JASON: EIB in Hubbell, Michigan. Scott, you’re first up today. Thanks for hanging on.

CALLER: You’re welcome. Thanks for taking my call. What I wanted to mention, I really do miss Donald Trump as far as I’ve got… I’m a small business, and I’ve got patents and got products on the market, and it wasn’t the covid that slowed it down. It was Chinese infringement.

JASON: Right.

CALLER: Yeah. I fought several of those battles, and the playing field is not level.

JASON: Not at all. In fact, I know a company right here in Minnesota where I’m from that was just getting brutalized — they make countertops and things like that — and Trump came to the rescue. It wasn’t just the 242 tariff — or 232 tariffs, I should say — but it was just the basic government policy that keeps this unfair competition. You know, isn’t it crazy, the Democrats want a minimum wage on small businessmen and women, but they think it’s just fine to farm out at slave labor wages to China?

CALLER: I can’t… They can produce the product cheaper than I can even ship it. They’re subsidizing. Their country is subsidizing all the manufacturing.

JASON: All right.

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JASON: In Minot, North Dakota, Gary, you’re first up this hour on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. Hi.

CALLER: Yes, Jason, thanks for taking my call.

JASON: Glad to do it, sir.

CALLER: I have been trying… I appreciate this. I’ve been trying to call Rush for a little over 30 years, and, like I told your call screener, I’ve been in business since 1975. I started a cabinet manufacturing company, and one of the things that I’ve always told my potential customers is that the measure of a person or a business is not how you handle your successes; it’s how you handle your failures.

One of my major failures was that my business did work in 26 states, and I did a project in Kofu, Japan, and we did actually five projects in Kofu, Japan. One of the kitchens that we bid, because of the language barrier and the cultural barrier, we ended up staining the wrong color. And we found that out. These were only $1500 kitchens, and we built an entire kitchen, or that entire kitchen in one day. We stained it and finished it, and we sent it FedEx the next day. It cost $4500 to FedEx it to Japan. And that’s how we handled our failure.

JASON: Amen. I mean, this is part and parcel of the marketplace, and that is failure. You cannot have success without failure, and this is why socialism and these bailouts… I mean, you can go back to the housing crisis, you can go to the 2001 dot-com bubble, you can go back to the Obama-Biden stimulus that demonstrably failed back when Biden was vice president (which he still thinks he is, apparently).

But regardless, these zombie… When the government props up a company, it misallocates resources and drags down the entire economy because it doesn’t let it fail and the assets be liquidated to more productive uses. Most people that start a business end up failing once before they get going. It is a crucial part of the process, and you couldn’t be more correct.

CALLER: When I started my business, I was young, and I did not know what I did not know, and I probably should have quit. I probably should have, you know, called it in and quit. But I was too hardheaded, and I stayed with it, and I ended up retiring after 44 years in the business.

JASON: Well, congratulations, Gary. That’s fantastic. We gotta move, but thanks so much. And if you’ve got a business for 44 years, you are in the elite. You are in the absolute elite.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

JASON: Big Rapids, Michigan, Jeff. Thanks for waiting. You’re on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network with me, Jason Lewis.

CALLER: Hey. Good afternoon, Jason. As always, thank you very much taking my call and for hosting.

JASON: Thank you.

CALLER: First, I want to give heartfelt condolences to Kathryn and the entire Rush Limbaugh family on his passing and knowing that we will see him again. As a Christian man, a man of faith, I know we’ll be reunited one day. So that’s comforting to know.

JASON: You bet.

CALLER: The reason for my call, sir, is I’m a small business owner. My wife and I are physical therapists. We started a small outpatient therapy clinic in a little town in Michigan almost 30 years ago from nothing, basically. It was given no handouts or anything like that. We just had a dream, had a goal, had some experience, and went for it. We started small and let it build a little by little.

And then we added a fitness center a few years into it, and, you know, had just come to a point almost three years later where this whole coronavirus thing and have my government, my governor tell me that I have to shut down. It was just literally appalling. You know, I pay my taxes, run a good business, serving my community, and to have —

JASON: You know, when people were little in Michigan, they were all told that anyone could grow up to be governor of your great state. And sure enough, that particular day with Gretchen. I’m telling you, if that person can be governor of Michigan, literally is a crisis in America.

CALLER: Yeah. As President — former president and still my president — Trump would say, “That woman in Michigan,” it’s amazing. (laughs)

JASON: No, I’m telling you, that’s not fair to other women who aren’t as crazy as she is. She is so drunk with power, it’s scary — and if she had her way, she would assume the power. And that gets to our point about balance in a republic, checks and balances. Democrats today do not believe in checks and balances. They don’t believe in the republican form of government. They believe in a socialist dictatorship.

CALLER: We’ve experienced that for a year now. See, we have a majority in the state senate and state representative, and I’ve been telling people, “Do you realize we have not been represented in Lansing because of all these executive orders?”

JASON: Right.

CALLER: The people say, “Oh, it’s the law.” It’s not a law. You know, and we have not been able to be represented. She has not brought you the governmental process. She has not been open and transparent and shared what’s going on. You know, and I’m sitting here as a business owner and having to shut down. And, you know, I went ahead for a short time, signed up for unemployment.

JASON: All right.

CALLER: I said, “Heck, yes. I paid into this for years. I’ll take some of that money back. If you’re gonna tell me (crosstalk).”

JASON: Which is exactly what they want you to do. I’m not criticizing you, and I gotta move, Jeff, but thanks for the tale.