The Complicated Global Economy with Ron Dodson

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My name is John Harris, and we have a special guest today. We're gonna talk about a number of things. I'm not actually certain yet where the conversation will take us, but I know wherever it takes us, it will be edifying for you as a believer and for non-believers listening.

Hopefully it will be convicting and help you come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ. And with that, I just need to make one quick announcement before we introduce our guest. We do have a conference coming up in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, Christianity and the Founding, Christianityandthefounding .com if you wanna find out more.

We also have a really great dinner that is going to be in conjunction with that conference. I would love to see you there. Okay, with that, let's start the podcast. And let me introduce to you Ron Dotson.

Ron Dotson is a hedge fund manager. He's there with the Dallas Skyline in the background in the new founding office. And you can follow him on X and it's very simple. It's his name, it's Ron Dotson or on Substack.

So Ron, thank you and welcome to the podcast.

Oh, thanks for having me, John. Appreciate it.

Yeah, it was really good to meet you. Actually, I met you, I think about a year ago, but get to know you a little better not too long ago as I was in Dallas. And you have a lot of different hats that you wear.

And so maybe take a minute and introduce people to who you are because I know you're a guitarist, you're a hedge fund manager, you give all this sage wisdom to people there in the new founding office.

Who is Ron Dotson?

I'm a lifelong Dallasite Texan. I went to SMU, played baseball at SMU and then went to UT grad, got in my family businesses in multifamily real estate, but really wanted to go kind of chart my own path for a bit.

And so I, in grad school, studied derivative finance, went to work for a hedge fund, did that. And then kind of been doing my, I've kind of been one foot in each of those, in each of those areas for my career.

I was basically a family office manager. So running an internal hedge fund for a lot of my career for the money that we were producing in multifamily. And so we sold the biggest part of that business a couple of years ago.

I opened this up and which runs side-by-side to the hedge fund that I manage. But while all that was going on, I've always been very interested in theology and where it crosses over with philosophy.

I studied Latin for five years when I was young and then kind of taught myself a coin A when I got out of school. Really have a huge interest in the intertestamental period because I think as Protestants, I don't think the Apocrypha should be considered scripture, but it's interesting history.

But as Protestants, we kind of ignore that period and it's hugely formative to Christ's mission and interaction with the Pharisees and Sadducees. So that's, and then did some work with the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.

And so all that stuff is very, very interesting to me. Has been for a long time. And I was encouraged to, I taught big Sunday school class at my church. I'm PCA Presbyterian officer in that and my church.

And so was encouraged to start writing and I've been doing that for a couple of years now.

And you got saved or however you wanna phrase that. Jesus found you and you repented of your sins at a very young age, right?

Yeah, well, my folks were divorced in the seventies. My mom was a beauty queen and my dad was a quarterback and they got married at 19. And so, I had single parents in the seventies and all that implies, but my father, my grandfather on my dad's side was very devout and spent a lot of time with him.

He was born in 1903. So he was fireman for Bell Helicopter. He was chief, he was the fireman on the flight line. This was during Vietnam. And so he would wear the foil suit and go out on the flight line while they were testing the Hueys and the Cobras before creating them up to send them to Southeast Asia.

And he was just a hero to me. And I saw him every night. I spent a ton of time with my grandparents because my folks were divorced. And I saw him every night reading his Bible till one or 2 a .m. He encouraged me, he helped me learn to read at a very early age, reading the sports page and then encouraged me to read and gave me a Bible at an early age.

And of course, it just that he poured into me in a way that was completely a sign of God's sovereign grace. So it was really encouraging and he loved people. His favorite thing was once he retired, he grabbed his wife, my grandmother and me and we'd go to the local mall and walk around and he just talked to anybody who would listen about Jesus.

And not in a manipulative way either, just in a, I'm so happy to be saved by the sovereign king kind of thing. And he's Southern Baptist. So I was baptized Southern Baptist and still have a lot of love for my Southern Baptist brothers and sisters.

And even though I, by conviction of am Presbyterian, I had to accept John Calvin into my heart at one point.

So that's a joke.

That's kind of who I am. All this, one of the things that really convicts me is as Protestants is that we are, if we're not seeing our mission as a prophetic mission to the whole of the church, then it's kind of a LARP and we can't just be a holy huddle.

And so, and I don't mean giving up our distinctives. I think those distinctives are important, but they're distinctives meant to, the reformers really wanted to reform the church and the protest was a part of that.

