♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaha Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more. - Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Today on the show, I'm gonna tackle more of the philosophical discussion, not a lot of real practical nuts and bolts financial planning in this show, in fact, nothing of that. But if you're interested in philosophical discussions around money and government and things like that, especially as it relates to tax, then you might enjoy today's show.

So with that caveat, I'll tell you the question. The question comes in from a listener, writes in, says, "Hi Josh, I really enjoy your podcast. "I've learned a lot and I really like your "more than average philosophical approach "to many of the topics. "However, I have a small rant.

"These different feelings might be "just because I am from Europe and you are from the USA, "but I don't understand why so many Americans hate "or don't trust governments "and try to minimize tax payments. "Your last episode on cash advantage "touched on this as well. "I understand that government wastes a lot of tax money, "but it also does a lot of good.

"Infrastructure, financing research and science, "healthcare, even social care, et cetera. "We take benefit of roads when we travel "and police when we need them, "but we don't like paying taxes. "Would you rather pay a toll tax for every road you use "and pay a policewoman every time you need them?

"I know this is a never-ending discussion, "but just felt like saying this after your last episode "and the examples that you gave of how to pay cash, "pay with cash for a mechanic to avoid taxes." I thought it was an interesting question and I've received many such questions like this 'cause certainly I'm not shy in my opinions of encouraging people to minimize the amount of tax that they pay.

Hopefully I do a good job of always encouraging that legally. I don't wish to encourage people to break the law and perhaps from time to time I stray too near to that. I don't know. I'll talk in a moment about my comment about paying cash to the mechanic, et cetera, why that's important even though it's possible the mechanic might use a cash payment to not pay income tax on it.

I'll talk about that in a moment. But I don't wanna be one who encourages people to break the law, although I think there is a place and a time for that. I have a lot of respect for people who are tax protesters, but I'm not going to be associated with that, or at least not in the conditions that I live in.

I don't see that as being a useful strategy at this point in time. But I thought this listener raised a couple of interesting questions that would be worth discussing. And I thought that it would be interesting to talk about them and then give a broader philosophical conversation. And what I'll try to do is, towards the latter part of this show, after I deal with a few technical things here and just kind of a few quick answers, I'll try to lay out my vision, what I see as the ideal vision.

And as part of my preamble here, you should know, however, that this is, as I see it, largely theoretical at this point in time. Very few people agree with my positions. I have no influence or power, nor am I seeking any influence or power. My only thought is to simply try to live my life in accordance with the principles and philosophies that I believe are the best, and try to live as an example for my neighbors.

And that's about it. So don't think I'm not advocating for voting for somebody or really anything. I'm out of the mainstream. But if you're interested in how I've arrived at some thoughts after years of thinking about these things, I'll tell you where I'm at right now. These shows are always very hard for me because the older I get, the more humility I feel with regard to my ideas.

I think it's probably natural when we're young. We think we know it all. But it's a little hard to, when you're on record with your ideas. It's easier when you're just talking with your buddies and you can grow and you can change. But the older I get, the more I realize I don't know.

And yet, how do I ever find the time to sit down and spend the next 20 years searching out every answer? I can't do that. So just take today's show in the tone of one friend speaking to another and just sharing with you what I think about. So first, this listener says, "It might just be because I am from Europe "and you are from the United States.

"But I don't understand why so many Americans hate "or don't trust governments "and try to minimize their tax payments." Now this one I think is an interesting question to begin with. Because certainly, I am very vocal about minimizing tax payments to the United States government. And there are many of us who are, and many of us Americans, who are very vocal about that.

And it's in many ways part of our culture. The United States culture is a culture that was founded in rebellion, right? We overthrew King George. Whether it was a good idea or not, frankly, if I could trade in and go back and live under King George, I'd do it in an instant.

The early colonists paid less than 1% of their incomes in total net taxes. Whereas today, Americans sit back and are happy with anywhere from a third to a half of their income going to taxes. So all of the nostalgia about somehow things are better today under a constitution and all this stuff versus how they were under King George is nonsense.

So if I could, I'd go back to King George in an instant. I'd give up. You can have your, what was it? No taxation without representation. You can have your representation and I'll take the no taxation that the previous colonists enjoyed. Much of the kind of American mythology, it really doesn't hold water when you dig into it.

But that being the case, or whether you agree or not, regardless, the mythology has a controlling influence. And Americans are deeply, generally, distrustful of government. Now that has waned significantly, especially since the early 1900s. That has changed substantially. It's hard to overestimate and over-discuss the massive change that occurred from the United States of America pre-1900, just for an easy round century number, to post-1900.

I mean, it's a completely different society. But still, there are enough of the roots of the pre-1900 Americas in the American psyche and in the mythology and in the general psyche of the land that it makes us different. Now, interestingly though, if you try to compare Americans to Europe, I don't think there's much of a comparison that you can make.

Because especially when it comes to taxes, almost all Americans believe that cheating on taxes, not paying what you owe, is morally and ethically unacceptable. And although I think most Americans say there's an exception to that, I would give exceptions. It's not morally and ethically unacceptable in all circumstances, I would agree.

I believe you should pay the taxes that you owe. And that's common across the United States of America. In fact, the voluntary compliance rate in the United States is usually measured to be around 81 to 84%. And that is one of the highest rates in the world. One of the highest rates in the world.

By comparison, since we're using Europe and trying to compare Europe to the United States, Germany has the highest compliance rate that's measured in Europe. And Germany's voluntary tax compliance rate is 68%. Whereas Italy's voluntary tax compliance rate is 62%. So before you get too bent out of shape about what's wrong with Americans, why do Americans complain and moan and grope and gripe and not trust their governments, et cetera, and aren't we just European so much better?

The data indicates otherwise. And my source, what I am alluding to here, I'm pulling this data sourced from a Wikipedia article on the tax evasion in the United States. You can look it up, just search Wikipedia for tax evasion in the United States. And there is a discussion there where it directly cites that.

Interestingly, there was an Atlantic article published earlier this year in, I think, April of 2019, right around tax time, called "Why Americans Don't Cheat on Their Taxes, "The Weirdly Hopeful Story of How the United States "Came to be a Leader in Tax Compliance," by the writer here, Renee Chun.

And one of the things that's interesting about this is they go through and the author of this article points out why and how Americans are so much higher in terms of the American compliance with the tax rates. And the author tries to go through and identify some of the different reasons why this might be the case.

Why is there such a high percentage of the American people who say you should pay your taxes, and why is there such a high percentage of the American people who do pay their taxes? They talk about things like the income tax withholding, which the United States started, which if I could change one thing, two things, there was an article, I think Gary North wrote years ago, on Lou Rockwell's site, where he said, "If I could have two things changed, "I would change only two things.

"I would eliminate federal withholding from paychecks "of people's taxes, and I would move the tax payment day "to the first Monday of November." The idea is that the first Tuesday of November is election day in the United States. And so if every American had to file and actually pay, write the check for their taxes on the first Monday of November, and then go vote the next day, that in and of itself would be a tremendously powerful thing to change.

And I agree. I find that there's a very different perspective among business owners who have to make quarterly tax payments, and often one large tax payment when their taxes are due, as compared to employees who don't really see the amount, they don't even know the amount of money that's withheld from their paychecks due to employee withholding.

So in the article, "Americans Don't Cheat on Their Taxes "from the Atlantic," they talk about what accounts for this. And basically, what's hinted at is probably it comes down to tax morale. So I'll read just a paragraph here. "Economists say a third factor, "one with profound political implications, is tax morale.

"This is a catch-all term for various forces "that motivate people to pay taxes, "including social norms, democratic values, civic pride, "transparent government spending, "and trust in leadership and fellow citizens. "People are more inclined to fudge," yes, economists use that word, "their tax forms "if they think others aren't paying their fair share.

"None of this would seem to bode especially well "for tax morale in the United States, "where faith in government has been dropping for decades. "So why are Americans still paying?" And talks about some of the reasons why. You can judge for yourself if you think that will continue. But don't be too quick to say, "Well, we just in Europe have much higher, "we're just, everyone's okay with paying taxes, "whereas in the United States, they're not." Maybe the difference between Europe and the United States is simply that there's a difference in tax rates.

The European tax rate is so much higher. It's much more within your interest to avoid taxes and evade taxes if you're paying taxes at a 50% tax rate, versus if you're paying taxes at a 20% tax rate. It's just a very different scenario. So, but don't try to propose Europe quite so much until you actually look at the rate of compliance.

Again, Germany's is the highest at 68%. The United States, however, is 81 to 84% voluntary compliance rate. Now, the next question that you ask is this. "I understand that government wastes a lot of money, "but it also does a lot of good, "infrastructure, financing research and science, "healthcare, even social care.

"We take the benefit of roads when we travel "and police when we need them, "but we don't like paying taxes. "Would you rather pay a toll tax for every road you use "and pay a police woman every time you need them?" Well, short answer is yes, absolutely. I would rather pay a toll tax for every road I use and pay a police woman every time I need one, than to pay the taxes and income taxes and everything else the way that it is generally assessed right now.

Now, there are a couple of red herrings that we need to get out of the way. First, taxes are not really doing much to pay for roads and police women. This is the biggest fallacy. It is rather funny. I don't know if you know it or not, but it's an ongoing meme and a joke among more libertarian leaning circles that you always wind up, "But my roads, "how are we gonna pay for the roads "if we don't have taxes?" I would bet you almost every anarchist, every libertarian I know, anybody who's in the more freedom-oriented, less taxation, if you told us that the only function of government is gonna be the roads, and you said that the government's gonna take care of roads and nothing else, I think most of us would stop our griping.

