The David Knight Show - Interview: Faith, Courage and Liberty: The Ideas That Forged America

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Lawrence Reed — founder of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and former president of the Foundation for Economic Education — joins David Knight to discuss his new book Born of Ideas: How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America. Reed argues the revolution didn't begin at Lexington and Concord but decades earlier in the hearts and minds of colonists shaped by the Great Awakening — and that the radical idea at America's core, that rights come from God and not government, is still radical today and still under assault. Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Joining us now is Lawrence Reed. He's a former president of Fee. And when I saw the two together, I immediately thought of Leonard Reed, wrote the famous op-ed piece, I guess you call it, eye pencil is a short exposition of economics and how it works. And I've talked about that so many times as those of you who listen to the program know, going back to what happened with all the supply chain disruptions back in 2020. I've been talking about it even before that. But I thought Is there a connection there? Of course, they're spelled differently. One is R-E-E-D.

That's our guest today. The other one is R-E-A-D. Now, Leonard Reed was the founder of Fee, and yet our guest has also founded the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Did I say that correctly? Yes, you do. We were just laughing about that off air because I called it the Mackinac Center. And that's not the way that is pronounced, yeah.

But I do know. of it, I was able to go to a think tank convention, I guess, in mid-2000s, and they were very well represented there. And I had a lot of respect for what they were doing. I don't know if you were the ones who sponsored it or not, but one of my fondest memories of that, they had a party after hours for people who were there, and it was themed along the alcohol prohibition, and they had a speakeasy. And the way that you would get in, the password to get in was, I'm here for the ethanol subsidy. I thought that was a great idea.

But yes, our guest has been a professor of economics. He has also been chair of the economics department as well. As I said, he founded the McAnaw Public Policy Center. And he was there for 21 years. And then he went on to Fee and had a very successful career there. He's been honored internationally. He's written over 2,000 articles. He's written eight books.

And he has a new book. that has just come out. We want to talk to him about that, and maybe some of his other books, if he's got time. The new book is, from the Mayflower to the Bill of Rights, it's called Born of Ideas, How Principles, Faith, and Courage, Forged America. I think that's exactly right. I think that is what forged America. So I'm very interested in talking to you about that. Thank you for joining us today. Hey, my pleasure, David. Thanks for having me and for mentioning the Foundation for economic education and our founder, Leonard Reed, whom I knew in the last seven years of his life.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great essay. So much to learn in that. Very well done. I might let you know that the title of his, of course, as you pointed out, was I Pencil, but I have most recently written an updated version, and it's available on Amazon, but it's called I Smartphone. And it takes the same lessons and the same structure of Leonard's essay but applies it to a smartphone. You need to send a copy of that to Trump. Maybe he'd read it, you know.

It would be an aha moment, wasn't it, if he could read it? Yes, it would. And understand it. That's why I mention it all the time. When we look at the things that are happening now in terms of tariffs and other issues, and maybe we can get at that later on. But I want to talk to you first about your book. You know, we have so many celebrations. this year, about the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and it should be celebrated.

Unfortunately, we don't follow it anymore, but we don't follow those principles anymore. But the bill writes, I often wonder if when it hits its anniversary, if there will be any celebration or mention even of it at all. What do you think? Well, I certainly hope there will be. Some of us are already doing some long-range planning to that effect. So there'll be an anniversary in 1787. which will mark the Constitution, and then 1791 would mark the anniversary of the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Well, let's hope that we still have something left of the Bill of Rights, at least nominally by that time. It's rapidly disappearing, isn't it?

Talk to us a little bit about your book, and, of course, the idea that character and principles and faith and courage were the things that forged this nation. We seem to be in a short supply of all those today, don't we? Yeah, yeah, we do. And we need to work on that. But I think the American story from the colonial days through the adoption of the Constitution is truly remarkable. There was nothing like it in the rest of world history. For the first time, a nation was founded on the idea that human rights,

the rights that each of us as individuals have, come not from the government, but rather from our creator. Yes. And that we are endowed by that creator with those rights, and among them, as the declaration said, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That was incredibly radical in 1776. But John Adams, our second president and very active in the revolutionary effort, he pointed out that the revolution really didn't start in 1776 or even 75 when Lexington and Concord happened. it had been percolating in the hearts and minds of the colonists for many years. And what happened in 1776 was really the culmination of an intellectual and a religious revival in the country that put us on a path to found a nation based upon freedom. Yes, yes. The Great Awakening had a lot to do with that, didn't it?

