We're always excited to have another opportunity to speak with the great George Willie has a new book out. It's Armstrong and Getty extra Large because four hours simply usn't enough. This is Armstrong and Getty extra Large. The new book is American Happiness and Discontents, a collection of reflections on American culture during the most mercurial period in recent American history. Mr will our User, I'm very well, do you just
finding dandy. We're not big fans of hyperbole, and some might think, well, the most mercurial period in recent American history, but it does seem like if if a culture is a plate spinning act, and that is a lost art by the way, plate spinning, but if if a culture is a plate spinning act, it feels like every single plate is wobbling. It does. And we now have three foreign policy crises coming to a boil over Taiwan, Ukraine,
and the Iranian nuclear program. And domestically we're spending money as though we had it, which we don't, and we're at daggers drawn over the most ridiculous I guess, sanitizing of opinion on college campuses and all the rest. So yes, at the time. That does not make for cheerfulness of this holiday. So it's not just our imagination because my whole adult life, they've always said each election is the most important election in our nation's history, you know that
whole thing. But um, it definitely does seem whether the universities or China on the scene, or you know how many different defund the police, all the different things. We're in some weird territory we are. You just express probably the most destructive political slogan of modern times, defund the police. Almost reelected Donald Trump clearly has cost uh number of House seats and gubernatorial races and all the rest. And you do wonder about the death urge of political parties
that adopt foolish slogans like that. Well, and it's gone beyond that as long as we're talking about the Justice Department. On the Today's Radio show, by coincidence, we we talked about several of the radical left d a's whether in l A, San Francisco, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago. The list goes on and on who are instituting this very very
strange experiment decriminalizing crime and the results have been just awful. Yeah, I mean shoplifting in San Francisco is essentially a misdemeanor if that as long as you shoplift only up to n fifty dollars worths of merchandise from the very the declining number of all Greens drug stores that are still open because they keep closing them there because they can't keep products on the shelves well, and it goes even beyond that. Michael, I'm talking to our technical director here.
I'm trying to find the clip of George Gascone. There it is clip number thirty four. Georgia. I think you're going to be able to hear this. This is the d A of l A County. I am proud of our entire team in the l A County District Attorney's Office. We cannot prosecute our weight out of social inequalities, income in equalities, the Young House, the desperation that we have since when is that what a d A is supposed
to do. That's amazing, isn't All kinds of institutions now are branching out to do things they're just not supposed to do. Universities don't educate the dcor nate newspapers like The New York Times decided it's their job to reframe our understanding of American history. So they come up with the sixteen nineteen project and the preposterous idea that the American Revolution was fought simply to preserve slavery. I mean,
it's lunacy. Now, you really don't expect a newspaper to be good at American history, and you don't expect universities to be good at uh indoctor nation, although they're doing their best to acquire enough experience with that. But you do what does wish people would stay in their lanes, as it were, do what they're paid to do. Or the c d C deciding how long a person can go without paying their rents for instance, exactly housing policy
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's amazing, Um, what we got you on the line hit me with a definition of conservatism or conservative. A conservative as someone who wants to conserve the American founding, which has three principal tenants. One, there is such a thing as human nature. We're not just creatures that acquire the culture we're situated in. Be Therefore, there are some natural rights. Thats rights essential
for the flourishing of creatures with our natures. See therefore, right first come rights, and then comes government. So we do not get what we rights from government. What we get from government is the protection of our rights. And so therefore we want a balanced government, separation of powers, not too strong, a presidency, and a judiciary alert to the government slipping its leash so that government will secure our rights. What percentage of the electric do you guess
currently would accept that definition and when want to promote it? Well, I it's an excellent question because the American people often are ideological conservatives but operational liberals. They talk like Jeffersonians that government is best, that governs least and all that, but they want to be governed by Hamiltonians that will give them all the possible benefits. It turns out, surprise, surprise,
that free stuff polls well. Right now, you have the Biden administration saying we're gonna give everybody free stuff, and nint two percent of the American people aren't gonna have to pay for it. That is, everyone under earning under four hundred thousand dollars a year. The Biden administration says we're gonna pay for all this by burdening too unpopular, minorities too wealthy, and corporations. The Biden administration clings to
the fiction that corporations pay taxes. Everyone knows they don't. Corporations collect taxes. They passed their tax burden onto a customers and the cost of the goods or services be they take it away from resources that otherwise would be available to their employees as compensation, and see from shareholders dividends, which include, by the way, vast numbers of Americans through
their pension plans, that have invested in American corporations. We would love to see, and I have a feeling you might agree, we would love to see the basics of business, the basics of economics, and the basics of civics taught
in every middle school and high school in America. I think it's it's utterly unwise that we don't do that, And for seeing some of the effects of that absence, I wish every school child in America primary secondary school would be sit down and read a short essay called I Pencil, written by Lawrence Read many years ago, the theme of which is no one can make a pencil.