Same thing, by the way, if tax rates were more modest, if tax rates were, say, under 10%. I can't imagine that, I can't say I wouldn't gripe. Hopefully, I'm griping less than I used to, but I'd probably still gripe, but it's just not really worth planning if it's under 10%.

It's when you get into the tax rates that we're at. I mean, right off the top, 15% of your income is lost. 15 1/2% of your income is lost to Medicare Social Security taxes, plus, then, your federal income tax rates. So it's very common, the normal situation is for all but the very low income, the normal situation is that you're automatically losing 25% of your income, and that can grind up to, in the United States, up to 50, 55 to 60% in very high-tax jurisdictions of your income is gone.

Well, that's just unacceptable. And so it's very much within your best interest to do planning for that. But the United States government does not spend money on roads and policewomen, or at least not much. The vast majority of spending in the United States is based upon transfer payments, trying to transfer money from one person to another.

The primary expenditures are Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. If you add up Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and then add in military spending, you account for at least about, I think it's 2/3 of the US federal budget. It was with those things, 2/3 of the US federal budget.

And my beef is not with roads and policewomen, but my beef is with Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and military spending. Those are my beefs. And unfortunately, in the United States, those are the things that are considered to be untouchable. Those are the things that are considered to be sacrosanct.

So don't have this illusion that somehow the problem is roads. Roads are not a problem. But yes, to implement a system of privatized roads in today's world would be ridiculously simple to do. One of the little jokes that libertarians usually like to point out when we're talking about my roads, how are we gonna get the roads done?

Governments don't build roads. They simply don't. Governments do not build roads. What governments do is sometimes engage in a planning process, trying to figure out where the roads go. But usually they hire private contractors to do the studies to figure out where would be the best place for roads and road improvements.

Then they facilitate an extremely corrupt and bloated and inefficient process of securing bids, which leads to massive corruption of small favors and donations to campaign donations by all the large road contractors to the local politicians to try to help them in the re-election campaign. And then you wind up with a contract that's awarded to a private company to build the road.

And the private company is the one who actually builds the roads. Governments don't build roads. So if it's that difficult, or that's the thing, it's hard to imagine a government program that could be privatized easier than building the roads. Now, there are some things where you would say, how do we figure out the easements and how do we figure out the eminent domain and all that stuff?

It's a little bit thorny, but I don't know anybody that's all that concerned about the roads. I'm not turned off about the roads. But you don't need to pay 60% of your income to finance roads. The other thing about police spending, frankly, these examples you use are some of the easiest things to privatize.

Just use police women as an example. Would I rather hire a policewoman when I need one? Well, absolutely I would. And there's an easy, obvious parallel that could easily be built in the United States. Now, in the United States, would be different from Europe, but in the United States, if you call the police and they come out to your home, you don't pay a fee, a usage fee for that service.

You also generally don't get much great service. Half the time they shoot you, half the time they don't show up when you need them, half the time they don't investigate the crimes. Where I'm from in South Florida, I have several friends who are police officers, and at this point, they don't even bother investigating minor crimes, minor property crimes, et cetera.

They pile a police report so you can do it for insurance purposes. But if your stuff gets ripped off of your house, you're not gonna have any, I mean, they'll dust for fingerprints, but they're not gonna do anything to try to catch the people. I had a truck get stolen.

Truck got stolen. The guys came out and made an effort. I shouldn't be that cruel. Made an effort to dust a few places for prints on my pickup truck after I recovered it, but they didn't do anything to try to catch the thieves. There was no massive law enforcement effort to say, oh, we're gonna go and get these people who stole the truck and we're gonna get off.

It's just, so you don't get great service. Now, if there's a murder or something like that, people, they treat that a little bit more seriously. But again, where I'm from in many places, it's not even worth calling them for the except of get a police report for your insurance.

But you don't generally pay for the hourly work of having a police officer come out. Same thing with fire. But what you do pay for is if you call out an ambulance service. And the way that things are often done is that the fire service and the ambulance service has kind of have been integrated.

But you get billed if you call out for a medical call. And so if you call an ambulance, you get a bill for your ambulance ride to the hospital. And then you have private insurance that usually will pay that bill, if not, you wind up owing the bill. And then sometimes the bill is negotiated, whatever.

But it's not just automatically covered by the government. Well, it would be very simple to apply that exact same thing to firefighters. And it'd be very simple to apply that exact same thing to police work. That could be easily privatized. You could be easily, even if the work were actually coordinated by a local government, you could easily charge usage fees, call out fees for calling the police out, et cetera.

And that could easily be covered with private insurance policies. That's not unknown. There are many of us in the United States who out of concern if we ever kill somebody in self-defense, maintain private insurance policies to cover court costs and fees and lawyers fees and things like that, or defending yourself.

That's fairly popular, at least advertised popular in the United States. And so there are all kinds of ways that those things could be covered. So don't fall into the idea that somehow everyone is out there griping about police officers and everyone is griping about building roads. That's not the gripe.

The gripe is the other stuff. The gripe is the massive transfer programs and the entitlement programs. Now, let's talk about those a little bit. I don't think that these programs are fundamentally good. They're fundamentally useful. I have a number of complaints, but let me just speak practically. It doesn't really matter what I think or what you think about them.

There is a massive political movement of people who believe that these things are good. There's no chance whatsoever that the United States of America is going to disband Medicaid or Medicare or Social Security, at least not politically. There is no political will for that whatsoever. Every person who even tries, the last president in the United States who tried to touch one of these entitlement programs was President George W.

Bush. And it was interesting, I read about it in his memoirs, in "Decision Points," I think it was called, where he was just talking about how one of his big regrets of his presidency was how he couldn't make any progress even on a partial privatization of Social Security. And yet it cost him massively politically.

President Obama certainly didn't try to say, "Let's minimize entitlement programs," the opposite direction. And President Trump was politically savvy enough to from the beginning never even bother to try to say anything about, "Let's minimize entitlement programs." Once you get a group of people that recognizes that they can vote themselves money from the government treasury, you're pretty much lost.

And so my opinion or your opinion about this makes no difference whatsoever. What I think personally will happen, my personal opinion, is that in the coming decades, all of these programs will prove to be worthless because there's simply not gonna be any money. But that's not gonna be anything fast, it's gonna be something excruciatingly slow and painful.

And all the people that thought, "Well, if I just vote myself some more money, "it'll all work out," are going to be sorely disappointed. Last week on Twitter, I shared an interesting Washington Post article, the headline of which was called, "Maine Families Face an Elder Boom "and Worker Shortage in Preview of Nation's Future." I thought it was a well-written article.

Jeff Stein was the reporter, and he was talking in Maine and dealing with different people who were really facing just awful problems. Even though they're fully qualified for Medicaid, they can't get help. Couple of excerpts for you. Flaherty's mother, Caroline, has for two years qualified for in-home care, paid for by the state's Medicaid program.

But the agency could not find someone to hire amid a severe shortage of workers that has crippled facilities for seniors across the state. With private help now bid up to $50 an hour, Janet and her two sisters have been forced to do what millions of families in a rapidly aging America have done, take up second, unpaid jobs, caring full-time for their mother.

"We do not know what to do. "We do not know where to go. "We're in such dire need of help," said Flaherty, an insurance saleswoman. Across Maine, families like the Flaherty's are being hammered by two slow-moving demographic forces, the growth of the retirement population and a simultaneous decline in young workers that have been exacerbated by a national worker shortage pushing up the cost of labor.

The unemployment rate in Maine is 3.2%, below the national average of 3.7%. Later, "We've added an entire generation "since we first put the safety net in place "with no plan whatsoever for how to support them, "said Ai-jen Poo, "co-director of Caring Across Generations, "which advocates for long-term care." As the oldest state, Maine is the tip of the spear, but it foreshadows what is to come for the entire country.

Last year, Maine crossed a crucial aging milestone. A fifth of its population is older than 65, which meets the definition of super-aged, according to the World Bank. By 2026, Maine will be joined by more than 15 other states, according to Fitch Ratings, including Vermont and New Hampshire, Maine's neighbors in the Northeast, Montana, Delaware, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

More than a dozen more will meet that criterion by 2030. Separately in the article, we read this. "But with nursing homes across Maine "closing at an unprecedented rate, "Honey has been unsuccessful. "Medicaid pays for a care aide "to come to his home for 70 hours a week, "but the state has told Honey "it cannot find enough workers to cover the hours, "even though he legally qualifies for the care.

"Care workers in Maine were paid about $11.37 an hour "in 2017, according to an AARP report "with a 2019 minimum wage of $11 an hour. "As Christy Penny, who has cared for Honey for four years, "noted over the phone, "even Dunkin' Donuts pays you more. "Honey said he lives in fear "of one of the caretakers getting sick "and quitting or finding another job.

"When you're confined to a bed, "there's not much you can work with, Honey said. "It only takes one or two of the girls being sick, "or one of the two of them quitting, "for me to not be covered. "And then you're up a creek without a paddle." Separately, Congress created a commission to study the long-term care problem.

In 2013, it issued dozens of recommendations, including a national strategy to help family caregivers. But a fair number of these things have not been implemented. "Those that have been implemented "are being implemented far too slowly," said Bruce Chernoff, co-author of the commission's report and president and chief executive of the SCAN Foundation, which advocates on long-term care issues.