Yes, it did. And if you haven't seen the movie that came out on Easter Sunday called A Great Awakening, I strongly recommend it. I think it's well. I haven't seen that. I'll have to look for that. Yeah. Oh, it's historically accurate. It is uplifting. It's just a magnificent film. I think the best of the year so far. And that's the key. You know, so many of us when we talk about, we have this term Christian nationalism bounced around. A lot of people mean a lot of different things about it. When I talk about it and when I talk about America being a Christian nation, it's because it was based on these fundamentally Christian ideas that there's not some master race or chosen. people ethnically, but that all men are created equal and that we have, should be held equal before government as well as before God. And so those are fundamentally Christian ideas. And that's really, you talked about it being radical back then. It's still radical today, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And there's no denying that Christian ethics, the Christian message,

was profoundly influential at America's founding. I would hasten to add, though, that didn't mean that the founders created a theocratic state. That's right. They didn't even mean that they were Christians necessarily, right? You know, that's the other thing that people will do. They'll nitpick that. And I said, no, it's really a reflection of where the culture was, wasn't it? Yeah.

What they wanted was a society in which government was not involved in religion. And the last thing they wanted is for government to set up or establish a favored religion. So they believed in religious freedom. irrespective of how firmly their personal Christianity may have been. And they were, you know, they represented quite a spectrum. Yes, that's right. And a lot of that stuff was born out of experience, of course, that people had had. We're going to, as many people have said, experiences is an expensive school, but it's the only one of full attend.

So because we can't learn the history lessons that, the things that they suffer that gave them such respect for due process and search warrants and all the rest of the stuff, including religious liberty. because so many of them had been hectored and jailed, and many other things happened to them because of a state-associated religion. And that was very fresh on their minds. You had different states that had set up an official state religion, but they did not want to have one that was going to be dictated to them from Washington. So that was really the key thing. They knew how that would be wielded against people who were Christians.

Yeah, that's right. And in England back in those days, there was even a tax that everyone had to pay for the Church of England. And, you know, you may have had some disagreements with the Church of England, but you paid a tax for it anyway. And our founder said, enough and that. Let's keep a government out of religion. And they were right when they also noted that faith in God will likely thrive in the absence of government intervention. That's right. absolutely did. So matter of fact, that's the thing that Thomas Jefferson is so proud of, the fact that he broke that connection between government and religion. And I remember when my sons were young, we used to go up to Williamsburg all the time. We lived in North Carolina. And they had an excellent reenactor who did Thomas Jefferson. And he would speak. And wherever we spoke about that, I spoke about religious liberty. I would raise my hand and ask a question. I said, so do you see any connection between some states that have?

have government-sponsored religion. I said, I may not be forced to send my kids to attend that, but I still have to pay for it, even though I disagree radically with what they're teaching. Yeah, yeah. And, well, you're right. Even the colonies, right up to the moment of the Declaration of Independence, had some state-recognized and subsidized churches.

But the federal government that our founders created provided for no government involvement or subsidies of any particular faith. They thought that was a dangerous path to follow. So why can we take away from this today in terms of looking at the lessons of this? Of course, it's great to go back and look at great men. And as you point out, it was unprecedented what happened in the American Revolution. Typically, when you have a revolution, it's kind of like the Who said, meet the new boss, same as the old boss, right? You wind up with a different group of mafia that's ruling over you. And that was another thing that was very Christian about the American Revolution because the people who were the leaders of it did not seek to have that power.

George Washington stepping down after two terms and so forth. They did not clutch that kind of power. And they think they really saw themselves as servants to the public, which is another Christian principle that you don't lord it over people, but you become the greatest among you become the servants, right? Yeah. Even George III, the King of England, said that Washington was a great man. And why? Because when tempted by the offer of being a king, he turned it down. He turned it down twice. And he walked away from power after two terms as president. So he set a remarkably good example as our first president, just as he did as our commander-in-chief of the continental army. Yes. It's a shame that we've lost those lessons, isn't it?

People who don't respect that. Even when there's a law that is there, they tout about how they're going to. overthrow that. We have come a long ways, haven't we? You can put your picture next to George Washington on a meme, but you're miles away from him in terms of your attitude toward government, right? And that's the main reason I wrote the book, because I thought Americans needed a refresher in an easy-to-read, very accessible fashion, to once again hopefully become passionate about the things that made America so exceptional right from the very beginning. That's great. Yeah, I imagine it's going to be very popular with homeschoolers. It sounds like exactly the type of thing we would have looked for when we were homeschooling our sons.

