Episode 169: George F. Will on “American Happiness and Discontents” with Don Boudreaux and John Tamny
Release Date: 01/25/2022
The Bill Walton Show
Author John Tamny joins me on this episode for a freewheeling back and forth about some of today’s big concerns. John, a free market fundamentalist and original thinker, almost always has a contrarian take on things. John’s books include Who Needs the Fed, When Politicians Panicked, Popular Economics and The End of Work. Some of the questions we get into: Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter Why credit's never there when you need it What it means when Jeff Bezos says your margin is my opportunity Has social media censorship been overstated Have social media companies created a market...
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Listen in to a behind the scenes story meeting as the Bill Walton Show team speculates on what’s going on in the world. Starlink satellites and all the junk flying around in space, Elon Musk vs Jeff Bezos, Ukraine, the domino theory, Biden’s open borders, Alyona’s Kazakhstan take on Russia, media’s monolithic coverage of Ukraine, inflation, cooking oil and fertilizer prices, the insane (perhaps) Shanghai covid lockdown, the fragmenting world order and the dollar’s reserve currency status, what’s going on with China and Russia, corporate profits at all time highs … and more. Send...
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We’re more than two years into the Covid-19 pandemic. So by now, we should know enough to assess what we’ve learned about the measures our governments took to mitigate the virus? What worked? What didn’t? Fortunately, we now have a comprehensive comparative study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, authored by University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan - and Steve Moore and Phil Kerpen of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They compared Covid outcomes in the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on three variables: the...
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In this episode I’m talking again with Dr. J. Michael Waller, Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Policy, Mike’s Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today predicted the rise of the KGB, and inevitably, a Vladimir Putin. He was also Annenberg Professor of International Communication at the Institute of World Politics, and instructor in SYOPS operation at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center School at Fort Bragg. In this wide ranging and of necessity, speculative conversation we ask whether, after the Cold War ended, the United States could have brought Russia into alignment...
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This episode is a follow-up to my conversation a few weeks ago with Dr. Peter Vincent Pry about our concerns that our Administration’s responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine could lead to nuclear war. Today, we consider also an alternate possibility that Vladimir Putin is playing a much deeper game than most in the West have imagined. As Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, former Chief of Staff of the Congressional EMP Commission and Director of the US Nuclear Strategy Forum, Dr Pry brings a vast and imaginative knowledge of history...
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Since the COVID-19 virus was loosed upon the world, either intentionally or accidentally, from Wuhan, China, the world has been fundamentally changed. The globalist economic and geopolitical fabric has been torn. There is no one single dominant power anymore and the post Cold War, unipolar world system is gone and is not coming back. Russia now is the first to take advantage of what they think is a window of opportunity. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is but the beginning of many conflicts that will emanate over the next decade. So argues Brandon Weichert, my guest on this...
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“No borders. No walls. No USA at all.” Chant by Antifa rioters marching in the streets of Denver. With Ukraine and Russia dominating the headlines, America seems to have lost focus on the border - and the war - that really counts. It’s not Ukraine, it’s America’s southern border with Mexico. The Biden Administration seems simply to have “opened it up.” Completely. And what’s happening is an ongoing catastrophe that’s fueling illegal immigration, human trafficking and drug smuggling. People from over 100 countries around the world have crossed...
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Thirty years ago, the United States, Europe, and Japan manufactured 90 percent of the global supply of the key ingredients for the world's medicines and vitamins. No more. China is now the largest global supplier. Millions of Americans are taking prescription and over-the-counter drugs made in, or with critical ingredients from China and they don’t know it and neither do many of their doctors. This is becoming a grave concern. As we’ve seen, first with the global pandemic driven lockdowns and now, with the Russia/Ukraine war, the world’s economy has acute supply chain interdependencies....
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Growing up Bozell. Stops Along the Way: A Catholic Soul, a Conservative Heart, an Irish Temper, and a Love of Life. Talking in this episode with L. Brent Bozell III, author of Stops Along the Way and who is one of the most outspoken and effective national leaders in the conservative movement today. Brent founded and is president of the Media Research Center, the largest media watchdog organization in America; and ForAmerica, which the New York Times declared was “one of the greatest unexpected influences on the 2016 election.” Lecturer, syndicated columnist, television commentator,...
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This is a very upsetting episode. I’m joined by my frequent guest Dr Peter Vincent Pry and we’re talking about Ukraine and the likelihood of nuclear war. Dr Pry is executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, served as chief of staff to the congressional EMP Commission, and director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum. Just recently, he published a piece titled, “The Nuclear Crisis Nobody Knows” “I think we're facing an unprecedented danger that we've never experienced in the nuclear missile age, worse than Cuba, a circumstance where we are on the threshold...
info_outlineIn this episode we get to talk with George F. Will about his latest collection of essays, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020, and also about his magnum opus, The Conservative Sensibility.
Joining in on the conversation are John Tamny, Vice President of FreedomWorks, editor of RealClearMarkets, and author of When Politicians Panicked,
and Don Boudreaux, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, research scholar at Mercatus Center, who runs the go-to blog for free market economic thinking, Cafe Hayek.
Always witty and erudite, George offers up his views on today’s pressing concerns, queried, challenged and amplified by John and Don, two very smart men.
Among our questions:
- How and when do Americans recover the liberties lost from over two years of government lockdowns and mandates?
- Why did so many libertarians acquiesce?
- Public choice theory says that people in government are not any different than people in the private sector. Is this still true?
- A prosperous and free society depends on trust. Will America’s government health establishment be able to recover the public’s trust?
- Can woke progressivism’s long march through American institutions be reversed?
And more: on families, voting rights, campaign finance, college campus fragility, social media’s power, judicial restraint, closed questions in an open society, majority rule, self-regarding versus other regarding acts, China’s future … almost everything except baseball.
We’ll get to that next time.
Definitely worth a listen.