"Left unaddressed, this will be catastrophic. "We as a country have not wrapped our heads "around what it's going to take to pay for long-term care," Chernoff said. "Other countries have responded to their aging populations "with government-provided care, "and many have beefed up the number of aids and providers. "America and England are the only "economically developed nations in the West "that do not provide a universal long-term care benefit," said Howard Gleckman, author of a book about long-term care and a senior fellow at the Urban Institute of Nonpartisan Think Tank.

Now, you can read the article if you want. It's on the Washington Post from August 15, 2019. But this, in my opinion, is a perfect preview of what you can expect to see repeated thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of times over the next few decades. No matter how much it might feel good to say, "Well, we've got Medicaid, "we're gonna cover all the people," the money's not there.

And for these people who retired, what happened is the culture in the United States voted themselves all kinds of massive government programs, which were predicated upon having a whole bunch of young people building and working to pay taxes to pay for the old people. Then, the old people didn't bother to have any children, so the birth rate declined massively, and now there aren't many workers who are paying for the old people.

So, what's the solution? There is no solution in terms of a government solution. You can't just magically print babies. Birth rates continue to decline in the United States of America. And you can't increase the taxes more 'cause people are gonna find they're gonna be willing to move more and decrease those taxes.

And if taxes get much higher, people just simply say it's not worth it. You're gonna have an increasing press towards increasing immigration because that's gonna be one of the only ways that American politicians see that they can increase the tax rolls or to bring in more immigrants to stabilize the population.

But ultimately, what's gonna happen is the people who are dependent on the government programs are going to be screwed. They're going to run out. They're not gonna be there. Doesn't matter how great your Medicaid benefits are, the state can't send you workers 'cause they're not gonna pay what the $50 an hour people are charging in the private market.

When the government gets involved in these markets, it winds up screwing up because it's easier for politicians to promise benefits than to actually pay for stuff. That's what we've been talking about on this show for months and months and months. It's easy to make promises. It's hard to actually pay for stuff.

So we've got needs and opportunities. This has to be solved at the community level. You first, you work on your own children, making sure that your own children are willing to take care of you when you're old. You have a responsibility to take care of your parents when they're old.

And then you build a community fabric where individuals caring for their neighbors. That's the only solution that there is to it. So I say this to say it's a preview of what we're gonna expect over the coming decades. So you can't think that, oh, we have better things and everything's gonna be fixed if we just have more programs.

The money's not there. It's not going to be there. And systematically, in my opinion, this is probably gonna lead to a massive diminishment of the power of the nation state some decades from now, 30, 50, I don't know, 75 years from now, who knows? Maybe I'll be around to see it, maybe I won't.

But there are major problems and major moral hazards of these programs, and these programs are the problem, not having roads. That's not the problem. The problem is the entitlement programs, the wealth transfer programs. And what I see happening, and what I think will continue to happen, at least in the United States, is these welfare programs are going to continue to fuel anger of one group of people against another group of people, and anger at the government, which means probably in time, the voluntary tax compliance rate is gonna continue to go down.

I'm convinced that this is one of the things that are the foremost vanguard of all of the issues with the immigration debate in the United States right now. Probably the biggest issue, if not the biggest, one of the biggest issues right now in the United States is a major immigration debate.

And this is usually played out in the political circles as somehow some kind of racist versus non-racist position. I don't think it's that way. I've met and talked to lots of people on all sides of the political issues. I have never, let me think, I have never encountered somebody who is, I have never personally spoken to somebody who is just racist, who's outright racist, especially somebody who's in the anti-immigration camp, or the President Trump build a wall camp.

I've never spoken to anybody who is in that situation who is racist, who just doesn't like brown people or black people or whatever the issue is. Never happened. But what I have seen constantly is concerns about the transfer payments, about trying to transfer money from one person to another.

And there are millions and millions of people all across the United States who look down and recognize how much of their income is stolen from them in income taxes, and how much is being transferred in the form of welfare payments to people who are immigrants to the country and who may or may not be paying taxes.

Now, there is an important thing to discuss and actually look at and say, what's actually happening with the data? What's actually happening? Are immigrants actually using welfare programs? Is there actually a net loss? But on the whole, if you look at the data, the only people who in the United States are net taxpayers over the course of their lifetime are white men speaking as a group.

And so when you look at that and say, white women are negative net taxpayers, black men, black women, brown men, brown women are all negative taxpayers when taken as racial classes, you can understand why there's a bit of frustration on the part of many white men. And so I think you see a major, it's almost like the taxes are a bellows on a blacksmith's forge making the frustration and the heat drive up.

It's not a matter of racism or non-racism, it's a matter of why is my money being taken and transferred to those people over there? And there is this issue very possibly could rip the United States apart. And it comes down to these things like the government programs and taxes.

Now, I think personally, just indulge me for a moment, I think I could solve the immigration problem. And here's how I would do it if I were emperor of the world. Number one, I would eliminate the welfare state and eliminate all transfer tax payments. Every single transfer tax payment, every single aspect of the welfare state, gone.

I'm not saying you could eliminate all tax. I personally, I'm not an anarchist. I believe there should be tax, I believe there should be government, I believe it's important, but it should be a certain type of government. So I don't personally, I'm not an anarchist. But if you eliminate all transfer payments, what happens is you take away a major source of frustration for individual people.

Because now, if they are paying tax, they understand that they're paying tax for something that's for everybody. If they understand they're paying tax for a road, they're paying a tax for a road. They're not paying tax so that money can come out of their pocket and be transferred to that person over there that they see who's not working, that's not being productive.

They know they're just simply paying for a road. So number one, eliminate the welfare state, eliminate all transfer tax payments. Then you could solve the immigration problem with number two, establish firm border controls to process all people in order to screen out criminals. I don't think that, in my opinion, I don't think that government should have the right or should engage in the practice of trying to hinder the movement of non-criminal persons.

But criminal persons do need to be apprehended and made to pay for their crime. Number three, establish free, unhindered, no cost access to the United States or any country for any immigrating person. And then you have the best of both worlds. You have free access for people to flow into free markets, to go and pursue work, to go and pursue community, to establish themselves wherever they want to be.

That solves a major problem of the inefficiencies of government bureaucrats trying to say, well, we need 22,000 of this kind of worker. We need 15,000 of this kind of worker. We need to issue 182,000 of this kind of visa. It's insane to think that somehow some government bureaucrat somewhere can engage in effective central planning of immigration to figure out what kind of worker we need here and what kind of worker we need is there.

Let the market work it out. But stop the transfer payments from one person to another. I think also you could solve a lot of the frustrations by making sure that there were changes to citizenship and voting. I think if you establish careful identification laws for voting to ensure that only citizens are engaging in voting, that would make a big difference.

If you lengthen the pathway to citizenship while simultaneously removing visa restrictions on workers, et cetera, I think that would solve a lot of the problems of how do you bring people together and be open to immigration while simultaneously bringing a society together. And then finally, you have to affirm individual people's absolute right to control their own property without other people trying to interfere.

The right of that person to discriminate or not discriminate with their property, the right of that person to manage their property the way they could, and that way every person feels free and they can handle their own property, they can handle their own situation without interference by bureaucrats. There's Joshua's five-part plan to solve the stickiest issue in the United States at this point in time.

But at its foundation, the frustration, a lot of it stems from these tax systems. Now, I didn't really mean to start talking about immigration, but there are rippling consequences to these programs that can't be seen in advance. And yet these are the things that make a big, big difference.

Additionally, as the size of government grows, and as you wind up with government handling more and more of these things, you wind up with much higher levels of corruption. And there's a huge moral hazard of having large government systems here where you don't have that if you have a small and restrained government.

As the size and involvement of government grows in an economy and in society, corruption and inequity among persons will always grow. Now, let me just give you a very simple example. Let's assume that you have a government that's extremely small, and all it does is take care of roads and policewomen.

It has to take care of courts too. I'll get to that in just a moment. I think the number one basic function of government should be to handle the judiciary. But let's assume that it just does roads, policewomen, and courts, and there's nothing else. Now, let's say that you are a wealthy person and you have a tiny tax rate, a few percent of, if you were still taxing income, let's just say it's a 5% or 10% of income, flat tax across the board.

Every citizen, every resident owes 10% of their income to the US government. Is there a lot of incentive for local business people and wealthy people, et cetera, to start buying their way in and out of Congress? Is there a lot of incentive for big companies, big pharmaceutical companies, big oil companies, big insurance companies to spend millions of dollars on their political action committees to buy their legislation done through Congress?

Is there a big incentive for the local realtor board to have their political action committee and raise $150,000 to send to the representative in Congress to make sure that they maintain the housing exclusion, section 121 housing exclusion? There's no incentive to it because you have a small government and the government's not involved.

And so you would immediately have many billions of dollars less of interference and influence by these companies trying to interfere in government circles. But now when you come to a situation where a wealthy person is faced with a 50% tax rate, there is massive incentive for that person to spend several millions of dollars to have the tax code adjusted in a way that helps their situation versus paying the money in tax.

If you've got a $10 million tax bill, you can afford to spend a couple million dollars on your local politicians to make things go your way a little bit. And the individuals are just the tip of the iceberg. One of the biggest problems in the United States is that every single big company to basically survive in the modern world when you have a huge, all powerful, all knowing, all involved executive state.

Basically every single company has to commit millions and millions of dollars towards their political action committee, towards their lobbyists in Washington, DC. And this leads to incredible corruption. I used to sit in this stuff, I would go to every year, I'd go to an annual meeting for the insurance company I used to work for.

