What Your Life Costs, According to Uncle Sam (Bonus)
The Political Orphanage
Andrew Heaton
4.9 • 1000 Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2020
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the request of Patreon listeners, I'm releasing this bonus episode to the main feed--go to Patreon.com/andrewheaton if you want a weekly bonus episode like this on top of the main show!
This week I explain why the government calculates a monetary price of what an individual American's life is worth, and why that's actually a useful tool for making cold, deliberative policy determinations. Which is unfortunately something we might have to do if confronted with the two bad options of "risk lives to pandemic" or "hurl the country into another Great Depression." If and when we get to that point, we'll need rational people operating the levers of power.
Season 2, Ep 42
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello orphans and welcome to another installment of Heaton's musings, bonus content available exclusively to you as a thank you for your patronage of this show. |
| 0:11.0 | I've had a bunch of jobs, but I've only had one job that I think I probably should have been fired from and had I been fired I would not have in any way faulted the management. |
| 0:22.0 | I was a bartender in Washington DC for a |
| 0:24.6 | brief period of time. I had just done a congressional internship, but I had not |
| 0:28.9 | been able to secure gainful employment with the US Congress yet, and so I went and worked at a |
| 0:34.7 | upscale bar in Washington DC located at Union Station. It's a cool place by the |
| 0:40.2 | way I don't I don't think the business is around anymore it was called |
| 0:42.7 | B Smith's at the time but historic location it was where the president's |
| 0:48.0 | train depot was so in the same way that there there's Air Force one there used to be |
| 0:52.2 | like an Air Force or there used to be a train one, you know, the |
| 0:55.7 | President's official locomotive and there was a designated train depot at Union Station that had a banquet room and a bedroom for both the President and the |
| 1:09.5 | First Lady and they could stay there when they came in from trains and you know could |
| 1:14.3 | board it privately and that kind of thing for when they came by that's since been |
| 1:17.8 | turned into a restaurant and I was a bartender there and a very bad one for a variety of reasons. |
| 1:24.4 | My nickname is Earthquake, if that gives you a perspective on all of that. |
| 1:28.6 | My mind comes back periodically to a conversation I had with one of the patrons of the bar while I was |
| 1:36.6 | working there. He was a doctor, an emergency room doctor and came in with a friend and we |
| 1:42.1 | got to chatting and I asked him how can you |
| 1:45.0 | How can you deal with all of that pain and gore and blood in an emergency scenario where you know someone's come in and |
| 1:57.3 | they've been shot like how do you deal with that that just seems so |
| 2:00.1 | massive I don't I don't know that I could and he told me that that morning or the |
| 2:06.7 | day before he'd had a really grisly case of a guy coming in his his truck had |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Andrew Heaton, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Andrew Heaton and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

