Editor’s Note: In this exclusive interview, congressional candidate Terri McCormick takes on her opponent, Washington insiders, politics as usual, and issues that matter to the people of Wisconsin.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Your campaign for Congress features the phrase “credibility cannot be borrowed.”  Is this a reference to runaway government spending?

TERRI McCORMICK: It actually refers to integrity in the political process and the current state of politics in our country.  People are desperate for no-nonsense leaders with integrity and proven records of telling the truth, standing up for principles, and using the same common sense we use in our private lives.  No more “favors for votes.”  When I was in the legislature, I had a reputation of bucking the party line and voting independently from issue to issue.  I was not in it for the special interest politics that plagues Madison and Washington, but I was in it to return our country to common sense principles that we also can find in our Constitution.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Speaking of which, your campaign site features a running national debt clock.  It runs at an amazing $100,000 every two seconds and stands at $13 trillion.  Are these numbers too abstract to be fully comprehended, or do you think people have a sense of what they mean?  Moreover what do they mean to you?

TERRI McCORMICK: The debt clock is a reminder that our government is too large, too intrusive, and too expensive – and future generations are going to pay for it (literally and in other ways) if we don’t change this pattern of abuse now.  That’s right – I said abuse.  Our so-called leaders are abusing the trust we bestowed upon them.  They continue to run up the debt without concern for your grandchildren and great-children.   It is not sustainable.  The debt clock is a reminder that change is needed.  I hope to deliver that change to voters in Wisconsin’s 8th District this fall.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: For observers outside Wisconsin, the upper Midwest is a bit of a mystery.  On one hand it produces people like Paul Ryan and Michelle Bachmann, but on the other hand it consistently votes for Democrats in presidential elections, seemingly regardless of circumstances.  What are we to make of this?

TERRI McCORMICK: I’m from the district neighboring Bart Stupak’s, so I’m in far northern Wisconsin.  The people in my district are hard-working and dedicated.  Unfortunately, we have lost our manufacturing jobs in the area and unemployment continues to rise despite the big-spending policies of Washington politicians.  People in my area are very concerned.  This is an independent-minded district and I am an independent-minded, solution-focused candidate.  With regard to the politics of the area, the two largest cities in this area – Appleton and Green Bay – vote Republican.  The truth is that people around here vote for the person they feel will best represent them.  It isn’t about ideology, but solutions.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Specifically your district is WI-8, in the upper part of Wisconsin.  It voted for George W. Bush, but then voted for Obama in 2008.  The pundits seem to have it at best at leaning Democrat but at worst likely Democrat for 2010.  How do you convince this swing area that the time to swing is now?

TERRI McCORMICK: By running on issues and focusing on jobs, the economy, and overspending.  These are the bread and butter issues that people in this area care about.  The health care bill that Steve Kagen voted for is also a huge issue.  People in my area do not want a federal government takeover of health care.  So I will convince voters by talking with them, providing solutions, and showing that credibility cannot be bought, instead it must be earned.  Solutions are what sell here in northeast Wisconsin.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: You are running on a “platform of solutions” that is vaguely reminiscent of the Contract with America back in 1994. Right now, what’s our number one problem, and what’s its solution?

TERRI McCORMICK: For this area, the number one issue is jobs.  I believe job creation flows from the ground up, not the top down. There is too much Washington regulation in northeast Wisconsin.  My view is that bureaucratic interferences hamper business and manufacturing growth in the area.  Wisconsin has been suffering economically for many years now.  While I was in the legislature, I served as the Chair of the Economic Development Committee from 2003 to 2006.  During that time, Wisconsin saw a spike in revenues from a healthy economy.  I worked on capital investment reform, including the Small Business Regulation Reform Act, which created vibrant economic growth by alleviating economic burdens placed on Wisconsin business owners.  I want to bring this background of results – and as a small business owner myself – to change Washington and help our economy in Wisconsin flourish.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Your campaign features a healthcare plan that includes ideas such as portability and tort reform.  Is this assuming a repeal of the Obama legislation or is it an attempt to reform the reform?

TERRI McCORMICK: Obamacare should be repealed.  I will work at every opportunity to repeal Obamacare if voters elect me to Congress.  There is no need to reform the Obamacare reform.  It must be repealed and never revisited again.  The burden this new system is going to place on our state will be overwhelming and, as I said, I am very passionate about true health care reform – the first step of which is repealing Obamacare.  Health care is another issue I worked on as a Wisconsin legislator.  Specifically, the Prescription Drug Purchasing Pool that I created saved the state (and taxpayers) tremendous amounts of money and provided free-market consumer choice in health care.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Your opponent Dr. Steve Kagen has been described by various sources as a “rank and file Democrat.”  Is there any part of the Obama agenda he has rejected for the sake of Wisconsin’s best interest?

TERRI McCORMICK: Great question.  Well, there is only one thing that comes to mind where Steve Kagen took a position different than Obama and Pelosi.  At least that was reported on, here in our local media market.  Last week, Steve Kagen came out with a statement opposing Obama’s lawsuit against the state of Arizona.  Voters in northeast Wisconsin are overwhelmingly opposed to illegal immigration, so Kagen probably saw this as an opportune time to – for once – stand with residents in the 8th district.  His efforts are too little and too late.  He has voted time and time again against the wishes of northeast Wisconsin voters – the most significant being his House floor speech in favor of Obamacare.  Voters are fed up with politics as usual in Washington.  Kagen has rubber-stamped everything Obama asked for, including health care, Cap and Tax, and the Card Check Forced Unionism bill.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Congressman Kagen has recently sponsored what might be termed as a “make BP pay” bill.  None of my maps show Wisconsin anywhere near the Gulf Coast.  Is his focus really on Wisconsin?

TERRI McCORMICK: No, he’s not focused on Wisconsin.  He’s representing special interest groups and liberal elites.  Look at his contributions list, and you’ll see who he’s representing.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: The word on the street is that some conservative bloggers have been unhappy with your candidacy.  As far as you can tell, what’s their problem with the campaign, and how do you respond?

TERRI McCORMICK: There are a few bloggers – I’m not sure I would call them conservative – who are mad at me because I dared to challenge the most unpopular Republican in the state in a 2006 primary for Congress.  George W. Bush came to Wisconsin and the Republicans spent $2 million in the primary.  I moved on, but they have not.  It’s a different election cycle but they are still holding a grudge.  I have been endorsed by the Republican Liberty Caucus of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Right to Life, former RNC Committeeman Terry Kohler, and Wisconsin Conservative Digest publisher Bob Dohnal.  A broad coalition of people have coalesced behind me.  I’m so honored to have the support of the independent-minded and constitutionally-focused voters in the district and the state.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Finally, how can people follow you and keep up with the campaign?

TERRI McCORMICK: Please follow me on Facebook and Twitter.  My Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Terri-McCormick/179758644293 and my Twitter page is www.Twitter.com/Terri4Congress.  My website has more information about my background and issue position statements: http://TerriMcCormickforCongress.com/.  You’ll also be able to hear me speak on several different issues.  I am interested in providing solutions.

We have a campaign headquarters in Appleton, DePere, and Marinette Wisconsin. Anyone in the area should contact us and pick up a yard sign.  I hope to meet your readers on the campaign trail.  Thanks so much for taking the time to learn about me and this campaign for northeast Wisconsin voters.

Editor’s Note: In this exclusive interview noted historian, author, and frequent Glenn Beck guest discusses his new book, American history, politics, his upcoming documentary on the Berlin Wall, and more.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Your new book is 7 Events that Made America America and Proved the Founding Fathers were Right All Along.  The title suggests, at least to this reader, a discussion of seven positive events that made America great, but in reality these are seven major flaws that have developed in our nation throughout the years.  As of this moment in time do you see America’s glass as half empty or half full?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: I certainly don’t see all the events as flaws. For example, the Johnstown flood chapter and the rock and roll chapter highlight great strengths in our system and show what we can do without government. As to half-full or half-empty, it’s really irrelevant where you are if you know where you’re going. In 1979, we had come out of a culturally devastating decade, lost a war, had a president resign in disgrace, saw trust in Congress, unions, the clergy, and all institutions EXCEPT the military fall to extremely low levels, witnessed a dinky foreign power take and hold many American hostages, and experienced a collapsing economy while a president told us to essentially “get used to it.” It only took one man with a vision and the courage to act on that vision to turn all that around in less than three years. Right now, I don’t see that person on the horizon, but things change fast in American politics.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: As if stripped from today’s headlines, there is a chapter about an event called the Johnstown flood, a major natural disaster that was handled with virtually no federal intervention.  Do these people along the Gulf Coast have it wrong when they call for greater action from DC?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: No. And there are worlds of difference between the two. Johnston and the Dayton Flood were both self-contained, really only affecting a region within a state. The feds had no authority and there was no need for federal help in either case. Indeed, in each case, the citizens didn’t even want STATE assistance. They could, and wanted to, deal with it themselves. The Gulf Coast affects many states, making it de facto a national problem. But the real issue here is the utter incompetence and arrogance of the Obama administration in not even allowing the states to deal with this. Obama delayed on accepting foreign skimmers, he blocked Bobby Jindal’s attempts to erect protective berms, and rather than working with BP, he repeatedly demonized the company.

In addition, there has been over 100 years of change in cultural attitudes between Johnstown and today, namely that American citizens have been conditioned to think the federal government will just come to the rescue, whether it’s an auto bailout or health care. The feds have a role to play—a CONSTITUTIONAL role—and as long as Uncle Sam sticks to its constitutional authority, I have no problem with “greater action from D.C.”

