- My name is Ilan Stavens, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to this year's
Point/Counterpoint lecture series that is also part of a
semester-long exploration about globalism and its discontent that is sponsored by 36 members of the 50th reunion of the class of 1970, if they got that right. It is thanks to them and to the idea that there has to be, on campus, a more balanced, open, respectful, civil dialogue across ideological lines that we have begun doing this last year. We're doing it this year again. And hopefully, it will become
something that will continue, not only in other forums
of the Point/Counterpoint, but my hope is in other courses and in other aspects. For one of the biggest
challenges I think that we face in small liberal arts college
and in universities at large is the bubble effect of
listening to our own voice, being exclusively receptive to messages and voices that sound like ours. And as a result of the 2016 election, the drive has been to try to open up to other viewpoints, to bring distinguished
guests and emerging voices that can help us reason together, and the word reason is crucial here, what we are going through as a nation and as a planet in this particular time. Last time, we had a number
of very distinguished guests that included Bret Stephens
from the New York Times and Bill Kristol, among others. And this year, we're going to have five. We are starting with our
guest today, George Will, about whom I'll say a
few words in a second. A week from now, we will have the second of the fifth events. It will be at Stirn Auditorium, and it is with Professor Saskia Sassen, who teaches at Columbia,
is from the Netherlands, and specializes in a
unique and powerful way on globalism in the urban landscape. We will have after that
the month of October, Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize
winner, an Amherst alum, who will talk about economics
in the global vision in the age of Trump. Amartya Sen, another economist
and also political scientist, another Nobel Prize winner
who teaches at Harvard, originally from India. And we will conclude at
the very end of November with Martha Nussbaum from
the University of Chicago, who will come and also engage us. Before we start, I want to stress that the purpose of these encounters is to humanize the other side, to recognize that others
might not think the way we do, but they have the right,
and they have the foundation to do that, and it is up to us to be respectful and to engage
them and be engaged by them in a way that can be
enlightening to both sides. There will be a conversation that will last approximately 40 minutes between George Will and I. And after that, there are going to be, there's going to be Q&A. Everybody is invited, students and faculty and the members of the larger community here in Amherst and in the Pioneer Valley. There is a microphone here to my left, and I just ask you to take your turn and ask any question you want. In the interest of keeping
the rhythm of the evening, it would be best if those participations are brief and to the point and so we also give others
the opportunity to talk and mostly that they
are in the same spirit of respect, you will, I have no doubt, just based on the many years of reading George Will's
columns and books, you will disagree with many of his takes. I hope you do.
(audience laughing) And he will disagree
with many of the things that we are likely to say as
well, and that is the point. So maybe just before I introduce you, I wanna also remind everybody that though technology makes us global, let's isolate ourselves
from that technology and turn your cell phones off so that we can really concentrate on what we are about to do. There is an episode of The Simpsons that includes, I think it's The Simpsons, that includes a debate
between two characters. And one of them tells the other, there are two conservatives, and this is one pope ago,
there are two conservatives that really believe in evolution, the pope and George Will. (audience chuckling) And the other character
says, that George Will? Meaning this is the figure that becomes a referendum for many of us. George Will is a
nationally-syndicated columnist. His regular columns appear in 400 newspapers nationwide. He has been doing this
for many, many years. He is a graduate of Trinity College, not too far from us, and he has a PhD. He went to Oxford first,
to Magdalen College, and after that, he came
back to this country, and then a PhD in philosophy at Princeton, an institution that he
has remained close to and where he will be
teaching a freshman seminar in the coming year. He is also a regular contributor to, well, for a long time, to Newsweek and to MSNBC and NBC. And he is a passionate, devoted, and very erudite baseball fan and baseball historian. He was telling me today that his, of the 16 books that he has
published that won Best Seller, the one that outsells all
the other ones together is Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. And for many of us who have
watched him on television or who have read his columns, not only on politics, but on baseball, we know that he is a Chicago Cubs fan. And he will tell us a little bit more, in the middle of Red Sox Nation, what the future of this
season is going to be. (audience laughing) I wanna start, George, with the, let me say one more thing. I have been privileged to have him in my seminar this
morning and then as part of the NPR podcast in contrast. And so we have been in
conversation throughout the day. And there might be moments
through this conversation where I might or he might
make a reference to something that he said or a student said in class. That would be the first
session where he participated or to the conversation
we had on the radio, and that will be aired in the
podcast in about two weeks. So why don't we start with something-- - Let me say something
first before you do it. I'm glad to be back on a campus. I am a faculty brat. My father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois. I went to Princeton
intending an academic career and briefly taught at Michigan State and the University of Toronto. I went to Princeton because, and this is why I'm not a lawyer, when I was leaving Oxford, I applied to a distinguished law school and to Princeton in philosophy, and I chose Princeton because it's midway between two National League cities, which gives you an idea of
my scholarly seriousness. (audience laughing) Go ahead. - That's a good place to start. Let me, I'm gonna go back to Princeton, and I'm gonna go back to a recent column that you have written about the state of undergraduate and graduate education. But before we do that, I
wanna start in politics, and I wanna start at the Republican Party. And I wanna start with the elephant in the room, Donald Trump. You believe, George, that Donald Trump is going to win the next
presidential election. - No, I think it's possible that he will. It depends on the other party. The Democratic Party was indispensable to electing him in the first place, nominating one of the few bipeds on the planet that he could beat. And so we'll see if they want
to repeat that performance. He should be very beatable. He's underwater in the
approval/disapproval polling, and the Democratic Party has
lots of talent out there. The problem is when their
candidate debates begin in June, they've already
set it early, in June 2019, they will have, as the
Republicans had in 2015, they will have 18, 19, 20 people onstage. The danger is that the
most lurid will stand out, as happened in the Republicans' case, and the rest is not pretty to see. - Do you think anybody
within the Republican Party can stand up and contest the
possibility of the candidacy? - No. Donald Trump's approval among Republicans, at this point in his first term, is 87%, and that's 10% higher
than Reagan's approval was at the same point in his
first term among Republicans. So it's Trump's party right now. - And is the fact that it's possible that he will win the next election proof of the disarray, the fracturing of the Democratic Party? How do you see the Democratic
Party after the 2016 election? Where are they? - The Democrats have to
decide whether they're going to make the mistake Republicans
made in the early '60s. I cast my first presidential
vote for Barry Goldwater and loved every minute of it, but the theory of the Goldwater campaign was that there were lots and
millions of conservative voters who didn't vote because
they were just waiting for someone to offer them
a choice, not an echo, which was Goldwater's slogan that year. It turns out he was wrong, that there were 27 million
of us who voted for him, but that was not nearly enough. He carried only six states. The Democrats may have a
similar folly up their sleeve, which is to say, if only we
