Speaker 1: When you're ready to ride Metro, we want you to
Speaker 1: know we're ready for you. Here are just a few
Speaker 1: of the people at Metro to tell you how we're
Speaker 1: doing our part to keep writers safe. We've cleaning like
Speaker 1: never before. Great, you've found halfs out of suns of
Speaker 1: statist no mask, no Metro need one. We have a
Speaker 1: few extras at Metro. We're doing our part to keep
Speaker 1: the DC area moving. Find out more at Well not
Speaker 1: a dot com slash doing our part. We quoted George
Speaker 1: Well many times over the years, whether it's a book,
Speaker 1: a column in the Washington Post, or something he said
Speaker 1: on one of the many talk shows that I've I've
Speaker 1: watched him on over the years. He's got a new
Speaker 1: book out called The Conservative Sensibility. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you like a good blurb on your book when you're
Speaker 1: an author, but a pretty good blurb from Jonah Goldberg,
Speaker 1: who we also really like, staggeringly good, easily one of
Speaker 1: the best books on American conservatism ever written. And I
Speaker 1: watched the conversation between George Will and Jonah Goldberg on
Speaker 1: c SPAN the other day and it was fantastic. I
Speaker 1: highly recommend it to anybody that has any interest in it,
Speaker 1: whether you're hate conservatism, is a progressive or your conservative yourself.
Speaker 1: What a great intellectual, easy to understand conversation. And I
Speaker 1: think it's safe to say this conversation will pale badly
Speaker 1: in comparison problem, So enjoy. It's always a pleasure to
Speaker 1: speak with George Will. How are you, sir? I thrive,
Speaker 1: I'm better than the country. Excellent. Well, given the fact
Speaker 1: that the ideas of limited government and the sacred value
Speaker 1: of the individual have died. Do you want to talk
Speaker 1: about baseball? I know more about baseball. Actually, as we talk,
Speaker 1: I've got the MLB channel on muted in my office
Speaker 1: that I turn it on at seven in the morning
Speaker 1: and I turn it off and I leave it six.
Speaker 1: I could watch baseball highlights all day long. Exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So listen. Is the way you mentioned that progressives progressive
Speaker 1: should be interested in my book because it explains something
Speaker 1: that should worry them. Nineteen sixty four podcast, My first
Speaker 1: vote for very Goldwater, to whom the book is dedicated.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty four of the American people said they
Speaker 1: trusted the government to do the right thing all the time,
Speaker 1: or almost all the time. Today, that's down to a
Speaker 1: sixty point collapse in the prestige of government. Now, since
Speaker 1: everything progressors want to do depends on a strong state,
Speaker 1: and a strong government depends upon public confidence in it,
Speaker 1: they should be seriously worried about what's happened. That's not
Speaker 1: a minor change, a sixty point collapse in the way
Speaker 1: people look at government. Well, but at the same time, though,
Speaker 1: we have this enormous contempt for government, yet you know,
Speaker 1: the masses of voters want more and more of it.
Speaker 1: That's a bit of a disconnect to me. It's called
Speaker 1: the fancy words for that is cognitive dissiplance. That's holding
Speaker 1: in your mind with equal fervor and sincerity, flatly incompatible ideas.
