IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY’RE GARBAGE PEOPLE IN A GARBAGE INDUSTRY: When the Mainstream Media Encourages Violence Against Their Competition.

LONDON, UK — In the wake of the swift capture and extradition of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, millions of ordinary British citizens have asked if Trump could please come do that same thing with Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Jack Smith was the hyper-partisan special counsel appointed by Joe Biden who tried, at the federal level, to get Donald Trump thrown into prison, thus ending his political career. His efforts supplemented those of the notorious Fani Willis in Georgia and Alvin Bragg in New York, who represented the Democratic Party at the state level. Scott, seeing Smith’s photos, memorably dubbed him “Krazee-Eyez Killa,” after the look-alike Curb Your Enthusiasm rapper. Killa sat for a deposition conducted by the House Judiciary Committee on December 17.

Other aspects of the deposition have given rise to minor news stories, but I want to concentrate on just one point: Smith’s determination to send Trump to prison for his actions relating to the January 6 protest in Washington. I don’t think Trump covered himself in glory that day, but what did he do that was a crime? He said that he thought the election had been stolen. So what?

Q But the President’s statements that he believed the election was rife with
fraud, those certainly are statements that are protected by the First Amendment, correct?

A Absolutely not. If they are made to target a lawful government function and they are made with knowing falsity, no, they are not. That was my point about fraud not being protected by the First Amendment.

Q I mean, there is a long list of disputed elections, I mean, the election of 1800,
1960, year 2000, where candidates believed they were wronged by the — you know, because they lost. And there’s a long history of candidates speaking out about they believe there’s been fraud, there’s been other problems with the integrity of the election process. And I think you would agree that those types of statements are sort of at the core of the First Amendment rights of a Presidential candidate, right?

Of course they are. Election integrity is a critically important issue on which all are allowed to speak freely. Watch what Smith does next:

A There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case. As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election. He was even free to say falsely that he won the election.

But what he was not free to do was violate Federal law and use knowing — knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function. That he was not allowed to do. And that differentiates this case from any past history.

Smith refers here to the counting of electoral ballots that was going on in the Capitol on January 6. There is a federal crime of interfering with lawful processes, but Trump never told his supporters, or anyone else, to obstruct the electoral vote counting. On the contrary, he told them to demonstrate peacefully and patriotically.

More, from later in the deposition:

Q So did you develop evidence that President Trump, you know, was responsible for the violence at the Capitol on January 6th?

A So our view of the evidence was that he caused it and that he exploited it and that it was foreseeable to him.

Not a crime, obviously.

Q But you don’t have any evidence that he instructed people to crash the Capitol, do you?

A As I said, our evidence is that he in the weeks leading up to January 6th created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to State legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware in the days leading up to January 6th that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.

True or not, none of this is even arguably a crime.

Now, once they were at the Capitol and once the attack on the Capitol happened, he refused to stop it.

“Refusing to stop it,” assuming that is correct, is not a crime.

He instead issued a tweet that without question in my mind endangered the life of his own Vice President. And when the violence was going on, he had to be pushed repeatedly by his staff members to do anything to quell it.

And then even afterwards he directed co-conspirators to make calls to Members of Congress, people who had were his political allies, to further delay the proceedings.

Nothing itemized here is even close to being a criminal act. Trump had a legal theory according to which the vice president had discretion to decide which slate of electors to approve in a disputed state. It was a weak legal theory, to be sure. But was it as weak as, for example, the theory the Supreme Court accepted in Roe v. Wade? No. In any event, advancing a weak legal argument is obviously not a crime.

What follows is softball questioning by the Democrats:

Q And during our hour, we talked a lot about the knowledge that Mr. Trump had, one, that he had lost the 2020 election; two, that what he was saying to the American public was false about the 2020 election.

I think Trump sincerely believed, and still believes, that he won the 2020 election. Smith’s evidence that he knew he was lying is that some Republicans told him he was wrong.

Can you help now bring us full circle on how you analyzed the First Amendment claims with the knowledge of the fraud that Mr. Trump was putting out to the American public in 2020 and 2021?

A Sure. From a legal perspective, this is really quite clear. I think all of us want to make sure people’s First Amendment rights are not abridged in a way that they shouldn’t be. I think I certainly feel that way. I’m sure everybody in this room feels that way.

But there is a very clear carve-out for fraud in our case law. The Supreme Court — I think there’s — one case is the Stevens case, talks about that, and there are others. And so when you’re committing a fraud, meaning you’re not just saying something that’s untrue, you’re saying it knowing it’s untrue or with reckless disregard for the truth, that’s not protected by the First Amendment.

That is completely untrue. If you defame someone with knowledge that what you are saying is untrue, it is actionable. But it is not a crime. In any event, defamation law has no application here. Politicians say things all the time with reckless disregard for the truth. Kamala Harris? Chuck Schumer? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Nancy Pelosi? Send them all to prison! Or rather, let’s not.