offered the American people a pure, high-octane progressive agenda, abolish ICE, free college, $15 national minimum wage, Medicare for all, et cetera, et cetera, that we'll do just fine. I don't think so. - Well, we we're talking through at dinner that you think that
President Barack Obama's coming back to the campaign is actually going to
be, it's gonna backfire, and it will make those
that are supporting Trump even more enthusiastic about him. - It will, and it will remind some of them why they are for Trump. Mr. Obama occasionally
adopts a condescending and hectoring tone that I'm
afraid is characteristic of a certain kind of
progressive, as though he's addressing a rather slow
class of fourth graders. And it annoys people, and it's grating, and I don't think very many
presidents have done this, to get to immediately plunge into the first off-year election after he leaves the White House. - Is this bad protocol,
or is this setting us up for what post presidents will do? - I don't know. I mean, presidential norms turn out to be more easily shredded
than we hoped and thought, but this is another one being shredded. - You have written in your columns, through those eight years, many, many things about President Obama. But as we are a year and a half plus, close to two years,
what is your assessment of what was good in the Obama years and what was bad in the Obama years? - I think what was bad was a kind of tone that he adopted. He was disastrous for the Democratic Party in terms of 1,000 or so
state legislators they lost, lost control of both houses of congress. They suffered two wave
elections in '10 and '14. His great achievement, I
think, is now apparent. When he came into office, there
was not a national consensus that the country should insist on universal access to healthcare. When he left office, there was. Now, the Affordable Care
Act was not a success and was going to take a lot of revision, partly because he made
one fundamental mistake, which was that when he started this, 90% of Americans had healthcare, and 90% of the 90% liked
the healthcare they had. And the mistake that progressive
Democrats are now making, Medicare for all,
single-payer, and all the rest, is that 155 million Americans get their healthcare from their employer. It is untaxed compensation. It's an enormous, I mean,
it's obviously compensation, and it's untaxed, and is
therefore a good deal. So when you come out and
say, Medicare for all or single-payer, you're gonna immediately get the backs up of 155 million Americans, which is enough to win an election twice. - You left the Republican Party in 2016, and you describe yourself, and you and I talked a little bit
about this earlier today, as a Libertarian, or at least
leaning in that direction. Is there a possibility, can you imagine returning to the Republican party, and what do you really mean by a Libertarian or Libertarian-ish? - Well, American conservatism,
descending from Locke and the natural rights
philosophy of the founders, is inherently Libertarian and inherently about limited government. To my mind, the most important word in the Declaration of
Independence is secure. "All men are created equal,
endowed by their Creator "with certain unalienable Rights." And governments are instituted
to secure those rights. Now, if government's primary function is to secure natural rights, it's inherently limited in its function. I don't think it's a question of me going back to the Republican Party. I think it's of them coming back to me, which I don't think
they're in a hurry to do. I rather enjoy being a free agent. Samuel Johnson referred to
himself as an unclubbable man, and I may be such a hopeless
individualist that I am. By Libertarian, I simply mean this. As a classic liberal, which
is what Americans are, Acton, John Stuart Mill, Locke, et cetera, I believe that before
the government interferes with the freedom of an individual or the freedom of two or more individuals contracting together voluntarily
to achieve something, before the government
interferes with that, it ought to have and state a
compelling reason for doing so. It should explain itself. There is, in the Libertarian
approach to government, a presumption not of unconstitutionality and a presumption not of illegitimacy, but a presumption of skepticism
about what government does, because we know that
the idea that government is an independent, neutral,
altruistic arbiter is a fiction. It's a romantic one that
people like this state's Elizabeth Warren are wholly smitten by, that government is
itself an interest group, that government is responsive to compact, intense, organized factions,
to use Madison's word. And therefore, government is not to be looked upon romantically. This is simply an application
of public choice theory as practiced by Buchanan and Tullock and some of the others at
the University of Virginia in the '50s and '60s. Wherein, they said, just
as we analyzed the behavior of private citizens in the private sector as self-interested, usually
as trying to maximize profit, so too we should analyze government as behaviors trying to maximize power. And once you do that, the romantic view of
government falls away, and you can approach it as
adults without illusions. - You have stressed a number of times, and you did it today in the class, that you have a vision
of a small government, never an absence of government. You're not an anarchist. What is the size of government that is, is it possible to imagine a size? What's a size, the advisable
size of a government that doesn't interfere
in the transactions, the negotiations of that
one or two individuals and that is as un-clumsy, I
don't know if the word exists, but is as effective and engaged as a government might be? - Conservatives, the
beginning of conservatism is to face facts. It's to respect data,
respect the given in life. And I'm a big boy. I know that Social Security
and Medicare are here to stay. They've made these choices. Social Security is an example of what government can do well, that is, it identifies
a particular cohort, Americans over 62 or 65,
and it mails them checks. It's good at that. What government is not so good at is delivering more ambitious goals, model cities, meaningful
work, head starts. Government, when it undertakes a kind of ambitious social engineering,
reform of the culture, that's when the government begins to find that it is prey
to the second reason conservatives are conservative, which is the law of
unintended consequences. The law is that when a large
institution like government interferes in the complicated, spontaneous order of a free society, that the unintended
consequences of its action are apt to be larger than and contrary to the intended actions. So government should be very wary that society is like a Calder mobile. When you jiggle something over here, things get in motion all over the place. And government is usually surprised, and often unpleasantly so. - In this reduction or limitation of what government ought to do and not meddling in those
other areas or spheres, you believe that it is the
open market, the competition, what should come up with the solutions or the alternatives of how to handle life. - What markets are are
information-generating devices. A market, close down a market, you're closing down the
generation of information. Does anyone here get a
bagel on the way to work? Okay, you go to your shop, and you go, how did they know to have that there? Genius, weren't they? No, they weren't
geniuses, because in fact, they've seen the
information over the years, who comes in, who comes
out, what bagels cost, what the market is for
bagels at this price. If I had one thing I could hope that all American undergraduates, Amherst and elsewhere, would read, it's a little essay by
Lawrence Read called I, Pencil. And the point of the essay
is no one can make a pencil, the point being no one can make a pencil. To make a pencil, wood,
little bit of metal, little rubber for the eraser,
graphite for the middle, requires literally millions
of people to make a pencil. Just does. From the people who, the
lumberjacks who cut down the trees that make the wood and the milling and the shipping and the
mining of the graphite, takes a million people to make a pencil. If we said, starting from scratch, we want the government to make a pencil, we'd have no pencils. So some sense of the tremendous complexity and creativity of spontaneous
order of a market society. - And that creativity and spontaneity should be left to its own device, untouched by larger extemporaneous forces, the question that I have, George, is that markets, as
inspiring as they might be, and I'm thinking here of the theories of Milton Friedman and others, can also be cruel and savage
and might leave some behind, which is generally the tension
between the conservative and the liberal viewpoint. Should there be any help, any encouragement?