And so that's a real conviction of mine. So I really am a, I wanna be without being liberal ecumenical, I'm kind of a big tent guy who still holds to the distinctives. And that makes for interesting conversations slash arguments at times.

But that's really what drives me. And I think a lot of the things that I study, maybe play a part in that, the writing that I do.

Well, you read about a broad range of topics and you have a very encouraging kind of disposition. And so I've noticed that you're on a lot of other podcasts that would be somewhat adjacent to this one.

And so, I'm sorry that you're kind of late in coming to the Conversations That Matter podcast here, but I want to talk about a few things. We just obviously briefly mentioned before starting the show, kind of what you just mentioned about where Christians fit in, what Christians should be thinking of and doing, how they should be engaging the world around them.

But the world around them is changing very quickly. And this is going to impact a lot of things, things that maybe we, someone like yourself even, who is looking towards the future may not even know fully yet because it's so volatile and so many different directions could manifest themselves.

So I think a good way to enter this conversation, since you're a finance guy especially, is to talk about what's happening right around us, and that is the tariff issue. And every morning there's new headlines about what's going to happen with the tariffs.

One of the things I've noticed is a lot of guys on the Christian right, and maybe this is a good thing, who don't know a lot about economics, but they are in on the MAGA agenda, will frame it this way.

They'll say the market economy was fake and the money, it just wasn't real. We were living in a deception and Trump is righting the ship. He's actually revealing, pulling the curtain back, revealing what our economy actually is like.

And it may affect people who have 401ks and that kind of thing, but that's a good thing. It needed to happen. And so it's kind of like the guy who's overweight and needs to go on a diet. America needs to slim down.

We need to get back into a more fighting spirit and a spirit of readiness and all of that. So that's not very helpful to some people who really want to understand what's going on, but that's how I've heard it framed.

So why don't you just take it away and explain to us what's really going on, the thinking behind this, and then maybe broadly speaking, how does this fit into the globalist kind of, or the global political situation that we have?

Christian Economic Ethics and the Logic of Trade

Well, I think what you said in describing kind of the down the line MAGA positioning, there's some truth in that, but I think what we need to hold as Christians, what we need, there's very basics that we need to hold onto.

And so there is a Christian, I believe there's a Christian economic ideal and that is, from a very early time, if John, you had a goat and I had maybe a parcel of land, a tiny bit of land or something I wasn't using and we could trade, both of us would say, thank you, right?

And that's tied to, I mean, Jesus, even when he's saying the one anothering statements, there's an economic aspect to that. And so free price discovery and the arm's length transaction I think are endemic to a Christian economic ethic.

I think that anything that moves towards, there's a reason that communism has to reject God, especially Trinitarian views of God, because it flattens out those, well, again, we're reflecting perichoresis, the relationship within the Trinity itself.

And so when I go right over here across the street to this 7-Eleven and I buy a pack of gum because I ate lunch and my breath stinks and I give him or I put my car down and 7-Eleven gets a little bit of money and I get my thing of ice, whatever, gum, both of us are better off, right?

And that is basic, but hugely important. I think what is lost, so let's go further on, Adam Smith comes along and says, wow, look at the geopolitical world is set up in these nations that due to where they are and who they are, have different advantages.

And those different advantages are similar to the John and Ron meeting together and doing the double thank you, can that be applied to nations as well? And the answer is yes. But what we forget is that Adam Smith assumed Christendom.

He assumed an equanimity of presuppositions. In other words, that when Ron and John get together, we both have basic ideas of equal scales and we're not trying to cheat each other and we worship the same God and the value structure that that implies.

So a global, if we wanna take Adam Smith to a global system, what that says is all those equal scales, all those sameness of presuppositions has to be erased. That's not important anymore. What's important is the, what's truly important and we can get, I don't wanna get too super ridiculous sophisticated, but is the instantaneous liquid flow of capital across borders.

That's what ends up being most important. And when you do that, then what you're really saying is, is those dollars or whatever the currency is, the dollar just happens to be the reserve currency of the world and it still is.

It may have been weakened a little bit. We can talk about that because that's driving some of this as well. That those currencies end up having more importance than the citizens themselves. And so that's part of what this MAGA, the guys who are pushing kind of the MAGA view on all this, that's what they're sensing, even if maybe they're not explaining it very well.

It has to do with, I just wrote about this, what's called Dutch disease. And Dutch disease is, well, I think we need to come up with a new name, but it's in Holland found in their territorial waters, I think late 60s, early 70s, a huge deposits of natural gas.