Yeah, I think so. It is very accessible to anybody from probably junior high school age on. And you can read any one chapter and put it aside and pick it up later, skip around if you want, Each chapter is a standalone, but it deals throughout with the key events, ideas, and personalities that made America what it is today. That's great, yes. And of course, it's available wherever books are sold, right? And again, the title... Amazon has it for sure.

Okay, great. And the title is Born of Ideas. That's the main title. Subtitle is how principles, faith, and courage forged America. So take a look for that. I think you'll enjoy reading that. It could be a great educational resource for you or for anyone, especially if you're homeschooling. But let's talk a little bit about some of your other books, because you've got eight books,

and a couple of the titles really caught my eye here. One of them is Seven Principles of Sound Policy. We haven't had to much of that lately, have you? What are your seven principles of sound policy? That was a booklet. Oh, okay. Or kind of an essay. But, yeah, it's been very popular.

the seven principles begin with one, maybe the most important of them all, and it reads, free people are not equal, and equal people are not free. You may kind of shake your head at that, say, what? I thought equality was a good thing. Well, it is, if you're talking about equality before the law, the law should be blind to things like your color, your place of origin, the income you have, that kind of thing. It should be fair and impartial for everybody. But economic equality, which that first principle refers to, is a very different thing. It says that as long as people are free, they're not going to be equal economically.

Why should they be? We're not equal in terms of the talents that we have. We're not equal in terms of even putting our talents to their best uses. We're not equal in terms of how long long and hard and smart we work. We're not equal in terms of what we save and what we spend and what we invest. There's any number of reasons why unequal people will generate unequal incomes in a free marketplace. And that isn't something to be lamented to the extent it reflects the differences in us all. It's something to be celebrating.

That's right. But it's the second half of it. Let me just inject into that and say, you know, that's one of the things whenever I looked at the French Revolution and say their slogan, liberty, equality, equality. It's like, wait a minute. This stuff fits together. I absolutely, totally agree with you. That's really well said.

That's very important for people understand. Oh, thank you. And if they're not sure of that first half of that first principle, the second half of it really drives the point home. Equal people are not free. That's right. Here's what I mean by that. If you came to me and said,

Mr. Reed, I've just been from a country where everybody is equal economically, and no matter what they contribute to the marketplace, They're all making the same. The wages are the same. Their material wealth is all the same. I would say in response that without knowing anything else about that place, it has to be a very unfree place. How could you possibly make people equal economically?

You'd have to tell everybody, don't excel. Don't be better than anybody else. Don't be there first with something you'd want. Don't be better at servicing your pay. patrons don't invent or innovate or do anything ahead of anybody else. I mean, what kind of a society would that be? It would be a society of stagnation. Yeah, it'd be Harrison Bergeron all over again.

Yeah, exactly. This is why every time I hear somebody refer to the common man in a very complimentary way, I say, you know, I know what you mean by that, but I think it's the uncommon among us to whom we owe the greatest debt of gratitude. And as a parent, I sure hope you're not telling your children, hey, work hard because someday maybe you can be common. You know, that's kind of child abuse to tell a child, you know, don't strive for anything beyond the average, just blend in with a mob.

And we should want our children to be uncommonly good, uncommonly generous, uncommonly talented, uncommonly focused on a strong work ethic. I mean, it's the uncommon, like those who founded this country, that we should be most grateful for, not the mob. I agree. Yeah. When we look at things like universal basic income. Yeah.

That's just communism. And it is so antithetical to human nature. It would be so incredibly oppressive. You'll own nothing. But don't worry. We'll take care of you like a pet or something. It's so dehumanizing. Yeah.

I have a chapter in the book, I think it's number two or three, about the socialist experiment that the pilgrims employed for their first year or two. And that was by terms of the contract with their investors who thought they should do this to make the colony thrive. What they had to do was to put anything that they grew, anything that they produced into a common storehouse, and then it would be distributed equally to everybody. But within a couple of years, Governor Bradford, you can read his diary. He explains. He says, what happened was that a lot of people just became lazy, slackers.

