Takeaways
02.00 – Jason Hartman’s personal risk evaluator model relies on construction cost and land cost, and this is a great way to minimize risk when investing in real estate.
06.30 – If you’re building in a higher price area, you’re going to have to pay your contractors more because they have to be able to afford to live in that area.
11.10 – Three sources of assessing your land value: tax collector or assessor for property taxes, an insurance broker – an insurance company selling you a policy based on the property, and an appraiser.
17.45 – If you’re interested in looking for the sorts of properties that can offer you regression to replacement opportunities, come along to the Birmingham, Alabama property tour in November.
20.10 – For more information specifically about risk assessment in investing, go to www.JasonHartman.com and type in ‘Hartman risk evaluator’ into the search bar to find podcasts and blog posts.
22.30 – Another recommendation for you is to look for the podcast and YouTube video about how to read a property Proforma. This is a really vital skill you can use to become a better investor.
25.20 – Surely we can’t go to war with anybody unless we have a direct congressional authorization?
31.00 – If we can reinstate America as a country of free trade and prosperity, we can give other countries reasons to work with us, not against us.
39.50 – With everything going on in the world, one of the most important things for us to do is work on empowering women.
47.00 – Being a Senator in the United States isn’t about having all of the answers – it’s about clearing the restrictions for the experts that do have the answers.
51.20 – Find out more about Sean Haugh by heading to www.SeanHaugh.com, Twitter: @EmperorSean or Facebook searching Haugh for Senate. You can also find his YouTube channel by just searching his name.

 

Tweetables
Let your lender haggle with the insurance provider to protect your collateral.
Regression to replacement cost is more like homeostasis – an equilibrium is created within the construction world.
The world is full of people using American weapons and American training to fight against America.

 

 

Transcript

Jason:  It’s my pleasure to welcome Sean Haugh to the show, he is the Senate Libertarian candidate from North Carolina, and it’s a pleasure to have him on. Sean, welcome, how are you?

Sean:  
Well thanks for having me, I appreciate it. It’s a beautiful day here in North Carolina.

Jason:  
Fantastic. Where exactly are you? Are you in Charlotte?

Sean:
  I’m in Durham.

Jason:
  Durham, fantastic, good place. Tell us about some of the issues on which you’re running and why they’re important.

Sean:
  Well, the whole reason I wanted to run was an act of conscience. I wanted to be able to walk to the voting booth myself in November and vote for a candidate who wanted to stop all war and stop spending more money that we have, and neither of the Democrats nor the Republicans can be counted on for that at all.

Jason:  
You’re definitely right about that, and war isn’t a very good deal or investment. Do you think war can ever really be stopped when we’ve got so much interest in it? Of course, the military industrial complex, the Central Bankers – there’s just too many people profiting from it, it’s a disgusting situation.

Sean:
  Well that’s why we have a republic – so that the citizens can take back control of their government and set these things straight. One thing that really bothers me and also motivates me to be in the Senate is that Congress needs to grow a spine. They spend all of their time bickering with each other and they don’t really do much of anything. From a return perspective – only having voted on seven bills in the last year, it might be considered a good thing. Congress has fallen down on the job of monitoring the executives as the executives conducts war. One thing that I feel very strongly about is that we can’t go to war with anybody unless we have a direct congressional authorization as the Constitution specifies.

Jason:
  Yeah, when did that change? When did the war powers move into the executive branch, where you can have these undeclared wars? Can you distinguish that a little bit for myself and the listeners?

Sean:
  I think it really started in World War Two, where we just started saying ‘Oh yes, the President can go ahead and handle it all’, but it really was with the Iraq wars too, where it just came out, especially after 9/11 when Congress just gave the President a blank cheque. They passed what they called a ‘declaration of war’ but it was more about whatever the President says, even if it’s ‘You can go out and kill those guys’. That’s not how it works. The authorization has to be very specific about who the enemy is, what the objective is and just how far the President is authorized to go. Right now we’re at the point where Barack Obama says he can kill anybody he wants to anywhere in the world without any oversight.

