Podcast 308

Cars. A prominent British auto collector said recently the driverless car will have a catastrophic impact on the auto industry, sooner than you think. Recently a few stories about the twentieth century romance with the automobile may have caught your eye. The son of a collector in France, who’s vintage Ferrari’s, Spyder’s, and Maserati’s were forgotten for decades, and an auto dealer in Pierce, Nebraska who saved his unsold inventory, resulting in a stunning collection of hardly driven Chevy cars and trucks from the 1930’s onward. Nothing says twentieth century like the car. From the Model T and Al Capone’s 16 cylinder Cadillac to the muscle cars of the 1960’s and 1970’s. This is not a technical automotive discussion, more a talk about how automotive technology conveyed independence and freedom for the first Model T owners, all the way up to the baby boom generation. For many, the car IS the American Dream. With student loan debt averaging around 8 thousand dollars, credit card debt and rents increasing, today’s young adults struggle to afford a car, and many don’t want one anyway. What conveys freedom today? The smart phone and the technology and communication it brings. While many are nostalgic for an easier time – cruising the Dairy Queen or main street on a Friday night – disruptive changes technology brings can be frustrating and frightening … but they can also inspire. Today’s new technology actually does convey independence and freedom in ways Henry Ford couldn’t imagine. Today’s industrialists in Silicon Valley and Seattle, worry about artificial intelligence; smart machines some believe threaten humanity. Meanwhile, Bill Gates and those following in his footsteps are rushing to create autonomous software and machines that can do everything from pick fruit to work as medical orderlies. There is a new world coming, and its coming fast. Many of our social institutions were created for the twentieth century world, which will soon be left in the dust, and it doesn’t seem like we’re ready to accommodate new ideas like the Driverless Car, autonomous machines, robotics and many other innovations. What happened to the romance of the open road, and the Plymouth Road Runner? It got stepped on by an iPhone. Now what? (Editor’s Note: I like this podcast because it also includes a lot of memories from my childhood, and some great car songs.) Sponsored by My Complete Basement Systems, and Depotstar.

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Podcast 191

Minimum Wage. A Stillwater Minnesota restaurant is under fire from rabid leftist netizens for adding a .35 cent “minimum wage fee” to the bills of customers to compensate for a 75 percent increase in the minimum wage in Minnesota. Can the ‘price of labor’ be set by Government? Get ready for an onslaught of ‘junk research’ ‘proving’ the minimum wage decreases unemployment. Is it valid? How is the minimum wage like the French Revolution? Meanwhile, President Obama says ‘Congress’ should ‘end’ corporate inversions – the practice of buying or merging with a foreign company and moving the home office out of the US. The solution? Make it Illegal? Sick the IRS on firms that have strayed from obedience to Obama? What about lowering the US corporate tax, currently now the highest in the world. And what are the top investors in companies that invert? The answer may surprise you. Meanwhile, the 1 percent continue to legally avoid paying tax. Actor and liberal activist Robert Redford, who made millions from selling his stake in The Sundance Channel, says he doesn’t owe New York a cent in taxes since his S corporation already paid taxes in Utah. Pay your fair share, huh? And what about Robert Reich, former labor secretary in the Clinton administration, currently on the hustings condemning the “1 percenters” for creating no social value. Reich currently earns over $250,000 a year for teaching one class at the University of California, not to mention his earnings for speaking and books. One percent indeed! And Ebola continues to frighten people. Africans are now angry they aren’t getting the ‘vaccine’ the US has given to two of its citizens. Is it a vaccine? Has it cured them? Finally, there is proof the media is biased. A secret cabal of left wing journalists collaborate in private to gain support for their appearances in media, and write articles to further the left’s goals, and never reveal their association in the articles they write. Sponsored by Sedation and Implant Dentistry of Saint Paul.

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Randal O’Toole – Podcast 189

Randal O’Toole talks about Light Rail, Street Cars, the Driverless Car, state and city planning, subsidies and the Highway Trust Fund, with The Bob Davis Podcasts. Cities all over the United States are spending billions, sometimes tens of billions to research, and billions more to build, light rail, streetcar and so called ‘high speed’ rail lines. Projects designed to serve centrally planned cities with subsidized high density housing. Millennials are interested in these cities, for now, but what happens when they start raising families? How did the Met Council come into existence? Do people really want this kind of life? Central Planners think so, but what if the future does not cooperate? What if the future is a dystopia with increasingly expensive transit systems, serving no one. In the second half of the Bob Davis Podcasts conversation with the CATO Institute’s Randal O’Toole we talk about driverless cars, the history of streetcars and the efficiency of today’s streetcar lines, and their costs. Why do a few elites make the working class pay for transit systems they use, expensive apartments they live in, in cities they design. They may not think they’re one per centers, but today’s Republican and Democrat liberals are creating what they think are utopian cities, but they’re not for the rest of the 99 percent. Hailing from Portland, O’Toole knows the folly of light rail and streetcar transit plans inside and out. If you want to learn how to argue against these plans at your city council and neighborhood meetings, listen to Randal O’Toole and learn how. Sponsored by X Government Cars!

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