And I would always go to the legislative lunch update where our company's lobbyists would come and give us a report. And several times I went and did the political action days up in Tallahassee, Florida with my local insurance boards. We would say, "Here are our issues." And I would go up to Tallahassee and go around and meet with all the state senators and the state congresspeople and say, "Here's our thing, here's our issue." When you have the government involved in these things where there's no reason for it, you have nothing but massive political spending on it.

And so as the state grows, you're always gonna get more corruption. And so one of the things I see is that if you minimize your tax payments to the state, you wind up with less corruption. You wind up with more efficiency 'cause they have less money to spend, which is incredibly important, but you also wind up with less corruption.

The United States of America is one of the most corrupt countries on earth. And what has happened to happen is, it's not the old way, it's not the way that it is in, insert little banana republic country here or little African dictatorship here. It's not as simple and easy as here's a couple of hundred dollar bills or here's a briefcase full of cash.

That kind of corruption is petty and it's simple to deal with 'cause everybody can get through it. The corruption in the United States is big money and it has to be done massively. Look at how much money is spent on a presidential election. Look at how much money is spent on every single senator and congressman's election.

It's insane. And yet this is a result of having a giant executive state involved in everything. Now, I'm opposed to tax evasion. I don't think that should be done. I don't think it's a good strategy and especially, it's just not a good strategy in my opinion. I'm sensitive to the times where it has been a good strategy.

I'm sensitive and sympathetic with many of the arguments of the tax protesters. But at this point in time, I don't think it's generally a wise strategy. Now, I have, thankfully, I have become a little bit more moderate in my own opinions and my frustrations over the years. Over the years, I used to be very frustrated about it.

These days, I've lost a lot of that. I just simply view taxation as basically payments to the mob. I basically think of the US government like a mafia mob that controls a certain neighborhood. And that neighborhood has certain attributes. Some of them are nice, some of them are not nice.

If I wanna live in that neighborhood and get the benefits of living in that neighborhood, I have to pay the mob. And it's just practically, it's far too dangerous for me to not pay them and have my legs broken. It's far too dangerous for me not to pay them every cent they owe, they want, and have, get locked in prison or something like that.

It's just too dangerous. So either I pay the mob their extortion fee or I leave and go somewhere else. And it's no different than dealing with any government official anywhere else in the world. It's just a practical assessment of how much money I make after the cost of the extortion fees and if it's still worth my time.

Think about it with a tariff example, because it's a more direct tax, which by the way, I think tariffs, nevermind. Let's say I have a product that I wanna sell and I wanna go and sell my product in the national borders of Loompa land. Well, if the government of Loompa land imposes a tariff on me, then I have to simply sit down and do a calculation.

Is it worth it? How much can I sell of my product in Loompa land? I think the Loompa leaders are dumb for imposing tariffs. It only hurts their citizenry, makes them pay more money. It's not my business to fight about it. I just calculate the cost and say, do I wanna participate or not?

So, and as an advocate for freedom, practically speaking, the first goal of living a free lifestyle is staying out of prison. So I pay taxes and I recommend you do too. And thankfully, when you live in a tax system where the taxes are as high as the US or many places in Europe, then you have a system where because of the high levels of corruption, then there are wrinkles in the law.

And so if you simply read the wrinkles in the law and align your activities with them, then you can follow all of those adjustments and put yourself in a situation where you can follow the law perfectly and yet result in a very low tax rate. And that's the double-edged sword of a large state.

When you have it, you always have wrinkles and anybody can get around it. The Realtor Board, the US Association of Realtors has been incredibly effective in lobbying and continually lobbying for the deductibility of mortgage interest against your taxes and in the exclusion for capital gains on the sale of a personal residence.

Thank the local association of Realtors in your community for keeping it that way. Well, I don't think it should be there. I don't think the local association of Realtors should have it. I don't think they should have a PAC. I don't think they should do lobbying. I think that I wish it weren't that way, but it is that way.

So I can still come in and I can buy an individual house that I live in. I can live in it cheaply. I can mortgage it to the hilt. I can deduct the interest against my other taxes. And then I can sell that house two or more years later and I can pay no tax on the gain from that residence.

It's truly tax-free income. I followed every single law. I just use the fact that the local board of Realtors has this political clout, has this political power and the US government has chosen to set up the tax code in this way. You can do it too. And so that's what I spend the vast majority of my time talking about on this show.

That's what I spend all my time discussing is teaching you how to do that, following the law carefully. Now, I briefly touched on and what this listener was talking about. I just simply said that one of the benefits of paying cash is often you can get a discount. If you're gonna pay with cash, always ask for a cash discount.

And that cash discount can be offered by the person for many reasons. Not the only one of which might be that the person who I'm doing business with may or may not be paying taxes on the money, the cash that comes in. There are many reasons why you get a cash discount on cash.

For example, just the security of cash. It's possible that if you write a check, the check may not clear. It's possible that if you swipe a credit card, the company may issue, you may get a charge back. Those of us who run merchant accounts, you have all kinds of problems with charge back sometimes and figuring out how to get people to pay.

Just having the security of knowing there's cash in hand has a significant value to a merchant. It's cash, it's here, it's now, and it can't be taken away from me. That's a big, big deal. Another example would just simply be the low cost. Credit card transactions eat up a couple to 3% of your fees, depending on the kind of credit card.

And so most merchants still offer the ability to process credit cards because it allows them to get more business and higher sales, et cetera, which is worth the 3% fees, but it's still a cost to them. They're still paying those fees every single transaction. Where do you think your credit card rewards points come back?

Where do you think your credit card cash back schemes come back from? That's where it is. So you can get a discount for simply that. That's probably worth a 10% discount. So there are lots of reasons there. And then of course, I did point out that whether or not the person reports the money, that's up to them.

Now, I don't personally, it doesn't personally bother my conscience to do that. It's none of my business how another person interacts with the government. And I like the privacy of making sure that I can simply pay, that I don't have to have all of my personal data exposed by having their credit card.

You go to the mechanic and you give him your credit card and all of a sudden you get all kinds of junk mail from him and whatnot, because you have to give him your address. I'd rather just give it here, fix my car, here's money. It's done, it's simple.

I don't have to give you my name. I don't have to give you my address. I don't have to give you my phone number. I just want my car fixed. That's it. Once the car is fixed, I'm done. I don't have to have all of that data. All of the data on a credit card, all the data on a debit card, all of that data is shared among hundreds of companies in the financial sphere.

So I have no personal privacy on anything that I buy, because all the data, if I swipe a Chase credit card or an American Express, it's all sold and shared across the industry. And so it creates a spending profile. So I'd rather avoid all of that. There are major reasons for it, the least of which involves taxes.

Now, I like the fact that I can personally be a little bit of an activist, and I can force a question of conscience on another person by paying cash. Now, if the person reports the income to the government, then I force them to physically manually pay taxes on it, which forces them to consider what they're getting for it, which is really important.

So by paying cash to somebody who's used to having all their money deducted, I can force them to know you have to write a check on April 15. I like that. I wish I could force every person in the world to have to write a check on April 15.

Then Uncle Sugar, instead of being seen as this great thing of, "Oh, I just can't wait till I get my tax refund." Half the population in the United States thinks that Uncle Sugar is out for them because they get a tax refund on April 15. I wish every person had to write at least a modest check so there could actually be some recognition of I'm paying money.

So I can force that by paying it. That makes me happy. Now, what if the person doesn't pay tax on the money? What if they don't report it? They just take the cash and they put it in their pocket? Well, not on my conscience. That's up to them. I'm happy if the government has less money.

Now they're forced to be more efficient with what they do have. And more importantly now, there's no way that person can, without becoming an incredible hypocrite, advocate for higher taxes on me or on you. They're the ones who now have to sit down and say, "Oh, I'm choosing not to pay taxes "and I'm choosing to keep this money quiet "and keep it in my pocket here "that Joshua just gave to me.

"Why should I tell somebody else "that they have to pay more money?" Now, they know they're cheating on their taxes. So if they know they're cheating on their taxes, how can their conscience allow them to simultaneously vote for and advocate for more tax on others? I think hypocrisy is hard to stomach for a long time.

Maybe there are some people who are genuine psychopaths who can handle all of these moral, they can handle moral hypocrisy. Most people can't though, I don't think. So one thing or another has to break. So I can, by just simply paying cash, I can force a crisis of conscience on them.

What are they gonna do with it? And that makes me happy. I don't see any problem with that. So, it's kind of a ranty, forgive me, but there are major, major benefits of doing this. And I don't expect it to have any kind of impact. I don't. I hope it does, but maybe I'll influence a couple dozen people, but that's about it.

But it still makes me feel good by doing that. And I need, and there are, again, tons of other benefits of paying cash. One of the things I'm most concerned about is that more and more financial institutions are getting involved in activism. I find that insane that Bank of America says, we're not gonna process gun sales manufacturers.

We're not gonna let you use our services. We're not gonna let you bank with us. It's insane. And it's a major, major danger because if everything gets digitized, well, how do individuals do business with one another? Now, there'll always be solutions. I've done all kinds of business in black markets all over the world.

There's always a method of transaction. There's always a method of exchange, whether it's a box of food, whether it's cryptocurrency, whether it's a silver coin, whether it's a stack of cash, we don't know. There'll always be an opportunity, but it makes it a lot harder when you have this kind of activism is what's happening in the United States.

Now, forgive me if that was too ranty. I'll try to just give you a few ideas on what I think is the ideal expressions of government. And I'll explain to you why. I think it's ideal. And to just be a little bit philosophical, you can consider if you like any of these ideas, but they're not gonna be accepted this year, maybe a century from now, who knows.