They slept in. They didn't show up in the fields to work because each of them felt that, hey, why should I work when I get just as much as the guy who does? And so they had to face in starvation. They got rid of the socialist communalism that they tried at first. Yes. Yeah, that is a great motivator having a crisis with that, isn't it? But yeah, it is, you take away that incentive for people to actually work. And by human nature, people will just default to that. And I think that is really the fundamental flaw as well, you know, not only communism, but also the technocracy that they're trying to establish and impose.

I think all of these things are just dehumanizing and degrading. And we've seen how that operates and practice under communism. It's not even a theory. You know, you can take, I mention all the time, the fact that you have two countries, Germany and Korea. You split one of them up east and west. You split the other one up north and south. Same people, same talents, basically, you know, same pool of people. And look at the difference when you just change the economic system between those two. Yeah, totally. Whenever I hear somebody talk like a socialist, I'm quick to tell them, hey, what's to keep you from doing that now? There's no law that says you can't go

door to door in your neighborhood and ask each of your neighbors, hey, can we just put all that we produce and all that we earn at our jobs into a storehouse and then equally distributed to each of us in the neighborhood, you can do that, but you wouldn't get any takers. That's why socialism ultimately must rely upon force because it's such a rotten idea that a few people will do it voluntarily for very long. You have to impose it on. Well, you have had some people who have been foolish enough to try it in communes like the Oneida commune and other things like that. They typically fail. Yeah, every one of them. Yeah, we had more than 100 of them in the 19th century in America alone. None of them lasted even five years.

So they kind of blamed the fact that the parents were not brought along. The kids were being miseducated by the parents, so they decided what we need as a government school. Yeah. And now we're looking for ways to help parents escape them. Yes, that's right. Well, your book is definitely needed, and so is the Southern one here as well. And I want to talk a little bit about was Jesus a socialist because we're seeing the rise of socialism so much so in the Democrat Party that even Democrats,

who I've always considered to be socialist, even they're concerned about it. As I've said so many times, the Democrats of my youth today are now become communists and the Republicans that now become socialist, this real leftward drift, I think, of central planning. I'm maybe not a socialist, but maybe in the economic sense, fascist in terms of combining government and business together. But I think what we're seeing is because of the obvious central planning aspects and the planning is basically causing a redistribution concentration of wealth of people who are connected politically.

And so that kind of open corruption, I think, is really paving the way for a lot of resistance of people who don't see the bigger economic picture, as you point out in your books. And they just look at this with resentment and with envy. And I think the current administration is really pushing us down the road to socialism in a big way in terms of a reaction to it, even if you ignore some of the aspects of government ownership of companies that Trump has done in a big way. Yeah. Yeah. As a believer in free market capitalism, I too oppose anyone using their political connections to get something at someone else's expense to go after, to have government go after their competition. to freeze or rig the market, that kind of thing. That's not free market capitalism. That's a kind of socialism in which government power is pushing people around

and determining winners and losers and so forth. That's right. So true free market capitalism means government is a referee. It's a night watchman. It disciplines the misbehaving among us who threaten the lives of the property of others, but it otherwise doesn't rig the market by subsidizing or protecting anybody. So I'm against all that stuff too. Of course, now in the last week, as you and I are speaking here, we've had tariffs come up big time. We've had the tariff

wars. I call him tariff tantrums because he does it when he's angry. But we've had that happening with Canada. And we also had Trump tacitly admitting that tariffs increased the price of products when you look at what's going on with the beef stuff. And of course, you know, many of us were talking about this until we were blue in the face that, of course, a tariff is a tax, and of course it's going to be paid by the consumer. Talk a little bit about that. That's right. And it isn't always the best way to get the other side to change their trade policy.

Often, it just leads to retaliation. Barriers go up on both sides. And as consumers, we pay the cost. So I'm a free trader, although I recognize that the world is. not a fair place all the time. And I also recognize that unfairness isn't just something that foreigners do to us. We do it to them too, you know. That's right. In fact, one of the things over the years, we've really disadvantaged many farmers in poor countries in Africa. Why? Well, because we sometimes subsidize American grain. And other times we send it to those countries as foreign.

