This is three minutes that answer the question everybody actually has. Jenny Beth Martin puts it to him directly: you just called the price system one of the most remarkable forces in our lives, so what do you say to the person who says things are too expensive and I am struggling?
Reed's first answer is the one people find hard to accept. High prices are their own cure. A rising price is a signal that says more people want this, so put more resources into it, and that is how the shortage ends. He proves it with a case nobody planned. America switched from whale oil to crude oil to light its homes in the nineteenth century because whales were common property, nobody had an incentive to produce more of them, and the price of whale oil went up. That signal is what sent John D. Rockefeller looking for something that would burn better. No federal department of energy decided it.
Then Jenny Beth Martin pushes back on behalf of the family that could feed four people for a week on a hundred dollars in 2019 and now gets two days out of the same hundred, and Reed's second answer is the one that gives this episode its title. Prices do not only rise because demand rose or supply fell. They rise because the government is ruining the currency. The dollar is worth less than a nickel of what it was when the Federal Reserve began in 1913. So the real question is whether you want to rig the prices or fix the fundamentals underneath them, which are massive budget deficits and the printing of money.
Watch the full episode at jennybethshow.com. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — What do you say to someone who says things are too expensive
00:21 — High prices are their own cure
00:55 — Whale oil to crude oil, with nobody in charge
01:52 — A hundred dollars of groceries, then and now
02:26 — Another reason prices rise: the government is ruining the currency
02:38 — The dollar is worth less than a nickel was in 1913
03:00 — Fix the fundamentals, or play around with the symptoms
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