People commit crimes all the time using words. And when someone commits a
fraud, an investment fraud, or someone commits an affinity fraud, where you try to gain someone’s trust, get them to trust you as a general matter, and then you rip them off, you defraud them, that’s all words, but it’s not protected by the First Amendment.

Of course that is true. It is a point I have made many times. “Speech” within the meaning of the First Amendment does not mean all talking or writing. My favorite illustration is the gangster who says, “Shoot him, Bugsy,” and Bugsy shoots him. The gangster does not have a First Amendment defense because all he did was talk.

Fraud pretty much always involves communication, either written or oral. But that does not mean that fraud is insulated from prosecution. If you say, “Our records show that this company had a net income of $400 million last year, so you should buy it,” and in fact the company lost money and the records are fake, you are guilty of fraud and are likely to go to prison. You don’t have a First Amendment defense because all you did was talk.

Smith obviously understands this, but he pretends not to:

And in a lot of ways this case was an affinity fraud. The President had people who he had built up — who had built up trust in him, including people in his own party, and he preyed on that. Some people wouldn’t do it. Others would. We’re lucky that enough wouldn’t that the election was upheld.

This is pitiful. Trump saying he thought that he actually won the 2020 election was not “affinity fraud” because some of his supporters might believe it. It was political speech that is entitled to the core protection of the First Amendment.

In fact, Trump may very well have been right. As I argued here, there were several million ballots counted for Joe Biden in 2020 that were almost certainly illegal, the result of voter fraud.

The debate over election integrity is one that desperately needs to take place. Jack Smith’s effort to shut down that debate by imprisoning President Trump because he said the unsayable–our election processes are inadequate, and are highly susceptible to fraud–was disgraceful. Smith should be relegated to America’s Hall of Shame, along with Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg.

Elon Musk recently put forth a bold vision: that within two decades, AI will automate virtually all productive activity, work will be optional, and money will lose meaning. Coming from Musk, such pronouncements carry gravitas. And noticeably, the expressed vision unsurprisingly dovetails neatly with Musk’s admittedly exciting entrepreneurial visions. 

Yet variants of those claims have circulated for years, usually without reference to economic theory, institutional constraints, or political risk. Rigorously examining those assertions is essential to decouple technological optimism from the practical realities that will shape the next two decades.

Will Work Be Optional in 20 Years?

In economic terms, “work optionality” requires three simultaneous conditions: (1) per-capita output high enough that the median person can maintain a high standard of living without paid labor, (2) widespread, reliable distribution mechanisms, and (3) institutional stability that ensures income security over time. None of those conditions are close to existing.

Even if AI substitutes for large swaths of labor, historically new automation has reallocated work rather than completely eliminating it. New goods, new services, and new forms of status competition appear as old ones disappear. Moreover, without explicit redistribution mechanisms — which no major nation has implemented — the owners of AI capital capture the lion’s share of gains. That, if anything, requires the median individual to work more, not less.

Musk’s claim requires the total (or near-total) automation of the entire global capital stock, universally broad redistribution of payment streams or wealth, and stable political institutions, all within twenty years. Even considering $38 trillion of US public debt, setting aside lumpiness of capital flows, uneven innovation in various places around the world, differing views on the sanctity of labor and countless other potential obstacles, that is an extraordinary compression of time, capital formation, and global diffusion.

When Musk says that “work will be optional,” no different than choosing to grow vegetables in one’s backyard for fun, he is insinuating a world where production is fully automated and money scarcely matters. But such a future requires astronomically more than clever automation. It demands the near-total overhaul of the global capital stock, new mechanisms for distributing income in the absence of labor markets, and political systems stable enough to address a world where everyone receives sustenance without working. Considering $38 Trillion in US public debt, wildly uneven innovation and development across nations and continents, and deep cultural disagreements about the value and role of work, fitting that transformation into a twenty-year window would require an inconceivable compression of capital formation and institutional evolution. 

Will Money “Lose Meaning?”

For money to lose meaning, scarcity must disappear. But scarcity is not abolished by robots, however intelligent they are or however cheaply they make goods. Scarcity arises because:

• Consumer preferences differ.
  
• Time matters (now vs later).
  
• Land, location, status, political influence, and other constraints make some goods unavoidably rivalrous.

As individuals become wealthier, their consumption tends to shift from goods toward services. Even in a world with ultra-cheap production methods, services — and in particular positional and experiential goods — would dominate utility at high income levels. Access to desirable neighborhoods, exclusive schools, bespoke clubs, rare experiences, or political influence cannot be automated into abundance. Prices will continue to ration those services, and money, even if it changes form, remains the social mechanism that expresses relative value.