Jason:
  That’s a very terrifying idea that the President can have that much power: when he can command fleets of drones and everything else, of course. Do you think, though, if I may be skeptical for a moment here, has the world changed? Enemies aren’t clearly defined anymore. The terrorist groups aren’t really governments like they used to be when it was Japan or Germany. It’s not that clear anymore, is it? Has the world actually changed to where that rule needs to change? I’d like you to argue against that if you would.

Sean: 
 What has changed is that everybody out there – friend and foe, alike – is now armed to the teeth with American weapons and American training. We have interfered with the affairs of other nations so much  – it’s blowback. We keep intervening with the affairs of other countries, we keep inflicting war upon them and we keep creating greater resistant and a greater threat. Now we’re dealing with this Islamic State, which to me, is a government. They’re claiming territory and they’re claiming to be a government. They may not be drawn on the official map yet, but they are completely armed with not only weapons that we gave them directly, but also weapons that we left behind in Iraq. We’ve just repeated the same mistakes over and over again by thinking that we can manipulate these people and turn them into assets to advance our aims, and they always end up turning against us. First it was the Taliban in Afghanistan. We thought they were on our side: we armed them, we trained them, and then Osama Bin Laden was a CIA asset for a while and you can find articles about what a great guy he was etc. Now there are these photos floating around the internet of John McCain posing with people who turned out to be believers of this Islamic State, and he’s talking about how he’s so happy they made these great freedom fighters who are going to help us achieve our objectives of freedom and whatever else in the Middle East. Then he comes back and advocates for us to arm them.

Jason:
  Yeah, John McCain never saw a war he didn’t like. His answer to everything is “Let’s launch some missiles”.

Sean:  
And one of the first things that we really need to do as citizens is reject those politicians that led us into the last Iraq war. John McCain is very much top of that list and it amazes me that Hillary Clinton can get any traction at all because she’s just as much of a hawk as John McCain. This was done by both Democrats and Republicans – people especially in Washington are so locked up in this partisan battle that they lose sight of the fact that Democrats and Republicans are united on more war and more debt to pay for.

Jason:
  It’s just unbelievable. It’s like you said, with all of these assets: you wait 20 years and they become our worst enemies and they’re equipped with all sorts of information, tools and weapons which they would not have had, had we not interfered in the first place. The problem is we are where we are now, so what do you do now? They’ve got the information, they’ve got the weapons. Can we really live in a world where the US becomes more isolationist and just doesn’t engage in all this stuff?

Sean:
  I reject the term isolationist.

Jason:
  Okay.

Sean:
  I like to often quote Jefferson, who was paraphrasing Washington when he advised us to engage in free trade with all and entangle in alliances with none, and they always say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We have to stop war, we have to stop thinking that bombing and droning is the solution to our problems. We have to stop thinking that giving arms to anybody is a solution. The first thing we can do to bring peace and stability to the region is to stop filling it with weapons and to cut off military aid to everybody out there. Also, if we stop our own wars and we stop interfering in these countries, then we stop giving them a reason to hate us and to arm themselves against us. If we, instead, engage these countries in free trade, then we help ourselves externally through the relationship with them – we give them reasons to like us and want to be like us. I’m 53. I remember when I was a kid, everybody wanted to be like an American because we were the beacon of free trade and prosperity, and if we go back to that policy, I think we can fairly quickly win people over because we can also undermine them from the inside. The average person will gain more prosperity and freedom and will see what freedom is like for other people, they will start doing that for themselves at home.

Jason:  
I agree with you, and what you didn’t mention is that that kind of prosperity also historically has the tendency to lower birth rates, which would be a good thing in this developing world. I was recently watching something about Belgium and how it is maybe, some predict, 10 years away from a real serious Sharia Law movement there, so they’ve got prosperity and the Muslims that have moved there just want to take over and institute Sharia. Not all of them, of course, I understand it’s a stereotype, but that’s what this documentary I was watching was about. It was pretty scary.

Sean:  
I haven’t seen the documentary so I can’t comment on it directly. I wonder if that particular fear is kind of overblown..

Jason:
  It might be.