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: One of the most fascinating observations is that the Supreme Court helped cause an economic panic in its infamous Dred Scott decision in addition to upholding slavery.  Before John Marshall declared that the court had this nearly omnipotent power of judicial review, what role was the Supreme Court in fact designed to play?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: It’s interesting that even after Marshall insisted on judicial review, that phrase itself was not invoked for many decades, as though courts still weren’t sure they really were acting within the Constitution. The court system was the least regulated, and least checked, of the branches of government because in the English culture from which the Founders came, courts were extremely weak. It was the monarch and Parliament to be feared, not a magistrate. While the Founders had great foresight in almost everything, I think they lacked an appreciation for the tyranny of rogue judges. So most of the Constitution’s references to courts actually strengthened them from their weak position in the English structure. None would have imagined a Dred Scott or Roe v. Wade decision, nor, I think, would they have tolerated such insolence.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: In a chapter that takes on Big Health, for lack of a better term, you describe a pseudo-science/media axis that works to parlay public opinion into laws.  You trace it back to, of all things, one of Eisenhower’s heart attacks.  How closely did the public follow his condition? Was it the dominant news event of its day?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: The public indeed followed his condition closely. It was the first time that a president was allowed to be vulnerable. Remember the news media was NEVER permitted to show FDR on crutches or in a wheelchair (making his monument in Washington a joke). But fir the first time, a president’s health was considered a fair subject for all Americans. This tied in with the “heart attack epidemic” cited by the American Heart Association, which, as I show, was not an epidemic at all, but merely the appearance of newer and better testing methods. So it’s like dominos—first Ike, then the AHA’s campaign against heart disease, then Ancel Keys and his claims that heart disease comes from fats, then the “Diet for a Small Planet” insisting that meat-eating is an ecological problem and before you know it, you have the government telling people to eat more carbs. This correlates strongly with the “obesity epidemic.” Hmmmm.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Similarly the media takes a huge drubbing in 7 Events over its activities in the 2008 election.  Everyone on the right has the sense that the media has a left-wing bias, but the statistics bear out a bias that’s almost beyond belief.  Would it be better if today’s news organizations took a page from the 19^th century playbook and described their biases up front?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: I have no problem with media bias as long as they are honest about their bias. MSNBC should be re-labeled the Democrat Party Propaganda Network. If you want to call Fox the Republican Network, fine, although you’ll find Fox far closer to the New York Times of the 1950s in terms of objective reporting than it is a direct opposite of MSNBC or ABC. If you go back to the 1840s, however, the newspapers were honest about who they were: the Richmond WHIG. The Arkansas DEMOCRAT. One editor said he had no ideas. “My ideas are Andrew Jackson’s ideas,” or words to that effect. One editor was severely criticized for attempting to be “fair and balanced.” The very purpose of a “news” paper was to get certain people elected. Well, the readers knew that. Unfortunately a view that the media was/is/should be fair and balanced emerged. From 1865 to about 1960 (as our research shows) the news media was indeed  relatively objective, but that changed sometime in the ‘60s, and yet when it changed, no one stepped up and said, “We’re no longer going to report both sides. Here’s the liberal view.”

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: A particularly inspiring chapter discusses the role of rock music in the collapse of the USSR.  What is the one thing today’s left-wing rocker ought to know about music behind the Iron Curtain?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: There are many important things modern rockers should know about music in a totalitarian regime. First, there is no such thing as artistic freedom. Dave Matthews can whine about George Bush, but if he were in Korea, he wouldn’t last 10 seconds. Over and over, our musicians from behind the Iron Curtain told us of how they were (in the words of now-Republican Arlo Guthrie) “oppressed, repressed, depressed, and suppressed.”

Another thing ANY musician ought to realize is that rock and roll became what it was without a dime of government support. You might claim that some of the federal airways involved government money—but that restricted music more than it enhanced it. Rock ENTIRELY came from the “free market of music,” developed by unregulated artists, and found its place solely on the basis of what people like. Even the so-called payola scandals really didn’t amount to much because you can’t foist crap on listeners. So the irony of the Iron Curtain is that it was felled by music developed exclusively in the private sector.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Conversely a particularly disturbing notion is that there is an almost gravity like pull toward ever larger government, even in administrations like Jefferson’s or Reagan’s.  Is this just something that has to be contained inasmuch as possible?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: It is what government does. It grows. Any new conservative movement must begin with that premise and realize that it’s not enough to say “I’ll resist bigger government.” The objective going in must be to overhaul it in revolutionary proportions, stripping away department after department, bureau after bureau, and aggressively and deliberately approach each election as a chance to reduce government at every level.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: You take on FDR with a line in 7 Events that says in the wake of the Great Depression he “subtly bundled public confidence with policy, thus giving him the authority to do whatever necessary (including lie) to restore a positive view of the future.”  What was the lie?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: No one would deny FDR or any president the tools to inspire and uplift the American people. By the way, I don’t see one iota of that from Barack Obama, who at every opportunity reminds us that “no we can’t,” that we aren’t the world’s superpower, that we can’t lead the world economy . . . . but I digress. My beef with Roosevelt was not his rhetoric but his destructive policies, from which we still haven’t fully recovered (Social Security, minimum wage laws, banking regulations). But this is where FDR, Reagan, even Teddy Roosevelt sharply split from Obama, for each of the former saw America as a great nation, the world’s leader, and a beacon of freedom, not just “one of the pack” and a nation that needs to be “cut down to size.”

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: On the other hand, one might find it surprising that Reagan takes a lump or two in the book over his handling of terrorism in its earlier days.  In light of this, how much blame should we assign to Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton, respectively?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: The point of the Reagan chapter was that EVEN Reagan, who got almost everything else right, failed to appreciate the diabolical nature of radical Islam. Carter didn’t get it, and after Reagan, G. H. W. Bush failed to get it. Clinton didn’t get it. Only George W. Bush really got it, that fundamentalist Islam was at war with the West. I hate to say “assign blame”—even to Clinton, who witnessed so many of these attacks—because it takes away from the real focus of blame, the radical Muslims. We always need to remember that THEY bombed the WTC and flew planes into buildings, and for all our intelligence screw-ups, it was the radical Muslims who committed these horrific acts of war.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Reading 7 Events, one can’t help the feeling that we need more and more history in our lives, yet the new trend in higher education is to drop history requirements from, say, six hours to three.  As an educator yourself, have you witnessed anything like this?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: Yes. Just last year, we had a close call at my university to trim a six-hour history requirement to three. History survived, but just barely. This is entirely in keeping with the trend toward making higher education “vocational” and job training, as opposed to providing the basis for a well-educated person in all areas.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Finally, how can people get a copy of 7 Events or otherwise keep up with you?

LARRY SCHWEIKART: All bookstores, Amazon, Barnes&Noble and Borders online have the book. We also have a website with teacher support: http://www.patriotshistoryusa.com

And I have been producing a new documentary film, “Rockin’ the Wall,” taken from the rock and roll chapter. It will be released in August, but people can go to the website and play the great trailer here: http://www.rockinthewall.com/.

Editor’s Note: In this exclusive interview,  author Rick Robinson discusses his latest political thriller, American symbolism, the retirement of Senator Jim Bunning, and more.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Your new book Manifest Destiny is a political thriller that revolves around an obscure but important symbol called the Mace.  What is it, and how did this idea occur to you?

RICK ROBINSON: The Mace is one of the great symbols of our Republic.  Physically its thirteen ebony rods bound together with silver ribbon. At the top of the rods is a globe with an eagle perched atop it, its wings spread full.  Symbolically, it represents the fact that power in Congress does not rest with any single person.  The Mace represents the

presence of the Republic itself.  No session of the House can start until it is placed on the rostrum and no session ends until it is removed.  When a Member of Congress gets out of hand, the Sergeant at Arms is instructed to “present” the Mace in an effort to get the Member under control.  That happened a lot during the debate leading up to the Civil War.

I was watching the C-Span special on Congress a year or so ago and they had a whole segment on the Mace being removed to be cleaned and restored by the Smithsonian.  As I was watching that segment, I found out that the original Mace was stolen by the British during the War of 1812. Right then I decided that in my next book someone would steal the Mace.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Much of the plot is centered in Romania of all places, but it reminds the reader of the intrigue that took place in Georgia (the nation) a couple of years ago.  Did that have an influence on Manifest Destiny?

RICK ROBINSON: Not really.  Because the book involved the Mace, I needed a place where the people were very superstitious.  I met with a few of my friends who work on foreign campaigns.  To a person, each said that Romania was the most superstitious place on earth.  People are still scared to death of “the evil eye.” So that’s where I ended up.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Speaking of Eastern Europe, do you think we’ve actually heard the last of the old Soviet Union?

RICK ROBINSON: As the Soviet Union…yes.  However, there are a lot of old hard-liners still around.  I try to make the point in Manifest Destiny that all the new Republics have done is change the names of the parties.  The old leaders are all still around.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Something very timely in the plot is a focus on energy, which is actually key to the action in the book.  With the oil spill in the Gulf, do you think that reality might be more inclined to imitate the art of Manifest Destiny?

RICK ROBINSON: Yeah.  When I finished Manifest back in the winter I never saw what was happening in the Gulf.  I do a lot of my writing in the Florida Keys and I am very concerned about what will happen when the oil hits the reefs.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: The most fascinating aspect of your new thriller is the role of the CIA, which plays both the protagonist and the antagonist simultaneously.  Do you see the CIA as a “necessary evil?”

RICK ROBINSON: ‘m not sure that necessary evil is the right term. There are a lot of elements in the world that believe that America should be eliminated.  We need people on the ground, whether its CIA or special forces, to keep the bad guys at bay.  Reduction of those forces was one of the reasons 9/11 happened.  We didn’t have people on the

ground giving us good information.  Evil, no.  I agree with the necessary part.

I am glad that you picked up on the fact that the CIA agent in the story is both a protagonist and an antagonist at the same time.  Most see her as either one or the other, but not both.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Similarly your main character Congressman Richard Thompson, who is a by-the-book idealist, faces a crisis of morality as the plot thickens.  What does this say about our actions in the War on Terror?

RICK ROBINSON: I don’t want to give too much away about the plot, but those who read my series know that I like to have my characters face some moral or ideological dilemma as the story progresses.  That which faces Thompson in Manifest in unthinkable to most.

As to how it relates to the War on Terror, it does probably pose a bit of a mirror to us as a nation.  As with a mirror, many see a differing reflection.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: To this reader the most memorable line of the book says something to the effect that we need a cowboy when the going gets tough.  Do you think there’s been some buyers’ regret when it comes to Obama’s foreign policy as compared to the foreign policy of the Bush administration?

RICK ROBINSON: Here’s the funny thing…I think that one thing we have going for us right now in foreign policy is Hillary Clinton.  Yeah, that’s right, I said Hillary Clinton.  I think she has more pull in foreign affairs than President Obama.  There are some serious situations out there right now which I believe that the President could not deal

with on his own.  She has the ability to cool down a hot leader.  I never thought that I’d find myself saying ‘thank God for Hillary,’ but on this topic we may all be saying it someday soon.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Fancy Farm, which hosts Kentucky’s most prominent political event, gets a mention in the book.  What is your own favorite Fancy Farm moment?

