Episode 972: I Pencil, You Eraser?
Air Date: July 8, 2026 | Host: Bob Metz
Just Right — broadcasting on WBCQ and Channel 292 shortwave
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this program are those of the participants.
Clip (Idiocracy):
Okay, sir. This is the White House. What are we doing at the White House?
Okay, wait a minute. So who are you?
Official: I'm the Secretary of Energy.
One of Contest got to be a cabinet member. I'm a Secretary of State. Brought to you by Carls Jr.
Why do you keep saying that?
Because they pay me every time I do. It's a really good way to make money. You're so smart. Why don't you know that?
The Secretary of Defense. Huh? And uh Funbags over there as the attorney general.
And that's Secretary of Education. It's kind of stupid, but he's President Camacho's stepbrother. Still does a pretty good job, eh?
Bob Metz:
Welcome everyone. It is Wednesday, July 8, 2026. I'm Bob Metz, and this is Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online. Join us for an hour of discussion. It's not right wing, it's just right.
Here's a metaphor for us to consider today, and it comes in the form of three related questions. Are you a pencil? Or are you an eraser? Or are you just the paper on which each is applied?
The answers to these questions have a lot to do with defining and determining America's very identity as it celebrates its 250th anniversary in the midst of a national identity crisis. How and why that is so, we shall discover right after our reminder that you can write us at feedback@justrightmedia.org. Hear us on WBCQ and on Channel 292 Shortwave. Follow and like us on your favorite podcast platform, and visit us at justrightmedia.org, where you can access all of our social media links, archive broadcasts, and the support button that makes it easy for you to support the show. Because as always, your financial support is appreciated and is what makes this show possible.
As Americans celebrated their 250th anniversary as an independent free nation this past July 4th, 2026, the incredible rise in the popularity of socialism and communism within the American political culture has caused many to question whether or not the ideal around which America was founded has all but been extinguished. But for Western nations, this is not a crisis unique to America, as can be seen in Europe, Britain, Australia, and Canada. And just last week on this show, our focus was on the Canadian cultural collapse, while a few weeks earlier, our focus was on the British incompatibility problem with Islam, especially in light of Rupert Lowe's release of his rape gang inquiry report. And at the heart and root of all these cultural crises sits a popular acceptance of the ideology of collectivism, generally seen as socialism, coupled with a popular rejection of the philosophy of individualism, again generally seen as capitalism.
Because socialism invariably leads to poverty, death, and destruction, while capitalism sustains prosperity, life and creation, it is paramount that the understanding of these distinctions is not just explained or intellectually understood, but is actually perceived. To that end, and even though we have made the capitalism versus socialism case over and over again on this show, I've got a feeling that what we're about to hear next will present that polarity in a way that requires no deep understanding of theories or ideologies, but in a way that is very, shall we say, organic. On his June 25th podcast, Glenn Beck produced what might be among his best productions, titled The Clear Case Against Socialism that Ends Any Debate. But how he made his case was essentially by telling a story that describes the condition of capitalism in a way that is indeed very clear. And it is here that our pencil metaphor begins.
Clip (Glenn Beck, June 25, 2026 - "The Clear Case Against Socialism"):
Glenn Beck: There was something that I read when I was a kid, and I think it was I, Pencil. I can't remember exactly. And so I'm going to bastardize it horribly, but I'm holding a pencil. Yellow. Six sides. Little pink eraser at the top. And we've used these our whole life. I mean, you don't know use them now, but we use them our whole life. Everybody had one. Okay. Nobody on earth, even though you have these, nobody on earth knows how to make this thing. Not me, not even the man who runs the pencil factory. I mean, he knows what it takes, but he's not the guy doing all of it. Not the CEO, not his best engineer, not the genius three cubicles down who corrects everybody's grammar. Not that guy. It's a pencil.
The cedar comes from off a mountain in the Pacific Northwest. It's cut by a steel saw. That steel came from iron ore in Minnesota, smelted with coal hauled by the rails by people who are long dead. Okay. The graphite comes out of the ground in Sri Lanka, and it's mixed with clay from Mississippi. The little band up at the top. It used to be copper from Chile, zinc from Canada, the yellow paint, the rubber that never once met a rubber tree in its life — all of these things. Thousands of people on five continents that don't speak the same language, who never met, who'd probably cross the street to avoid each other if they did. All of them, somehow or another, without even knowing it, have conspired to put this perfect little writing machine in a child's hand for less than a quarter. These people couldn't agree on lunch, and they built the pencil.