Sean:
  But there is a problem in Europe. I’m much more familiar with Scandinavian countries, Sweden in particular, and how they failed to assimilate immigrants and people with different beliefs. Here in America, our whole core principle is founded on immigration, and it is that anybody from anywhere in the world can come here and become an American. Let me underscore that last part: become an American.

Jason:
  Good point.

Sean:  
They can come into our culture – they can keep their religion, they can keep a lot of their customs that they bring from home, but we have certain standards that we’re just not going to tolerate: oppressing people over race or gender, no cutting off people’s hands for stealing, no female circumcision that some people from African countries might want to bring here. In Europe, they have this cultural relativism that I think has really failed them.

Jason:  
I think we have that here too.

Sean:
  I think we do, and I think we need to avoid it. I think it’s important to establish moral standard. On the one hand, I don’t want us as the Federal government to be going to other countries and dictating their policy – that’s obviously failed. But as far as our own policy here in the US, well, yes. Everybody here has constitutional rights, or they have rights that are described in the constitution; I don’t want to make it sound like the government gives anybody their rights, but our government is a republic based on the idea that the first job of government is to protect the rights of the people. If we stay focused on that, then people can come here and like I say, keep their own customs up to the point where they start violating other people’s rights.

Jason:
  With ISIS, what would you do? If you were in the Oval Office, would you just ignore it? I understand the background, and I agree with you about blowback and so forth, but what would you do now?

Sean:
  I think bombing them is just not working, as tempting as it is. They’re willing to talk to some Americans – we’ve seen pictures of Senator McCain talking to them. Maybe we can send them Senator McCain as an ambassador to negotiate! This problem has been a long time in the making and we’ve done a lot to create it and unfortunately, there really is no magic wand or magic drone to just make it all go away. We have to begin the long term process of dealing with everybody from a stance of peace and prosperity. It’s going to take a little bit to undermine them. Bombing them has created more problems than it solved.

Jason:
  Okay, about the free trade issue. I want to ask you about that because I agree with you on the concept, but who are we not willing to trade with now, besides North Korea and Iran?

Sean:  
Cuba, I think is still on the list, and then of course we’re using economic sanctions against Russia over this Ukraine business. I like to bring up Cuba because to me, Cuba is a horrible example of how economic sanctions don’t work at all. All we’ve managed to do in the 50 years that we’ve imposed sanctions on Cuba is to encourage the communist government to make people poorer and to give them a reason to resent the United States.

Jason:  
Don’t forget we gave Michael Moore a great documentary saying that the healthcare in Cuba was better. Listen, I’ve been to Cuba. I’ve actually been there and trust me, you would not want to go there for your heathcare.

Sean:
  By being so antagonistic, we’ve encouraged the isolationism of those countries and if you look at a country like North Korea where the government has managed to keep a pretty tight control over the information that people have, and our involvement in the Korean war helped create that state, which has managed to perpetuate itself ever since that.

Jason:
  I agree, we should open up Cuba because the embargoes haven’t worked. That’s one thing that Obama was kind of intimating that he might do – though I guess he’s not doing that after all. What do we do with ISIS? What do we do with this radical Islam? That is scary! You look at the beheadings, you look at the stonings. I don’t know how Western liberals can support this kind of stuff. They’re just mixed up and clueless, I don’t get it.

Sean:
  There’s a lot of horrifying things going on all over the world. What sets apart our mistake here is that we did quite a lot to create it ourselves. You look at persecution of people for their religion all over the world and you look at non-Christian countries and what it’s like to try to be a Christian in those countries. There are people who get slaughtered over that. I mentioned female circumcision in Africa, we had the Kony scare there a couple of years ago and there were some horrifying things going on in Central Africa too, but I really think the best thing that we can do in terms of supporting our allies who have to deal directly with these sources is to pump them up economically. We have to show people around the world the benefits of free trade with the United States, and show them the money, basically. You show people the money and they’re going to flock over to our side. There’s one thing that’s very important to me, and especially about the Islamic world, and that’s empowering women because the Islamists just really hate that, but if you build up the economies there through free trade, they’re going to have to go back to a manufacturing base and they will have to hire women. I read an article during the World Cup that some entrepreneur in Pakistan heard that China, who was making all the soccer balls, was falling behind in production so he fairly quickly was able to put together a factory, get a contract to make these soccer balls for the World Cup and he employed all women because that was the workforce that was available for him. He took a little pride in giving women jobs. Once people start getting a taste of having their own money and their own economic independence, they’re going to want more of it and they’re going to demand it from their leaders wherever they live.