RICK ROBINSON: I love fancy Farm.  The first time I went there was the year of the John Y. Brown – Louie Nunn election.  There wasn’t a stage cover back then and it was hot as hell.  My fondest memory involved a lot of bourbon the night before and a blues band in Paducah…but that’s all I’m going to say about that.  Next question!

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Also on a personal note, you had the pleasure of working for retiring Senator Jim Bunning.  What should people remember about his service to the country?

RICK ROBINSON: The thing with Jim was that you always know where he stands.  You may not always agree with him, but he let you know where he stands.  When he got into an issue he studied as much about it as he could.  When he was on the Social Security Subcommittee in the House, he became so well versed on the topic that the Democrat from Indiana who was Chairman actually endorsed Jim’s re-election one year.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Finally, how can people buy a copy of Manifest Destiny?

RICK ROBINSON: Grab one on Amazon or go to your local store. The hardbacks are going pretty fast and it’s already in its second printing. I am working on three others, which should be out in the next year or so.

Editor’s Note: In this exclusive interview, Dr. Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute discusses his new book The Alternative Manifesto as well as economics and politics in the UK and the U.S.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Your new book is The Alternative Manifesto: A 12-Step Programme to Remake Britain.  An American who reads it would be quick to notice the similarities between the situation there and in the United States, both economically and politically, but the situation there does seem worse.  Do you agree?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: In the UK, Parliament is sovereign. There are no formal, constitutional checks and balances as there are in the US. It’s like cricket – the system depends on people just ‘playing the game’ with its unwritten rules. Unfortunately, the 24-hour media demand and other changes have made our system more ‘presidential’, where most attention is focused on the prime minister, rather than on the government as a team. Charismatic leaders, like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, have taken more and more control to the centre, and because our executive (around 120 ministers) also sits in the House of Commons, Parliament rarely votes against executive policy. So there has been nothing to stop this centralization. So our state-funded services – healthcare, education, welfare, police, the justice system and much more – have ended up being run from the centre, in top-down, Stalinist fashion. Not surprisingly the public services just consume more and more money without delivering results, while police and justice officials have become agents of the state rather than guardians of the people. Equally, though, with our system we can reverse things quickly too, as Margaret Thatcher reversed our social and economic decline in the 1980s. So an enlightened government can change all this. But it means giving up power and devolving it back to the people – which no politician is really very good at.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: One common theme in particular seems to be the debt load in each nation.  Right now there are people rationalizing this by comparing today’s debt to the end of the Second World War.  Does this have any validity?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: Yes. Our deficit and our national debt are the highest they have ever been in piecetime. They were higher during the Second World War and during the Napoleonic wars, but at least then we were fighting to save Europe from despotism. Right now, we have just run up new debts to pay off our day-to-day overspending.

The UK has more chronic overspending than the US, believe it or not. Gordon Brown, who became our finance minister in 1997, and then prime minister, always claimed to be ‘prudent’ with the public finances, but in fact taxation has increased by over 50% over the past 13 years, and increased state spending and borrowing even more. Indeed, he doubled the national debt and planned to double it again, before he was thrown out in the general election three weeks ago. The new government, a coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, promise quick action to reduce the annual borrowing. But nobody’s talking about actually reducing the debt total in the foreseeable future.

Remember also that most of the UK’s trade is in Europe, and although Britain retains the pound, the Euro seems to be spiraling round the drain. That is actually bad for us because it undermines Europe’s demand for our goods and raises uncertainty, which depresses markets still further. London is the only truly international financial centre in Europe, and our banks are heavily invested in Euro-zone countries, so that is not good either.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Another theme that you describe is the debt addiction politicians seem to have.  In prosperous times everyone wants to spend money on new programs to buy votes, but then during hard times, Keynesian philosophy dictates spending even more money, regardless of ability to pay.  Can the political class in either country be convinced that any time is a good time to make real and substantial cuts?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: I don’t think the Keynesian ’spend to earn’ policy really convinces anyone anymore. Certainly not the public. When things are just down a little bit, you might get away with it. But when people are suffering the real pain of falling house prices, business closures, layoffs and pay cuts, they really don’t see how boosting the budgets of state employees is going to help them. Indeed, they think that government programmes should share in their pain. They know full well that new spending can only be funded out of higher taxes or more borrowing – or perhaps by inflation. But they know that higher taxes are already killing their jobs, that more borrowing is ridiculous when the country is already up to its ears in debt, and that inflation simply makes their money worthless.

Sure, politicians think it is their function to spend more and more, and the democratic system – you vote funds to me and I’ll vote funds to you – does not help to restrain them. And no politician likes going into an election saying that government spending, and the programmes that particular members of the public benefit from, should be cut. At least in the UK we only have elections every four or five years, whereas US politicians always seem to be running. But that democratic lack of restraint on budgets is why I and the Adam Smith Institute are promoting fixed limits on government spending, borrowing, and debt.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Similarly, another commonality seems to be that none of the major parties seem willing to really stand up for the taxpayer and be a good steward of the people’s money.  We have had our struggles here with the Republican party, most notably in the years leading to its defeats in 2006 and 2008.  Is there any hope for the Conservatives under Cameron?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: So far so good. Cameron has had to make concessions to his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, but they seem to be in perfect agreement that the first requirement in getting the UK economy back in shape is to balance the government’s books. Government right now is more than half the UK economy, but your economy cannot be fit and healthy when half of it is bloated and lethargic. They have also proposed a fixed-term, five-year government, so they have plenty of time to take all the nasty decisions early on in the hope that they will show benefit before the election scheduled for May 2015. They have already announced £6bn in immediate cuts – only about 1% of what the government spends, but a clear demonstration that they need business. There is little more they could do immediately, since it would mean tearing up contracts and wage bargains. But everyone in the government services is expecting far deeper cuts next year and in the following years. So I think they have the prescription right, and they do seem to be giving out the medicine.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Speaking of specific politicians.  Daniel Hannan, who is mentioned numerous times throughout the book, appears to be a hero at a time when, to quote Yeats, “the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  Is there a realistic chance he might be Prime Minister at some point?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: I would like to think so; he is a great believer in economic and personal freedom, but the chances are slim. He is presently in the European Parliament in Brussels, but his face does not really fit with the leadership of the Conservative Party in London. They regard him as too outspoken. And they decide who is chosen as a party election candidate. But he is doing no more that speaking the same truths that Margaret Thatcher, a small shopkeeper’s daughter, took for granted – that governments, like any family or business, have to live within their means, and that ours has grossly overspent. We should have been caulking the hull and fixing the rigging, as he put it, when the weather was fine, so that we are in good shape for the storms we are in now. But of course we did not. So our hull is full of holes and our sails too full of patches to pull us out of recession very quickly. But equally, people in Britain see the wisdom of Dan Hannan’s message, and if a dose of nasty economic medicine does indeed restore us to health, they might well come to conclude that he is right.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Frightfully, the loss of individual liberty in Britain is of paramount importance.  If it dies there, the place where it was born, there may not be much hope for the rest of the world.  How is it that some of the most basic rights of the accused have gone by the wayside while criminality appears to be on rise?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: Those who kill our freedoms do not come like thieves in the night, but openly and brazenly. Terrorism is a real and significant threat, and many politicians believe that they need sweeping powers to counter it. Mrs. Thatcher started that trend during the troubles in Northern Ireland, detaining terrorist suspects without trial. It may have spared innocent people from bombs and bullets, but at what cost to the rule of law? Mrs. Thatcher, of course, was a great champion of personal freedom and the rule of law, but even she was prepared to suspend it like this. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown went even further, removing trial by jury for certain complicated cases, seeking to detain suspects for up to 42 days without trial, putting terror suspects under indefinite house arrest, removing the right to silence in some cases, ending the double jeopardy provision for serious crime, collecting millions of DNA samples from anyone arrested for even the most minor offences, expanding surveillance powers, and much more. Politicians think it is OK to have these wide powers, because they are decent people and can be trusted. The problem is that if they give way to politicians whom you cannot trust, those people have at their fingertips all the instruments necessary to enslave us.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Specifically, one of the scariest things in the entire book had to do with antisocial behavior laws.  Could you go into more detail here about what those are?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: Tony Blair was fed up with people like problem families on poor housing estates who make life unbearable for everyone else, but who are not necessarily committing crimes other than perhaps rowdyism or threatening behaviour. So he introduced Anti-Social Behaviour Orders as a sort of fast-track mechanism to tell disagreeable people that they had to behave. Local authorities issue the ASBOs, which can be for anything – one family was told that it was not to allow its canary bird to sing so loud – without needing any judicial process. But if you breach one of these Orders, you can be sent to jail In other words, we have effectively given unelected officials huge powers that once belonged only to judges and juries. Of course, in English law we already had plenty of ways of dealing with these offences – Breach of the Peace rules, for instance. But the attempt to make the system more ‘efficient’ actually made it less just.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: One depressing thought that occurred to this reader is that it took an American Revolution and a war to cut a runaway government with runaway laws down to size in the 18^th century.  Though your book is full of all the best ideas of the 21^st century, far more than twelve by the way, is there the political will to implement them?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: Political will? I’ve never seen it. All I’ve seen is political won’t. No, the pressure for reform has to come from the citizens themselves. Politicians will follow their lead…it’s not the other way round. Fortunately, with the Internet the ’silent majority’ are at last finding their voice. So I am optimistic.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Along these same lines, everything here, at least until November, is moving in the opposite direction toward more central control and higher taxes to keep pace with the spending of Obama’s first year and a half.  The VAT or value added tax has been mentioned—a national sales tax upwards of 20%.  England has this, but how is it that EU rules make it impossible to repeal?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: VAT is the tax that effectively funds the European Union, so although it is not official, everyone knows that it is the price of membership. In fact, taxes on consumption, like sales taxes or VAT, are much better for an economy than taxes on work, like income tax. Tax work, and you get less of it, unfortunately. The trouble with VAT is that, while intellectually it is better than sales taxes, it is very complicated to work out. You have to add up all the VAT you have paid on your purchases and then deduct it from all the VAT you have charged on your sales. And there are different rates for some items – no VAT on books or children’s clothes, for example. So small stores have real problems with it. We are used to it, and it works reasonably for us – though if it goes up to 20% I am sure that people will trade even more in cash rather than have sales and purchases go through the books – but I certainly would not recommend it for the US.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: As for the big picture, the party line in America in 2010 is that the recession is over and that despite the unemployment number there is nothing really wrong with the economy.  Is the worst behind us, or is the worst yet to come?  Is Greece just the beginning of a new, darker level in the world economic condition?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: This could be a jobless economy, indeed. Firms have had to find economies to survive, and often that means doing things with machines that used to be done by people. The economy could be recovering for quite a long time before firms start hiring again in large numbers. But then, yes, on the horizon are other worries like Greece. Greece basically tricked its way into the new European currency, the Euro, by fiddling its budget figures to prove that it was a sound economy. And once in, it basically had AAA status because everyone knew that the rich countries – Germany, principally – would have to do whatever it took to protect the Euro. So Greed, government debt securities – rather like subprime mortgages – suddenly went from junk to ’safe’ investment status, and other countries’ banks bought them up. But as the Greed government ran out of cash, the true and dire state of its finances became clear. Now all our banks are exposed to that risky debt too. Germany and the others have done what they can to shore up Greece. But it is questionable whether they can shore up other risky countries like Spain, whose banks are riddled with bad debt, and Portugal, even Italy. I would not be surprised to see the Euro breaking apart. One part of me will smile and say ‘I told you so’, but most of me thinks this is very choppy water for any country with an internationalized banking system like the UK or US.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: On a lighter note, as we may well be two peoples separated by a common language, please give the official British to American translation of the following terms:  quango,  barmy, toff, throwing sickies, and budgie.