And traditionally Holland is just a big farming, traditionally farming, a little bit of shipbuilding, but mostly it's just in a very diverse economy. And when natural gas was found, it's so dwarfed the output, the GDP output GDP's kind of fake anyway, we get to that.

Charles Haywood just wrote an excellent essay six weeks, eight weeks ago on that, if you wanna go at the worthy house, if you wanna go get a, you know, spent 45 minutes talking about how GDP is kind of a poor substitute for actual economics and it's great.

But anyway, natural gas in Holland dominated the economy. And so, and it hollowed out all these other industries. And what I mean is, is all the human capital, all the smart people ended up going into this natural gas industry.

And then when the natural gas kind of dried up, Holland was a shell of itself. And so that became, that thing is called Dutch disease. And the United States, especially since, so you had a kind of a three stage way in which the United States has its own Dutch disease.

And number one is, or maybe four stages, but you had, the first stage was FDR for his own reasons. It was really to finance the three letter expansion and the social safety net, social engineering project of FDR took real, he was the guy, everybody blames it on Nixon, but it was FDR took us off the gold standard, said the Federal Reserve is gonna have basically carte blanche with the dollar, with the Federal Reserve note, which is what our dollars are.

They're like a check written on, they're a bank note and the bank is the Federal Reserve. The second deal was after World War II and you had the Marshall Plan, which is where we basically financed the rebuilding of Europe.

We did this with, this is how the dollar became, really started to become the world's reserve currency. And then the third stage is, because of that Marshall Plan and you had Bretton Woods, which was this way where all the other currencies were kind of pegged to this, a channel of value that was centered on the dollar.

But we had exported so many dollars, there was no way we could keep this artificial peg to gold anymore. And so Nixon really, his hands were tied and he said, we can't do this gold peg anymore. And then you had China enter the world, you have the creation of the World Trade Organization and China entering into it to where everybody just said, hey, you know what?

We'll let China build everything. So in that four stage process, the dollar became our natural gas for Holland to where it dominated the entirety of the economy to where all the smart, not all the smart people, but smart people ended up wanting to be hedge fund managers.

And instead of going into, in the 1960s, if you were really smart and had that kind of mind, you were going to work either for NASA or one of the, we were going to the moon and we were going to, you went to work for NASA or IBM or one of the Rockefeller Rocketdyne.

Rocketdyne was the old, they built the F1 engines for the bottom stage of the Saturn V. Or you were going to work for one of these JPL or some type of industrial thing. And that eventually changed over time to where now if you're smart, you're trying to figure out how can I write a program in Python in order to extract value using the dollar as this cudgel to the rest of the world.

And it's hollowed us out. Why do we want to make anything? We're finance bros, you know? And so it's a real problem. And then there's all kinds of issues that flow from that. And so what accelerated this issue is, is you had, I mean, and the ruling classes is really changed from a classical, in the United States, better or worse, was never a traditionally rightist kind of place.

You had traditional rightists, you know, Washington was kind of a man of the right, you know, he was part of the old Royal line in England. And you see some of this, you know, a more perfect union is a call to, can we do England better kind of thing?

Can we do a UK that is better? But once you had the second republic, which is what the modern, you know, we had the Articles of Confederation. Once you get to the constitution and you have these co-equal branches and really a Madison really pushing against any type of establishment.

And Madison writes in his letters, look, I want to weaken the church as a whole so that it's not a political force. And that's hard for us as conservative, you know, kind of as dissonant right Christians, it's hard for us to hear, but that's just part of it.

So these liberal assumptions were baked in. So we've got to just be cognizant of that. But it changed from classically liberal to this neoliberal idea. And the neoliberal idea is really that is multicultural, citizenship really doesn't matter, that GDP, modern economics really says that John, you and me, we're not individual reflections of the image of God, we're fungible economic units.

And so, and Carl Schmitt wrote very cogently, I know he's a controversial guy, but his writing is fantastic. He writes that, look, if you're gonna in the, it's either crisis of parliamentary democracy, I think that's where it is.

He's a guy who wrote political theology, which is absolutely brilliant. Then he wrote a concept of the political, but in crisis parliamentary democracy, he basically says that this neoliberal, he doesn't call it neoliberalism, but that's the move that was happening in the first part of the 20th century, that really if your idea is that all opinions are the same, as opposed to a discovering the best way to reflect what is true and right, that's transcendent, then everybody, you've got to flatten everything out.