Jason:
  I agree. Women generally are a more peaceful force, except for Hillary Clinton! That’s a good thing. No question, empowering women is going to be a very positive thing, but I don’t know if it can be done. They’re not allowed to drive, they’ve got to cover everything up. It’s just a crazy level of oppression. They’re not even allowed to go to school. Why would men want women like that? Why would they want women to be like that? It’s just crazy to me.

Sean:
  Well, people do a lot of crazy stuff in the name of religion. We do crazy things in the name of religion here in the United States. The other thing that’s really important to me is to keep theology out of legislation. My spiritual beliefs are going to inform absolutely everything I do, and it’s obviously not as bad here in the US as it is in some Islamic states, but the reason I point to women in particular in those Islamic countries is precisely because of the theocratic forces where oppressing women is a fundamental aspect of how they operate. You look at Saudi Arabia – one thing that we don’t talk about at all is Saudi Arabia, because they’re supposed to be our good friends and allies, but they are about the worst in the world in terms of the rights of the average citizen. They impose the worst forms of Sharia law on people and fund the extremists that we end up fighting, yet we never say anything about it and completely ignore it because we want their oil.

Jason:  
It is mind-boggling the way we do that with Saudi Arabia. We can have, allegedly, 19 hijackers on 9/11 who are Saudi nationals, and nothing happens to Saudi Arabia. It’s just okay and Obama bows to Saudi kings. You couldn’t write fiction like this, it’s crazy.

Sean:
  We have a drone campaign going on in Yemen which is on the Arabian peninsula, but we won’t cross over into Saudi itself. Because we are slaves to their oil production, we’ve given them a safe haven to be able to train people against this and they will work directly against the United States. I’m obviously not advocating hostility towards Saudi Arabia, but I think we need to put it in the proper perspective and really question how our close relationship with them is really benefiting the United States. I think getting energy independence is a very important aspect of our foreign policy, and not to be owned by anybody else. There are other aspects of policy too, like our debt to the Chinese. It’s another example of how we’re giving up our sovereignty economically and we don’t have to do that.

Jason:
  I don’t want to debate the China issue because I think we’re kind of in the position of power there because the borrower always has control over the lender. Most people think about that the other way around. When it comes to energy independence – make a comment if you like.

Sean:
  I don’t disagree with you, and in a sense, I do jump from topic to topic, but I keep seeing these common things, and one of those is that we’re willing to let others outside of the United States dictate our policy to us because we’ve put ourselves in a bad economic position to do so. There are certainly advantages to Chinese investment in the US, as long as it’s investment. If people want to come here and invest their money in us and build up a national business, that’s a positive. But to simply be in debt and it’s such a huge mountain of debt that we need to get out from under. We can’t saddle future generations with that.

Jason:
  Just the last question on energy independence: how do we do that? Are we going to do that with unproven things like solar and wind, or are we going to work on our vast oil and natural gas reserves here? What’s the energy independence plan?

Sean:
  Well, the answer is yes. What we need to have is a free market in energy for governments stop gaining things in favor of the oil and gas companies and car companies for personal transportation. If we were able to take regulation away from alternative energy sources, then they would have an opportunity to innovate and create something. One thing I really resent about the possibility of being a Senator is that I would be expected to be an expert on everything because I would be ruling over everything. I don’t need to have the answers. I don’t need to know how to create an alternative energy model. In the United States, I need to try to get the regulations and restrictions out of the way for the people who do, so that they can go out and create this, and they’re smart people so they’ll do it in a way that is economically viable for them. If they can see a profit in it and a way to do it without harming other people or creating liability, then let it happen.

Jason:
  More power to them, pardon the pun!