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: Cor blimey, guv! Let me think. A Quango is quasi-autonomous non-government organization. It is all those boards, panels, and committees that are effectively agencies of government – and some have the right to prosecute and fine people – but whose staff are not officially ‘civil servants’. Politicians like keeping things off the books. And they don’t even keep records of what these bodies do, how much their officials are paid, and so on. Or at least, they don’t tell us.

Barmy is a sort of combination of daft and crazy.

A toff is a member of the upper classes, like David Cameron, who went to Eton and Oxford. The newspapers love reproducing the picture of him at Oxford, in his white tie and tailcoat.

Throwing sickies is the traditional British pastime of getting a day off work by phoning up and saying you are unwell. UK employment law contains such generous provisions for absence that there is almost no downside to this national sport, except in terms of our economic efficiency, of course. The public sector has roughly twice the absences of private business, naturally.

A budgie is a budgerigar, a small colourful bird rather like a lovebird. It is also the name of the helicopter in a series of children’s books written by Price Andrew’s ex-wife, the Duchess of York. Since the Duchess, who is always pleading poverty, was recently filmed offering access to the Prince for £500,000, some people think she should be doing a different kind of ‘bird’ but most of us want to see her left free to add to the general gaity of the nation.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Finally, is The Alternative Manifesto available in the U.S., and how can people get a copy?  How can people follow your work at the Adam Smith Institute?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: Yes, go to Amazon, put in my name and you will see it there along with the prequel, The Rotten State of Britain, and lots of other things by me on a wide range of different subjects. Or click http://tinyurl.com/2wo4bcj to go straight to it. And you can follow the Adam Smith Institute blog at www.adamsmith.org/blog – and at http://tinyurl.com/39n4jex you can follow the RSS feed. Then there is our Facebook group at http://tinyurl.com/39mgcrf and at http://tinyurl.com/34fh7o2 you can follow our Twitter feed. Everywhere, really!

Editor’s Note: In this exclusive interview, FairTax advocate and author Ken Hoagland discusses everything from Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive agenda to the surprising progressive nature of the FairTax.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Mr. Hoagland, people know they don?t like the current tax system, but they hear similar terms like Flat Tax and FairTax, and it might start running together.  Why the FairTax and not the Flat Tax?

KEN HOAGLAND: The FairTax is a national retail consumption tax that lifts all federal taxes from earnings of any sort—including personal and business earnings. The Flat Tax, while better than the overly complicated and corrupted current system, still taxes the engines of our economy—work, savings and investments. The Flat Tax also continues the FICA payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare on top of a Flat Tax rate while the FairTax eliminates both income taxes and the highly regressive FICA payroll  tax.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: The title of your new book The FairTax Solution: Financial Justice for All Americans is intriguing.   Is this a play on the term “Social Justice”?

KEN HOAGLAND: No, not really. The title is simply a statement that all contribute to the FairTax, including all those who now illegally shield their income from taxation and all those who have secured special treatment through tax lobbyists. The consequence is that each taxpayer can carry less of the burden of federal taxes because the tax base is expanded to include those who now avoid a fair share. The title of this book also alludes to the fact that, under the FairTax, the fruits of our labors belong first to the taxpayer not, as we see now, to the federal government. Finally, it is simple justice that our tax system actually benefit the taxpayer and the national economy and not operate as a system whose primary beneficiaries are members of the political class who profit through manipulation of the federal tax code.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Throughout the book, there are numerous quotes from antiquity and the American past.  Which is your favorite and why?

KEN HOAGLAND: From Thomas Jefferson, an American I admire as much or more than any other from our history: “A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

This is my favorite quote from my new book because it reflects the view that all governments inevitably gather power to themselves because of the entirely human ambitions of those who work in government. He saw that the best government leaves people alone to pursue happiness while restricting, through law, the violence that is also part of human nature. Jefferson and the other framers of the Constitution knew that the myriad system of checks and balances would only slow the inherent nature of government to grow at the expense of those it was designed to serve. He understood, and said here, that the taxes exacted from labor were the key to either ensuring personal freedom or eroding such liberty.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: It seems that the greatest obstacle to the FairTax is that it would require a constitutional amendment.  Thinking back on history, these movements tend to take decades, such as the temperance movement of the 19th century finally culminating in prohibition of alcohol.  Realistically, what might be the time frame for such a massive overhaul of the Constitution?

KEN HOAGLAND: The 16th amendment allowing the income tax won ratification almost 100 years ago and has been expanded and corrupted ever since. It won the approval of the public during a populist surge in public opinion led, interestingly, by Republican Teddy Roosevelt who promised the new (then-modest) tax would simply be a way to “soak the rich.” I believe we will see the needed citizen pressure to overthrown the badly corrupted tax system by the 100 year anniversary of the income tax in 2013.

It is fitting and perhaps even symmetrical that the current populist grassroots uprising we are now seeing should throw off what has become an intrusive, destructive and unfair instrument of a new American aristocracy that, in effect, makes up the modern political class. They are spending our money as if it were theirs and creating policies to advance themselves at our expense. The current tax system has fueled and will continue to fuel unchecked growth of the federal level of government if not reformed or ripped out by the roots and replaced.

FairTax legislation will not prevail until there is such overwhelming pressure from the public that the self-interest of those who perpetuate the broken tax system is eclipsed. Seen this way, the passage of the FairTax over the objections of those in and around Congressional tax writing committees is the threshhold event for legislation allowing repeal of the 16th amendment and, later, ratification, driven by public pressure, by state legislatures. Failing ratification, the FairTax legislation “sunsets” seven years after passage.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: To get bipartisan support, the partisans would demand compromise.  Is there any part of the FairTax that could be compromised?

KEN HOAGLAND: The FairTax is far more fair, transparent and positive on the national economy than the income tax system. Fairly considered, it is very good for Americans across the political spectrum and should, by the merits alone, win support from union halls as well as advocates for the poor, middle class families, and every investor and free market capitalist.

There are many interdependent elements in the FairTax that create the “whole.” Changes to the legislation, like exempting certain categories of retail purchases, would damage the overall effects, require higher tax rates on every consumer and allow the profit and power driven motives for corruption of the tax system once again. So no, the basic design of the FairTax must be maintained in order to achieve a broader and fairer system of taxation based on the more stable base of American consumption. No proposal, however, can be perfect in every respect (even with $22 million of high-level economic research), so technical changes that are needed that are true to the concept of ending taxation on earnings, production and investment should, of course, be considered.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Let’s say that the nation does reach a tipping point and adopt the Fair Tax.  What would be the greatest pro, and what would be the greatest con?

KEN HOAGLAND: Many argue that the best thing about the FairTax is that we take home our whole paychecks WITHOUT money first subtracted by government. Some might argue that the almost immediate strengthening of our economy and creation of desperately needed jobs are the best things about the FairTax.  It has been projected, in fact, that trillions of dollars of private investment, now offshore, will flow into our economy as we become the most favorable tax environment in the world. It is hard to name something better than this, but I will.

The greatest advantage of the FairTax in my view is the visibility of the cost of the federal government and the connection of government spending measures to personal earnings. Today, taxes are hidden from plain view through withholding and payroll taxes. For many, government spending is wrongly (and destructively) seen as “free money.” Politicians can’t resist spending from the federal Treasury even though we are now far past spending what we have and are spending, instead, borrowed money secured with pledges of future earnings by yet-to-be-born generations of American citizens. The FairTax puts the cost of the federal government on every retail sales receipt, thereby turning every consumer into an ardent stakeholder in the behavior of elected officials. This will inevitably lead to what is now destructively missing–widespread pressure on legislators to act responsibly with our collective and individual wealth. Without such a check and balance, we are almost certainly on a path to ruination.

The worst thing? Once we reach that tipping point, keeping legislators true to the details of the legislation will be a real challenge because there is a very strong motivation by elected officials to keep the cost of the government hidden, to have ongoing power to pick winners and losers in the tax code and to profit from the granting of favors and special tax provisions. To avoid this, citizens will have to be as–or more alert–and forcefully proactive with legislators as ever before in the history of the nation. It is a steep hill to climb to wrest power from the government and deliver it back to the people, but worth it.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: As of now the current tax code is 67,500 pages. How long would the FairTax code be?

KEN HOAGLAND: Income tax regulations now fill 67,500 pages and are so complex that we spent more than $310 billion last year on the paperwork alone before any taxes were paid.  Regulations for the FairTax have not yet been written but would surely be a fraction of this total. The basic legislation for the FairTax is 131 pages long. Unlike the current system there will be no personal tax returns filed, and the test for retailers who submit taxes to state sales tax authorities is simple–you sold this many dollars of goods or services and you owe 23% of the combination of sales and owed taxes in payments. More than 80% of all retail sales now occur in large chains so the enforcement and oversight responsibility will be far more manageable and cost taxpayers less.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: One of the surprising things in reading about a national sales tax such as the Fair Tax is that it is “nonregressive.” People will naturally compare it to something like the Tennessee sales tax that hits necessities like groceries at nearly 10%.  How can Fair Tax proponents explain the difference?