- Of course. Of course, we've made the decision that we want to have a social safety net. For those who fall between
the cracks and those who lose in what Schumpeter called
the creative destruction of a constantly-churning market society. The greatest hymn of praise ever written to the power and creativity of capitalism is The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, in which he says, in this
astonishing creativity of capitalism, everything
disappears into thin air. All old social structures, in his view, feudalism, but everything disappears. Nothing lasts in a capitalist society, which is why there's a
more than faint irony in the fact that conservatives, who you would think
ought to conserve things, actually wanting to conserve a dynamism that churns constantly. The creative destruction
that Schumpeter talked about is creative, it's also
destructive, and there are losers. And we try to deal with those. Now, the current administration, having adopted protectionism, which is the complete
repudiation of conservatism, government doesn't get any more bossy and big and meddlesome and destructive than when it undertakes to tell a nation of 327 million people what it can import, at what price, at what time,
and in what quantities. I mean, that's as big
as government can get in a free society. So when you understand the tremendous creativity of
markets, you can obviously say, look, a market is in many
ways a government creation. You need contracts, you
need courts to adjudicate, there's a role for the public sector. But basically, when government intervenes to correct what it takes
to be the imperfections of market results, remember,
the government is doing so in response to organized factions. It's not doing so out of
the goodness of its heart. It's doing so because
some faction got it to. Now, the current administrations as well, we have to act because free
trade destroys American jobs. A, abundant data
demonstrates that it doesn't, and that result is economic dynamism. B, you wanna know who's really
destroying American jobs? Americans. Anyone remember Borders book stores? There were 395 of them. They had 10,000 employees. And then in 1993, a
little online bookstore named Amazon got started, and pretty soon, there were no Borders book stores. That's creative destruction. Today, Amazon has more,
has revenues larger than all the revenues of
American grocery stores, restaurant chains, and
department stores combined. And it's sweeping through
all kinds of portions of American life with creative
destruction in its wake, and frankly, I'm glad. But who else is destroying jobs? Well, if you're a New York cab driver, and you spent $500,000
on a taxi medallion, Uber is a threat. That's another California company. If you run a Netflix or a
cineplex around the country, Netflix is destroying your jobs. This is what a free society does. - So progress is inevitable. - No, no, no.
- Progress has its own-- - Change is inevitable. Progress is a loaded term. It suggests improvement. Change is not synonymous with improvement. - [Ilan] And change has its own rules and should be left to them. - There should be a presumption in favor of change driven by
the consensual activity of people in a market free society. - I wanna go to the
granular aspect of this, but I wanna ask you, just
to open a parenthesis here, George, I know that the word individualism is something that you
extol in your columns and that you think America, is what makes America
the great success story, with its problems. Can you define individualism for us? - Sure. First of all, it's a belief that we are individually
rights-bearing creatures, as Locke described us and
as Hobbes described us. That's where liberalism begins. We are individuals who act
on our individual interests, as described in the greatest economic book ever published, published in
the resonant year of 1776, The Wealth of Nations. It is the belief that we
make up our own minds, that we are not merely
reflections of our culture, that we can stand aback from our culture and be above and independent
of and criticize it, that we literally make up our minds. We furnish ourselves. That's what individualists believe. - I wanna go to the granular aspects by entering a number of
different controversial issues, and let's start with affirmative action. You are ambivalent, can I
say, about affirmative action, or have very strong beliefs
on one direction or the other? I kind of see you in the
middle, but could you, could you explore what the benefits of affirmative action and
what the drawbacks are? - Well, there are two rationales
for affirmative action. One is that it's remedial, and that it is to make up for prior injuries, and therefore, is
theoretically time-limited. And one of the affirmative action cases coming out in the early
years of this century out of the University of Michigan, Sandra Day O'Connor said, "This is remedial, and
it's to make people whole "who have been injured,
and therefore," she said, "in 25 years, it should not be necessary." We're 15 years into that period. So in 10 years, perhaps that
need for affirmative action, if she was right, will expire. There's another rationale
for affirmative action that is not remedial,
but it is an exercise, an ongoing, unending exercise in the attempt to formulate, in the interests of academic freedom, as an exercise of academic
freedom, a diversity conducive to maximizing
the university's mission. That affirmative action never ends. And there will be constant readjustments as to what should count as the ideal mix. And this gets the admissions departments of selective universities
into the business of constant engineering
of their student bodies. I was four years on the
Princeton Board of Trustees. I'm quite familiar with Janet Rapelye and the work she does as
the dean of admissions for Princeton and how hard it is. Princeton could probably
fill a freshman class with young people with
1600s on their SATs. They don't wanna do that,
for very good reasons. We're gonna go over these
reasons in about three weeks when Harvard's lawsuit, being challenged by some Asian Americans, is going to come to
litigation in Boston, I guess. So we're going to explore this. I do not want the government stepping in. God knows it's not telling Harvard how to shape its student body. On the other hand, the civil
rights acts are quite clear, which is that institutions
receiving federal funds, and Harvard gets its fair
share of federal funds, shall not have racial discrimination. It's pretty clear they do discriminate, in some sense, racially,
involving Asian Americans. - But in the shaping, maybe
the social engineering of any class in any college or university, by virtue of the fact that
there is some building of what would be necessary in one area and not necessary in the other, there is inadvertently
some discrimination. We are excluding some because we need to create some sort of artificial balance. You're in favor of that. - Sure. Being discriminating is a virtue. It's making distinctions. And we make distinctions for good reasons and not-so-good reasons. - And what is your, we
talked a little bit in class, but not enough, to me, what
is your view on the lawsuit that Harvard has received
from some Asian Americans? - Well, about to read it
on the plane back tomorrow, big stack of stuff on this. - So it will come up in a column soon. - It will be. There's one in your future. - (laughs) Okay. Now that we are in the
topic, and of course, in the setting of a college and education, and this is of enormous
interest to many of us, I would like to, there's
a column that you wrote maybe you published a couple of days ago about how we in higher education pamper, or how the
students are overprotected. You talked about topics
like microaggressions and safe spaces. In the parenting, you and I have talked about the word parenting, you mentioned in the radio conversation how it has recently entered
the English language as a verb. - Yes. - Where are we failing? This is a perfect audience. Where are we failing as
teachers, administrators, as students in how we are perceiving what education is about? - Well, speaking as a lapsed
professor, very lapsed, I remember in 1976, two of my friends ran against one another
for the senate in New York. One was Jim Buckley,
the incumbent senator, who'd been elected on the
conservative line in 1970. And the other was the man who became my very closest
friend, Pat Moynihan. And when they both won the nomination of their respective
parties in June primary, Jim Buckley over at his headquarters said, well, I look forward to running
against Professor Moynihan. And I'm sure Professor Moynihan will conduct the high level campaign you'd expect of a Harvard professor. And back over at Pat's