Speaker 1: The political scientists have long argued that the American people
Speaker 1: are rhetorically con servative and operationally liberal, that they talked
Speaker 1: like Jeffersonians that government is best to governs the least
Speaker 1: and all the rest, but they want to be governed
Speaker 1: by Hamiltonians, and they certainly got that. Now. Well, the
Speaker 1: thing I've quoted on you on the most over the
Speaker 1: many years, because you've been saying this for a long
Speaker 1: time and it's just so true. What bothers you most
Speaker 1: is not the gridlock and the polarization and how the
Speaker 1: parties can't get along and get anything done. It's the
Speaker 1: thing they do agree on, that we should have more
Speaker 1: government than we pay for. Both parties seem to be
Speaker 1: an agreement on that. I think the political class is
Speaker 1: far more united by class interests than it is divided
Speaker 1: by ideology. For all to talk about the discord in
Speaker 1: our country, and the Lord knows it's room enough. What
Speaker 1: terrifies me as the consensus, which is that we should
Speaker 1: have a large, omnipresent, omniprovident, ever more generous welfare state
Speaker 1: and not pay for it. The public loves this because
Speaker 1: they get the dollars worth of government and their charged
Speaker 1: to eight cents for it. And we shove a fifth
Speaker 1: of the cost of government off on the unconsenting because
Speaker 1: unborn future taxpayers will have to service this debt. And
Speaker 1: the result is that today, under a Republican government, we're
Speaker 1: running a trillion dollar annual budget deficit at full employment
Speaker 1: and three growth. Now ask yourself this, what is going
Speaker 1: to happen when the next procession begins with a trillion
Speaker 1: dollar budget deficit. Now you may some people say, well,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna have any more recessions. I think that
Speaker 1: if the current president had outlawed the business cycle, his
Speaker 1: native modesty would not have prevented him from mentioning it. Well,
Speaker 1: oh boy, So is this a failure of messaging by
Speaker 1: those of us of a conservative point of view at
Speaker 1: least in terms of the size and function of government? Um?
Speaker 1: Is it a just a failure of humanity that's gonna
Speaker 1: manifest itself over and over again as democracy is mature?
Speaker 1: Is there any avoid the slide towards seeing governments as
Speaker 1: a combination of Mommy and Santa Claus. I think a
Speaker 1: reckoning is coming, and I blame the leadership class. I
Speaker 1: don't expect the American people to closely monitor government. They
Speaker 1: have children to raise, and gutters to claim in the
Speaker 1: screen door to fix, and just getting on with life.
Speaker 1: I blame a leadership class that knows that it benefits
Speaker 1: politically from this constant running of enormous deficites that makes
Speaker 1: big government cheaper than it actually is. And the reckoning,
Speaker 1: when it comes, will not be paid by the political class.
Speaker 1: It will be paid by the people who understandably we're
Speaker 1: not paying chose attention, Well, you brought up something the
Speaker 1: other day in your conversation with Joonah Goldberg that I
Speaker 1: thought was really good about public choice theory and the
Speaker 1: way it applies to government workers in government itself. Can
Speaker 1: you explain that to us? Yes, a public choice theory,
Speaker 1: for which James Buchanan of the University vir Ginuine a
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize as an economist, says simply this. In the
Speaker 1: private sector, we understand that people try to maximize something,
Speaker 1: usually their income their wealth. In the public sector, people
Speaker 1: don't stop behaving like normal interested, aggrandizing people. But in
Speaker 1: the public sector, instead of maximizing their income, they try
Speaker 1: to maximize their power. Which is why government should be
Speaker 1: looked upon, not sentimentally as a disinterested group of of
Speaker 1: social scientists. Rather, government should be looked upon as an
Speaker 1: interested fact in itself. It has its own interests, and
Speaker 1: it should be treated accordingly, as as with weariness, and
Speaker 1: we should avoid the sentimentalizing about government. This is what
Speaker 1: puzzles me about the likes of Elizabeth Warren, who whose
Speaker 1: idea content I'd rather like. I mean, I don't like
Speaker 1: her ideas, but I like the fact that she brings
Speaker 1: ideas to politics. Here's the problem, he says with some
Speaker 1: justification that the government has become the plaything of interests.
Speaker 1: The government is so deeply involved in allocating wealth and
Speaker 1: opportunity in the United States. Uh, there's another not a
Speaker 1: mystery wife. Five of the ten wealthiest counties in the
Speaker 1: United States by per capita incomer in the Washington area.
Speaker 1: We don't have any natural resources, We don't make anything
Speaker 1: except laws and trouble. But so much money slashes through
Speaker 1: Washington and is directed by Washington that it pays for
Speaker 1: people to capture the government. And they do capture it,
Speaker 1: and it's captured by compact, intense, articulate, confident, well lawyered factions.
