Elijah talks about the free market
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Transcript
29 segmentsFrom the spacious KWTO studios, it's the Elijah Harshow, 93am 560, KWTO. Welcome back to KWTO on this Wednesday afternoon. As a reminder, I will not be here Thursday and Friday of this week. I have a special guest coming in. I will be in Detroit at the Republican National Lawyers Association meeting. I know, I know these dirty lawyers. But you'll have some fantastic guests coming up. But I wanted to, every once in a while, I like to wax a little professorial on the show. You know, I'm not just a news guy. Sometimes I didn't want to dig it a little bit to the philosophies and the decision making behind what makes a conservative tick. And I mentioned this a couple days ago that when I was growing up, conservatism generally meant it was always a combination of social conservatism and economic conservatism. But the cool buzz when I was younger, like in the 90s, was I'm an economic conservative and a social liberal. Essentially, the same platform the libertarians espoused. The problems with the libertarians was that they were always more obsessed with prostitution and drugs than really doing anything productive, which is why they never were able to win an election. But in the 90s, that was the position that all the cool kids embraced. Oh, tax cuts are awesome. Look, we don't deal with social issues. If you're gay, that's cool. You can be gay, whatever. Like, that was the cool position. And I had this discussion a couple days ago with Jonathan Schiller and his friend Jacob, who come on on Monday, we do this little conversation with high schoolers. And we talked a lot about the new right. And I think one of the defining characteristics of the new right is this belief and this, you know, position that essentially... The social conservatism and economic conservatism have to clash. That at some points, you have to choose which conservative you are because occasionally they collide with each other. And their example was families in America, that the number one stress around a family of America is often financial and that Republicans have a... implicit belief in conservatives are more than so than that in implicit beliefs that families should stay together and so therefore things like minimum wage and universal basic income are not the devil that that the 1990s country club republican think they are now i don't necessarily agree i think that is a position to be right i'm not sure i agree but i think that's kind of an extreme position however
I think there is a less extreme position that we all can get on board with. There's a great article today in Compact. The headline is Republicans embrace the vice economy. And it's basically about the fact that marijuana is on the increase, that everybody from Donald Trump to Rand Paul have been delaying bans on things like hemp. that Trump has rescheduled marijuana, that prediction markets like Kelshi and Polly Market, they're like, look, we don't need regulation on these gambling websites. In fact, we've encouraged gambling in the United States. In Missouri, we legalized gambling and recreational marijuana. And frankly, a lot of Republicans were for it. And they were for it because. The back to the 1990s like, well, we're economic conservatives. Like who cares about the effects? That's downstream from the policy of economic conservatism. Economic conservatism says small government, less regulation, lower taxes. And who cares if those decisions flow down to broken families, bankruptcies, foreclosures? And so what they would say, look, there's no clear, you know, we don't believe in paternalism. We support people's right to make decisions as they see fit. And therefore, we are not going to regulate these markets and people should be able to do whatever they want. And in some ways, like I understand the argument, I certainly disagree when it comes to kids. This is one of the reasons I'm so. pro these lawsuits against tech companies, Instagram meta for their their attempts to grab children. You know, things like if you go on Instagram, so I'm not on Instagram. Not that I'm against it. I think I'm on Facebook and X. Maybe LinkedIn, but I forget about that. If you go on Instagram. you will find ads that pop up in your spam, especially if you look at pictures of kids, it'll say like, oh, let your teen join Instagram, safe, you know, blah, all these parental controls. But they're clearly targeting it at teens. Now, if you look at the statistics, social media for kids is somewhere worse than. I don't know, fentanyl for adults. I mean, the teen statistics are alarming if you really take a serious long look at him. Everything from depression goes up, bullying goes up, suicides go up, physical activity goes down, increase in pre-diabetes. The amount of bad effects are everywhere. And we all know, we know this from science. people don't have an ability to make reasoned decisions really until they're 25 this 16 18 21 they're all stupid 25 is really the age that that science say your brain stem is fully developed not to say you won't make bad decisions at 26 it just means you won't make a bad decision because your brain's not fully developed when you are under 25 and what we're doing is we're shoving these screens in front of these 15 year olds and they don't know