headquarters, a journalist said, Pat, Jim's referring to
you as Professor Moynihan. Pat drew himself up to his
full and considerable height and said, ah, the mud slinging has begun. (audience laughing) Look, universities have,
for lots of reasons, now acquired a kind of long-term accretion of an administrative class
that now is almost as numerical as the faculty on American campuses. But they do not have academic purposes, not academic as traditional understood, not scholarly purposes. Their job is to fine-tune
the culture of the campus, which they take to be
to protect the students who come to them, and here we
go to the root of the problem, which is their parents, come to them from a kind of parenting
that has become normal, which is the kind of, it
reaches its culmination in what are called helicopter parents. I'm sure you've all heard the phrase, those who hover over their children, even though when their
children are in a college dorm. These are now contrasted with people who practice what's now
called free range parenting, which, when I was growing up,
was called being a parent, which is you open the door,
and the children went out and came home for lunch. Now it's considered,
there is a presumption that a child should, A, never be out of the sight of an adult, and that when two or more
children have a disagreement, an adult should intervene
to negotiate the settlement, rather than letting the little
critters do it themselves and learn how to disagree and
learn how to settle things and get on with life, so that
they don't arrive at Amherst or anywhere else and find
that they have disagreements with people and have no
clue how to cope with them. So I think the root of the problem is something that goes much deeper than and is prior to the
academic chapter in it. But the way we have structured academia makes matters worse. - And if the root of the problem, George, is that parachuting or helicopter or intrusive parent that will get involved at all times and not let the child fail, to figure out what failure is about, how did we get here, how did
we get to that parenting? - I don't know. I have four children. My youngest son was a really spectacularly bad athlete, just no talent whatever, and his room is full of soccer trophies (audience laughing) because he showed up, you know, the participation trophy. I don't know how we got started on this, but I'm sure at age 26 now he can look at that glittering gold
with an appropriate irony. But that's a symptom
that no one's gonna fail. - But is it also a symptom of the excesses or the caricaturing of individualism? We want, everybody's a winner,
as long as they compete. Everybody gets a trophy, and thus, nobody really gets the taste of-- - I don't think that's individualism. I think the theory of individualism is what Robert Frost said when he said, "I don't want to live in
a homogenized society. "I want the cream to rise." Individualism is meritocratic. Individualism is unapologetically elitist. Individualism says and conservatism says, the question for any society at any time is not whether elites show
rule, it's which elites. And the problem in democracy
anywhere at any time is to get people to
consent to worthy elites. So all this talk about
elites is not just grating, it's fundamentally absurd. - You have said, you said
it again both in the class and on the radio, that the
purpose of institutions like Amherst and Princeton and others is really to create an elite, to shape and allow that elite to retain its power and its presence. - Amherst exists to exacerbate
American inequality. Let's face it. No, we have an increasingly
cognitively stratified society, and the more, look, 200 years ago, the great source of wealth
in America was land. We had so much of it,
we were giving it away. 100 years ago, the great source of wealth in America
was heavy fixed capital. Think of Andrew Carnegie steel mills or Cornelius Vanderbilt's
New York Central Railroad. Today, the great source of wealth is mind information, what
we call human capital. The market is saying, at the
top of its considerable lungs, stay in school. And the more we educate,
the more we're going to create a cognitively
stratified society. Now, various things can probably be done to ameliorate this and to
encourage social mobility. But 50 years ago, the great
sociologist at Harvard, Daniel Bell, said,
"You're gonna find out." The meritocracy is a
word put in the language by a British sociologist
named Michael Young. So it was mentioned in academic interest back in, 50 years ago, and Bell said, "You just watch." The cognitive stratification
will be accompanied by great skills in entrenching the top winners of this
society who will be very good at transmitting family advantages. Andrew Ferguson, one of
the really great writers in Washington, wrote a
wonderful book called Crazy U, Crazy, number U, about the
university application madness that we now go through in this country. And he made the acute point, he said, "The least diverse classes in America "are SAT prep classes." It's just because the middle class and upper middle class
know how to do this. They know how to transmit this. Now, we have learned an enormous amount in the last 50 years about early childhood development. We know that the difference between the number of words a
child in a poor family hears, particularly if it's a single
parent with several jobs, and the number of words
a young child hears in a middle class or upper
middle class family is millions, millions, in the first six years of life. A teacher in Chicago's
public school system said, not long ago, she
said, I get children, seven-year-old children
coming into my classroom who don't know numbers, shapes, or colors because, this teacher said,
no one, while making dinner, ever turned to the child and said, here are three green, round peas, because they are raised in a culture of exhaustion and silence. What you would do about
this, I do not know. - Going back to the topic of elites and self-perpetuating
motion in which they live, in of the institutions
like this one, there is, maybe driven by genuine desire
for change or maybe guilt, the conception that the elite, though it might always be at the top, this image that you presented of Frost, of the cream emerging, can be expanded. So it is not the same, but
it incorporates others, which includes issues like opening up, like affirmative action, and others that might or might not be controversial. It's still an elite. - Sure. We want to be governed by elites, but we want them to be
elite elites, that is, we want them to be elites
not of inherited privilege. I mean, the Great Revolution affected, how far are we from Boston
here, how many miles? - About two hours. - Okay, about two hours from here, in the 1930s, when James
Conant and others said, you know, we're tired of Harvard educating the children of Boston Brahmins and, he did not need to
say, excluding the Jews. Therefore, they came up
with something we now know as the SAT test. And it changed American
education in American society more than any single
educational reform ever, because, we said, we're gonna
measure different things. Now, you do that, and different, you replace one set of winners
with another set of winners. Moral of the story,
you're gonna have winners, so let's not flinch from that fact, and the fact that you have winners, you're gonna have losers. And that's why this lawsuit is going on, because an enormous
number of Asian Americans, because of the culture of their families and the culture they brought with them when they did the wonderfully
entrepreneurial act of immigrating in the first place, gives them social capital
that other people don't have. Now, you have to say, well, gee, do we want that social capital to pay off? I think yes. I don't think we'd wanna
discourage families from trying to transmit
advantages for their children. That's a wholesome thing. But there are going to be winners, and there are going to be losers. - One of the maybe injustices or partial approaches that I often see in the opinion pages, yours,
the New York Times, and others, is that whenever there's
discussion about education, there's discussion of Amherst, Williams, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, but the real educational
experiment in this country is in community colleges. It's where the American
dream is being made. And seldom do I see a columnist that is exploring the challenges that those community colleges face, which seems to me a way of blinding us to the same type of
rhetoric that institutions or newspapers are guilty of. - It is a very pernicious thing that we have absentmindedly adopted the idea that a life that does not include a four-year college degree is a blighted life. Now, when you say that, first thing you do is insult the 66% of Americans who don't have four-year college degrees. But worse than that, we