So you get this deracinated cosmopolitanism that is that citizenship doesn't matter, what matters is how can liquidity flow as fast, how can capital flow as fast as possible? So that's coming home to roost, that's what we're living in, and that's why citizenship doesn't matter.

That's why, why do you care if all these people flow in by the boatloads? And my last point, golly, I've been going on forever, but what really brought this, what really brought this to bear is in the Biden presidency, which was neoliberal maximalization, which was kind of the extension of the Clinton, Obama, and interestingly enough, those two camps really don't get along, but they were different flavors of the same impetus, this neoliberal impetus.

You had Putin invade Ukraine, and so what's the problem there? What do we have to do? And forget all the conspiracy theories, which I think have a lot of basis in truth about what was going on in Ukraine, some at least, some of the corruption, but what's the big deal?

The big deal is, wow, borders on the one hand don't matter, but they really do matter if this big, the biggest advocate for anti-liberalism is gonna cross one, right? And so the response to that was to basically shut Russia and the Russian acolytes out of the dollar system.

So, oh, we're gonna punish Russia by doing these things. And hey, you know, Russia, absolutely the aggressor. We can argue whether or not it was, they were provoked or unprovoked. The answer is they were provoked.

But that being said, that's my opinion at least, that if when shutting them off, when you have this reserve currency, this Dutch, American Dutch disease, or our chief export is dollars, well, the problem is Russia's one of the chief producers of the things that trade in dollars, that's oil and gas.

And so suddenly when you have a reserve currency, the cool thing is you can produce all the deficits in the world and they don't matter because the rest of the world is this dollar sponge that soaks it up.

And we cut off a huge portion of that. And that's what drove this massive inflation that was hugely underreported, unbelievably underreported. You can go to shadowstats .com and look at some real measures of what inflation did under Biden.

So we caused this crisis that the neoliberal ideal probably could have gone on, I don't know, for a while, but kind of bringing this to a head in how we responded to the Russian incursion on Ukraine. So that's kind of my, I think that's a good place for me to stop.

We're good. Yeah, there's two things I want to explore. I think that was great. The first one is you had mentioned early in your presentation there that Adam Smith had assumed Christianity and fair trade.

Well, Christendom at least.

Christendom, yeah, that there was a sense in the market of we're not going to give you unjust balances and these kinds of things.

Right.

So I'd like to expand on that a little bit. Because Trump has been consistent for decades saying that we're getting a raw deal with China specifically that they're devaluing their own currency to manipulate us.

And I don't know all the ins and outs of that, but we've heard this for years. And I think in 2016, people weren't ready for that. They didn't understand it and it wasn't a resonating message. So Trump, and I'm not saying that he did this strategically but he became the wall guy and that really resonated.

I think this term though is now, this is Trump's baby. It seems to me like this is the term Trump wanted initially because he's been talking about this forever. So explain to us maybe what you meant by Adam Smith assumed Christendom, we don't have Christendom and these countries that don't have Christendom are somehow being unfair.

And cause it's free trade versus fair trade, right? That's the distinction we're always seeing. What is that?

Well, there's a lot of issues there and it's separate. The Asian question is separate from the European question. So let's do Europe first because it's a little, I think it's a little easier. We rebuilt Europe with this Marshall plan and the Marshall plan at some point had to end because you can't finance.

It's like, let's say, I mean, let's say you're the oldest brother and your little brother is maybe not quite as smart, doesn't have quite the work ethic, but you figure you can, man, you really wanna, you're 10 years ahead of him and you can help him pay for college and get him set up.

But at some point he's gotta do his own thing, right? That's the European thing. So we look the other way with these massive, we were such a big and growing market. We wanted Europe to be a NATO partner because of the Soviet Union, not Russia, but the Soviet Union, these godless communists.

And we were, even though even that's kind of complicated because we partnered with these godless communists in World War II and that's a whole nother, that's coming to a head too, by the way. I mean, everybody's realizing that, wow, we basically financed the Soviet's victory in World War II.

And that goes against every, we're finally able to start talking about that. So everybody, the idea in World War II is can we just keep a radical tyrant from running half of Europe? And we went over there and a lot of our men died and a radical tyrant ran half of Europe.

It was just the other guy, the guy we partnered with.

Right.