KEN HOAGLAND: There are several elements that make the FairTax more “progressive” than the income tax system. Elimination of highly regressive FICA taxes is a big one. Everyone pays it, and for the self-employed, it is 15.3% off the top of the first dollar earned. FICA taxes are a drag on job creation because they represent a self-destructive 7.65% tax on the salary paid to every new hire.

The “prebate” is the second major element of the FairTax that makes it more progressive than the income tax system. The prebate is essentially a one-month advance on the tax consumers pay on spending up to the poverty level. It is a check that arrives at the first of every month in the mailboxes of every (legal) American household. The poverty level varies by family size and the checks reflect that. The prebate amounts to 23% of an annual poverty level income, by family size, divided into 12 equal monthly payments. As such, the prebate reimburses all FairTaxes for those at or below the poverty line. Because it goes to all households, irrespective of income, the closer one is to the poverty line, the greater the effect on annual taxes. That’s progressive. A middle class family of four will see a little more than $29,000 a year of federal tax free spending because of the prebate.

Two other elements of the FairTax effect should be noted—the prebate deals Congress out in deciding what should and should not be taxed because that is the pathway to profit and power-driven corruption of the tax code at the hands of lobbyists and members of Congress. While all new goods and services are subject to the FairTax (used good are not), the prebate allows a just and rational reimbursement for taxes on the necessities of life. Secondly, the FairTax protects families from taxes on such necessities but creates a system where the more one spends, the more tax one pays. In this way the FairTax puts the power of taxation decisions (both timing and amounts) in the hands of the individual instead of Congressional committees. It also makes existing wealth subject to taxation, when spent, unlike the current system which only taxes income.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Another issue that might impede the FairTax is basic math.  People will see 23%  and 30% as the rate, and both numbers are actually correct.  What’s the simplest way to explain this without bogging people down with terms like “inclusive” and “exclusive”?

KEN HOAGLAND: Calculated as sales taxes are commonly figured, it is a 30% tax. Calculated as income taxes are always calculated, it is a 23% tax. One counts the tax alone and the later counts the tax as a percentage of both. At most (and you have to spend more than $900,000 a year to arrive at this figure) the FairTax requires 23% of everything you spend. Today, on the other hand, we spend on taxes an average of more than 31% of everything we earn. Is it better to cap federal taxation at, at most, 23% of what is spent or pay, on average more than 30% of everything earned?

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: On a different note entirely, Mike Huckabee is painted in a very positive light in this book.  Did the Republicans pick the wrong candidate in ‘08, and was Huckabee the right one?

KEN HOAGLAND: I found Mike Huckabee to be friendly, keenly intelligent and insightful and, at his core, thoroughly principled. He reminded me of Ronald Reagan with his sunny personality and unwavering values and ethics. I believe he would have made a fine President, perhaps one of our best, and I regret that anemic early campaign contributions made a more powerful campaign impossible. Of all the candidates, I personally felt that he best represented who we are as a people—faithful, fair and generous but also tough and principled, inventive and, at once, both hopeful and doggedly determined.

That said, I respect the will of the people and believe that even if it takes a while, the American people always figure out the right course for the nation. The challenge for us, and why I believe so strongly in the potential of the FairTax, is for our will to be truly and honestly reflected in the actions of our government. Too often, it is not.

I very strongly believe that the passionate argument between different points of view that has occurred since our earliest days as a nation is not a weakness. It is the strength of our system of self-government–enabled by our Constitution–and the lasting virtue of the nation over the centuries. The assessment of Mr. Obama as well as who should have won the Republican nomination is going on right now and I have little doubt that our judgment will again be the right one.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Finally, how can people get a copy of the Fair Tax Solution and follow you and your work?

KEN HOAGLAND: My new book is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and most booksellers. A link to booksellers and an excerpt of the book can be found at www.kenhoagland.com.

Editor’s Note: In this interview, J.D. Hayworth discusses his primary campaign for U.S. Senate against John McCain, his distaste for  Big Government, the need for border security, his “involvement” with the Birther movement, and more.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Congressman Hayworth, you have a monumental task ahead of you, namely defeating the 2008 Republican standard bearer in the 2010 primaries.  What is it that has changed in a year and a half that gives you confidence in this race?

J.D. HAYWORTH: What continues to change more than anything is John McCain, who I actually campaigned for way back in 2000.  He continues to abandon core conservative principles and the voters in Arizona have noticed.  There was a poll last year that showed that more than 60% of Arizona Republicans felt that John McCain did not share their conservative values.  After that, there was a Rasmussen poll that showed he and I running neck-and-neck in a hypothetical matchup.  Then you have to add the wonderful reawakening of this country’s patriotic base.  Obama has shown us what the future looks like if we do not get our act together and elect real, consistent conservatives to office.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: We all know that John McCain has an (R) following his name, but there has been a lot of speculation about his actual political identity.  He is a self-described “maverick,” but some say that’s code for progressive.  Is he a progressive Republican cut from the same cloth as Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Herbert Hoover?

J.D. HAYWORTH: You could certainly make that argument.  His voting record can be liberal on some items to moderate on others, and he seems far more interested in pleasing the readers of the New York Times than he does the voters of Arizona.  It is quite possible that John truly believes that Republicans are the party of open borders, bank bailouts, big government intrusion into our health care system, and higher taxes, but he and I are going to have to disagree on that one.  I think his votes on those bills were very wrong and I was on the other side of those issues from him.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Similarly, at this point there is a din of talking head echoes in Washington bemoaning a lack of bipartisanship.  As “the consistent conservative” in your race, what’s your view on bipartisanship and the lack thereof?

J.D. HAYWORTH: I think that bipartisanship can be a laudable goal when we are talking about issues where a healthy compromise can be found.  But can you find a compromise on spending $850 Billion to bailout the banks, including $150 Billion in earmarks?  I don’t think so.  I would be arguing, along with my conservative brethren, that we should not be spending that money at all, while senators even more liberal than John McCain might be arguing for $1 Trillion.  John McCain might consider $850 Billion a bipartisan middle ground, but it is a horrible vote and horrible legislative outcome.  In that situation, bipartisanship is not worth $850 Billion of taxpayer money.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: McCain is at this time sponsoring legislation called the Dietary Supplement Safety Act, regulating vitamins and supplements.  No one wants to be harmed by such a product, so why isn¹t this good legislation?

J.D. HAYWORTH: Again we see John approaching an issue with a Big Government solution.  To the Left, there is nothing that cannot be improved by establishing a bureaucracy to oversee it and hundreds or thousands of pages of rules to control it.  It also looks after the giant companies that can afford the legions of compliance attorneys at the expense of the smaller companies.  Look, when you create a new drug to fight cancer, you can patent it and have exclusive rights to the profits from the product for years and years.  That is lucrative enough that you can afford to go through the FDA approval process.  But these small companies are dealing with natural substances like Vitamin C.  You can’t patent Vitamin C or the rest of these natural substances.  So there is no great payday at the end, and there is no way to afford the process.  The McCain-Dorgan bill is not designed to protect people; it is designed to protect the big companies that do not like losing market share to natural alternatives to expensive medication.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: You were part of the Revolution of 1994.  When one looks back at the Contract With America, many of those planks went unfulfilled—such as zero baseline budgeting—yet they seem to be the prescription for treating the ailing federal budget.  Will you work to renew those ideas, or is something new the answer?

J.D. HAYWORTH: I think we passed a lot of good things while I was in the House, but not all of them were signed by President Clinton.  Still, what we had was an excellent framework for solutions that could still help us today.  I would definitely keep fighting for fundamental reforms because they are the only way that we are going to really change Washington, D.C.  We can tinker at the edges and not get much done, or we can pursue fundamental reforms and make a real difference.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: According to the ASU Morrison Institute, Arizona is about $1.5 billion in the red.  Likewise, cities like Phoenix are behind as well.  There are plans in the works around the state to lay off teachers.  There will be pressure to bring home the pork. How will you balance what’s good for Arizona with what’s good for the country?

J.D. HAYWORTH: Less government and more money in the pockets of our citizens is good for Arizona and the country.  Ending bailouts and earmarks, cutting regulation, and pursuing pro-growth policies is good for Arizona and the country.  Secure borders and a federal government that pays for its failures to secure them for the last several decades is good for Arizona and the country. Arizona spent more than $2 Billion last year to deal with the costs of illegal immigration, and that is money that our federal government should be reimbursing us.  But they don’t, and now our state government has to be making these tough choices because of it.  I will make reimbursing Arizona a top priority.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Arizona is of course a border state on the front lines of illegal immigration.  Conventional wisdom says that Hispanics are opposed to any attempt to bring order to the border, and “comprehensive” immigration reform is waiting to resurface, probably in early 2011.  What’s the alternative to blanket amnesty?

J.D. HAYWORTH: Conventional wisdom is certainly wrong.  There are tens of thousands of conservative Hispanic and Latino voters who want our borders secured, not just for economic reasons but for reasons of national security. They have supported our efforts in Arizona to improve enforcement of our laws and to deny taxpayer-funded benefits to those here illegally.  I’m grateful for the support my campaign has from these voters as well.  Now, does that mean that John McCain and Barack Obama don’t still want an amnesty plan?  Of course not; they certainly do.  But John isn’t going to push it while we are in this primary. He will wait until 2011 if he is re-elected.  And that’s another very good reason why we need to thank John for his lifetime of service, but welcome him home, and replace him with a consistent conservative who will vote to protect our country and secure our borders.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: In the area of energy policy, Arizona might stand to benefit from green technology.  There¹s a lot of sun there, so much so that the state could be a leader in solar energy.  Is it practical, and is it the right course of action if the goal is to free the country from the turmoil of the Middle East?

J.D. HAYWORTH: Energy independence is a very worthy goal, and solar is one part of the puzzle.  But its not the only part.  Which is why it was troubling to see John McCain vote against domestic energy production and against drilling in ANWR.  He even gave the Hard Left a PR coup by comparing drilling there to drilling in the Grand Canyon, an absurd comparison and a damaging statement when the goal should be energy independence and greater national security.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: As a member of the media in recent years, you are an opposition researcher’s dream with hours and hours of recorded statements.  As such, a bit of a controversy around the so-called “Birther” movement has arisen around your campaign.  Would you like to set the record straight?