have all kinds of colleges in this country, Amherst is,
of course, not among them, full of sullen students who
aren't studying very much and don't know why they're there and don't really want to be there. And they're idling away their time with spurious majors, gender studies, and, well, I'm gonna
start insulting people, but I guess I don't care,
(audience laughing) cinema studies, and all the rest. And they emerge from... I remember a few years
ago, the New York Times had a front-page story on college debt, and it was, the heart of the story was some young woman who'd gone to NYU and racked up $100,000 in student debt. And you had to read down
to about paragraph 38 to learn that she studied,
had a degree in gender studies and was finding that the market was really not interested in her. Well, she was not
well-served by universities that produce these, who
treat students as customers and treat their curricula as cafeteria, that they have to keep
pulling these people in so that the universities can
scarf up the federal subsidies. You may have noticed that
there are two spheres of American life where inflation is worst, healthcare and higher education. What do they have in common? A lot of federal intrusion. People who run our colleges
and universities aren't dopes. Well, some of them are,
but most of them aren't. They see a river of federal
money coming down the pike, and they say, we're
gonna get some of that. And as fast as the federal
government subsidizes tuition, tuition goes up. Surprise, surprise. The incentives work. It is a shame, to go back to what you said about the community college. It was said a couple years ago, things have changed a
bit in the energy sector, but if someone left high
school the year some, another, his brother left Harvard, and the kid leaving high school
went to community college, spent six weeks becoming a welder, and went to the North Dakota oil fields, he's making more the
first year out of college than the kid leaving Harvard was making. There are lots of ways to be happy in America without a college degree. And we certainly need
welders more than we need, frankly, another graduate
in gender studies. - And George, the topic of this year is globalism and its discontents. We are at a moment in which the, with the rise of populism, there seems to be a backlash,
represented by Trump, on what the globalist ideology and the globalist mission is about. But you are an unapologetic
supporter of globalism. - For three reasons. First, globalization is ethical because it's what freedom
looks like in economic affairs. The freedom of goods,
services, people, and ideas to move freely as the market directs them to the most efficient use. Second, it's moral. It is because of globalization that since the Second World War, four billion people have been
lifted from abject poverty, not yet entirely into the middle class, but from subsistence living. Four billion, that's a lot of people. Third, we have no choice,
in the following sense. We have made certain decisions to make promises to ourselves,
calls on the future wealth of our country through entitlements, particularly Social Security and Medicare. Social Security's a tiny part of this. It's medicine. We have attached our aging population, in percentage terms, the most
rampantly growing portion of the American population
are those the Census Bureau calls the very old, Americans
85 years old or older. That matters because the
average healthcare costs for an 85-year-old are five times higher than for a 55-year-old. We've made these enormous
promises to ourselves that we can't begin to afford to meet unless we have very rapid economic growth to throw off the revenues
to pay the bills. You cannot have rapid economic growth behind walls of protection. You cannot have rapid economic growth if your aim is to protect people from the churning of a dynamic society. You cannot have rapid economic growth if you do not have the creativity part of creative destruction. So it's ethical. It's moral. And it's necessary to have this. You see, about 10,000 years
ago, we invented agriculture, quit being hunter/gatherers
and settled down. Between the invention of agriculture and Mr. Watt's steam engine, there was approximately
zero economic growth, negligible economic growth. Since then, in what Deirdre McCloskey, the great economic historian
in her great three books on Bourgeois Equality, Bourgeois Virtue, and I'm drawing a blank
on the third title, but fat, wonderful volumes,
she calls the Great Enrichment. It began at the end of the, in Britain, actually began, she says,
interestingly, in Holland, because what they did in Holland was they quit stigmatizing
entrepreneurship. They quit saying, well, that's greed, and that's unseemly ambition, and it's not the aristocratic longueur that we're supposed to admire. But that said, good for them. Go out and get rich. And it crossed the English Channel, which a nation, largely made of coal, where Watts invents the steam engine, and suddenly, economic
growth went like that. Economic growth always
has been inseparable from globalization, always. - But just as in--
- Let me, give me a minute. How many of you here have an iPhone? Show of hands, okay. Poor Samsung, can't win, can it? But anyway, used to say on
the back, in print so small, it was clear they didn't
want you to read it, they've now taken it off, it said, designed in California,
assembled in China. This is not, in any meaningful
sense, made in China. It's assembled in China from parts that come from South Korea, Taiwan, Italy, Wisconsin, all over the world. The Chinese add about
$6 value to this thing, about what you pay for a
latte on the way to work. That's what they add. And the reason this costs
as little as it does, I mean, you've got more
information in this than the Library of Alexandria had. You've got more computing power than the NATO Alliance had in the 1960s. And it's dirt cheap. And the reason it's
cheap is globalization. Wanna have a $5,000 iPhone? Build enough walls, we'll
have a $5,000 iPhone. The first cell phone, Motorola, 1983, was as big as a brick,
charge lasted half an hour. The cost of calling
New York to Los Angeles for 30 minutes was what you paid a day for a month of roaming
across North America. It cost $4,000, 4,000 1984 dollars. Globalization produced this. - Now, just as in the open market where there are winners and losers, in the question that I asked you before, which is at the heart of what liberals and conservatives think. In globalization, there
are winners and losers. There are the losers
in developing countries that don't have the resources or don't have the history or
don't have the infrastructure or have not the ingrained
vision of individualism and enterprising that
will automatically, again, put them at a disadvantage
in that they will be makers of that phone or
providers of the factory, but not leaders or leveling
themselves with others. - Well, first, let's be clear. The biggest winners from globalization, Americans have been wonderful winners. European Union, wonderful. Biggest winners are India and China, which are just going like that. Give you a staggering figure that gives you a sense
of the velocity of life in a globalized world. In the 20th century, the United States comes up with the internal
combustion engine, the Model T, Model A, Chevrolet Impala. We pave the country, roads everywhere. Interstate highway system
was just the cherry on the top of this sundae
of infrastructure growth. Century of building. In one recent three-year period, China used more cement
than the United States used in the 20th century. That's what's happening out there. This is fast, and it is enormous, and it is wonderfully beneficial in Benthamite, utilitarian terms, greatest happiness for
the greatest number. There hasn't been anything
remotely as good as globalization for increasing happiness
and decreasing misery. - All right, I wanna ask
you one more question, and then we're gonna
open it to the public, and that is that you, I
don't know how to put it, but in the dinner conversation, it was a fascinating and
sometimes heated discussion on climate change, where you are, to put it mildly, skeptical. - No. It would be impossible to state with greater precision
the opposite of my view. (audience laughing) I am not skeptical of climate change. I believe the one thing
we can all agree on and where the discussion has to start is that of course the climate is changing because it is never not changing. The question is how you find the predictable in climate change and how you locate
causation in climate change. There was a time when this