And even more people died. Anyway, so we built this Marshall Plan and Europe was the younger brother that we needed to be strong in order to kind of counterbalance Eastern Europe, which was under the thumb of the Soviets.

Well, the Soviets went away and we honestly, we don't really need NATO anymore other than just as we built up, we used an ethnic hatred and I don't wanna get into, there's stuff that I think is nasty in some of our circles that I don't wanna get into, but our state department in this anti-Soviet positioning became and we employed a lot of people who had a natural ethnic hatred of Russians because it just was easy for them to do.

And so we're still dealing with that. And so when the USSR went away, instead of immediately kind of partnering with the guys who ran off communism, we still had a state department that was just really anti-Russian and we're still dealing with that.

Hey, you may agree with that or not, but there's some ethnic hate animosities that are still there that we're dealing with that you may or may not agree with. I personally don't, but a lot of people do.

And I get that. That's what we have. So instead of this Marshall building up this little European little brother for the purposes of helping him be big and strong to him and the Soviets and the Soviets went away and now, hey guys, you're ready to, hey, be on your own.

We just kept building this thing. And now, so we look the other way on tariffs and all these kinds of things. The French didn't wanna compete with our wine. They didn't wanna compete with our farming.

The Italians didn't wanna compete with our auto building. The Germans really didn't wanna do that. The Brits had a bunch of tariffs. We look the other way because the bigger thing is we need a big strong buddy over there, a little brother to fight the Soviets and then the Russians, okay?

And that's just, we're, and Trump is like, we're done with that. We don't need that anymore. Y 'all are, can y 'all do, I mean, y 'all need to do your own thing. And he's got enough people in his, he can't completely cut it off because NATO is this 800 pound gorilla that he can't do away with.

And there's a lot of people who still hate Russia and hey, that's why we've gotta build up, we still gotta have a strong Europe. Well, Europe, I think everybody can see is a shell. You know, what is, Germany's a disaster.

The French are a little bit stronger because at least they still, they have a lot of nuclear power, but still a little, you know, Spain completely depends on tourism and their coastal real estate. England isn't even England anymore.

You know, I hear horror stories from London. And so that's ending. I, what the end game is, I don't know, but Trump is like, hey, we can't do this whole deal where we just finance, you know, look the other way on tariffs.

So that's what's going on over there. Asia is a different thing because whereas in theory, and also part of the European thing is, Christianity's turned into this tiny little minority because they've imported half of Africa and Saharan Islam.

And so we just don't have the same presuppositions anymore. It's like an alien place. And I'm sorry, I know, you know, metaphysics, the neoliberals tried to outlaw metaphysics, but they didn't go away.

We still have to have, it's still real.

Yeah.

Metaphysics were always an alien thing for Asia, always. We just had a different thing. And so with China, the issue is the, it didn't start with they're gonna make everything. The issue that underlied the otherness of China, how did this otherness, this completely radically different presuppositional framework manifest?

Well, they're just, it's this, oh, good night, what's the term for it? I just wrote about it. Now I'm having a brain fart. But this idea that there is no, there is no propriety over the ownership of ideas.

That is an alien thought, especially among the Han. That's the ruling race of China, the Han Chinese.

So copier, right? Full disclosure, I have two,.

I have two, my godchildren are both Chinese. So I have no disdain. I love all people everywhere, I really do. But I'm talking about the ruling class and Maoist communism is ugly. It's a special kind of gross because you wanna talk about people don't matter.

I mean, they've starved 30 million of, at least maybe 50 of their own people, just didn't think.

Oh, yeah, reading a biography of Mao was the most horrific thing. And I've read deeply about Holocaust stuff and Japanese treatment in World War II of their even non-combatants. It's despicable. But the worst thing I think I've ever read was about Mao and what Mao did.

Struggle sessions and starving people.

Oh, it's horrific, people aren't even people.

People aren't people.

And that's the communist thing.

You remove God, you remove metaphysics, you remove transcendence, and this is what you get. You either get that or in America, you get this rise of kind of a Nietzschean. Anyway, we can talk philosophy in a minute.

So in Asia, there's just no, we start trading with the Chinese and suddenly all our stuff, there is no such thing as IP of intellectual property. And there's a litany of stories about, I wanna start a factory here and build this thing.

And you can't because of regulation. And you can do it for 10 cents on the dollar over there. So you send a prototype of your product over there. Yeah, we can build this for you. We can do it for this, great.

And then you never see any product and you're except on Amazon under a different name and you've got no recourse. And this happens over and over.