J.D. HAYWORTH: The McCain campaign has been pushing this manufactured controversy for weeks, trying to distract from John’s very public flubs on his being “misled” on the bailouts and on how he suspended his presidential campaign because President Bush “asked him to.”  So they’ve gone back to my old radio program and found times when we talked about the issue and tried to make something out of nothing.  Look, as a radio host it was my job to talk about the things that my listeners cared about, and the topic of Barack Obama and his birth certificate was certainly in the news for some time.  But the idea that because we talked about a topic, so I am therefore automatically an advocate for one position or another is false.  Obama is the President, and that’s a fact.  John McCain is a big-spending moderate who calls himself a maverick and that’s another fact.  Is it any wonder he wants to change the subject?

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Finally, how can people find out more about you,
and the campaign?

J.D. HAYWORTH: So glad you asked!  http://www.jdforsenate.com/is the website and you can learn more there.  You can also make a contribution, sign up to receive our campaign updates, or get more involved in any number of ways.  I hope that all of your readers visit the website and sign up, no matter where they live.  This is the most important Republican Senate primary in the country, and we all have a stake in its outcome.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE

SENATOR SANTORUM: The biggest threat to our nation’s security is the war against radical Islam.  Since 9/11/01, I have said that we need to accurately identify our enemy so that we can effectively defeat it.  The radical Islamists who are hell bent on destroying our way of life and prosperity aren’t just simply terrorists – terror is a tactic – they are an
ideological enemy who will use their own people as weapons.

I also believe that a nuclear-armed Iran and its rogue president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an enormous threat to our nation’s security.  However, one bright spot is Iran’s Green Revolution. It continues to grow and could lead Iran into a revolution that may end Ahmadinejad’s reign.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  One thing that your organization has pointed to as a problem is Shariah Law, or Islamic Law.  In Europe there has been a push to recognize this in cases such as a ruling in Germany a couple of years ago that allowed a man to beat his wife.  As a watchdog against this, have you observed any such rulings or policies in the United States?

SENATOR SANTORUM: I am very concerned about issues related to libel tourism, Shariah-compliant finance and attempts by the United Nations to employ “defamation of religion” to silence the critics of Islamism.  These issues
are much worse in Europe, but we must be particularly vigilant here because these issues have a tendency to migrate to the U.S. For this reason, it is especially important for the U.S. to lead the way in speaking out about the dangers of Shariah Law.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Lately Sarah Palin has dominated political conversations once again.  Before her VP nomination, you advised in an op-ed that it was “better for John McCain to be safe than sorry.”   What was your initial reaction and what is your assessment of the pick in hindsight?

SENATOR SANTORUM: At the time, I felt Senator John McCain made the right choice for his vice presidential nominee.  Governor Sarah Palin had the conservative credentials that Senator McCain needed to balance out some of
his more moderate positions.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Speaking of hindsight, you went to the Senate riding the wave of the Revolution of 1994, which was the first time in half a century that Republicans controlled Congress.  Looking at the Contract with America, there were a number of good ideas that never made it to fruition, such as zero baseline budgeting.  Whatever happened to the Contract with America?

SENATOR SANTORUM: If you look at the Contract with America, we were able to achieve many things we set out to do.  For example, we passed welfare reform, which empowered millions of Americans to leave the welfare rolls and enter the workforce.  But with that said, did we accomplish everything we set out to? No, but we did a great deal.  Unfortunately, the further we got away from 1994 and the principles that brought us those electoral successes, the more difficult it became to pass important conservative legislation.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  You have walked in Senate chamber.  Will the proposed healthcare plan make it past that body?

SENATOR SANTORUM:  This legislation is so deeply flawed and will change the course of our nation’s health care system for the worse for generations to come.  We cannot allow it to pass.  It’s very important for Americans to
realize that this thing is not over yet.  Folks all over this country should continue to speak out to their Senators and Representatives to voice their opposition to this bill.  Particularly now with President Obama backtracking on his promise to ensure the negotiations would be transparent and televised for all to see, many more Americans are becoming skeptical of this legislation.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: What would Cap-and-Trade do to a coal and steel state like Pennsylvania?  Might it have electoral implications?

SENATOR SANTORUM: Absolutely.  That bill would destroy a coal state like Pennsylvania.  Over tens of thousands of Pennsylvania families are directly or indirectly impacted by the coal industry.  It is frightening just how focused the President and Congress are on destroying this industry.  Rather than focusing on energy technology, this Congress is trying to recklessly eliminate an entire source of energy.  There’s a reason why the United States is called the Saudi Arabia of coal, and it’s because we have decades of coal reserves that can be utilized for electricity generation and
coal-to-liquid fuel technology.  Not only is this an energy issue, but it is an economic and national security issue.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: In a similar vein, Pennsylvania flirted with George W.  Bush, and McCain seemingly staked his entire campaign on it, yet in the end a state that John Carville once described as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh
with Alabama in between” looked much less like the latter and more like the former.  What is your assessment of Pennsylvania’s status as a blue state?

SENATOR SANTORUM: I think Pennsylvania will continue to be a swing state for many years to come.  Just look at how aggressively both President Obama and Senator McCain campaigned in Pennsylvania, which I think demonstrated that
they both knew Pennsylvania wasn’t a given either way.  The issues that matter to Pennsylvanians are very dynamic and change from region to region, ensuring that Pennsylvania will be a competitive state for elections to come.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Is Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter finally on his way out, or will he survive yet again?

SENATOR SANTORUM: Senator Specter is the ultimate political survivor.  His decision to switch parties was made so that he could survive another race. While I think he’s going to face a tough challenge from Congressman Sestak, he cannot be counted out.  However, if he does survive the primary, he may not survive a general election against Pat Toomey.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Have you thought about running for office again?

SENATOR SANTORUM: Yes, I have been traveling around the country and am considering a run for higher office.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: On a personal note, you are the proud father of seven children. How do you find the time to balance that with your public life?

SENATOR SANTORUM: My loss in 2006 was a mixed blessing.  I’ve said this many times since 2006 that God gives you what you need, not necessarily what you want.  And while I didn’t want to lose my race in 2006, I’m thankful that it
has allowed me to spend more time at home with my wife and kids and focus on what’s really important.  That has been a real blessing.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Finally, how can people find out more about you, the EPPC’s Program to Protect America’s Freedom, and your work?

SENATOR SANTORUM: You can find more about me by visiting  www.ricksantorum.com or http://www.eppc.org/programs/ppaf/.

In this exclusive interview, Economics Professor and Rush Limbaugh guest host Walter E. Williams tackles everything from the economy to the Great Depression to “Black Economics” to the perfect gift for the Mrs. this holiday season.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: In your book, Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism, you wrote that American education is “in shambles.”  Simultaneously there is a major push to have more and more people attend college.  These students are the freshmen in your classes, so what’s the most egregious example of miseducation you have seen personally in the classroom?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Oh, well.  I’ve seen students who cannot do simple mathematical computations, students who have very poor use of the language.  Let me give you one example.  Some years ago (I haven’t noticed it recently or I haven’t taught the introductory classes where I do get a lot of freshmen.) I’ve come across students writing in their bluebook.  They cite something, and spell it several different ways, site, cite, sight, not being able to differentiate between the various terms.  Then a lot of it is that students are many times just plain lazy.  They don’t want to do the work.  They expect a high grade for a mediocre performance.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: “C” means average, but then they want the “A” or excellent score?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Oh, absolutely.  I did a column a couple of weeks ago, and if you look at since 1960, grade point averages have been rising, but SAT scores have been falling, which tells you something about grade inflation in colleges.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: You are a professor of economics.  If a student walked into your office at George Mason University, declared that she were quitting college, but wanted to know one thing about economics for the real world, what would it be?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: There’s no free lunch.  That is that there’s nothing free.  Everything costs.  That’s one of the problems that our economy’s facing right now or that Americans are facing.  They think that they can get free health care.  They can get free education or free transportation, or that cleaner air does not cost us anything.  And so, that’s one of the uncomfortable things about economists.  We tell people that things cost, and when you say things cost, that simply means that when you get more of one thing, you have to give up something else.  That is, nothing is free.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: You have called attention to something called the Enumerated Powers Act that would require Congress to list the Constitutional authority for each law, which has not yet, of course, passed.  Even so, wouldn’t the claim just be the General Welfare Clause, or the Necessary and Proper Clause?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Yeah.  Congress will always find a way around the Constitution.  However, I think if you read the Enumerated Powers Act that’s sponsored by Congressman John Shadegg, who has introduced it every Congress since 1995, it does not allow them to get away with the Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause.  They have to specifically point in the Constitution where they get the authority.  And as a matter of fact the reason the Enumerated Powers Act’s maximum number of co-sponsors in the House has been 31, or it could be a bit higher than that (and it has never had a co-sponsor in the Senate until this year) is that the Congressmen can read the writing on the wall.  If Congress were forced to obey the United States Constitution, then I would say that two-thirds to three-quarters of all the spending Congress does would be found to be unconstitutional.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: You’re probably right about that.  Article 1, Section 8 has a very short list of things government is able to do according to the word of the law.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: That’s right, and if you read the Founders’ statements, they say that Congress can only do those things that are specifically enumerated.  On my web page Walter E. Williams.com, I have quotes from Madison and Jefferson, and I believe that Jefferson said that Congress cannot do anything in the general welfare but only those things specifically enumerated.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Those quotes are full of that kind of thing because they were trying to get away from King George III and Parliament and some of those decisions.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: That’s absolutely right, and Americans do not understand the level of contempt that Congress has for the Constitution because here’s a guy or a woman who puts their hand on a bible and swears to uphold the Constitution, and the first thing they do is try to tear it down.  However, the more worrisome thing is that I wonder whether the contempt by Congressmen for the Constitution just represents the contempt Americans for the Constitution, that is if you said to Americans, look, this Social Security program, it’s not authorized by the Constitution, and we’re going to get rid of it, they would go ape.  Or if you say, look, this senior citizen prescription drug program is not in the Constitution, so we’re going to end it, you’d have these people rioting.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Everybody wants to cut spending except on his or her personal slice of the pork, it seems.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Right, but the key point here is that Congress’ contempt for the United States Constitution might be simply representative of the general contempt among the population of the American people.  One of the tragic things is that if by magic, James Madison were running for the presidency in 2008 making the kind of statements he made when he was President and also when he was at the Philadelphia convention, the American people might even lynch him.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  He might not even get the chance to make the statements because they would take one look at him on television, being 5’4” and 120 pounds, and they wouldn’t take him seriously.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Yeah.  One of the quotations on my page is what he said in 1794.  In 1794 Congress appropriated $15,000 to help some French refugees.  James Madison stood on the floor of the House irate and said, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article in the Constitution that authorizes Congress to spend the money of its constituents for the purpose of benevolence.”