an aid for free. Imagine you're a poor farmer in Zambia, in Africa, and you're trying to make a living growing grain, and here comes a boatload of free American grain in the name of helping your people. Well, that's just going to put you out of business. I guess the cattlemen can relate to that. I think American cattlemen can relate to that this past week. I can see if that's going to happen. We should be very worried of imposing these costs on consumers because they usually backfire. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And it is kind of interesting, the justification, the shifting justification for unilaterally imposed terrorists by the executive, which I think is an incredibly dangerous precedent. But, of course, part of that has been, you know,

when you talk one of your essays with the great myths of the Great Depression. Now, of course, one of these, I think, would probably be the impact of the Smoot-Hawley-Ther fact. That many people would say that caused the Great Depression. Others would say it exacerbated. What do you think about that? Because now Trump is pulling that back up, and that is the basis of his attack against Canada. What do you think about the Smoot-Hawley tariff act

and the impact that had the Great Depression? Smooth-Hawley was very damaging. It raised tariffs to an all-time high and virtually closed the borders. Stimulated an international trade war as foreign governments retaliated by raising their tariffs. This was in June of 1930. when President Hoover signed it into law,

you might think, well, we were already in depression in June of 1930. No, we weren't. We had a stock market crash the previous October. And by the spring, we had unemployment of about 8%. That's not a depression yet. That's a recession. And the stock market had already regained half of the ground it had lost. So we might have had a recovery from that crash,

except the downward slide accelerated when Hoover virtually closed the borders with Smoot-Hawley. So it took a recession and made it a depression within the year. I agree, yes. And so, you know, when we look at it, I've argued that Trump is trying to make America Great Depression again. So what parallels could we see from the Great Depression and some of the myths that were there about the Great Depression and apply that to?

today's environment that we have. We know the biggest myth, perhaps, about the Great Depression is that for some reason or somehow capitalism, freedom, free markets, you know, whatever you want to call it, that all of that is what caused the depression. And then government had to come in and do all sorts of things under both Hoover and Roosevelt to save us. Yes, that's a textbook example. Nothing could be further from the truth, the seeds of the Great Depression.

I agree. That's what they call you in the textbook. Yeah, exactly. And it's dreadfully wrong. The seeds of the Great Depression, yeah, the seeds of the Great Depression were sewn by a crazy monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. From 1924 until early 29, the Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply by some 66%. I mean, it fostered an unsustainable boom.

Those of us who were around in the 2008 collapse, Perhaps we'll wonder if that's an echo. Yeah, it's like deja vu all over again, isn't it? So we had them. Exactly, like Yogi Beres said. But yeah, we had this crazy monetary policy helping to fuel an unsustainable boom. Now, we had good things happening. The Coolidge administration was cutting tax rates, which was a good and healthy thing to be doing.

But the monetary policy was very inflationary. And then they didn't just quit doing that, starting in 1929, the Federal Reserve completely reversed itself and began contracting the money supply. And they contracted it between 29 and 33 by about one-third. So the whole thing was like, you know, you run over a man with a truck and then you decide that the way to help him out is to put it in reverse and backup over it. It gets hit both ways. That's what monetary policy did. Then it was aggravated by Smooth Holly, and then all the interventions of Franklin Roosevelt

that prolonged the depression by another seven years. Yes. And we're seeing so much of that now. When we look at the whiplash effects of these tariffs, they're on again, they're off again. Oh, it's 100 percent. Now it's down to 10 percent and so forth and so on. That is the thing that in and of itself would be destructive.

Regardless of what the actual rates are, it's the constant changing of them that is even more damaging. isn't it? Oh, that's right. Markets, business people hate uncertainty. Uncertainty is what keeps them on the sidelines. Makes them think, well, gee, I can't take a risk and invest in a new plant or this or that expansion, hire a lot of people if the future is so cloudy because of these crazy policies. So, and that's what we had through the Roosevelt years, a kind of constant uncertainty. president coming out who promised to cut taxes when he ran in 32, but instead Roosevelt will take tax rates to all-time highs.

And then imposing all kinds of silly controls, paying farmers not to grow crops, destroying crops that were perfectly healthy, and crazy other things that kept the Depression going until the end of World War II. Yes, I agree. You know, I skipped over. We started talking about liberty and equality.

That was the first principle. You got seven principles, I think, get to hear the other six. Give us those a little bit quickly. I'd be remiss if we didn't do that. Okay, I'll run through them kind of quickly. And this is from memory, because I wasn't expecting this,

so I don't have it in front of me. But I think my second one was, what's yours you tend to take care of. What belongs to everybody or nobody falls apart. Yes. Think about that. This is basically the principle of private property. If it's yours, you tend to take care of it because you have a vested interest in it.