Sean:  
Exactly. I’m not necessarily against the oil and gas industry. I’m for it as long as the people who are in business and know what they’re doing and are going to look at their billions of dollars can say ‘Yes, I’ve studied this and this is going to be a sound investment and we’re going to be able to do this without creating legal liability through any accidents we might cause’, go right ahead. Whether it’s drilling for resources from the ground or alternative forms of energy. I don’t feel like I have to have an opinion on that, and that’s the difference from people in Congress.

Jason:  
I like that. I think you’re right. That’s a good philosophy. They all act like know-it-alls, like they can be central planners and make all the decisions and decide that wind is the way to go. They’ll then set up a bunch of windmills that don’t work, that don’t finance themselves, they’re guillotines in the sky for birds – I don’t know why the environmentalists aren’t outraged about that!

Sean:  
One thing I don’t think gets talked about enough are the green energy scandals of the Obama administration.

Jason:
  Oh, with Solyndra etc?

Sean:
  They pick winners and losers and throw a lot of money away over bad investments.

Jason:
  No question.

Sean:
  Essentially they were trying to pick winners but it turned out they really didn’t know what they were doing. They were just there to scam the taxpayer because they managed to give a lot of money to President Obama’s campaign or to people he wanted to support. So much of this right now is ruled by corporate special interest, and that’s one thing I really want to be able to do. I want to replace everybody in Congress with people who are interested in the constitution and the rights and needs of the people, the citizens, as opposed to other rights and needs of their corporate interests.

Jason:
  Absolutely. Give out your website, Sean, tell people where they can find you.

Sean:
  I’m at www.SeanHaugh.com. I’m also on Twitter with the handle @EmperorSean and on Facebook – Haugh for Senate is the name of my page there. I also have about 2 dozen YouTube videos up and I only put another one up this morning. So you can just search my name on YouTube and you can find those.

Jason:
  Fantastic. That’s an obvious sarcasm with the Twitter.

Sean:
  I drop in every once and a while. I work as a pizza delivery driver and it’s a job that I really love because children just revere me. They treat me like the emperor of pizza. I’m driving around town and they all wave at me and I’ll wave back. I ring the doorbell and the kids cry ‘Yay, pizza!’ and after getting paid, that’s the best part of the job.

Jason:  
You are like the common man. That’s great!

Sean:
  Well, it’s important. These politicians only listen to each other. Once I started working with these people I realized that after about 6 years they lose track of everything and what the world is like. I’ll give you this one example: allegedly there’s this problem with scheduling part-time workers, such as myself, so a bunch of Senators tried to publish a mandate where employers would have to publish workers’ schedules within two weeks and guarantee them at least 4 hours a day and pay them. I work for a large corporation and I get my weekly schedule two days before the week starts, and that works fine. I’m not really being taken advantage of here, but they’re trying to run every little business in ways that they don’t even understand. I can just see that that is going to be a huge imposition on the company that I work for.

Jason:  
Yup, absolutely. Very good points. Well, Sean, thank you for joining us, and I sure hope we get some common sense back in government, and I just want to leave you and the listeners with a thought. There’s this constant debate about whether the government should be bigger, smaller, more activist, less activist, and everybody will agree on both sides of the aisle. Even the far left will pretty much agree that government is inefficient, it’s riddled with corruption and there are all sorts of problems, and so I just say this. If you want the corruption and the inefficiency to be less of an issue, just make the government smaller, because all of that will always be there in any human organization and if we just make it smaller, the bad things will be smaller too.

Sean:
  That’s exactly right. There’s a campaign about finance reform and that’s exactly what I tell them: the only way that you’re going to regulate money in politics is by abolishing the product because right now, with Congress ruling everything, it’s one-stop shopping for special interest. I’d much rather Congress not get involved with certain issues and then make these special interest have to appeal to millions of consumers instead of Senators and Congressmen.

Jason:
  It is absurd. My real estate company does market research on different markets around the US and ever since the bailout fiasco started in DC, the real estate prices have skyrocketed as every businessperson from around the world flies into Washington to get their money. It’s unbelievable. It’s so corrupt it’s absurd. We could talk forever, but keep getting the word out. This is important stuff. Thank you so much and I wish you luck in your campaign.

Sean:
  Well thanks so much, I really appreciate your having me on the show and thanks for what you’re doing.