spot here in Massachusetts was covered by enormous glaciers. Then along came climate
change, and aren't we glad? I don't know what caused
the Medieval Warming Period. I do know it wasn't the Ford Explorer. I do not know what caused
the Little Ice Age. When the Thames froze so thick, they moved shops out onto
the ice of the Thames. I don't know what caused that thing. All I'm saying is I don't know. And these people who say they do know, I mean, I don't know if
you've made the mistake of turning on MSNBC in the
last three or four days, when all their hosts on MSNBC, turned in, I had no idea they
were all climate scientists. And they said, Florence
proves climate change, global warming. And I thought, gee, that's amazing. I own a home on Kiawah
Island in South Carolina. It's in the Atlantic Ocean. It's facing southeast. That's where the hurricanes come from. So I'm really interested in this. And I remember after Katrina, people said, well, that's it. That's, global warming did
this, and it's a harbinger of a sharp increase in violent hurricanes. Of course, what happened was
hurricane activity disappeared. It just, there was a sharp downturn. I'm not saying this
disproves global warming. I'm saying I don't
understand climate science as well as all those anchors on MSNBC who in the last few days have been saying, ha, we told you so. - But there's a crowded
field of scientists beyond what's happening
on MSNBC or on Fox, that are stating time and
again that the climate is warming up.
- Absolutely. Absolutely, and if repetition
established the truth, the truth would be established. And if we took a vote
to establish science, scientific propositions, that would win. But as I mentioned to you at dinner, when Einstein left Germany, the Nazis organized 100 scientists to denounce him and his theories, to which Einstein said,
you know, if I'm wrong, one scientist would suffice. We don't vote on scientific propositions. We do science. - Maybe some scientists will come forth. This is the time to begin
having a conversation. If there is anybody who wants to start, there's a microphone right here. Please. - This working? - I think it should be working now, Nishi. - Okay. Thanks so much for coming here. I think we definitely need to hear voices outside of our, what seems sometimes, like an echo chamber here. You can't hear? - Come closer to the microphone. - Okay. Put my mouth right on it.
- Lean in, lean in. - Lean in, right. So I kind of wanna ask you
about the op-ed you wrote, but I'm hoping one of my students does. I wanna actually ask you, then, about the beginning of the conversation, which was now a long time ago. But at the beginning, you
were explaining, I think, the role that, the kind
of foundational role that Libertarianism plays
in your political views. Whenever anyone says
that, my ears perk up, because I'm trying to figure
out exactly what that means. And here's what it sounded
like you were saying. It sounded like when you
articulated your Libertarianism, what you were saying
amounted to the following. Government intervention
into people's lives, into free markets, is
bad, except when it isn't. And that just amounts to a tautology. So if that's all you ended up saying, which is what it sounded like, then it couldn't possibly be playing any-- - I got your question, and
now I'm gonna tell you. What I meant was there should
be a presumption of skepticism for two reasons. We know that the ability of government to master unto itself
the kind of information that only a market can aggregate is extremely limited. Second thing we know is that governments never are impartial referees. Governments respond to
interested factions, in a free society. Governments have interests. Government bureaucracies
have maximizing imperatives. The sociology of government
is a complicated business. So I was saying that for
all of these reasons, when government says, ha, we can do better than the market can do at
allocating wealth and opportunity, there are reasons for doubt. And the basic reason for doubt is what Hayek and The
Constitution of Liberty and elsewhere called the fatal conceit. The fatal conceit is that we can, through public institutions, as I say, aggregate information the way markets do and control events. There's no reason to have
that kind of confidence in government. So, a presumption of skepticism
was all I was saying. I didn't say it was bad. I'm saying that mature people
with experience of government purse their lips and raise their eyebrows. - It seems to me that if
that's what you're saying, a lot of liberals could agree with that. You just disagree about where and when government intervention
is actually justified. But it has nothing much to
do with the Libertarianism. - Degree matters. - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Okay, thank you. - Yeah. - Yes, hello. So people were speaking about the 2016 election, and there were two political surprises. There was the nomination of Donald Trump on the Republican side, but there was also the remarkable success of Bernie
Sanders on the other side. And those seem to me
in some way connected. And I guess I would like
you to address the question of how you see, for
example, the popularity, particularly among millennials,
at least a certain subset, of the word socialism,
whatever that means to them, Bernie Sanders. And the second question
I would like to ask, which is related to that,
is there's a tendency now among many people all across
the political spectrum to see the election of Donald Trump as kind of a freak accident. It doesn't seem to me
like a freak accident. So the question is, given, for example, this wave of what I would
call right-wing populism, is it possible that
globalization could be reversed? It was reversed earlier in
the 20th century, for example. - Sure, it could be reversed, with predictably calamitous results. It would mean economic stagnation. It would mean rewarding those who are already entrenched at the top. I mean, Alcoa, they're ready
to get rid of globalization. - [Man] So how much do
you see Donald Trump as sort of a contingent, or do you see it as a culmination of broader trends? Do you think that if Donald Trump loses or is impeached or if somebody
else comes into office that the effects will, things
will go back to normal, or do you think things have
already shifted in some-- - Things have shifted. Nothing lasts. What was normal wasn't gonna last. But this can be changed
and tempered and produced. But he will have left his mark. - [Man] Sometimes you sound more like Heraclides than Hayek. - I'm an, Heraclides
was the first Hayekian. I am absolutely Heraclides and Lucretius. That's exactly where
conservatives come from. But let me get to, what was the first part of your question again? - [Ilan] It's about Bernie Sanders. - Oh, well, Bernie
Sanders appealed to people because, as a grumpy old
grandfather, he looked authentic. It wasn't so much what he said, it was that he said something he seemed to care about and believe in, which contrasted ruinously
with Mrs. Clinton, who just looked entitled,
to a lot of people. Socialism, and I said one thing about... When Marx came along, he said, socialism is the government ownership of the means of production,
distribution, and exchange, good, clear stuff. Lenin, in about 1921, and
when his new economic program got criticized as being
insufficiently radical, he said, well, no, actually, socialism is government ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, heavy industry, communication,
transportation, et cetera. After the Second World War,
the British Labour Party and others further watered it down. They said, actually, we
don't need to own industries. Socialism is heavy regulation and aggressive redistribution of wealth, which is approximately what we have in the United States of America. Redistribution of wealth,
67% of the federal budget is transfer payments. The sky is dark with
checks going back and forth to farmers and old people and ship owners, and it's just one, our government
does almost little else but redistribute income. So when people say they want socialism, ask them to define their terms, and the argument will
dissipate pretty fast. - Thank you for being
here with us tonight. My name is Sophie. I'm a student at Smith
College down the road. I was interested in your story about the child who lives in a home where the parents are too exhausted to say, you know, words
while making dinner. And it just, it made my wonder,
you've spoken a little bit about negative rights or freedoms, the role of the government to stay out of people's lives when unnecessary. And I'm curious about your thoughts about the role of small government in granting positive rights, so things like public education in the US.