Speaker 1: So Elizabeth Warren's right about that. But then she says, inexplicably,
Speaker 1: what we need to do is make this difficult government bigger.
Speaker 1: We need to get it more involved in allocating wealth
Speaker 1: and opportunity in society. George will Let George will has
Speaker 1: a brand new book out, The Conservative Sensibility, which is
Speaker 1: getting grave reviews in many different quarters. Uh. We were
Speaker 1: talking about the homeless crisis on the West Coast, or
Speaker 1: the West Coast bomb explosion as we usually describe it,
Speaker 1: and one of our theories is that it's it's the
Speaker 1: natural result of the triumph of emotionalism over realism, the
Speaker 1: idea that if you're just kind and compassionate and give
Speaker 1: people everything they need, they will well, I don't know
Speaker 1: that they'll they'll move into apartments and go away, or
Speaker 1: something as opposed to, you know, the more realistic, perhaps
Speaker 1: not compassionate enough past, where a compages run you out
Speaker 1: to the edge of town, say I don't know where
Speaker 1: you're gonna go, but you did, it isn't going to
Speaker 1: be here, would you agree. There's been a lot of
Speaker 1: that on the West Coast. Well, the West Coast is
Speaker 1: first of all, it's taken progressive policies, meddling with the
Speaker 1: housing market, trying to achieve various social goals, at least
Speaker 1: the goals that these people have high density living all
Speaker 1: the rest, get people out of cars, all that stuff.
Speaker 1: As a result, you have a shortage of a four
Speaker 1: sable housing. You do have a good climate, which attracts
Speaker 1: a lot of people. But also it simply is the
Speaker 1: case that a welcoming, a well intended, compassionate policy is
Speaker 1: going to attract some of these problems. There's a little
Speaker 1: story in my book by a man named John Cochrane,
Speaker 1: who's up at the Stanford Hoover Institution and he blogs
Speaker 1: as the Grumpy Economist. He tells the story he said,
Speaker 1: a government decided it wanted to get rid of snakes,
Speaker 1: so it put a bounty on snakes. If you brought
Speaker 1: in dead snakes, what could go wrong? Hint, He says,
Speaker 1: snakes are easy to raise, so people went into the
Speaker 1: snake raising business so they could kill the snakes and
Speaker 1: get the bounty. Government when it starts with many of
Speaker 1: these policies, well, we'll just regulate the housing market. All
Speaker 1: of a sudden you learned what I called the fatal conceit,
Speaker 1: the business that government doesn't know as much as the
Speaker 1: market knows. You begin to realize that society is like
Speaker 1: a Caulder mobile, or you jiggle something here, and a
Speaker 1: lot of other things jiggle way over on the other side.
Speaker 1: So government should reject the progressive analysis, which is as follows.
Speaker 1: For us to say the more complex society becomes, the
Speaker 1: more government or to try to regulate it. It's exactly
Speaker 1: the reverse. The more complex society becomes, the more government
Speaker 1: should step aside. Allow market forces to work, because all
Speaker 1: markets are our information aggregating devices. And they know more
Speaker 1: than governments. Now, talking with George will his book The
Speaker 1: Conservative Sensibility, we're trying pretty hard to stay away from
Speaker 1: the T word um uh and and really the politics
Speaker 1: of the day, because once you started on that, people
Speaker 1: immediately go to the side. So I'd like to make
Speaker 1: this more more, a little broader in that power has
Speaker 1: been going to the presidency for several administrations now for
Speaker 1: quite a while. And and and then just the people's
Speaker 1: view of government is the president. The president decides everything.
Speaker 1: That's the only election I care about. The only person
Speaker 1: I pay attention to in the news is are we
Speaker 1: getting the government we deserve? And that effect that you
Speaker 1: blame the media, I mean, what's going on there. I
Speaker 1: blame the media in part and technology in part because
Speaker 1: once radio came along and made mass communication by the
Speaker 1: president possible, television wants to being sort of slave to
Speaker 1: a superficial news gathered an instrument, which the camera is.
