50)
So your final prediction is that we'll have President Harris come January?

Sean Dempsey (1:37:53)
Yes, I think we will definitely have President Harris, and I'm calling it right now, that it will either be official and it's just a runaway, know, or, well, it won't be a runaway, but the swing states will just happen to come through with the necessary votes. Or, that's plan A for the Democrats, obviously, and the power brokers. Or plan B, Trump wins, but he doesn't see the light of day.

Kevin Maley (1:38:19)
But then wouldn't JD Vance take office?

Sean Dempsey (1:38:21)
Yeah, then JD Vance. I JD Vance is probably much more willing to play ball than Trump. Yeah, absolutely.

Kevin Maley (1:38:25)
Okay, so it's either President Harris or President Vance, but not President Trump on January 20th.

Sean Dempsey (1:38:29)
Yeah, it's actually why in the betting markets, have a very strong bet right now on JD Vance being the next president of the United States.

Kevin Maley (1:38:39)
wow. All right. I'll make a virtual bet with you. I think it's going to be Trump president and vice president. I think the election will actually be more decisive than poll show. I think we're going to sit down election night and people there's a chance it doesn't probably a 50 50 chance. It's not decided that night and we have to wait a day or two. But I think there's a maybe.

Maybe more than a 50 % chance we actually do know that night that we start to watch the returns come in and Pennsylvania was supposed to be tied, Michigan's supposed to be tied, and we see a decisive win plus two or three for Trump or maybe plus one or two, but we know the outcome. And I forget the election rules, like maybe Pennsylvania, you can mail in your ballot on election day, so that does delay the count, but I think it's gonna shift.

Sean Dempsey (1:39:19)
Well that happens I just...

Kevin Maley (1:39:32)
more favorably for a decisive outcome for him and he might even look better than he did in 2016 and he might get the popular vote, but he'll definitely get the electoral college.

Sean Dempsey (1:39:41)
If this happens the way that you're calling, I pray that it does, only because I really, if nothing else happens this political season, if we get Ross Ulbrich pardoned, it'll be the best thing that could possibly happen. And it's the only thing that I'm shooting for is being a positive out of this entire debacle that is the 2024, 2025 election.

Kevin Maley (1:40:06)
Alright.

Well, it's a good note to end on. Before we go, do you wanna plug your book?

Sean Dempsey (1:40:13)
yeah, got it. If anyone who's watching, Kevin's putting it up right now on screen, I wrote a book called The Investor's Warp Whistles. It is nothing to do with politics, don't worry. If this has major eyes bleed or ears bleed, please know that there's nothing to do with politics in the book. It is 100 % based on how to invest, how to save, how to create systems that allow you to have passive income.

And so I've taken the last, 20 years of my business experience and capsulated them into this hopefully easy to read narrative. I've put it in a format that's fun and relatable, especially for us millennials who love playing the game Mario 3. every chapter is based on a video game.

modalities so it's a lot of fun and I try to take a dry topic and make it interesting. Check it out on Amazon at warpwhistles.com we'll bring you right there and I'd love any of your listeners to check it out.

Kevin Maley (1:41:16)
and we'll put the link in our show notes.

Sean Dempsey (1:41:18)
Thanks for having me on, Kevin. I really appreciate it.

Kevin Maley (1:41:20)
Thanks for being on, Sean, much appreciated.