And here's the key. No one was in charge. There is no pencil czar. There's no department of pencils in a marble building deciding how much graphite Sri Lanka needs to mine this year. Nobody on the planet wakes up at three o'clock in the morning in a cold sweat thinking, dear God, does Ohio have enough erasers? Nobody does. It just happens every day. It's a miracle so ordinary, we walk right past it on the way to complain about something.
So here's how you explain capitalism and socialism. If no one is smart enough to plan a pencil, nobody — it doesn't take anybody. It just happens. Who exactly do we figure is smart enough to plan an entire economy? There's this economist named Friedrich Hayek. He spent his life on this one idea. The knowledge that it takes to run an economy doesn't live in any one place. It's scattered across millions and billions of heads. It's the welder who can feel a batch of steel running brittle. It's the grocer who notices that young families are starting to move in and they've got all these kids, so I better stock up more diapers. It's the farmer that can read the sky. None of them could write down what they know. They couldn't fill it out in a form, but they act on it every single day.
And the price tag is how they talk to one another. Copper jumps, and a man in a workshop who has never spent one waking thought on the nation of Chile suddenly figures out we should use less copper. He didn't know why. I don't think he even wants to know why. I don't want to know why. But the number told him, hey, slow down on the copper. Somebody else in the world is using a lot of it, and they need it worse than you do right now. So slow down. That message races around the planet at the speed of light, without one human being saying, uh, put out the warning on copper.
But then we introduce a central planner. Let's just say, best heart in the world. It's Mother Teresa with a PhD and a spreadsheet and the most sincere Mother Teresa desire to help the poor. And she stands up and she says, We don't need all this messy haggling over prices. I'll decide. I'm gonna set the prices. You love me, I love you, you know my heart. We'll just plan it. How hard can it be? And the second Mother Teresa does that, she turns off the lights. She blinds herself to the one thing that is telling everyone what everybody else knew. She's not stupid. She's not greedy. She's been handed the job. No human, no computer can pull off because the information she needs doesn't exist in any form that they can hold. It's in the lives of the welders and the hands of the farmer's gut. And it dies the instant that you tell them to stop deciding for themselves and wait for the memo. Then the farmer's like, well, I gotta tell you, my gut says this, but the memo says do this, and that's when the bread line happens.
Breadlines are real, and it happens the same way every single time. It's honestly, it's like a band that only knows one song. That's what socialism is. Those countries, they were not stuffed with lazy people, evil people, stupid people. The people were the same. We took one nation and we split it down the middle with a wall, and we waited 40 years like the world's bleakest science fair. East German, West German, same people, same Beethoven, same grandmother's recipe, same family. Sometimes they were on different sides of the wall. One side became one of the richest places on earth, and the other side bugged its own citizens, ran out of coffee, and built a wall. Same people, what happened? And by the way, notice which direction people were climbing over that wall. In all of history, all the history of that wall, not one man ever risked the searchlights and the machine gun towers to sneak into East Germany for shopping or the good food. Pull up a satellite photo of Korea tonight. The South of Korea, South Korea, it is a blanket of light. The North is a black hole with one lonely pinprick where the dictator keeps his lamp on. Same people, same mountains, same conditions, one border, one difference.
So when somebody tells you socialism just hasn't been done right, ask them and ask them gently. How many times do we have to see the same movie end the same way before we stop being surprised at the ending? So let me spend a second being the kind of man I always ask you to be and give you the strongest thing the other side says. Because I can't just hand you an easy version of the argument. I'm not informing you. I would be flattering you. And I don't want to do that. I hate when I ask a question of ChatGPT or some one of these AIs, and they're like, that is a very smart question. Shut up. Just give me the facts. Okay.
The socialists will look at my pencil and say, beautiful story, Glenn. That's really not. I mean, that's really Hallmark movie stuff. It's great. I'm gonna cry in the end. Oh, and do you end up together? Okay. But your market made that pencil. And the market can't make a single thing that it can't slap a price tag on. It can't price clean air. It can't price a stable climate. It can't price the quiet dignity of a man who has built something with his own hands. So it just ignores them. It runs clean off the cliff with those things and calls it efficiency. Here's the thing about that argument. It's not wrong. And any honest defender of the markets has to own that. He's not wrong.
And then I could go harder. The wealth doesn't stay polite. It doesn't sit in the corner, Glen, sipping water. It buys senators. It writes the rules of the very game. It swears it's playing fair. A kid born in a dying town with a worn-out school, you're gonna look him in the eye and tell him, you know, his reward is tied to his effort when the race was three quarters run before he put his shoes on. Absolutely fair. Absolutely fair. That is correct. So if you want to be honest, where do you land? Well, you don't burn down the engine that lifted more human beings out of crushing poverty than anything else in the entire history of the world. This is why I'm a conservative. You look at the whole situation, you go, what worked, what doesn't? Okay. The engine is good. The corruption is bad. Okay. That's what you have to do.