Speaker 1: It wants to be able to appoint the camera at something,
Speaker 1: and it's easier to do it at the president than
Speaker 1: five five members of Congress. When Roosevelt gave his first
Speaker 1: Franklin Roosevelt gave his first fireside chat on the radio.
Speaker 1: As president, his first two words were my friends. Now,
Speaker 1: we're used to this kind of talk, but back then, frankly,
Speaker 1: it was revolutionary, and people didn't used to think that
Speaker 1: a president ought to be our friend. The doesn't supposed
Speaker 1: to take care that the laws are faithfally executed and
Speaker 1: their laws made by other people. Presidents were secondary. The
Speaker 1: presidency is Article two of the Constitution for a reason,
Speaker 1: and Congress is Article one for a reason. But there
Speaker 1: you said Congress. Congress has been transferring powers voluntarily and
Speaker 1: recklessly to presidents for several administrations. It's actually about eighty years.
Speaker 1: Goes back even further than that, Freddy Teddy Roosevelt said
Speaker 1: a president should be free to do whatever he wants,
Speaker 1: as long as it's not explicitly forgiven. Then along comes
Speaker 1: from Woodrow Wilson, the first president to criticize the American founding,
Speaker 1: which he did thoroughly. He said, the whole separation of
Speaker 1: powers is a mistake, because now we need a government
Speaker 1: that is nimble and can be wielded by a very
Speaker 1: strong president. Well, progressive said good, we'd like progressive presidents
Speaker 1: wielding our Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt Lyndon Johnson. I
Speaker 1: don't think they anticipated the current president occupying this, uh,
Speaker 1: this unleashed office. Hey, by the way, you you've become
Speaker 1: aware of Tim Sandifer, who is a friend of ours,
Speaker 1: personal friend of ours. He used to call into our
Speaker 1: show years ago as Tim the Lawyer and set us
Speaker 1: straight on various things, and then he became a guest.
Speaker 1: So he's terrific. He is fantastic national asset. I agree
Speaker 1: he is, and hilariously funny too, which is underrated. For
Speaker 1: George will is on the line. So what do you
Speaker 1: say to those and this is dovetailing obviously off your
Speaker 1: previous a couple of sentences, But what do you say
Speaker 1: to those who advocate a living constitution that can move
Speaker 1: with the times. I think a living constitution is an oxymoron.
Speaker 1: I think it's a contradiction in terms. A living constitution
Speaker 1: that takes on the shape of whatever uh, cultural forces
Speaker 1: and political winds are blowing doesn't constitute anything. A living
Speaker 1: constitution is one that is plastic to the forces of
Speaker 1: the moment. And that's the opposite of what a constitution is. Remember,
Speaker 1: our constitution is a series of prohibitions. There shall be
Speaker 1: even if Congress wants it, even if the public wants it.
Speaker 1: There shall be no law abridging freedom is the press,
Speaker 1: no unreasonable searches and seizures, no establishment of religion, no
Speaker 1: taking a public property without proper compensation. The Constitution exists
Speaker 1: to say majority rule is fine, but majority rule is
Speaker 1: limited and constrained. George Well, the book is the conservative sensibility.
Speaker 1: I can't wait to dig into it myself, and George,
Speaker 1: you are always welcome here. It's always enjoyable and stimulating
Speaker 1: as well. Thanks for the time. I hope you guys
Speaker 1: are spreading out across the country. We need you now
Speaker 1: we're doing Thank you very much. All right, thank you.
Speaker 1: When you're ready to ride Metro, we want you to
Speaker 1: know we're ready for you. Here are just a few
Speaker 1: of the people at Metro to tell you how we're
Speaker 1: doing our part to keep riders safe. We clean, you know,
Speaker 1: like Neville before Hot to a Great Queen. You'll found
Speaker 1: hands down at thiuns of statist no mask, no Metro
Speaker 1: needed one. We have a few extras at Metro. We're
Speaker 1: doing our part to keep the DC area moving. Find
Speaker 1: out more at well Mata dot com slash doing our
Speaker 1: part