- I don't think governments give us our rights. I believe, as Jefferson
and the other founders did, in natural rights, first come
rights, then comes government, basic, conservative proposition. First come rights, then come government. Government does not give us our rights. It exists to secure preexisting rights. That's the heart of the American
Creed, the essence of it. But within that, government, we have clearly said, we're the first nation to embrace it in a sort of full-throated way. Universal free public education, that's a government job. Now, Oregon, for a lot
of peculiar reasons, finally decided in the '20s,
1920s, to ban private schools. And the Supreme Court said, no, no, no. No, that's a basic liberty
interest that parents have. They can educate their
children as they want, so long as it meets certain
state set requirements. So, we accept that is it
the job of government, government has a huge
role in equipping people to take advantage of the opportunities that a free society offers. And that's not controversial. Now, you can have huge arguments as to how best ought to do this. I mean, I would completely
voucher-ize public education. If I were State of Massachusetts, I'd say, this is how much per student we wanna spend on public education. I'd send everyone a
voucher, let them cash it at whatever public school they wanted, or private school, and
watch the competition. - Thank you. - Thank you. - So in the beginning of the talk, you said that conservatism, I think, is primarily about facts. Is that correct? - Correct. It's reality-based. Starts with what exists
and what we cannot change, like human nature, stuff like that. - And I wanted to connect that to your statements about climate change. So you said you were skeptical
about climate change-- - No, again-- - Well, sorry, I--
- No, no, no, no, no. It's important that we
not get careless here. What I said was the one
thing I'm not skeptical about is the fact that the climate is changing, 'cause it always is. That's very different from
the way you phrased it. - So you're skeptical about climate change as it's commonly talked about
on MSNBC as global warming. - You're fortunate in that you have in the world's foremost
authority on what I believe. So let me say what it is.
(audience laughing) I am skeptical that we have so mastered climate science that we can
isolate the contribution of human activity to climate change. That's what I'm skeptical about. Go ahead. - Okay. So right now, sorry for the, okay, so there is a consensus
among the climate scientists about the fact that humans have
an impact on global warming. And moreover, there is a world consensus, as seen in events like
Paris Climate Accords, that governments maybe
should do something about it. And so my question is, in your opinion, when will you be personally persuaded that the government needs to do something in order to reduce the
impact on the environment? - I'm, see, there's nothing,
to me, counterintuitive about the idea that seven billion people riding motor scooters and driving cars and burning fossil fuel have
an effect on the climate. Nothing counterintuitive about that. I'm profoundly unimpressed by, and indeed, uninterested in the fact
that a bunch of governments got together in Paris, and
the majority of them decided that the minority of the
governments should send them money. That was not a scientific
judgment they arrived at in Paris. That was kleptocracy. That's not how we do science. We don't vote. I will be convinced when the science is more convincing. And do not, I mean, it's
constantly repeated, again, the idea that
repetition establishes truth. It's 'cause 97% of all scientists believe in man-made-driven climate change. Know where that came from? - No.
- No, well, point one. Aren't you curious? Wait, wait, who took that poll? It came from one paper. I think it was written by a woman at the University of Illinois, and now it's an established fact. But in fact, there is dissent
among climate scientists. If there weren't, no one would
wanna be a climate scientist, 'cause there'd be nothing
left interesting to discover. - Okay. Thank you. - And just for the interest of the evening's consistency, we are going to stop with
the gentleman right here, one, two, three, four, five. And I appreciate everybody
else who has questions. And I also encourage brevity. - Thank you for being here. I also read your op-ed in the Washington Post
published yesterday. One sentence I found interesting, you were talking about campus
diversity administrators and how much they've grown. And you said, "These people
find vocations," quote, "and micromanaging student behavior "in order to combat imagined
threats to social justice," social justice in quotation marks. "Can anyone on a campus
say anything sensible "about how the adjective social
modifies the noun justice?" So my question is, why
doesn't the word social lend any meaning to the word justice, and how does social justice
differ from justice proper? - I don't think it does. And here, I'm echoing Hayek again. Hayek constantly said, well, how does the, adjective's a modifier. How does the adjective social
modify the noun justice? Can someone tell me that? I'm genuinely, I'm not
trying to be disagreeable. Well, I am a little bit. I don't think, I think justice is justice. There are various theories of justice. John Rawls' famous book on justice isn't about social justice,
it's about justice. I just don't understand
what social adds to it. I'm truly bewildered,
and I was hoping someone would be able to tell me, but not yet. - [Student] Thank you. - Hi, I'm incredibly interested in the EU and global markets as a whole. And so I have two questions,
one concerning the US and negative income tax, and the other one concerning EU in its current
predicament with Hungary. So my first question is, what
do you think about income tax and if it should be
implemented in the US, how? - A negative income tax?
- Yeah. - Which is essentially
a guaranteed income? - Yeah.
- Yeah. We have a bit of one. It's called the Earned
Income Tax Credit, which was radically expanded by Ronald Reagan because it reinforced a
bourgeois virtue, work, that is, if you have an income, you're eligible for a negative income tax. And I'm against a guaranteed income, regardless of what you do, but like, I'm for things like the GI Bill, which said, if you do certain, I'm deliberately trying to
provoke you, bourgeois virtues, buy a house, we'll help you do that, which means you'll start a family, go to school, we'll help you do that. And so the GI Bill said this wasn't a general entitlement, this was an entitlement for people who were willing to
commit to certain things. So I'm all for that. - Okay, and my second one
is, recently, in the news, Hungary's been facing charges from the EU about not following regulations
concerning Viktor Orban, the famous populous in Hungary, and his stance on immigration. And so, I'd like to know what
your stance on the EU is. - Good question.