When China and India finally quit trying to plan every single pencil and let the markets breathe, a billion people climbed up out of the kind of poverty that kills your children. A billion. No charity, no revolution, no five-year plan ever came close a thousand miles to something like that number. What it did was let ordinary people own things, trade things, keep a little of what they earned. You don't put out a house fire by knocking the house down. You build the thing the market can't. The rule of law, a real shot for that kid, a fence at the edge of the cliff. You build it around the engine, not in place of the engine. The government is supposed to be the policeman. If a powerful man hates your idea, somebody else prints it. They might even just print it just to make a buck off the controversy. That grubby profit hungry marketplace is the very same thing that keeps the dissident fed. The freedom of the spirit and freedom of a wallet were never two things. They were always one thing wearing two coats.
So let me quickly end where I started with the pencil. The reason why this little miracle works. The reason a quarter's worth of cedar and Chilean copper assembles itself in a child's hand with nobody in charge. Is that it trusts something that no planner ever can or will? It actually trusts you. It trusts the welder that they've never met, the farmer, the grocer, the grandmother. It trusts that millions of free people, each one knowing one small true thing, will between them know more than any genius in any capital ever could. Socialism says that the people at the top are wise enough to run your life. Capitalism at its best says something much humbler and a whole lot more radical. Nobody's that wise. Not the king, not a committee, not a computer, not the man with a spreadsheet and the very sincere face, not Mother Teresa. Nobody. So we'll leave deciding to the only people who actually know, which is all of us, one at a time. And I'd rather live in a country that admits nobody knows how to make this pencil, because that's the country that figured out how to make a billion of those pencils. And then hand them to the poor.
Bob Metz:
Of course, the original source of the I, Pencil analogy that Glenn couldn't quite recall hearing as a kid, was Leonard E. Reed, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, who wrote his essay I, Pencil in 1958. So while I love Glenn Beck's version of the I, Pencil story, I think he was being far too generous to the quote unquote other side, who argued that your market doesn't create anything it can't put a price on. You can't price clean air or stable climate or the quiet dignity of a man who has built something with his own hands. Well, I would dispute Beck on saying that it's not wrong and that it's an absolutely fair argument because it is wrong and it's an argument made completely out of context.
While pricing stable climate, quote unquote, is a metaphysical impossibility given the nature of climate, and of course, is an irrational objective, since constantly changing climate is essential to the maintenance of life on this planet, this is not so with respect to Beck's other two examples. You can price, quote unquote, clean air, assuming this means cleaning up actual air pollution and enforcing laws against such pollution, of which carbon dioxide is not a factor. It's kind of like the argument that water should be free, since it exists naturally in nature, and then complaining about the fact that the market forces us to pay for water. No, it doesn't. The water itself is still free. Go out and collect it yourself, from the rainfall, streams or rivers, etc., at your disposal. What people are paying for in the delivery of water to their homes is for the labor and infrastructure that makes the transportation of the water from its source to their homes without physical effort possible. Thank the plumbers, don't thank Mother Nature.
And the same market principles apply to the quote, quiet dignity of a man who has built something with his own hands, end quote, who, by living under a free market, can claim ownership and control over that which he has built or created for himself alone. Thanks to property rights, he is free to own, use, or sell what he has created at a time of his own choosing. So if these are the strongest arguments the other side has against the market free of coercion, those on the right in favor of freedom or capitalism should have nothing to worry about, right? Unfortunately, that is simply not so, because the process of maintaining a free society requires eternal vigilance against the ideas of collectivism ingrained into each successive generation's culture. But who's going to do that job?
And in this context, here's where I might again ask the questions toward that objective. Are you a pencil? Or are you an eraser? Or are you just the paper on which each is applied? In the effort of best defining and promoting individual freedom and liberty, even before my Freedom Party involvement, I used to attend what were called the Art of Political Persuasion workshops hosted by libertarian Michael Emmerling. And during his brainstorm sessions on how to best promote individual freedom and liberty, he would always begin by instructing his workshop participants thusly: be a pencil. Don't be an eraser. He would say this in order to address most people's immediate objections to their own ideas or proposals. In fact, this simple practice was quite a psychological revelation. We often see faults in our own ideas and proposals because we haven't really thought them out through to their logical or moral justifications, or how to present them to other people with whom we disagree. This is a principle I would suggest for anyone in a creative writing mode. No matter how much you'd like to do otherwise, write first, edit later. In other words, first be a pencil, then be an eraser. Because trying to do both at the same time often weakens both processes, as well as the final result.