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  And he’s the Father of the Constitution, so there’s no wiggle room there.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: That’s right, and if you look at federal expenditures today, two-thirds or three quarters of it is for the purpose of benevolence. Handouts to farmers, handouts to business, bailouts, food stamps, Social Security, prescription drugs, just name it.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: One time on the radio you said the Republicans are almost as bad as the Democrats because they’ll take your money and give it to a different set of people.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Oh yeah.  The Democrats believe in taking your money and my money and giving it to poor people in cities, and Republicans believe in taking your money and my money and giving it to banks and farmers.  They both agree on taking our money.  They just disagree on what to use it for, and the last Republican Congress is evidence of that. When Republicans had control of the White House, and the House of Representatives, and the Senate, they went on a spending binge.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: It seems that when Gingrich and the Contract with America had sort of expired, that was the end of that kind of thing.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: And they just proved that it’s a matter of whose ox is being gored.  And so this is one of the faults that many people make.  They think they can change what goes on in Washington D.C. by changing the personalities involved, by electing different people.  That’s not very optimistic because if you elect somebody to office, they’re going to find the same constraints as anybody else, so what we have to do is change the rules of the game.  That is we have to, for example, have a spending limitation amendment to the Constitution saying that Congress can only spend a certain percentage of the GDP.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Or at the very least the balanced budget amendment that never quite happened.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: I’m against the balanced budget amendment.  Look at it.  Our GDP, our gross domestic product, is $14 trillion.  I would not be happy if Congress spent $14 trillion and taxed us $14 trillion.  We’d have a balanced budget, but we’d be slaves.  The point is to limit federal spending and not worry about the balanced budget.  I’d much rather have an unbalanced budget where Congress spends $4 trillion and taxes us $2 trillion.  We’d be freer.  And Congress would just love a balanced budget amendment in the sense that they’d always be able to say we must raise taxes to balance the budget.  Spending could just go through the roof, and then they could come back and say there’s an amendment saying we have to balance the budget, so up your taxes go.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: How dangerous are both the current deficits and the overall national debt?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: They’re very dangerous.  The national debt will never be paid off.  Congress will repudiate the debt.  That’s what all countries do with a national debt when it gets out of line.  And one way to repudiate the debt is just inflate the currency.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  And so then you have a Weimar Republic situation?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Well, hopefully it won’t get that bad.  But I think that we run a real risk of seeing the inflation during the Jimmy Carter days as the good times.  I would surely hope that won’t be the case.  But see the Federal Reserve has the capacity to break the back of an inflation, but you can imagine next year or the year after, there’s been some revival in the economy and we’re clipping along but prices are rising and the Federal Reserve starts tight money policy, they’re going to run into all kinds of political gunfire as a result.  People will say just as the economy is getting on its feet the Federal Reserve is starting the tight money policy to stifle the economy.  That will be the political argument against the Federal Reserve pulling in the reigns on the money supply.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: And that would be another one of those potential populace rebellions too when all of a sudden the interest rate on the house will be 10%.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: And what you’re going to have is the inflation and the higher interest rates, but they might just disguise it, that’s all, but we’re still going to suffer from the spending binge we’ve been on.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Speaking of that, how will the average person know when the economy has recovered?  What are the best signs?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: I think that one of the signs is the recovery in the equity markets.  And what equity markets are really about is that they’re guessing how the future will be, short term, at least.  And there are leading indicators of recovery and lagging indicators of recovery, and employment is one of the lagging ones.  Why employment has not increased the way it has been promised to increase is that firms are becoming more productive.  They are finding out that they can do more things with fewer workers.   In this recovery, the employment will not rebound as rapidly as it has in the past.  Firms have found ways to economize on the most costly input, namely labor.  If they can get machines that don’t need sick days off, and don’t demand higher wages and health insurance and all these other things, they’ll surely choose those methods of production in contrast to wage labor.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  This is the 80^th anniversary of the Stock Market crash that contributed to the onset of the Great Depression.  Is this current economic situation the worst since the Great Depression, as it is often said?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: I don’t know.  And first of all the stock market crash had absolutely nothing to do with the Great Depression.  If you look at, just look at the numbers there, by mid-year 1930, the stock market had recovered its October losses.  But nonetheless the Great Depression went on until 1946.  And what caused the Great Depression and what extended the length of the depression was failure by government.  The Federal Reserve Bank changed money supply by 25% and then Hoover and the Democratic Congress raised taxes 25% to 63% and then the New Deal legislation regulating the economy made it worse.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  And that doesn’t even include the Roosevelt Recession in ‘37.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Oh yeah, and Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, around 1937 said, “Mr. President, we have spent more money than we have ever spent, and it has not done any good in terms of revitalizing the economy.”

Now I think one of the things Americans do not realize is that we have been around since 1787, and we went from 1787 until 1930 experiencing depressions, and sometimes they called them panics, of a duration between one and six years.  Nobody until 1930 thought that the federal government ought to be involved in the economy in terms of stimulus packages, bailouts, and all that kind of stuff.  Each time we had a depression, and we came out of it.   A good example is 1921.  There was a sharp downturn in the economy.  Nothing was done about it, and we recovered by 1922-23 and just went off to the Roaring Twenties with no government program.  And rather remarkably, when we did have a government program in 1930 under the Hoover and the Roosevelt administrations, we had the longest depression of our history.  It went from 1931 to 1946.  And a lot of people say that the Depression was ended by the start of World War II.  That’s utter nonsense.  And if you ask anybody who was living during World War II and were buying things, what could they buy, and how were they living, it was not a good thing.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Have you ever disagreed with Rush Limbaugh?  What was the issue, if there was a time?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: I disagree with his stance on the decriminalization of drugs.  I think that the War on Drugs has been one of the most devastating policies in recent history.  We have made many neighborhoods unlivable.  It’s corrupted public officials including policemen and people at our border because this stuff could not get in the United States unless somebody’s getting paid off.  My view on it is that if anybody’s going to use drugs, heroin or cocaine, I would spend some time trying to convince them not to use it, because I don’t think it’s very good for you. But on the other hand, I have so much respect for individual liberty, that I would never take any measures to stop the person from using it.  As a matter of fact, when the first Bush appointed Bill Bennett as the Drug Czar, I asked a question, which was not warmly accepted by people in the administration.  I said, “Look mankind has been trying to eliminate drugs, gambling, and prostitution since before Christ, and it has been an utter failure.” So I asked Bill Bennett whether he thought it would be the Bush administration that would succeed.

So my view is that I think the Drug War is inhumane in one sense.  If a person is hell bent on destroying himself, then I say let him destroy himself rather than force him to destroy others in the process of destroying himself. What I’m saying is that cocaine is cheap to produce, and the reason it is very costly is because of all the laws and regulations, all the things people have to do to get it to the market.  Drug addicts are not very productive, so that means that they have to go rob, steal, and murder people in order to get money to get their fix.  And I say that’s inhumane, forcing them to destroy others in the process of destroying themselves.  So I’d rather just let a drug addict sit in a corner and nod and go his way rather than forcing him to destroy others.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Even if that person is on the dole?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Nobody should be on the dole.  The point is, I don’t believe that one person should be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another because that’s what slavery is all about.  That is when you force one American to work and you take his money to support some other American, I think that’s hideous, but we do a whole lot of it in our society.  Nobody has the right in my opinion to live at the expense of another person.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Some readers may not know that you are also an “expert” on gender relations.  What is the perfect gift for the Mrs. this upcoming Christmas season?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Unfortunately, my Mrs. (we were married 48 years before she died almost a couple of years ago).  This happened some years ago.  I was doing the Rush Limbaugh show around Christmas time and somebody called up and asked me what did I get for my Mrs. And so I said I got her a pair of golf shoes.  She doesn’t play golf, but the golf shoes have cleats on them so she doesn’t slip and slide on the ice when she’s washing my car in the winter.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  And the e-mails starting flowing in, I’m sure!

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: Oh yeah, and I did it to kind of get the “Feminazis” worked up.  And it went over big, so that’s what I did every year giving people advice what to give their spouse, but it’s all tongue in cheek.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Some time ago, you authored a Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to all Persons of European Decent.  What is the story behind it?  Was there a particular incident that led to it?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: That’s on my web page at Walter E. Williams.com, and if you click on Gift, there it is.  It’s a proclamation of amnesty, and I give it to all Americans of European ancestry, and I say for both their own grievances those of their forebears against my people so that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like damned fools.

This was a number of years ago when I was teaching at Temple University, in the early or mid ‘70s, and my colleagues were talking about some black students who came to the chairman’s office demanding a course in Black Economics.  I was asking my colleagues how do economics differ from black people to white people, and they couldn’t give me any reason, because it’s just nonsense.  I was telling them at a department meeting that if some Italian students came in demanding Italian economics or Polish students came in demanding Polish economics, you’d throw them out of your office by the scruff of their necks, and the reason you don’t throw the black students out of your office is that you feel guilty about what your ancestors might have done to us.  I suggested that I wanted to give them full and general amnesty for their own grievances so that they stop acting like damned fools.  Many white people will tolerate forms of behavior from black people that will not begin to tolerate from white people, and they do it from a sense of guilt.

One other example of this is that I went to lunch, soon after I started Temple University with a very nice guy, as a matter of a fact a refugee from Austria when Hitler came, and he was telling me that he had a number of black students in his class, and they were not doing very well.  He was looking for my advice. I said, “What do you, in fact, do?”  He said, “I try to take into consideration discrimination and the handicaps they have had.”  I said, “I’m not asking that.  You get a pencil just like I get, and you have to put down a grade.  What do you do in that case?” And so he said, “Well if they come every day, and they look like they’re taking notes, I give them a ‘C.’” I said, “That’s very much like you have an English class, and there’s a dog in the class, and one day the dog gets on his hind legs and says, ‘You’re not supposed to do that.’  Well you give the damn dog an ‘A’ no matter what he says, you don’t expect him to talk in the first place, and whatever he says is laudable.”  He said, “I never really looked at it that way.” And he damn sure wouldn’t do the same thing with white students.  He’d flunk them.  But with black students, motivated by guilt and by other things he’d treat them differently than he would treat white students.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Finally, where can people go to find out more about you and your observations on economics and the government?