- Yeah, just what your stance on the EU is
- That's an excellent question.
- in its current predicament with Hungary. - When the Cold War ended,
my friend Pat Moynihan said, all right, well, you can't hate Moscow. What are you gonna hate? I said, I'm gonna hate Brussels. (audience laughing) The EU is, well, the way
they politely put it, they have a democracy deficit. The EU is the progressive
nightmare come to life, all kinds of unaccountable bureaucrats. And, I mean, the European Union
has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a
president no one can name. You know, it's just a concoction, however, it's at its best when it does something like what it's doing to Hungary, saying, there is such a thing
as European civilization, and you're discordant with it. And I think it's an excellent thing. And Poland should be next on their list. - Thank you.
- Yeah. - So I was particularly interested
in your appreciation for and faith in a laissez-faire
market society. And if I heard you right,
please correct me if I'm wrong, I thought you highlighted kind of a duality of a market society with the pencil essay you mentioned in which there are many small participants in any market society
operating successfully, but also kind of the corporate giants such as Amazon and Uber,
which really do dominate how a world works that's
dependent on an economy. And so I was wondering,
as you also mentioned that you have little to
no faith in large powers creating conscious social
engineering movements, if we acknowledge both the
government and big corporations to be competing interest groups, why we should have more
faith in the motives and practices of big corporations
in a market government. - Well, I don't have
faith in their motives. As Adam Smith says in
The Wealth of Nations, we do not get our dinner because the baker wanted
us to have our dinner. The baker was gonna make
money selling us the bread. The genius of The Wealth
of Nations is exactly that, that people pursuing their own interests serve larger social interests. The difference, one difference
between large entities like Amazon and the
government is Amazon can fail. Government's here forever. You can't get rid of it,
can't make it go away. You don't want it to, but it can't fail in the way that companies can. There was a time when local
businesses were terrified of the A&P, Atlantic
& Pacific Tea Company. It was the Amazon of its day. It was gonna put all the
grocery stores out of business. And they went to government and said, you must stop Amazon, it's this behemoth. Well, along came Piggly Wiggly, see? A&P had all their stores downtown. Henry Ford over here invents the Model T, and people start going to the suburbs. And Piggly Wiggly said,
we're gonna build our stores with big parking areas. And when's the last time
you saw an A&P store? Sears was a huge deal. Amazon's about to put
Sears out of business. Sometime, somewhere, someone's gonna put Amazon in its place, just will. Nothing lasts. Third basic conservative principle, nothing lasts, and aren't we glad? - Thank you very much. - Thank you. - Hi. It's my understanding that
you're generally unconcerned by lots of money flowing
into the political system in terms of, sorry, it's not
a great characterization, but I was just hoping you could-- - You're absolutely, you're right. Go ahead. - I was just hoping you
could talk a little bit about campaign finance and your belief that it constitutes a
kind of freedom of speech. - It doesn't, not a kind
of freedom of speech, it is free speech. As the Supreme Court has acknowledged, almost every dollar contributed
in political spending is for the dissemination
of political advocacy. That's what it's for. Therefore, when you limit the amount, the quantity, content, and, quantity and timing of political spending, you're regulating political speech. I think almost all campaign finance laws are therefore unconstitutional. I am amazed at how little
money we spend on politics. We spend much more money on
lobbying than on politics because it's much more effectively spent at that granular level of Washington. I was in a drugstore the other day just full of orange and
black Halloween candy. I'm pretty sure we're gonna
spend a lot more money on Halloween candy in
the next two Halloweens, this October and the next one, than we'll spend in the
2020 presidential campaign. Spend a lot more money on potato chips. Country's full of money. Politics gets a tiny portion of it, partly because there's a
steeply declining utility of the last political dollar. I mean, in the last presidential campaign, in swing cities like Columbus,
Ohio or Las Vegas, Nevada, you could see 175 presidential
campaign ads a day, which means they didn't matter at all because people had seen them already, and the truly swing
vote of the electorate's maybe 7% of the electorate. So we're, all this sound
and fury and money, trying to move 7% of the electorate. So I think it's a great misplaced worry. There's lots to worry about in this world, but campaign spending? Even if we didn't have a First Amendment, and thank God we do, I'd be opposed to it. Let people, look, if Bill Gates
wants to take $100 million and give it to some candidate, let him. Put it on the internet at the
close of business every day, every contribution a candidate's received. Make them reveal it. Let the journalists publicize it, and let the country make up its mind. And if that makes people unhappy that Gates gave them the money,
they vote against the guy. Or a guy wants to take
$100,000 from Philip Morris, people say, we don't like that,
well, you'll pay the price. But let people decide. We don't need the government's say. But, see, here's one thing to remember. Every campaign finance law has one thing, they all have one thing in common. They're all written by
incumbent legislators. So incumbent legislators
are constantly tinkering with the rules of competition
against incumbent legislators. What's wrong with that picture? What could possibly go wrong? All campaign finance laws, therefore, if you look at them straight
on, are incumbent protection because people in office
can suppress the amount of money spent, 'cause they
have all kinds of other ways to communicate and publicize themselves. - Thank you. - Hi. I was curious about your
political background and development, you know, past Wikipedia. So I was curious, what are some of the most influential political events that have changed your perspective? - Yeah, when I was an
undergraduate in 1960, I was a Kennedy Democrat. People forget, Kennedy was
really to the right of Nixon on armaments and Cold War
stuff, but leave that aside. Then I spent two years in England and was struck by two things. One was I thought socialism of the watery British sort was suffocating the energies
of a creative people by over-regulating and by the government misallocating capital in inefficient ways that the market never
would have put up with. Second, I went to England to study for two years in September '62. The Berlin Wall went up in August '61. I went and saw the Berlin Wall. And it was a, I got it, I said. They have to have a wall to keep people in in the socialist society. And I went to Checkpoint Charlie, where they have a, there
was a little memorial, makeshift memorial at that time for a young man named Peter Fechter, who tried to escape, and they shot him, let him bleed to death
right next to our soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie. I came home not a fan of collectivism. Came home and voted for Goldwater. Haven't enjoyed about that much since, but anyway.
(audience laughing) - Thank you.
- Hey, George, one last question. Why do you think that,
you were telling me, you don't get invited to campuses. - No, because I say things that trigger anxieties.
(audience laughing) - It has been terrific to have you around. - Thank you. - Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. (audience applauding) We appreciate it very much.