Now one has to assume that that's the process the framers of the Declaration of Independence would have had to have gone through in some form or another. So in light of an apparent political knowledge vacuum that is suffocating American culture, it was fitting that John Papola of Dad Saves America should have read the Declaration of Independence on his July 3rd podcast. And while time does not permit us to share his entire reading of the Declaration, we have retained some of the more relevant to our discussion quotations, along with some of John Papola's own insightful observations. What pleasantly caught me by surprise was how many of his observations so closely mirrored those of our own, especially when it came to constitutions and the rule of law.
Clip (Dad Saves America - John Papola, July 3, 2026):
John Papola: Hey there, friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America, John Papola here. This is the 250th birthday of the United States of America, of our Declaration of Independence, and so I thought I would read the Declaration of Independence and talk about it, because one of the things at the center of this declaration was a desire to secure our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness within a free society. And how do we raise our kids and frankly ourselves to be able to live and thrive in a free society and want to keep it free? And since unfortunately civics education has been thrown to the wayside in the name of other priorities, let's say, I thought this was something I could do to help you out, to give you an audible way to revisit this most important document, one of the most important singular documents in all of human history. That is how important the American Declaration of Independence is. This is not merely a collection of words. This is a document that transformed the planet, the entire society, the success of the American Revolution and its constitution, the founding principles, it gave rise to a new era, to an era of constitutional government.
For a long time, the U.S. Declaration and the Constitution were deemed the model of how to build a free society and protect the rights of the people within it. And it kicks off in Congress, July 4th, 1776. The unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Obviously, right off the bat, there is an appeal to the creator, to God the creator. And to the laws of nature, which is interesting. This is drawing on the concept of natural law, that law itself is rooted in the natural order of things. And that when it's not, it's probably not going to work. So laws that attempt to run at odds with human nature don't tend to really be much of a law at all. But this broader idea of natural law speaks to the inputs into our founders and into Thomas Jefferson. These are the writings of people like John Locke, who wrote about essentially the concept of limited government and of private property as an essential protector of human flourishing and human liberty. In fact, what comes next has echoes of John Locke in it.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Now, that is a bold claim. That was a bold claim in 1776. That was a bold claim by Thomas Jefferson, who was a slaveholder at the time. Where is he getting this? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That is powerful, that they're created equal. It is the creator with a capital C. It is — you cannot extract from the history of Christianity, the Declaration of Independence, or the Enlightenment for that matter. It is fundamentally a metaphysical assertion that all men are created equal, because we're obviously not, because everybody's different, and some are more different than others, and some people are scoundrels and some people are brilliant, and some people are dirty, selfish crooks, and some people are kind, selfless givers, and we're all a mix of all those things. But what we're not is all equal, not really. We have to appeal to something greater, to a universal human dignity that is not material, and that is what Thomas Jefferson is doing here.
The other thing, this formula, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Again, you will find the simpler form in John Locke: life, liberty, and property, because that is the core mechanic of the pursuit of happiness. That is right below the surface of the assumptions of the Declaration. In fact, when we get into the grievances, which of course include taxation without representation, chief among those, the assumption that taxation without representation is a problem, is that you have private property in the first place to be taxed. If private property is not assumed, then it makes no sense to revolt on the basis of taxation without representation because the property being taxed is not yours to keep. So private property, the essential mechanisms of the free enterprise system are baked into the moral assertions and assumptions of the Declaration of Independence.
And I hate to sort of bring in communism here on this day as we head into the Fourth of July, but at 250 years old, that idea that there is no private property, that we could arrive at a utopia, a stateless, moneyless, classless society, a godless, stateless, moneyless, classless society, which is the utopian assertion of the greatest enemies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I mean, they are the greatest enemies of it for a reason, because the fundamental assumptions and assertions of that philosophy are in direct opposition to the Declaration.
So life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. And that is also at that point a relatively modern assertion. This was still an era of monarchy. Now, the British monarchy had in it a belief in freedom that goes back to the Magna Carta, and that even the king was indeed constrained. There was an understanding, even among the monarchy of the time, but especially in Britain, that people did have rights, that there were free men, that freedom was not something that was granted to the English people by the king.
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. And accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. And so, right here, Jefferson acknowledges how hard change is, how difficult, how dangerous it is to overthrow the existing order. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.
And you could argue that today, as the federal government has grown, and as our size as a nation has grown, and the distance between the states and the government has grown, that our federal government now takes on a lot of the qualities that the king did at that time, that the operations of our state governments and our local municipalities are being trampled upon by the federal government. He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and he means a small c constitution at this point, to the body of the people, to the nature of the culture of the order, the constitution small c and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assents to their acts of pretended legislation.