But here is what I think, how I think the government should be properly diminished and limited. First, a comment for my anarchist friends. I personally am not an anarchist. And the reason is because I'm a Christian and because I affirm the authority of the Bible. And the Bible makes very clear that government is a gift from God and that government has a specific function.

That specific function is to punish evil doers and to serve as a restraint against evil in a society. Doesn't give any license beyond that, but that is the specific function. And you see that in Romans chapter 13, one of the important passages on government, you see very clearly that as Paul is writing to the Romans, he simply says that would you have no fear of government and do what is right for government is a terror to the evil doer.

And so there has to be a mechanism of restraint against an evil doer. And that in my opinion is the proper role of government. That doesn't give license for everything else. And so my anarchist friends and I would have lots of things in common, but it does mean that I do affirm that there is a position for and a place for government.

Now, to the extent that a population of people has fewer evil doers and less evil being done, you have less and less of a need for government. So if you can help people to no longer be evil doers, to no longer be sinning, to no longer be abusing their neighbors, to no longer be killing and raping and stealing and harming others and breaking their word, et cetera, then you have a diminished need for government.

But we all expect that there will always be some people who are not restrained by their own individual self-government. And so because of that, there needs to be an external civil government that is involved in the restraint of those people and that is involved in the punishment of those people.

So that's the first thing. Now, if we affirm that we have a basis for government, then we could say, how would we know what's the right kind of government to have? And I think that if we're gonna reason with this with moral philosophy, we should stop and simply bring things down to a level that we can understand.

'Cause I have no concept of how to deal with 300 million people or half a billion people or a billion people. It seems impossible to even think about that sometimes. But if you take things down to an individual level and to a community level, you can start to see perhaps some principles that can be extended out to a broader example.

So I like to do that because it helps me to understand things that are morally permitted and things that are morally not permitted. It's morally instructive to collapse an action by society into a small neighborhood or to an individual level to understand if something is morally right or not.

And then once you're clear on what's morally right or morally wrong, then you can understand and say, well, how could this be extrapolated to a larger society? So let's give it an example. Let's pretend that you and I are part of a small neighborhood and for use of a beautiful metaphor, we're part of a small neighborhood on a desert island somewhere.

And there are a total of a dozen families in the community. You lead one family, I lead another family. There are a total of a dozen of us. And let's talk through some different things that could happen in the community. Let's begin with the clearest example. First, assume that one of the men in the community murders another man.

It's unfortunate, but it has happened throughout history. From the very beginning of history all the way to the end, there are going to be people who are murdering other people. So we hear about it. And for the sake of a good clean illustration, let's assume the facts are crystal clear.

We have at least two reliable witnesses who witnessed the murder. We know what happened prior to the murder. We know exactly how the murder happened and we know the aftermath of the murder. Even better, we have physical evidence that corroborates the testimony of those witnesses. So we're confident that the witnesses are not bringing false witness against their neighbor.

We're confident in their words. Well, what do we do? In this situation, we bring our community together and we hold a public trial of the accused. We put together a community of jurors. We have somebody who facilitates the proceedings and keeps order in the proceedings. We make sure that we protect the rights of the accused.

We assume that they are innocent until proven guilty. We protect their rights. We listen to the witnesses. We listen to the evidence. And then with deliberation, we make our verdict. Now, we need to make sure that we follow due process. One of the things I build and try to build and understand build most of my philosophy on the biblical precedent.

The biblical precedent requires there always be two witnesses. And that's super, super important. Without two witnesses, the person goes free. One witness is not enough. And the idea here is that it's a much more fearful thing to condemn an innocent man than it is to have a guilty man go free.

'Cause the guilty man still has to deal with his conscience and the guilty man still has to face God someday at the final judgment. But an innocent man who is condemned, that's a fearful thing. And that weight falls on the people. One of the things I have a great interest in is I've watched a lot of the justice projects and the different things where people are going back and opening old cases.

And you wanna have your heart torn out. Just go back and find all the people who after decades are released from prison and proven to be not guilty, proven to be innocent of the crime that they were convicted of. Finding the people that were executed and yet later you find that they were truly not guilty.

Even people who confess to a crime and find out why did they confess to a crime. And it'll sure put a soberness in your heart and a humility in your thinking to say, we're not so good at judging truth as we should be. So I'm not a lawyer, maybe someday I will be, but I study all this stuff out.

But there should be a very, very high standard of evidence to convict somebody of guilt. Better for a guilty person to go free than for an innocent person to be convicted. But assume here in our beautiful case, there is a clear guilty verdict, we have good evidence, then we, in this case, what's the proper punishment?

Well, the proper punishment for murder is execution. So as a community, we come together and we execute the murderer. And that should be done, in my opinion, it should be done in a way that's public, should be done in a way that's close to the event, not like the United States, where if you're rich, you never get executed, but if you're poor, you get executed a decade later.

It should be equal to all people. And my opinion, I think it should be done in a way that the community sees it and knows it and has to bear the moral weight, the moral responsibility of that. I don't like how the United States executions are hired out to some hired killer to do the lethal injection in a locked away prison somewhere.

I think the community, if the community is going to come together and do something as morally weighty as condemn somebody to death, then we should all have to face that. Because it's, what a horrific and awful thing. We should face that, straightforward and not flinch at it. Now, back on track.

So, in my opinion, this is a proper function of government. This is a proper, this is a kind of thing where you need government and you have a community of people coming together. Now, what needs to happen is when you then take it out to a larger degree, you can understand how there starts to be a division of labor.

In our little community of a dozen people, we would understand that there would be a murder every four generations. This is not something that's happening every week. But if our community grows to be now many thousands of people, we might have things like a murder or much more minor crimes, which is the majority of judicial disputes, happening more frequently.

And so now, as your community expands, you have a much higher division of labor. And then, and that division of labor starts to also apply to governmental functions. In our dozen family community, we don't need a full-time judge. You don't need a police officer. You don't need any of this kind of thing.

But if we're a hundred families, things start to dig in, start to expand. If we're a thousand families, if we're 10,000, if we're a million people, now you start to have a specialized division of labor. But the moral principle still remains. It goes from the community of a dozen people to a community of a hundred million people.

It's just that you have an increased specialization of labor as things grow out. Now, let's go on to something different. Next scenario. What's the second thing? Let's assume that one of the men in our little community of a dozen people steals his neighbor's property. So one man goes, steals the property from another person.

Now, again, we need a trial and evidence. We need witnesses. We need maybe a confession. We need to find the property, but assume that we've had a trial, we've had evidence, and the thief is guilty. Well, in that situation, the community must come together and compel the criminal, the guilty person, to make restitution for his crime.

So the original property needs to be restored to the person it was stolen from, plus additional bonus for restitution. And what that system does is it compensates the victim for the loss of their property. It compensates the victim for the loss of their property, makes them whole again, and then the additional restitution does two things.

It compensates the victim for making sure that they have an additional benefit for the inconvenience of having lost their property, and it makes sure that the criminal, the person who stole it, has to pay extra, extra for what they've done. It wouldn't be right if you just had just simply a restoration of property.

One neighbor goes to another, steals the bicycle, goes joyriding it in the afternoon, and then brings it back. Well, what's the harm if the person just gives the property back? But now if that person has to go and spend three weeks working to make an additional bonus payment for restitution for their theft, now all of a sudden it really wasn't worth it for them to take the bicycle.

So the criminal needs to be made to pay restitution for his crime. Now let's assume that the criminal doesn't wanna make restitution for his crime. He says, "No, I'm not gonna respect you guys." Well, now we have the proper use of violence and force. As a community, we come to that person and we say to that person, we go to their house, we take the property, we take it, we sell it, whatever we have to do to make sure that the judgment of the community, the judicial judgment is carried out.

And so even if that involves force, where we all bring our guns to this person's house, we take their property, or we compel them into labor, we compel them to do hard labor for three months in order to earn the, for the person that they stole from, in order to compensate them for the crime, we're executing justice as a community.

That is a proper function of government. Now, let's discuss a different situation. Let's now assume that my son is sick. And unfortunately, I don't have any money to buy medicine. And let's assume that your son is not sick, and what's more, you have a lot of money. Now, can I come over to your house and quietly say, "Listen, can we sit and talk for a few minutes "on your front porch, and I tell you my son is sick, "and I explain to you that I don't have any money.

"Can I ask you for money?" Of course I can, I can ask you for money. And you can say yes or no. And what's more is I can come to you, and I can say to you, "Listen, will you lend me money? "I need $100 to buy this medicine.

"Would you be willing to lend me this money? "I can pay it back to you in three months "after my son is better and I am able to earn the money." And you can say yes or no. You can do that to me. But what if you are not willing to give me the money, or you're not willing to lend me the money?

The question is this, can I bring my gun over to your house and point it at you and say, "Give me the money," and take your money to pay for my son's medicine? Well, clearly, obviously you would say no. That's wrong, you're stealing, it's immoral. But I say, "No, but my son is sick, I really need the money." You would say, "No, you're stealing.

"You're pointing a gun in your neighbor's face, "and you're saying, 'Give me the money.'" And it doesn't matter what it's for. It doesn't matter that my son is sick. It doesn't matter that he's gonna die. It is wrong, it is theft. So you say, "Well, obviously that's wrong." Well, now here's the case.