You don't trigger it away. Always there are exceptions. But as a rule, if it's yours, you take care of. When you rent a car, do you know anybody who ever rented a car and washed it when they returned it? I mean, it's not yours. But you wash your own car, but you don't wash the rental car. That's right. Or take care of it.

You drive it like it was stolen, right? Exactly. But you know, it's on this simple principle of private property that an economy can rise or fall. If you want to destroy an economy overnight, just take stuff from people to whom it belonged and give it to people that it doesn't belong to and, you know, violate the principle of private property. Nobody takes care of somebody else's property as carefully as he takes care of his own. That's right. In fact, that's another of the principles, although slightly restated. With regard to spending, one of the seven principles is nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own.

We've got 40 trillion reasons to show that that's true, don't we? Oh, my gosh, yeah. That is evidence of the truth of this particular principle that if it's somebody else's money, it just isn't spent. with as much care as if it's yours. That's right. And let's jump back over to the Depression thing again. One of the things that was not there during the Depression was this crushing debt, was there? That we have now.

That's something's very different. Yeah. The debt did soar, especially during World War II. But as a percentage of gross domestic product, today's debt now is just about, if not, already slightly higher than it was at the height of World War II spending. Just imagine where the debt would go if we had another major conflict in the world. Oh, yeah. Or another depression.

I mean, we're not positioning ourselves very well to get through difficulties like that. Not when you go into such problems with a $40 trillion national debt. Yeah, that's right. So, yeah. That of itself is a crushing thing. And I think we're going to find out about that in just a couple of years. You've got a lot of people who are opining about that, Ray Dalio and many others are talking about the death spiral of the dollar because of the debt spiral going up.

Yeah. Well, you know, so many Americans think that the debt issue, though they may regard it as serious, they think it's a future problem. Maybe they'll be gone and their grandkids will have to mess with it. But no, it's becoming a present problem quicker and faster every year because the interest on the debt is beginning to crowd out other spending, some of which is good, some is bad, but you know, we're spending now a trillion dollars a year just to pay interest on the national debt. So I see these stories in the paper about are we running out of ammunition in the war

with Iran? And I'm thinking to myself, well, if we are, maybe the fact that we're spending a trillion of federal income just to pay interest on past spending, past debt. Maybe that's one of the reasons. So a nation can drown itself in its past debts and ignore current and future needs because too much money has to go to debt service. I agree. That's a serious issue we have to face. I agree. Yeah, I'm not really sure, you know, exactly what their plan is, but I don't think it's anything good.

No, I have one. When you look at what their options are, we had the very beginning of the Trump administration. You had some noise come out from Doug Bergham, Secretary. the Interior, Lutnik, and Bessent saying, you know, we've got a lot of assets in public lands, you know, so maybe they're just going to sell all that stuff off or tokenize it or something. I don't really know what they think they're doing. They don't seem to be concerned about it, actually, based on their actions. No, and in the past, when nations have gone through horrific financial crises,

you see the same phenomenon, right up to the moment that, you know, that the whole thing fell apart. you had politicians saying, don't worry about it. Or like John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, once said, in the long run, we're all dead anyway. And so is the dollar, right? That's right. Yeah, I know. I was raised on his macroeconomics nonsense.

It never made any sense to me at all. I thought it was nonsense from the very beginning. But, of course, now we got something even worse, the modern monetary theory, which I call the magic money tree. That's a good way to refer. to it. Yeah, the idea that you can just spend any quantity of money because you can just print it up and all will be well. And, you know, that is an abdication of fiscal sanity and responsibility. I agree. And we have people from both parties now saying, you know, the real problem is we've just got to raise the debt ceiling. I've seen that from both Republicans. The Democrat, Elizabeth Warren was saying,

I've seen that from several Republicans as well. That's the only real issue we've got is we've got a debt ceiling. Let's just get rid of it. Yeah, and how many in Washington are coming up with a list of things we ought to be cutting? In fact, one of the two parties, you see a little bit of that in one party, but the other one just has a laundry list of multi-trillion dollar new spending, as if we don't have a $40 trillion national debt. Nobody ever says, let's cut something dollar for dollar before we add to our spending. They just think it's so limitless. Yeah, yeah. There's absolutely no way out of this, except some kind of a strange default. But as you point out, everybody thinks everything is fine until the very end.