And so, baked in there is this notion of natural law, that just law, that real law is rooted in the natural order of things. And this too is also deeply British, because we inherited a tradition of law and understanding of law from England, from Great Britain, called common law. And common law is really radically interesting because what common law actually is is a belief that what is the law is that which has emerged from the habits and norms and agreements of the people themselves. And so judges, common law judges, when trying to decide a case and what is just and fair and in keeping with the common law, would not just turn to the laws on the books as passed by the legislature. That is statutory, that is the French. The British and America would look to what are the norms and expectations of the people. Hey, you wrote this contract. Is this what most people would consider acceptable? These terms, or is this unacceptable? This is what the common law did. The common law was fundamentally a bottom-up phenomenon. This idea of law, the root premise of law in our country, is that even the law itself emerges out of the natural rights of we, the people, of the public, of our behavior, of our agreements in peaceful voluntary civil society. It is not just a dictate from on high. The law itself is not a product of government. It is ultimately derived from the natural order of human relationships.
And again, this assertion of being a free people is worth remembering. The revolution, in so many ways, was not a revolution to overthrow the order. The grievances laid out in the declaration are overwhelmingly about interfering with the governments and with the governance and with the local laws and customs that had been established by these United States, by the colonies. The Constitution itself had precursors in Massachusetts and other states in the form of government that was taking place. We were already experiments in self government for a very long time when the king began to turn the screws of tyranny and taxation and intervention into the society. And so the notion of already being a free people was not merely American, as I've said, it was British as well. But the American flavor was very particular and was born out of our culture, our religious heritage, our creed, and our distance.
And Thomas Jefferson is often among some people thought to be nearly an anarchist in his disdain for government, in his desire for America to be so individualist and also so agrarian, that he would wish for a government small enough that you basically didn't even know it existed. And yet he recognized that you need self-government, and it needs to be just, and it needs to be rooted in the natural rights of man. This is what we need to renew in our understanding. This is what if we had a fully operational self-sustaining education system that saw as its mission the preservation of the best parts of our society, every one of our kids would read and understand and graduate with a rich understanding of. But we have to read this for ourselves and read it to our kids ourselves.
The Declaration of Independence was an exceptional document. It was an exceptional set of ideas. And what do we mean by that? They were literally the exception to the rule. The rule of humankind has been slavery, subjugation, despotism, the divine right of kings, might makes right, the notion that there was natural rights, that there was equal freedom under the law for all as a principle. And that a nation would be founded on that basis, and even more than founded on the basis of the declaration, but that that set of ideas would be broadly held in the hearts of a people, so that the documents that would come next would persist, because that's what it is. The constitution that follows the declaration. There's a big C constitution and a small c constitution. The big C is the document. The small c is the fact that it was ratified, the fact that its claims, that its constraints on power were understood and believed by the public, by the people of this society, and that it would persist for 250 years is exceptional.
Bob Metz:
You're listening to Just Right, Broadcasting Around the World and Online. John Papola's overarching case and argument made throughout his presentation generally made the very same case that we've been highlighting recently, in our acknowledgement that all societies are effectively governed or ruled by convention rather than by state constitutions, laws, and regulations. As we phrased it in our April 29, 2026 blog post, preserving the free nation that has been handed down to its descendants is a mission that many on the right would wholeheartedly defend, and rightly so. Towards that end, the importance or significance of having a written constitution to preserve and identify certain basic principles and rules upon which such a country is founded is paramount. However, even when such documents exist, laws and constitutions aren't worth the paper they're written on if the people to whom they apply no longer abide by them.
When it comes right down to it, with or without a written constitution, all societies are effectively governed or ruled by convention, and that means that whatever current values and practices are being applied and broadly accepted without resistance or opposition, effectively become the law. Thus, in order for a nation to have a constitution that protects the right to life, liberty, and property, it is essential that this document be drafted from within a culture that already abides by these values.
Now, Papola reiterated this very point when observing that common law was a bottom-up phenomenon. The root premise of law in America is that the law itself emerges out of the natural rights of we the people in peaceful voluntary society. Law is not a product of government, but derived from the natural order of human relationships. The Constitution, the big C is the document. The small C is the constitution of the people, that set of ideas broadly held in the hearts of the people.
Now Papola elaborated on the notion of natural law being rooted in the natural order of things. And in the British evolution of natural law into common law, he defined it as a belief that what is the law is that which has emerged from the habits and norms and agreements of the people. And while this condition of common law, or conventional governance, as we might have put it, is the way things generally operate, we mustn't forget that it rubs two ways, both for and against freedom and capitalism. For example, when we took a look at conventional government in Canada back on November 5th, 2025, we couldn't help but notice that Canadian law and politics were in complete disarray, wherein operable principles and processes had been completely replaced by the whim of politicians. This condition arose because no one successfully challenged the practice. And over time it became the quote unquote conventional way to govern in Canada.