What if, remember there's a dozen families in our neighborhood, what if I go to some of my neighbors that I have a close relationship with, and frankly, that they don't have much money, but they all know that you have money, and I go to them and I schedule a secret meeting, and I say, "Listen, guys, my son is sick, "and I don't have money, and none of the six of you "have money, but there's seven of us here." The seven of us should go over to your house, 'cause you're rich, and we should take the money to pay for my son's medicine.

So we all come over to your house, and we knock on the door, and there's seven of us there. And we say, ultimately, "Listen, give Joshua the money "that he needs to pay for his son's medicine." And you say, "No, I'm not gonna do it." So then we go home and we get our guns, and now there's seven people with guns on your front porch saying, "Give Joshua the money." Did the fact that the majority of us in the community are there asking you for the money, or the majority of us are there pointing guns at you and taking the money to pay for Joshua's son's medicine make it right?

Of course not. Obviously, it's a difficult situation. My son's gonna die without the medicine, but that still doesn't make it right. It still is not okay in that situation to use violence or the threat and intimidation of violence to get money from you just because you're rich and because Joshua's son is dying.

It doesn't matter the circumstances. The point is it's the theft. Now, there's a big difference between the seven of us there on your porch with guns saying, "Give us the money for Joshua's son," versus the seven of us on the porch of the guy who stole from his neighbor saying, "Give us the property." If we take the property from the thief plus the restitution fee and restore it to the person who was the victim, all we are doing is righting something that was wrong.

If we took more property from the thief than what was just for the making restitution, then we would now be stealing from that person. But if we just compensate the victim, we're now in the world of right. But if the seven of us are there on your porch and we're taking your money to pay for Joshua's kid because Joshua doesn't have any money, we are committing theft.

I have just described to you Medicaid. That's fundamentally what Medicaid is. It's people looking and saying, "Listen, there are people who are really hurting. "They're poor people. "There are poor people who don't have access to a doctor. "They can't get money for their medicine. "And yet there are rich people who have lots of money.

"So let's a majority of us get together "and then send the tax man to go and take "from the rich person and then give it "to the person who is poor." That's in a moral sense what's happening. Now I was having a conversation with a guy online recently. He said, "Well, it's just not violence." No, at the end of the day, taxation always involves a threat of violence.

Now the vast majority of us simply pay our taxes. So no one has ever come into my house, pointed a gun at my face and said, "You have to pay it." But here's the thing. At the end of the day, what's actually happening? The end of the day, if I don't pay my taxes, and if it's found out, somebody rats me out to the IRS and says, "Joshua doesn't pay taxes." And now all of a sudden I've got an IRS auditor there looking at my affairs.

And then they find enough evidence of a criminal case and they haul me into court and they bring a criminal suit against me because Joshua is willfully and intentionally committing felonious tax evasion. I lose my case and I get locked in prison. And the bailiff has a gun on his hip.

I get locked in prison and I can't get out 'cause there's guys with guns guarding the door. That is violence. Now, if I stole from somebody, then you can argue it's a right application of violence. Violence in and of itself is not right or wrong, just because it's violence.

All violence is not wrong. It's the moral underlying nature of the violence that makes it right or wrong. If somebody is in fear of their life and is in danger of being raped, violent defense is violence. It is absolute violence, but it's not morally wrong. Whereas the person who uses violence to take another person's life or to rape them, that violence is morally wrong.

And the same thing happens with taxation. Taxation always involves the implicit threat of violence. Now, let's go on and discuss a different situation. We've just talked about Medicaid. What about this? Let's assume that Joshua has an elderly parent who is mentally incompetent and not able to work to provide for their needs.

Let's assume that you have money. Can I come over to your house and say, "Listen, I'm really struggling right now. "My elderly parent is requiring a lot of time "and I need some money. "Are you willing to give me some money?" Absolutely, I can do that. I can come to you and ask for help.

Of course I can. And you can look at the situation, you can say, "Joshua, I can see how much you're struggling. "Tell you what, here's some money "and I'll give you some money to help you. "You've been a good neighbor." Or, "Here, I'll let you take food from my garden." Or whatever, you can figure out, "Or I'll come over and I'll spare you once a week "and I'll watch your parents "so you can go to work," or something.

You can figure out how to help me. That is well within my rights and your rights to ask you for help. I can ask you for a loan and it's your property. You can choose to lend it to me or not. But can I come and take your money just because you have plenty of it?

No, it's wrong. It is theft. Whose responsibility is Joshua's parent? It's not the community's responsibility, it's Joshua's responsibility. It's my parent. I'm the one who's responsible for that. So I can't take my responsibility and try to shift it onto the community. I'm the one who is responsible to care for my elderly parents.

And I can't just come and take your money because I think you have plenty. And it's no better if I get six of my neighbors, and again, we don't have money and we all come and say, "Listen, Joshua's parent is not doing too well. "We think that in the future, "our parent might not be doing very well either.

"Let's do this. "Let's all go to your house because you're rich "and say to you, listen, "there's a majority of us here. "And so because there's a majority, "it makes more right 'cause we voted on it. "There's seven of us here. "And we've all decided that you have to give us money "to pay for our parents." It doesn't matter that there's seven of us there and thus we created a majority and we had a majority vote.

It's still theft. If we're telling you, you have to give us money and we're threatening for it to do it. The violence is wrong. You can come and say, you have to give us money but if we're not threatening you, you just say, "No." And we walk away. But of course, that's not what we're talking about.

We of course all bring our guns and we point them in your face, figuratively speaking and we simply look at you and say, "Here, you have to give us the money." And in fear of your life, you give the money. By the way, back to the taxation is not violent thing.

The IRS is a useful thing here. What does the IRS do? If you make a transaction here and then you make another transaction, you make another transaction, you make another transaction and the final transaction and the first transaction, if you look at them, result in some tax savings that was not exactly legal but the fact that you put three or four transactions in the place muddied the waters.

Well, that's called a step transaction. The IRS will collapse it. They ignore all the steps in the middle and they look at the first step and the last step. So when I say taxation is always violent, there's always a threat of violence, then what I'm basically doing is applying the step transaction doctrine of the IRS.

And saying, let's look at what actually happens. I just collapsed it all from years of threatening letters, et cetera. And I collapsed it from the demand payment, pay us 50% of your income to the final result of the bailiff, armed bailiff marching you into prison and locking you up.

I just collapsed it. Let's look at the moral reality of it. It's a step transaction, let's collapse it down. So the fact that seven of us come together and compel you to give us money because we have an elderly parent doesn't make it right. And it doesn't make it right if we say, listen, we're gonna do this for the next 50 years.

So you, when you're old, if you don't have money, we're gonna go ahead and give you systems, we're gonna give you money as well. I've just described social security. So these systems don't make it right. Now, what about war? Because I'm trying to deal with the big expenses, Medicare, Medicaid, social security, the big ones in the United States, biggest costs, most expensive programs.

But then the next one is military spending. What's the right aspect of military spending? Is it right? Is it just? Well, if we're gonna have an answer to this one, we have to look at the morality and the justice of war. And of course, there are many perspectives on this, many discussions on this, but in general, the large majority of people believe that self-defense is morally justified and morally permitted.

Whereas aggressive offensive violence is not generally morally justified or morally permitted. That's a majority position. There are minority exceptions. I respect many of those exceptions, but the majority position at the moment, which doesn't make it right, but just trying to relay the facts as I understand them, would be that this, the proper thing is, are we dealing with self-defense or not?

Back to my violence example. If I come to you and I use my size, intimidation, and weapons to commit violence against you, to try to cause you to do something, whether it's to give me money, whether it's to perform some act that's against your will, doesn't matter what it is, that's offensive violence, which is wrong.

You are justified in using defensive violence against me, necessary to a level necessary to overcome the threat. Now, if you are in fear of your life, that level of violence that you would have justified in your response would be up to and including killing me. And you'd be morally justified in killing me.

If you're not in fear of your life, the level of violence must be less. Now, if we expand that out to our community, we have an understanding of the same moral principle in our dozen of us. Let's say that our neighbors, we look out across the water and all of a sudden, the neighbors on the neighboring desert island, they're coming at us and they've got, they're in their canoes, they're in their boats, they've got their cannons ready, and they're coming to attack our desert island.

Well, in that situation, they're gonna take us, they're gonna plunder our houses, they're gonna, what's the thing from the old movies? Plunder our women, plunder our goods. Anyway, they're gonna steal all our stuff and they're gonna kill us. Well, in that situation, our violent response is morally justified to defend ourselves.

But now, if we're the ones who look across the water and look at our neighbors and say, you know what? Our neighbors are living pretty well over there. They got a lot of stuff, they got a lot of money, they got a lot of resources. Let's take our canoes and our guns and go and attack them.

Well, that's wrong. So now let's bring money into the affair. We've established that defensive violence, defensive military violence is morally permissible if our neighbors are attacking us. Whereas offensive military violence, to go and to take their stuff is not morally permissible. So what about the cost of repairing? 'Cause we could look and say, you know what?

Our neighbors are looking kind of warlike. Maybe we should build some fortifications on our island. Maybe we should buy some guns. Maybe we should protect ourselves and that's gonna cost money. And we can go to one another and we can say, listen, everybody needs to chip in $100 'cause we need to build these fortifications here.

Well, I think most people in that situation would look and say, hey, this is necessary. We should probably fortify our island so that we could repel an attack if necessary. We lock our doors and our houses at night. We arm our alarm systems. Let's do the same thing for our islands.

