S8 Ep771: Tamny critiques the federal government's "command economy" response, specifically the trillions of dollars in stimulus and the Payroll Protection Program. He argues that consumption does not drive growth — investment does — and that by "hoovering up"
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Tamny critiques the federal government's "command economy" response, specifically the trillions of dollars in stimulus and the Payroll Protection Program. He argues that consumption does not drive growth — investment does — and that by "hoovering up" capital from those most capable of investing and redistributing it to consumers, the government delayed natural economic recovery. The PPP propped up "the past" and prevented the necessary "creative destruction" that allows a dynamic economy to evolve. Tamny ultimately advocates for freedom as the only sustainable answer to future crises, noting that private enterprise — not government mandates — produced the vaccines in record time. (4)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor. This is the new John Bachelor show on CBS Audio Network, and John Tamning, his new book, when politicians panicked. |
| 0:17.1 | The new coronavirus, expert opinion, and a tragic lapse of reason. John, two examples you |
| 0:23.2 | provide about the payroll protection program and the grants to businesses. Sidwell Friends, |
| 0:29.0 | the Distinguished Private School in Washington, with an endowment, I think, more than $50 million, |
| 0:36.7 | received $5.2 million from the government |
| 0:39.8 | programs, the combination of them. The John Burroughs School of St. Louis received another |
| 0:45.0 | distinguished private school, received $2.55 million. There are many examples of excesses, |
| 0:50.7 | people who apply. But the payroll protection program, did it work, John? Does |
| 0:55.9 | government have an opinion of it today? Because as we know, they continue to vote more and |
| 1:01.8 | more money to be handed out to their idea of who needs it. |
| 1:09.0 | If something worked because maybe it saved a few businesses, sure, perhaps, but that's not |
| 1:16.1 | a worthy way of looking at it because we always have to ask what businesses died, what |
| 1:20.8 | businesses never got funding because government was just indiscriminately propping up anything |
| 1:26.1 | that had an effective strategy for going online |
| 1:29.5 | and asking for P.P. money and working through a bank that was well tied to the government and was |
| 1:35.2 | able to get that money out to them. Again, we'll never know what would have been otherwise, |
| 1:41.1 | and it would have been much better because rather than government as the allocator,iscriminately propping up private schools, propping up Harvard, propping up the |
| 1:49.0 | Los Angeles Lakers, we would have had actual market forces at work. |
| 1:53.0 | The Federal Reserve had its own version of PPP. I think it was called Main Street Lending, |
| 1:59.1 | providing large sums of money to businesses to stay open. |
| 2:03.1 | It appears, John, a year later, that there was much, much attention to jobs, to the loss of jobs, |
| 2:11.1 | than there was to the value of sustaining businesses that were troubled or permitting businesses to sustain themselves. |
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