What could disappear is wage labor as the primary mechanism for accessing consumption. But that would not constitute an “end of money;” it would instead signify a shift in the income structure of society. One characterized by more capital income, more redistribution, perhaps more universal transfers. A world where “money loses meaning” is one where the economy violates the core assumptions of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and game theory. Artificial intelligence does not do that.

What Actually Matters: Capital, Diffusion, and Institutions

Musk’s vision treats AI as a profound, exogenous leap. Economic systems change, however, only through capital deepening, technological diffusion, and institutional adaptation.

At the very least, replacing the existing global capital stock with AI-augmented systems is a many-decade project. Upgrading energy grids, fitting logistics networks to the speed of AI, remaking industrial processes and transportation fleets, and all the other necessary upgrades of the global industrial base will take orders of magnitude longer than updating software. They require planning, investment, and training for complementary human skills. Each is additionally likely to be a target of hefty regulation, slowing that update process all the more. 

Second, technology diffuses unevenly. Historically, the highest-productivity technologies take decades to spread across countries, sectors, and classes. Under any realistic model of diffusion, any optionality where work is considered will arrive at vastly different times for different nations and the internal strata of their societies.

If that weren’t enough to cast doubt on the idea of work’s future irrelevance, prevailing institutions condition everything. Whether AI abundance produces universal prosperity or vast inequality depends entirely on property rights, competition policy, the rule of law, and stable governance. None of those variables can be automated by graphics processing units (GPUs). AI is indeed likely to be transformative, but productivity shocks are not destiny. 

Institutions, formal and informal, ultimately determine whether a society captures, mismanages, or squanders technological abundance.

AI vs. War, Famine, Pandemic, or Totalitarianism

The argument that rapid AI progress will reduce geopolitical danger is beyond economics; it may simply be a category error. Military conflict, agricultural collapse, disease, or authoritarian risk are not functions of the density of automation or its calculative capacity; they are functions of incentives, history, institutional weakness, and human failings.

If anything, AI may foster volatility: consider the long shadow likely to be cast by autonomous weapons, algorithmic political decision-making, and cyber vulnerabilities. Asymmetries in access to the most advanced AI at any given moment could increase international insecurity, not reduce it. Rapid automation may escalate resource competition, foster nationalist resentment, and shift paranoid regimes into overdrive.

Consider the impact of AI on already totalitarian regimes: thusly augmented, oppressive states become more capable, not more benign. Surveillance, social-credit systems, censorship, predictive crackdowns, and digital repression scale boundlessly with AI. North Korea, Cuba, and scores of other unfree nations will not suddenly liberalize because machines capture data and deliver higher productivity. Existential political risks are not reduced by AI abundance; they may, on the other hand, be amplified by it.

Must We ‘Get There Faster to Avoid Suffering?’

The view that a faster transition is better is nothing but an assumption. It may reflect a candid attempt at regulatory relief or direct government subsidies. In welfare-economic terms, though, the transition to an AI-dominated economy may be more painful than life at the destination itself. Rapid automation can produce unemployment, wealth concentration, social unrest, and political extremism. On top of that, the groups most harmed by the transition have extremely high marginal utility of consumption, which means that transitional losses will weigh heavily upon them.

Optimal diffusion may require gradual adoption precisely because societies need time to adjust: retraining, workplace changes, safety mechanisms, new institutional frameworks, and so on. A reckless sprint to automation might generate more conflict, not less. An adaptive, organic trajectory is far more aligned with empirical economic behavior and political stability. 

But that trajectory cannot be centrally planned. When governments attempt to dictate the timing of transformative technological rollouts — as some are already preparing for or attempting to — they almost always set the pace either too fast — triggering backlash and disruption — or too slow, stifling innovation and growth. Competitive market processes, though imperfect, tend to reveal a more measured rate of adoption than bureaucratically-imposed timelines.

A High-Tech Future, Without The Fiction

AI will significantly reshape the global economy. Productivity may rise sharply in certain sectors, returns on certain forms and mixes of capital may spike, labor markets will inevitably reorganize, and while some degree of both structural and frictional unemployment may result, new industries will emerge. But none of this implies an end of work, scarcity, money, or political acrimony. Across the past century, figures from Keynes to Jeremy Rifkin, Martin Ford, and Erik Brynjolfsson have predicted that technological progress, especially automation and artificial intelligence, ultimately make large portions of human labor unnecessary. Similar post-work visions appear in futurist/science fiction and political writing, from Marshall Brain’s Manna to post-scarcity theorists and Silicon Valley leaders like Ray Kurzweil, all of whom see automation pushing societies to rethink income, purpose, and the role of work itself.

AI is likely to magnify prosperity, but it will also magnify risks, and it cannot fundamentally change human nature. A better description of what AI will create is leverage in the economic, political, and military realms. What nations choose to do with that leverage will determine the future. Technology cannot, and does not, erase incentives, undermine money, or invalidate scarcity. It only changes the terrain on which human beings pursue them.