No one can make a pencil. Millions of people are involved in producing that yellow pencil with the little rubber eraser on top and the graphite in the middle, the people who mind the graphite, and lumbermen who grow the trees and and saw send them to the sawmills, etcetera, etcetera. The sheer complexity of a modern economy is up against the government's fatal conceit, the government's vanity and pride in assuming that it knows enough that it can dispense with markets.
What markets are are information gathering devices. They send signals of information to us as to what things cost and what things ought to costs, supply demand, and all that other stuff. Government steps in and says, no, no, we don't know that we need that. We can handle all this with all the clever people we have in our bureaucracies. No, they can't, and they make a dreadful mess of it.
We have been talking a lot about the the various trillion dollar spending packages that have come out of Congress in the last year year and a half, and UH compared it to like when you're on vacation. When you're on vacation, you buy stuff that you would never normally buy. You spend money in a way you never normally would. We're kind of that way as a country now, where it's like nobody remembers what a trillion dollars means or
anything like that. Do you have any concern that we're crossing a point of no return that you just can't get out of this kind of debt. Everybody knows that there is some point at which the ratio of publicly held debt to gross national product becomes suffocating in a huge impediment economic growth. Now are publicly old debt is now over. It's larger than our economy. So we're going to find out where that is, and we're going to
find out the hard way. The simple axiom of life is this, there are only two ways to fund the government, current taxes and future taxes. So we are piling up future taxes on the unconsenting, because unborn future generations from which we're borrowing. Yeah, I know, and that's such a moral thing to do. I just don't understand why more
people don't get that. So amidst all of the uh, the gloom and perhaps doom, we're discussing, it's notable the title of your new book is American Happiness and discontents. Where does your optimism come from when you feel it? What's positive on the scene these days? Well, the first is that the American people have made wrong turns before,
but they've corrected. Winston Churchill, who loved our country as much as he loved as American mother, once said, the American people invariably do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives. We have a way of making life difficult for ourselves, but no one ever got rich betting against the United States. Second, our principles are sound. Ronald Reagan once said, I don't want to go back to the past. I want to go back to the
past way of facing the future. Uh, the belief in an open market driven society rather than a government centered society. So I think at the end of the day, the Americans have have a national memory of the American founding principles. George will the new book is American Happiness and Discontents. I can't wait to curl up with it. Any glass of fine California wine, George, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for the time I was delighted to be with you.
Have a good day, terrific. Thanks. If you don't read George Will's columns in the Washington Post. You're you're missing out. You know. He often has the best take on whatever the big political story is that's going on at the time. Well, and if like us, you've felt your attention spanned shrinking during the twenty one century, I love the collections of columns because you sit down, you do, you read it, you enjoy it, you contemplated then you know, I mean
maybe you put it down for a while. Yeah, I don't know. You know that whole nobody's ever gotten rich betting against the United States. Of course, that's true up until the point it's not, which is actually a George wilfrase um. It's true until the point it's not. Then then then then we're in a different spot. And nobody's ever tried this before, nobody has ever tried running this kind of debt and uh and seeing how it's gonna turn out. Yeah, sports franchises are like countries, except that
the timetable is is compressed mightily. Obviously you're talking about a great sports Uh you know, what do you call it? A dynasty? Maybe four years, maybe four or five six years at the out at the outside and in the midst of it, and it said it's height. You're thinking, how could this possibly end? We have all the pieces, and then it does. And you know, obviously a country can exist over a few centuries. What was that reading
about the other day? It was um, Oh, gosh, it had to do with um, with the ancient world, Oh it was. It was the various periods of the Roman Empire. And at one point they casually throw out this sentence about and I can't remember what region it was, but it doesn't really matter. It said, uh, and and there followed a piece a period of relative peace and prosperity that lasted for two hundred and fifty or so years.
And I was like, wait a minute, you just YadA, YadA, YadA, two hundred fifty years the entire length of our being a country. Yeah, damn near so on, you know, in the measuring stick of empires, it was a tiny little period. Um. And and it just it reminds us and again not to be gloomier or like crazy pessimistic and negative, but it does remind you that if you screw up, you can end your empire. It is not impossible, you know.
You you trade the Bill of Rights, for instance, from the New England Patriots to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and all of a sudden America is losing again to you know, I think you follow me. There you go. Extra large