Let's all chip in $100 so we can do this together. Most people would look at that. In a moment, I'll deal with the question of should we force people to do that? But most people would look at that and say, we should do that. Then we could change the situation.

What if now we say, we're gonna go and we're gonna go and collect $100 from each of us. We're gonna use it to buy some new boats. We can paddle across to our neighbor's island and take all their stuff. Well, you can understand why, or I can understand why you wouldn't wanna participate in that.

You might look at that and say, no, I'm not gonna give $100 for us to go and buy new boats to go and steal our neighbor's stuff. That's stealing, we're not gonna do it, it's wrong. And I think you would be justified in your position. So things like military spending are a little bit more complicated because we have to figure out, well, is the underlying military action right or wrong?

And there aren't many people who are entirely opposed to violence. It's just the question is, is it violence in self-defense of my community and my location, or is it offensive attacking another person trying to plunder their resources, plunder their country? And that raises some real questions. How can my money be involved in that?

Now let's go to roads and then we'll talk about compelling people. Should the government be involved in building roads? Let's think of your little community of a dozen people. We come together and we say, listen, it would really benefit us if we had a road right down the middle of our island, but we need money to build the road.

And this would benefit all of us. We think that everybody should commit money to build the road. So you market the idea to your neighbors to gain their support. Now, I believe one of the most important things to do is to gain support for your ideas peacefully, not to engage in violence and coercion, but to engage in peaceful reason, discussion, salesmanship, trying to lay out why this is in your best interest to do this thing.

And if it's truly in your best interest, I think most people, probably about 80% of the people, are willing to listen to reason and do things that are in their best interest. Now, what about, so we take up a collection. There's a dozen of us in there. 80% of us say, yeah, we'd like to build a road, but 20% of us say, no, we've got three holdouts.

Nine, four, three holdouts. They say, no, I don't wanna pay money for that. Question is this, should you use the threat of violence, taxation, against those three? Should you say to those three, no, listen, you're wrong. We've all voted. Nine of us have said, we're going to do it.

We're gonna build this road, and we're gonna come to your house, and we're gonna take $100 out of your house. Should you do that? Bring your guns and force it. Well, my answer is I say, personally, I say no, probably not. Now, I'm not gonna argue these situations as extremely as I've argued the other, but I'll say that when you automatically resort to the threat of violence, and automatically resort to taxation as your first answer, you miss out on a lot of other things that could be done that would be a lot stronger.

So for example, I could imagine, in our little hypothetical community of a dozen people, where we voted nine to three in favor of building the road, I could imagine that after the majority vote, one or two of those three say, you know what? I don't think we need the road, but I wanna be a good neighbor, so I'll participate.

But what about the one or two that still say, no, I don't wanna have the money, and I don't wanna give the money? Should we take our guns and go take the money from them? I say no. If the rest of us are convinced we need a road, let's go ahead and chip in a little extra to cover the costs.

Why do you have to force every single person to do what the majority want? Why do you have to say everybody has to do this, so it's not right? After all, in a modern progressive tax system, we're content with a tiny percentage, what, the top 10% of people paying 50% of the taxes?

So in that situation, why not let the eight or nine pay for the road and leave the other two or three out that don't wanna participate? We already do that. So the fact that I say, let's not use violence and intimidation and coercion for this, let's just leave it alone.

We live in a system where a tiny percentage of people pay the vast majority of the expenses of the government. So all we're doing is saying it differently, but we're just not trying to force everybody to do it. So I say, no, let's not use force, or let's wait until everybody's in it.

Now, it's easy to do that in a community of 12 people. It's harder to do that in a community of 12 million, but let's just wait. Now, is it fair? Is it fair that not everybody chips in for the road, that somebody might use the road without paying for it?

I don't know. I don't know what, let's say there's two men who don't wanna contribute money. I don't know what those two men are dealing with. Maybe one of them would really like to build the road, but he'd like to put in the money, but his wife is sick, and he's spending all his money on doctors and medicine.

Question is this, should we force that person to come in and give us his money for the road? Because we've said this community needs a road, we're gonna build it, and now he doesn't have money to take care of his wife? I say, no. His wife is his responsibility, and that's a higher priority than building a road.

Leave him alone. Let him handle his money the way that he wants to. The old saying, those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still. Fundamentally, when you force someone to do something with violence, it basically means you've lost your case. The vast majority of people are thoughtful.

They're good natured. They wanna be good members of a community. They're willing to listen to arguments and debate and reason. They're willing to be a part of a public conversation, and they're even willing to sacrifice, even if they're in the minority position, if they believe that it's the right thing to do.

They wanna be involved in a local community. And what I see happening in the United States of America is that more and more, we've grown so accustomed to using violence and coercion and intimidation to get our way, that now it's basically the only way that people can get things done, is to use violence and intimidation and coercion to force the other people to do what we think you have to do.

Well, it's not helping things. It's not making people feel like more of a part of a community. It's not making people feel heard. The United States government was designed to protect the rights of the minority. And we should keep that system going in all of our thinking. We should always seek to protect the rights of the minority.

It's not hard to protect the rights of majority. History is fulfilled with societies that always focus on the rights of the majority. That's easy. But protecting the rights of the minority is where you have a truly just system. Where if you're gonna use coercion and violence and intimidation, it's only in the tiniest number of circumstances for the most clear things.

Increasingly, just look at the US culture and what you see is that, at least what I see, one of the major problems that's systematically fracturing the US American culture is that the majority of super monumental decisions and legal impositions that are accomplished today are not achieved through the slow moving political process of debate and voting and building political consensus, but through judicial decree.

By saying, the majority saying, "Ha, we got the majority. "We're gonna force these people "to do what we want them to do." And increasingly you find people who are just not that interested in being told what to do. No one's gonna listen to judicial decree if it's not dealt with politically.

Interestingly, earlier in the show, I alluded to the Affordable Care Act, when, I don't think I mentioned it, but long-term care. There was, when the Affordable Care Act was passed, I was talking about Maine, the problems with long-term care. When the Affordable Care Act was passed, there was a provision in it that established a government run option for long-term care insurance.

I think it was called the CLASS Act, if memory is right, but don't quote me on that. And I was interested in it 'cause I was selling a lot of long-term care insurance at the time. And I started learning about it. And what was amazing to me is a few months after it was passed, it was voided and the entire program was disappeared because it had been built on such faulty assumptions of actuarial assumptions that it was totally gonna be a disaster.

But the Affordable Care Act is a good example of something that was politically settled by the barest majority vote, and then enforced by judicial decree, but didn't have the political will of the people. How'd that work out for you? You had a last day kind of Christmas break, bare majority vote with a, what was it, the resolution process instead of an actual passing the bill, reconciliation process.

Basically, by the thinnest of margins, you had this Affordable Care Act rammed through Congress. Well, what's amazing to me is here, you look at it, what, a decade later, and you have, at least on the Democratic side, you have basically every single Democratic candidate says, "Well, that thing failed.

"It didn't work. "It was a waste of time. "We need a new system. "We need Medicare for all, "so we'll pound this down the American people's throat." Now, we can debate the reasons it didn't work. Maybe it was bad from the beginning. Maybe the hollowing out of it made it collapse.

Who knows? We can argue that. My only point is look at how ineffective it is to ram things through, to use the force of law to force people who didn't want health insurance to go and buy health insurance and to otherwise pay a penalty. I found that, the individual mandate and the imposition of fees, I found that the most insulting, infuriating, disgusting tax ever.

Now, I've always maintained health insurance or health protection of some kind, but when you say you're gonna force me to do something, it makes my hackles rise and probably some parts of my character that still need to be worked out, but it makes me basically say, "Screw you. "I'm not gonna do it.

"I'm gonna cancel my health insurance. "I'm smart enough to read the law, find the exceptions. "I'm not gonna maintain health insurance. "Screw you, I'll make you guys pay for it." And look at the disaster that has happened in the last 10 years because of this very thin ramming through and trying to force people to do what you think they ought to do because you think it's a good idea.

And so many of the hot political issues in the United States happening exactly the same way, where the political process of gaining consensus and working together and building political consensus is basically utterly broken and has been broken for a couple decades now. Look at, I guess a good example would be, look at how the legalization of homosexual practice has happened.

From the 1600s through the 1990s in the United States, sodomy was illegal, illegal. And this was as late as, I think it was 1986, there was a case, I think it was Bowers versus Hardwick, where the illegality of sodomy was confirmed as constitutional. Now, those laws were largely unprosecuted and unenforced.

The point is from the 1600s through the 1990s, sodomy was illegal. But then you have this tiny span of time, about 15 to 20 years. In 2003, you have Lawrence v. Texas, which ruled all those sodomy laws unconstitutional. The remaining 11 states that had extant sodomy laws, those were vacated by the court.

Then from 2003 to 2015, you have a series of court cases steadily pressing the issue forward until the 2015 Obergefell decision. In 15 years, you have a series of unelected judges who systematically changed three centuries of precedent. Question is this, how's that working out for you? Now, there was, in that 15 to 20 years, a clear change in public opinion.

I've previously talked about the public relations campaign that was necessary to accomplish that in the United States, and it was one of the most effective public relations campaigns ever. But my point is this, how is that working out for you? How's the current state of the US American society with regard to peaceful relationships among neighbors?

People being able to trust their neighbors. You got now lawsuits on every hand, sue this person 'cause they don't wanna bake this cake, sue that person 'cause they don't wanna do this thing. You don't change people's minds with that. All you do is create a fractured, divisive, untrustworthy society where people start to resent their neighbors.