Oh, these algorithms are designed to suck me in to ruin my ability to focus or pay attention to anything. And this online life is the real thing. And this physical life we surround us is the fake thing. And so the point of this is that. There's this interesting spot now where the Republican Party has decided, oh, we are going to make a judgment call in favor of the vice industries. Again, I'm going to boil it down essentially to drug use, primarily marijuana, maybe some other things, drug use, social media. and gambling. I would say those are the big three that you're seeing a lot of people that will go out there and say, look, this is the free market. This is what Republicans actually embrace. And ironically, I think they are wrong. I think you cannot divorce the economic decisions upstream from the horrific decisions downstream. I mean, we discussed it when it comes to kids. Quoted all the statistics about how kids that get stuck on social media or get in front of screens, what happens to them, which is terrible. And frankly, we're entering this period where the kids that got screens five or ten years ago are now adults. And they're totally unable to cope in the real world without a screen. I mean. dating. Have you ever seen the statistics of where you meet your spouse? If you look online 30, 40, 50 years ago, it was church, the bar, college, you know, some variation of those three were like the top three spots, maybe the beach. I don't know. Top four spots. We'll say top three would be probably college bar church. We'll say those are the top three. I could look it up, but I'm not going to take the time. Somewhere about 10 years ago, the online meeting thing started to spike and the other three started to crash. And now it's like 80% of people are meeting their significant others online. Maybe not dating sites, not swipe, left, swipe, right. But, oh, you're so-and-so's friend on Instagram. I added you. And that's how they start dating. And it's essentially like these people, I mean, I remember I had a friend who had her first fight with her boyfriend and she, the boyfriend's like, do you, do we need to text each other about this? He's like, I feel like we don't even know how to talk about it in person. They're totally living an online life. And then if you look at particularly young men, like, you know how I talked about the COVID shot and how myocarditis was particularly impactful of young men, the online economy. has been especially harmful to men. Now, it's been harmful to women in different ways. I shouldn't say especially harmful to men, but let me run through just a few statistics about younger men. More than half of young men gamble. 35% do it daily or multiple times a week.
Ironically, this number is higher among young conservative men. 47%. Now, look, I like to gamble. I talk about downstream. I go there and play poker. I'm 40. Just like Mike Gundy. I'm 40. I'm a man. I know what I'm doing. I know my limits. I know exactly how much money I can afford to lose. My first experience with gambling was at a little carnival in Republic, Missouri, where it was one of those where you put the quarter in and there's a bunch of quarters on a counter and you're trying to knock some quarters off. And I remember being like, I could beat this game. And about $2 in, which I think was all the money I brought to the fair, I had not knocked a single quarter off. And I was beside myself because I couldn't buy a soda at the fair. And I'd put it all to this game. That was like my first experience. Kids these days, it's now on your phone. And it's like, oh, look, free bets. It's the same thing, but extrapolated onto an online level. 47% gamble daily or several times a week. 43% watch porn daily or several times a week. Two-thirds play video games daily. Well, actually, several times a day or at least once a day. Think about this. The current generation of young men gambling, watching porn, playing video games. Two-thirds of them save gambling creates levels of emotional stress. And let's look at the lonely factor. Male loneliness is rampant. Over the last month, at 26% of all men, all men, not just young men, said they felt lonely and isolated. 42% say they've got two or fewer friends. 9% say they have zero friends. I want to leave this segment with this quote. I usually end this show with a quote. I'm leaving the same with a quote. John Adams wrote, our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. I think we're starting to see the impact of dispensaries and vapes and sportsbook and AI mistresses on the culture of society. And I think it's time for Republicans to take a long look in the year and say, we understand this economic panacea is turning into moral rot and we need to change the conversation.