Whether one is governed by laws or by convention is really secondary to the task of discovering the proper principles and practices that can foster a culture of individual freedom. Life, liberty, and property. Together, these three values constitute and create the condition we call freedom. That's why it was so essential that Thomas Jefferson and John Locke insisted on the establishment of limited government and of private property rights. When John Locke described property ownership as the core mechanics of the pursuit of happiness, this was very much in line with Freedom Party's description of property as the enabling right, the right that makes all other rights possible. And never forget that all rights pertain to freedom of action within a social setting, not to things, services, objects, or the products of other people's efforts.
When someone claims a right to a thing or object that has become property, it is because that person has earned the right to that property via the voluntary trade and actions in which he engaged to acquire it. Because property implies ownership, it also implies personal responsibility with regard to that property, and to never use it to violate the equal right of other people to their private property. And of course, never forget that there's no such thing as the quote, unmatched power of public ownership, end quote, so touted by socialists and those on the left. Ownership is an exclusively private concept and cannot possibly be exercised in any other way.
Which brings us to our final question regarding the rising popularity of socialism in America. On the Rubin Report of June 29, Dave Rubin and his guest Michael Malice expressed their concerns that when it comes to explicit socialism, America could be past the point of no return.
Clip (The Rubin Report - Dave Rubin & Michael Malice, June 29, 2026):
Dave Rubin: I'm Dave Rubin, this is the Rubin Report, and I am joined by my old friend, host of Your Welcome, Michael Malice. What do you make of where the Democrats are at right now? I mean you've written a lot about authoritarian regimes and you've been to North Korea and wrote a whole book about it and you know an awful lot about Soviet Russia and everything else. Like what is going on with these Democrats right now?
Michael Malice: I gotta tell you, I you're maybe you're not gonna be too happy to hear this. I don't think Mamdani is a worse mayor than Bill de Blasio was. He has no allegiance to the Democratic Party apparatus as a whole. They fought him, just like Trump had no allegiance to the Republican establishment, certainly in 2016, who did everything they could to keep him from getting the nomination, were none too happy when he was the nominee and was certain to lose. But at the same time, in terms of being a mayor, maybe my standards are so low, you and I both fled the New York City area. I don't see anything he's doing that's largely outside the mainstream of Democratic Party history.
Dave Rubin: And to the other side he's in the White House shaking hands with Trump it's a very weird situation. What's going on with the Democrats? I would be more concerned if they didn't have such huge landslides in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. So I'll go with you that let's say his policies are just a little more socialist and a little more communist than, say, Bill de Blasio. Let's go with that. My bigger issue would be that he's mixing a little Islamism or jihadism into it and what's going on with radical Islam. What do you make of that?
Michael Malice: I think the blueprint for that is to Sadiq Khan, who's the mayor of London, who is the mayor after Boris Johnson, which is quite an odd pairing. And you see this also in the mayor of Seattle or Portland, I forget which one, where this very young woman who's an open socialist was elected, somewhere in Austria, I'm liking what city elected their first communist mayor, obviously that's not in the United States. So there is this rise of explicit socialism reclaiming that term on the left, which has been for a long time and with obvious good reason a very dirty word. But I can understand the psychology because if you're being told every single day that Donald Trump is this Hitler figure, he's the worst thing to happen in America, including slavery, and then you lose with the Kamala corporate hack party person. It's like, guys, we gotta double down, we gotta fight, because otherwise, you know, in their mindset, you know, another term of Trump or Trump Jr. would destroy America. So it's kind of we're at a point where both political tribes genuinely think, maybe not incorrectly, that one more term of the opposing team is going to be the end of this country as we know it. They might be both wrong, they might be both right, but that's a scary place to be when you have this level of animus because things can quickly spiral out of control, both in a legal sense and in an extra-legal sense.
Dave Rubin: So what would you say those of us broadly on the right, or at least that are not socialist communist part of that thing? Are there better techniques that we should be doing to disconnect people from these bad ideas? You know, beyond mocking them and we can call them out, we can say why capitalism's better and why socialism doesn't work. Like, what are the better techniques?
Michael Malice: I don't know that I know what those better techniques are. If we're if I first of all, I think a lot of this is follow the money, like with any situation like this. And then Donald Trump, who was never elected to anything, who was regarded politically as a joke, tweeted his way into the White House. So all these tools of techniques that either team uses are public, and it just takes enough young people, I would think, to be like, all right. But the thing is, I don't think Mitch McConnell and Mitch McConnell types are listening to their grandkids to be like, this is what you need to do on Instagram, this is what you need to do on TikTok and so on.