WALTER E. WILLIAMS: There’s a lot of good stuff on Walter E. Williams.com and also there’s the recent collection of my columns Liberty vs. the Tyranny of Socialism.  Amazon carries it and the Hoover Institution, the publisher, carries it.

Adam Smith, Father of Modern Economics

An All Right Magazine Exclusive Interview

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE:  Dr. Bulter, you are the director of the Adam Smith Institute, a leading British economic think tank named for the Father of Economics, Adam Smith.  If Adam Smith were here today, observing the current economic situation in Britain and America, what would he say?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: Probably “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.” Or, I guess, republic. In other words, households are doing the right thing by tightening their belts, reducing their costs, looking for new sources of income, and paying down debt. That’s how you get out of trouble when you have overspent and over borrowed. Our governments, by contrast, seem to think they can spend their way out of overspending and borrow their way out of debt. You don’t have to be the father of modern economics to know that.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: In Wealth of Nations, Smith asserts that government has but a few true functions including national defense, the administration of justice, and certain public works. Is there a problem with granting a government wider powers in the name of the public good?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: There certainly is! The bigger that governments grow, the more they think they know what is right for the rest of us, and the more responsibilities they take on to themselves and deny to the public. Our government in Britain has taken upon itself quite draconian powers to deal with terrorism, but the trouble is that these powers are being used by minor officials to harass the general public. Local governments have used anti-terrorist legislation to spy on people who they think might be overfilling their garbage cans, illegally tipping rubbish, or letting their dogs foul the footpath. People have even been arrested under anti-terrorist charges for shouting at the Home Secretary in a conference, and daring to walk on a cycle path. Meanwhile we have more CCTV cameras spying on us than anywhere in the world – around 4 million of them, nobody quite knows – and the government wants access to all our phone calls, emails and web visits. And this is all done in the name of the public good!

The only way to stop this expansion of the state into our lives, and to overcome the sheer inefficiency of public services, is to have a much leaner government that simply does not do as much as it does now. You can’t trust the government and the bureaucracy to make itself suddenly more efficient, or to stop using the powers it has to interfere in our lives. You have to get it out of large parts of our lives, so it has no power to go there at all.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: During the current economic crisis, Keynesian principles of borrowing and spending money have generally been applied by those in leadership positions, including members of various political persuasions.  Was Richard Nixon right when he proclaimed that “We are all Keynesians now”?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: I think the monetarist economist Milton Friedman got there before him with that quip. Yes, there is a lot of Keynesianism about. I think Keynes himself would take a more sensible view of the crisis and what to do about it, but his followers tend to congregate in the high-spending government camp. Keynes after all wrote a short book on money, and was very concerned by the ability of governments to mess it up. That is exactly what we have seen here. We had the Fed, aided by the Bank of England and other central banks, flooding the world with money, then telling us they had abolished recessions. All they did was stoke up an enormous and unsustainable boom. Every problem that hit – the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the stock market crash of 1987, Russia defaulting on its debts, 9/11 – their response was to bring down interest rates and stoke up credit. After 9/11, US interest rates fell from 6.25 per cent to just 1 per cent. Nor surprisingly, people went out and borrowed more money to buy more houses. And there you have the source of the crash. All this new money and credit is like drinking whiskey. At the time it gives you an amazing high, and the world starts to look better and better but you can’t keep drinking it forever, and pretty soon you are going to suffer a hangover. And a ‘hair of the dog’, quite frankly, is not going to help. But that is the Keynesian solution…if you have spent too much and things go bad, then spend some more. It’s Krackers.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: What worries a lot of people in America about the long term is the price tag involved with the spending.  Not long ago, within the lifetime of most people reading this interview, the entire budget of the Untied States did not total $1 trillion.  Starting with Bush, but escalating under Obama, now all the economic solutions and new social programs aren’t considered serious if they are not each a trillion dollars By some counts, Obama alone has proposed spending $11 trillion, with some of those programs continuing in perpetuity.  Is this sustainable?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: Of course not. At least, you can muddle through and maybe even pay off your debts as you go along; but you will be poorer as a result. I don’t think people realize the amount of money which it is going to cost the UK and the US to service their enormous debts. Just paying off the interest will hobble both of us for years – decades – to come. If international investors started to believe that our governments could not actually carry the burden, and might default, they would ditch government securities without flinching. Then we would be going cap in hand to the IMF asking for a bailout, which is what the UK did in 1976 after years of profligate spending and borrowing.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Britain has also mirrored the path of America by lowering interest rates to historic lows.  Is this good policy, bad policy, or is it something in between the two?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: It is the right policy, but it came about a year too late. In the UK, we had fairly tight monetary policy from 1997-2001, when the incoming Labour government promised to match the spending plans of the outgoing Conservative one. They had to do that, because nobody trusted them to run the economy. And to their credit, they kept that promise. But once the promise had expired, Gordon Brown – then the finance minister, or Chancellor of the Exchequer – started spending like crazy. He put pressure on the Bank of England to cut interest rates, and he spent and borrowed and then spent and borrowed some more. It was an enormous boom, from 2001-2006. You had the same in the US, with the Fed slashing interest rates after 9/ll. Naturally, with loans now cheap, everyone went out and bought houses, and house prices in the US and UK soared.

But sometime in 2006, the Bank of England realized that it had overdone things. So it raised interest rates a full 1 per cent. That does not sound like much, but when rates were around 4.75 per cent and you raise them to 5.74, your mortgage loan repayments rise by about a quarter. And in fact market interest rates rose even more, beyond 5 per cent. So people who were borrowing because house prices and business seemed to be going higher and higher, suddenly found they were having problems paying their loans. Some banks, too had borrowed in the belief that the boom was real and would last. By fall 2007, we had our first casualty, the Northern Rock bank, which had borrowed faster in order to fuel growth. (When business is booming and everything succeeds, borrowing to fuel growth seems a sensible strategy.) The Bank of England offered it some help, but that just spooked all the customers, and 30,000 of them lined up to pull out their savings. It was a run on a bank, something we had not seen in a century. What the government should have done is to offer Northern Rock a loan to keep going – to be the lender of last resort – but in panic, the government flipped and bailed it out, and guaranteed every penny of its despositors’ money. Having bailed out the bank with the riskiest business model, it could hardly refuse please for a bail-out from the others.

And amazingly, the Bank of England did not cut interest rates. It held them high. So the banks still could not borrow at rates which might save them. By fall 2008, they were dropping like flies. All because interest rate policy was so inept.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: In response to Prime Minister Gordon Brown?s sentiment that economics were too complicated for the average citizen, you have written that the current economic situation is actually very easy to explain — that Britain is flat broke.  What is it that politicians don’t seem to get about that?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: They can’t admit it, at least, not government politicians. Remember that Gordon Brown was in charge of the nation’s finances before he became Prime Minister. He promised us an end to boom and bust. He can hardly admit now that he caused both. And maybe they do really believe that it was not all their fault. They are very keen to blame America, and say it was a world crisis with the UK somehow got caught up in. But in fact it was British banks and British loans and mortgages that caused the crisis in Britain, thanks to incompetent British public finance controls and even worse monetary policy. It’s also easy to blame the bankers for their carefree lending – 125% mortgages and all the rest. But as I say, when business is booming, the rational thing is to get as much of it as possible, and that is what bankers did. They paid large bonuses for staff to bring in business, because all business was good business. They are not doing that any more. It was like being in a casino, with the government handing out free chips and the regulators buying everyone drinks at the bar. No wonder bankers made some pretty risky loans. But I think you need to blame the operators of the casino, not the customers.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: You have also hinted in your writings that there is a danger of stumbling into stagflation.   What was that like for the average person in the 1970s, and how can it be avoided?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: It was terrible in the 1970s, because the theory was that it couldn’t happen. So nobody knew what to do about it. Keynes told us that you could have more inflation and less unemployment, or less inflation but more unemployment. You bought employment with inflation. That stimulus to the economy pumped up prices but also pumped up business and made things prosper. When we got inflation rising higher and higher and unemployment rising higher too, nobody knew what was going on.

Mrs. Thatcher of course knew the answer, which she had got from economists like Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. We had been living beyond our means. A little inflation does little harm, but little good, so governments try a bit more of it. Then a bit more. Eventually it is like a drug, you need higher and higher doses to have much impact. But just as drugs ruin people’s lives, so inflation ruins the economy. People got used to it, then demanded higher wage settlements. Then they demanded wages high enough to compensate for what they lost last year, and also to cover what they expected to lose next year. Naturally there were strikes and disruptions all over the place, leading to the ‘Winter of Discontent’ when public services just broke down. I think we could get back from stagflation these days, because we know it is the inflation that is to blame. But it would not be pretty.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Likewise, many people have become worried about hyperinflation, particularly in regards to Weimar Germany.  How did this affect the average person, and what needs to be done to prevent it?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: I do not think that inflation is our worst problem right now. Yes, inflation is still positive in the UK – though you might have thought that, with people losing their jobs and businesses closing all over the place, it really should be falling. But it is still at moderate levels. I think we understand these days what causes inflation – the government creating too much money. Well, we did that and it has exploded in our faces. I think that governments and the public now want to see sound and stable money, and accept that there has to be pain, such as public spending cuts, maybe even higher taxes – and that the 1970s solution of just printing banknotes is not going to work.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: In America, there has been what might be described as “gold fever” in recent years.  Everyone from pawnshop owners to respected jewelers seems to be willing to “buy your unwanted gold.”  The price has also skyrocketed. Is it a good investment, and if so, is it too late to jump on that bandwagon?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: If I knew that I would be a millionaire. Gold is not a hedge against inflation. It is a hedge against chaos. If you believe that the US or UK other other developed nations might indeed default on their government bonds, then you need to be in gold or something like it. If you take the view that most countries will muddle through, then you have no reason to hide behind gold. The fact is, though, that a lot of people feel a lot more comfortable holding gold than holding US dollars or UK sterling. I cannot blame them. And of course you have a lot of demand from China and other emerging countries where people traditionally save a lot and put their savings into things that last and things that you can wear, like gold. They don’t trust bankers to look after their money either.

ALL RIGHT MAGAZINE: Finally, how can people follow your work and the work of your colleagues at the Adam Smith Institute?

DR. EAMONN BUTLER: Easy. Visit our blog at www.adamsmith.org/blog and you can follow our thinking on all these issues. We believe it is the largest think-tank blog in Europe, so you will be in a lot of good company.

Also, Dr. Butler’s book The Rotten State of Britain is now in paperback:

http://tinyurl.com/mporgd