Now, how's that gonna work out for you in the coming years when you try to continue to impose taxation? How's it gonna work out for you? Think it's gonna lead to more peace, more neighborly relationships, you forcing your will on other people, forcing them with coercion and violence and taxation to do what you think they're supposed to do?

Think if you look at relatively recent history, you can see how fraught with danger it is to move with the force of law. Now, I believe there's a place for judicial decree. I support the judicial state. I think that bad laws should be ruled as unconstitutional. I think there can be times where things are right, times where things are wrong.

Just because something is settled doesn't mean it's right. I believe I'm not opposed to the judiciary functioning. What I'm saying is if you look at a society, look at the United States of America society, and you soberly ask yourself, how's it going trying to force other people to do what I think they should do?

When you just use courts and use laws that are inherently forcing other people, you wind up with a dangerous, fractured society. So my point is simply this. We should be very careful, very restrained before we ever try to use force on our neighbors, before we ever try to coerce somebody to doing what I think they should do just because I think they should do it.

If I'm in that community of a dozen people and I think we need a road, and nine of us agree, if I'm in the community and I think we need a road and three of us agree and nine of us don't, let's say I'm in the three, nine of us say, no, we don't need the road.

I'm just gonna keep on lobbying, right? I'm gonna keep saying, listen, here are all the ways that would benefit us, and in time, maybe I'll win you to my position, but I don't have the right to come and tell you you have to do it this way. Now, if nine of us agree we need the road and three of us don't, I still don't see much benefit in forcing the three to participate.

Let's be gentle. Let's not coerce other people to do our will. I'm not gonna advocate for forcing our neighbors to do it. Now, to wrap up this show, I don't know exactly how a lot of these things hold up. When you go from Joshua's fantasy metaphor of a dozen people on a island nation to a 21st century mega city with 23 million people in it, I'm not trying to do anything other than to talk about the underlying thing.

I'm not advocating one way or the other. If all the government did was build roads and arrange for a proper court system, fine, I'll pay it and move on. But my argument is this. The majority of the functions of our modern governments are built on institutionalized immorality. Instead of government that exists, that's commissioned to provide justice, to provide relief and restitution for the victims of crime, where you have a victim that can bring a lawsuit and say, "I was wronged," that's the proper function of government.

Instead of that, we live in political systems that are based upon encouraging sin and immorality. Politicians encourage covetousness, teaching people that they're entitled to the property of others. Listen, if you vote for me, we'll make sure that we soak those people for what they owe us. That's covetousness. And theft by majority vote.

If you'll just vote for me, I'll make sure we go get some of their property for you and I'll reward you for it. That doesn't work. That's not gonna have long-term success. It was not always this way in the United States. I can't comment on European history and I don't know all the demarcation points, but I understand American history pretty well.

Was not always this way in the United States. There was a sociologist, Robert Nisbet, one time in an essay, remarked that in the year he was born, 1913, the only contact that most Americans had with the federal government was the post office. And it was later that year that the Federal Reserve Act was passed in a late session just before Christmas break.

And that was when the income tax came into effect. And since that time, the ongoing never-ending expansion of the federal government has just continued. And it will, in my guess, it will probably continue until bankruptcy. So what do we do? I think we just start by repenting of our own sin, of our own covetousness and theft, and rebuking it wherever it comes.

If I see that I'm looking over at that guy 'cause he's richer than me, and I'm saying that, well, he owes me money because he's richer, that's wrong. And so I have to stop by saying, I'm not gonna do that. And if a politician comes along and tries to stir up my covetousness for another person's property and make me greedy for another person's property, I acknowledge what they're doing and I rebuke them and say, stop.

If they earned their property lawfully and justly, without stealing from others, that's their business. Their property is not mine. Now, if they've stolen from others, whether through whatever means, whether through outright theft, through abuse of contracts or something, something that's theft, and that needs to be righted. And there's plenty of that.

Rich people are not all rich because they're all just virtuous people. There's a whole lot of theft that's gone on. And nothing that I'm saying is going to change that. I'm not saying there's not a place for us to stand up against people who are stealing from others. But I gotta start with myself.

I gotta start by controlling those impulses that I have of greed and covetousness and a desire to steal from others. And then not trying to vote for things like that. Beyond that, I teach my children not to be greedy for other people's property, to be proud of working and generating the property of their own through honest, peaceful trade and commerce with other people, voluntary relationships with people, not trying to use intimidation and force to get their way.

And then I focus on helping my neighbor, loving my neighbor, encouraging them the same way, and then helping them so they won't be greedy for another man's property. If your neighbor has a need, you gotta solve that need. What's bad is if your neighbor is struggling with a sick son, if your neighbor is struggling with an incompetent parent, and then you're not there as a community, well, of course they're gonna vote to try to get some of your money 'cause you're not standing up and helping them.

That foundation though, when you build a society on covetousness and greed is not a stable society to make. It's breaking down in the United States, it's breaking down in Europe. You have increasing tension, you have increasing racial tension, you have increasing political tension, you have increasing political instability. I think you could trace some of this to some of those problems.

(birds chirping) It's a major moral hazard. So that's my idea. It's kind of what I think would be an ideal system of government, a judicial system that settles disputes and seeks to protect victims. You feel free to consider these ideas. I don't ask you to agree with me. Not lobbying for you to join me in anything.

Just consider the ideas. And then if you like any of these ideas, start imposing them in your own life. I'd say the biggest thing is simply, if you have the choice, stop engaging in coercion or violence towards other people and engage in peaceful speaking, reason, preaching, entreaties, engage in those things and stop participating in all the rest of that stuff.

When you can win converts to your ideas where people don't feel coerced, don't feel trapped by you in some way, don't feel intimidated by you, they just freely choose to become a convert to your ideas, you can build a powerful neighborhood. You can build a powerful community. But when you engage in forcing other people, basically as I see it, people will retreat to entrenched tribalism and that stinks.

So those are my answers to my listener. Why so anti-tax? Well, it's because of this, not anti-tax. And I do, I wish I weren't so loud mouthed in some of my opinions. I have moderated, I have become much more relaxed. For me, once I found the escape clauses, now I spent 10 years studying tax.

I remember when I was a new financial advisor and I remember the first time, here I am, I'm licensed, I'm selling insurance, I'm selling investments and whatnot. And I remember the first tax time I sat down with an accountant to do my taxes, I didn't have a clue how a tax return worked.

Did not have a clue. Nothing had prepared me for it, I hadn't done it previously, I didn't have a clue. But I started working at it. And I would say in the last year, I had a number of epiphanies where finally, I understood how to follow the law and yet how to totally break out of the tax system.

Today, I've worked out how I could earn 10 million bucks a year and not legally not pay a dime of income tax. I've worked out how to save taxes on capital gains tax, so that we're all that stuff. Now, whether I hope I'd like to earn 10 million bucks this year, but at the moment, we're not on track for that.

But so I'm tiki-hawking theoretically, but once I found kind of the escape clauses, once I worked it out, and I followed and worked out how to follow the law carefully and strictly, 'cause I feel a special burden being in a kind of a loud mouth voice. I assume whenever I file a tax return, I assume it's gonna be published on the front page of a local newspaper.

And so it better be exactly right. But once I worked out the escape clauses, once I worked out how I could peacefully and voluntarily disassociate myself and remove myself from the system without engaging in violence, without engaging in revolutionary conduct, et cetera, I moderated a lot. It helped me to be a lot more relaxed.

It lost a lot of my anger and frustration. Maybe, maybe that's in the first half of the show was pretty ranty. Maybe there's still a bit more there than I'd like. Hopefully in a few years, I'll be much more sanguine about the whole thing. So I apologize if I push too hard or if I go too hard to the line.

I get tired of seeing people abused. And as far as I'm concerned, it's just another expression of bullying. I hate bullying. I hate bullies. And I hate it when you have a majority of people that say, "Oh, we're gonna vote ourselves somebody else's money because we think that they should have it." And it causes me to be, I feel so angry when I look at these bullies.

And I watch political candidates who are bullies and they use the power of the vote to try to, and the power of the pen and the power of the government to try to force people to do things. And I think at some point, can we get to a society where people just simply leave peacefully with one another and don't force others to do it?

I've experienced it certainly, thankfully, in my local church. And you can experience the freedom that comes within a local community of like-minded people who live and let live and whatnot. But I get so tired of the public debate and the bullies who think that they can toss around the power of the government.

It's the bullies and it infuriates me. So I apologize if I get emotional sometimes. That's the underlying emotion that reflects out. But I hope to be more sanguine in the future. Hope to be careful with my words. I don't wish to, I'm happy to live and die by the words that I believe, but I don't wanna live and die by carelessness.

And so I hope that I'll be, learn to increasingly control my tongue and be much more sanguine about the whole thing. Thank you for listening to today's show. What should I plug as I go? Oh, I guess, well, I had a bunch of you that reached out to me for more personal consultations.

As I mentioned in, I think, the previous show, my life has stabilized more and I'm able to do more personal consulting work. So if you would be interested in any kind of personal consulting work, I promise I won't talk your ear off about this nonsense. This stuff, it's important, it's not nonsense, but it's just not practical.

I try to keep the show 95% practical and 5% theoretical for fun, but this stuff is not practical. But if you want practical solutions, you want practical things to help you save money, invest better, earn better, work out some of the thorny financial issues that you face, I'd be happy to work with you.

Send me an email, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. I'll connect with you, give you all the details. Joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. And I wish you well, be with you soon. - Don't just dream about paradise, live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs.

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