Dave Rubin: Do you think that it is in some sense just a function of our freedom and the beauty of this country and all it was set up upon, that we are now allowing these terrible ideas to flourish. That because we put freedom at such a high place in the hierarchy here, that it's going to allow terrible people to come in and quite literally take our freedoms away from us?
Michael Malice: Yes and no. I think it's also because people on the right don't understand as well as people on the left that human beings aren't truth-seeking animals, we are narrative-seeking animals. So you can give me all the stats and statistics about rent control and hunger in communist countries. I don't care. If you're telling me a story that I can't put food on the table because Elon Musk somehow just became a trillionaire, and that rings true in my mind, you've got my support. So it's entirely a function of telling the right stories that reach people. And when you have nothing, or you are at the bottom of the totem pole and have little to lose, and someone's like, screw both of them, I'm your guy. That's gonna resonate with a lot of people. And I think we're at a point across the political spectrum where people feel the sense of hopelessness and this sense of this is politics is crazy, where are we going? So anyone who speaks with an air of certainty, even if they're blowing smoke out of their ass, is still going to come off as a leader because just on an emotional level, it feels like this guy knows what he's talking about.
Dave Rubin: How horrible do you actually think it is?
Michael Malice: Well, I you're not gonna find anyone who loves this country more than I do, especially being an immigrant. I am very conscious of how much I love America as we reach our 250th birthday. But I always say I love this, uh, I hate the government because I love my country, right? So I think the upsetness that people have is because the politics seemed to be completely incoherent and broken. It seems that there's absolutely no ability on virtually any issue to find a majority consensus and coherence. So, what would you do if you if you were advising Trump right now? If he if you got the call and they were like, Malice, you understand, you know, cut some of the underbelly of the internet stuff, we need some help messaging, we gotta fix some of this. We get this ascendant socialist communist thing. What do we do to inspire the right people to get out there and wake up and vote and talk to their neighbors and everything else?
I honestly, I I don't think it would be that hard. I think it would be a matter of doing just a lot of focus groups. The Democrats have been very smart, and I'm kind of shocked. Maybe it was Pelosi, who I think is the smartest strategist thinker strategic thinker that they have, who told them, sit down and shut up and let the Republicans have a circular firing squad and we have a binary political system. So when the Republicans all destroy themselves, we're gonna pick up the slack. And that seems to have been their strategy, and it's working wonders for them, in my opinion. Hate to break it to you, but I don't think the budget has grown smaller under Trump and the Republicans than it did under Biden. And I think Trump with a Democratic Congress is in fight mode, and that's him at his best. I think people forget that in 2018, the first Trump midterms, it was a given that they were going to lose the Senate. And then they started pulling that Kavanaugh BS and they blew their shot at the Senate. So I know a lot of people on the right correctly think the Republicans can't take a win that when they have the chance to just shoot themselves in the foot, and they forget how often the Democrats do that as well and blow good opportunities because at the end of the day, they have their own crazy base.
Here's the big thing that drives me crazy. People have this delusion that moderates are more electable than ideologues. Well, Romney and McCain lost, and Trump won two or three times, it's depending on who you ask. It's like it's I feel like it's a farce, and it makes me sad how many people buy into this farce. And if people ask me for political advice, which I don't like to give advice to people I don't know, the advice I give is make your life the best it can be, because you are in the best country on earth with infinite opportunities. And if you're going to be fixated on whatever outgroup you have in your head, you are doing yourself a disservice. This isn't a dress rehearsal. You got one shot to make your life as great as it is. There will always be a team that doesn't like you, and the serenity prayer from AA is key. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Right? I think it's a good idea.
Bob Metz:
Now that would be a fitting way to end the show with you. However, in that we've you and I are like veterans of this online world and the culture wars and all of these things. What do you make of this kind of relative state of that right now? Just watching people go off the deep end and so many people have kind of gone crazy, flip sides, like there's just so much drama around all of it. I try not to participate in it, but we all do get sucked into some degree. What do you make of that?
Michael Malice: It makes me really sad. And I think people need to appreciate, and it's very hard to keep this in mind, how little social media is like real life. Because normies, and I don't use this term in a pejorative sense in this moment, have bigger things to worry about than which podcaster hates which podcaster, and this guy's a jerk and this one's a grifter, this one's controlled opposition, this one's Mossad. I'm all of those things, I will tell you that freely right now. But the point being, like, if you're if you're this invested in online drama, I mean, just on a psychological level, you're making yourself crazy. Why do you want to be in a place where you're always upset when we live in a place where you could be, if not always happy, certainly a lot happier than you are now.