That's the small level.

The higher level is stealth technology, atomic technology, pretty good evidence that the Clintons wanted that. And I know for a fact from, how can I talk about this? I did some work, some analyst work in the 2010 to 2012 timeframe when the Chinese were starting the work in the Spratlys of building up, basically annexing the South China Sea.

And the feedback from the Obama administration on some of this analysis was basically, hey, these guys are gonna be able to blockade Malacca Strait in a half day cruise from where they are. Well, now they've even built a naval base in Laos, but so Malacca is done.

Anyway, Malacca is the Strait between Singapore and whatever the island is, is that Borneo? I can't remember. Right across the Strait from that Strait and 30 of the world GDP goes through that Strait.

And the Obama administration basically came back and said, this is a feature, not a bug of what we're doing. So they wanted all this, they really did. And I think the idea is if China builds all our stuff, then we've basically got a Mexican standoff.

We've got the world reserve currency, they make everything. We're not gonna, business partners at this level can't go to war with each other. Well, sure they can, because they also make all our, you just, you lose all your sovereignty.

So anyway, that's the difference between Europe, the dynamic in Europe, it's leading to the same place and the dynamic with Asia, specifically China. Hey, look, we need, if we're gonna be a sovereign nation where citizenship matters, and these are Trump's big ideas, we need to be sovereign over our own deal.

When we trade, we can't, do I think Trump's an expert on Dutch disease? No, but I think he has it in his gut, he does understand. And I've come up, I've dealt with him in business, in real estate, our lending team and his lending team at Lehman Brothers way back in the day, we're the same group.

So I know how he understands certain aspects of these things. He, in his gut, understands sovereignty over a deal that you have to, if he's representing the people of the United States, then he has to have some type of leverage in order to represent them.

So, and all these other theories just support his gut.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, the comeback is from the more libertarian wing and some guys who would say they're not even libertarians, but they're operating perhaps that way, is that we are getting obviously a better price at a cheaper, it takes, and we're not suffering some of the same social costs and environmental costs that China is incurring in order to make the products that we use in our homes.

And so this is a good deal for us that the consumer is preferred in this. And so Trump is trying to prefer United States corporations and businesses over the consumer. How do you think about that? Because that's the big critique that I see out there.

I don't know how he's supporting corporations. If he was supporting corporations, I mean, look at the response in the stock market. Look, the libertarian, I was a member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

I've got von Mises and Hayek and Hoppe on my bookshelf. Hoppe was hugely informative to my thinking. So I appreciate those guys. But the big takeaway from the Austrian-based bedrock of what became libertarianism is that you need a sovereign in order to guarantee these basic freedoms.

You know, Hoppe is a monarchist even.

Well, and just to clarify, I didn't mean, so the corporations obviously want to build their factories in places where they can employ people with cheaper wages and that kind of thing. I meant like in the sense of Trump wants strong corporations.

He wants strong businesses to stay in the United States.

Right, right.

And of course he says that he's doing this for the American worker because he wants to drive up wages and stuff. But the downside of it is that the consumers end up paying a higher price. And so in the end, we lose.

That's the argument. And obviously there's things that are more important. That's what I think. Like, there's just things more important than getting the cheap price on some of this. Losing out, as you, I think, rightly described, losing the soul of your country, having it hollowed out is a lot worse.

But yeah, maybe explore that for a moment. Because I know people are listening to people that are in our circle, sort of, that are saying this kind of thing.

Sovereignty, the Individual, and the Christian View of Nations

Yeah, well, there's two aspects to this. There's the realist, kind of the John Mearsheimer, who I'm a huge fan of, the John Mearsheimer approach to things. And let's come back to that in just a second.

And then there's the value approach. And so the value approach is what you're talking about in that, look, is a nation simply an economic zone? Are we fungible? Are Americans not unique reflections of the image of God?

Or they're instead just fungible economic units? And so we measure everything as in the aggregate and damn the individual. Well, the problem is the libertarian should be the champions of the individual, right?

The libertarian ideal is that the individual is the individual sovereignty, right? If you wanna go full anarcho-capitalist, right? And so I don't understand. But again, Hoppe was great on this. In order for the individual to have any hope for sovereignty there has to be a guarantor.

There has to be a super sovereign in order to guarantee that. We know this from covenantal theology. If you're not dispensationalist, if you're kind of an old school Presbyterian or Reformed Baptist or whatever, you understand that every covenant has a guarantor.