Bob Metz:
I have to admit that there are times when I have to take a step back myself from all of the commentary speculations and the fog of war and politics that so often builds to a crescendo of existential panic and anxiety. But you know, it appears that this state of mind is a great motivator to action, whether for better or worse. Like, I mean, happy and contented people rarely get involved in politics, and given his anarchistic leanings and history of not voting in elections, that might account for Michael Malice's encouragement to politically do nothing and just be happy. Remember that song? Don't worry, be happy. Well, personally, I think it is possible to not worry, be happy, and become involved in the political fight for freedom. How? By applying the very principle outlined in the Serenity Prayer, accepting the things we cannot change and having the courage to change the things we can.
Perhaps one of the most profound statements made by Michael Malice occurred when he said that people on the right do not understand, as do those on the left, that human beings are not truth-seeking animals. We are narrative-seeking animals. Of course, on this show, Just Right, we have all along been emphasizing that fact, which in part accounts for our custom of opening each show with a dramatic theme and closing each show with a comedic smile. And this is why the earlier I, Pencil narrative presented by Glenn Beck so well described the experienced condition of capitalism in a more perceptive way, rather than just by pushing the truth of its economic principles and philosophy.
And I found myself in general agreement with Michael Malice when he suggested that New York mayor Mamdani is no worse than his predecessor, and despite his lack of allegiance to the Democratic Party, is nevertheless, quote, not doing anything outside the mainstream of Democratic Party history, end quote. And I was reminded of that constant refrain that today's Democrats are so different from yesterday's Democrats, which simply has never been the case.
As Nick Freitz has put it on his June 26th ex post: Don't take this the wrong way, but every time I hear someone say, I didn't leave the left, the left left me. It suggests that if the left backed up their crazy train, just one or two stops, you'd be right back on it. And that's what's concerning, because you don't seem to recognize that the current absurdity is actually a logical outworking of the past absurdity. So glad you got off the train, but just understand, it wasn't the stop that was crazy. It was the whole train.
And I will never cease to be amazed by the fact that the party that has since its beginnings been the pro-slavery party and which had explicit connections to the Ku Klux Klan could possibly have won the long-term political support of black people. Clearly, as Michael Malice put it, the truth doesn't matter, it's the narrative that counts. And when all that people hear or know is a narrative that is not true, they have become perfect candidates for socialism. People suffer from the delusion that moderates are more electable than ideologues, noted Malice, with the elections of both Trump and Mamdani being perfect examples of his observation. But he's also indirectly pointed to the necessity of creating a clear political polarity in order to attract the necessary voters to vote for the ideologues.
And another delusion that most people suffer from is the belief that majorities drive the democratic process or determine the outcome of political conflicts. And we'll give the final, very sobering word on this point once again to John Papola.
This document is a declaration for a reason. It was to make a moral case, not just to the king, but to the public. Because the other thing that's awkward about the Declaration of Independence is that by some measures, less than a third of all the colonists were fully on board with this idea. Which also speaks to sort of the strange nature of political revolutions. They are almost always a function of an engaged minority. And that indeed our founders were. They were an engaged, and I would say largely enlightened minority.
Bob Metz:
So, in the context of my earlier questions, are you a pencil? Are you an eraser, or are you just the paper on which each is applied? Consider yourself a pencil if you're among the engaged minority fighting for freedom. Consider yourself an eraser if you're among the engaged minority fighting against freedom. And consider yourself the paper on which each of the other two are applied if you are among the disengaged or among those oblivious to the whole process. The non-player characters, as they have been described in gaming circles and NPCs.
But for the minority of pencils among us who are engaged in the fight for a continued culture of freedom, it is our task to create and present a perpetual, eternal and truthful narrative that must be repeated and rediscovered from generation to generation. You can be a critical part of that engaged minority by simply sharing this broadcast with others online, and of course, by joining us again next week when we will continue our journey in the right direction. And until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right, think right, and be right back here. We'll see you then.
Clip (Comedians Roasting Liberals, Alex Assoune Collection, May 22, 2026):
Comedian: I'm a liberal, but I will say this. Republicans are better when the shit finally goes down. That's true. Like if there's a zombie apocalypse, I'm switching sides immediately. Immediately, and so would you! If you're a liberal, which side do you want to be on when the zombies come? You're gonna be with the group that includes everyone. I don't think so. That group will die quickly. No, you want to be in the group that loves guns and hates outsiders. That's the group. That's the group. Liberals wouldn't make it. The zombies would come, and liberals would be like, let's just let them in. Let's just they're a marginalized group. Let's just let them in. Let's just let the zombies I'm sorry, I mean the alive impaired. Let's just let them in.