It's like what Hemingway said, you know, has somebody really rich go bankrupt gradually then suddenly. Yeah. That's the way it often happens, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about your book, was Jesus a socialist? Because, again, I've seen the, and I'm sure everybody has seen this as become an anecdote, we'd ask a lot of kids in school, you know, from each of course. to his ability to each according to his need. Did that come from the Bible? And they say,

yeah, that's one of the Bible. Oh, my gosh. Not my Bible. Yeah. Lord helps those who help themselves type of thing, right? But yeah, that's not in there either. But let's talk a little bit about was Jesus a socialist and does he support that? Yeah. You know, this question is really a crucial one, its answer depends on a couple things. One, how you define socialism. And secondly, how well, how thoroughly, you've read the New Testament. I find a lot of people who make the claim that Jesus was a socialist, when you ask them, well, give me some passages, you know, where he endorsed the central planning of an economy, or robbing Peter to pay Paul, or government ownership of the means of production. You know, they never have one to cite.

socialism is not simply helping people. I mean, I'm amazed at how many people think, oh, socialism, yeah, that means you're concerned about the poor, you're helping the needy. Well, there's more help for the needy and the poor under capitalism than they're ever under socialism, even our foreign aid programs, which I have a lot of problem with. If you look at them, the flow of funds is from capitalist countries to socialist ones. They're the ones that need to be bailed out all the time. They're the ones dig themselves out of poverty.

But if you read the New Testament carefully, you will find that there is no passage whatever where Jesus is endorsing the objectives of what we call socialism today. He never says turn that over to the government. Let me put this way. If you came today to a meeting and Jesus appeared and he said to you and to the whole group, Okay, you know, I said some things about the poor. What did you do about it? And if you raised your hand and told him, oh, I voted for the politicians who said they'd take care of that.

I can tell you that he would not be a happy camper. He would say, what? Robbing Peter to pay poll? I said, you do something for the poor. Not coming off onto somebody else. But if you raised your hand and said, well, I volunteered in a soup kitchen. I think Jesus would say, good for you, if you raised your hand and said, well, I actually hired a lot of the poor people. I started a business.

I invented and innovated, built a customer base, brought things from all over the world, and made them affordable to people, including the poor. I was an entrepreneur, in other words. I think Jesus would praise you for that. But this business of just turning it over to the politicians, he would have nothing to do with. He's not into outsourcing, is he? No, no, not at all. And there is a passage in Luke where he's approached by a man with a redistribution request. It's in Luke 12, 13 through 15.

A man approaches him and says, Master, speak to my brother, that he divideth the inheritance with me. And Jesus' response is very instructive. He did not say, oh, you didn't get any. equal share? Well, we'll have to look into that and equalize things a little bit. No, what he said was, man, who made me a judge or divider over you? Take heed into wear of covetousness. In other words, here's the son of God saying, what? You want me to steal from somebody and give it to you? Who made me a judge or divider over you? That's not why I'm here. That's right. He told

parables, about 40 of them, and at least three have some strong economic content, like the parable of the Good Samaritan, where a man comes upon another man along the road who's been clearly beaten, robbed, he's in terrible shape. What does the Samaritan say? He does not say to the man, oh, well, it's got to be a social program for you, or I'll put a word in for you with the emperor when I get to Rome. No, he immediately pitched. in with his own free will and his own resources and help the man. He didn't pawn it off onto anybody. He didn't steal from anybody to help the guy. He did it through his free will and from his own resources. If he did it any other way, you know, turned it over to the government or just

went on his way, we wouldn't call him the good Samaritan today. We'd call him the good for nothing Samaritan. So in my book, I have a lot of examples like that. Some people say, well, Jesus chased the money changers from the temple, so he must not have liked people who make money. Well, what a leap. Take note of where he was when he drove the money changers away. He wasn't in a bank. He wasn't in a marketplace. He was in God's house. That's right. And there's good reason to believe from the Bible that these were people who were taking advantage of those who came to worship. Yes. If you showed up at a funeral and started playing you know, happy days are here again with your kazoo, somebody's going to ask you to leave.

And that's what Jesus did. He said, get out of here. That's not, this is not the place for that. That's right. Yeah, I believe that, you know, what I've heard is that they would have to have their currency in the local, they'd have to have the right currency. They couldn't use a foreign currency. And so they had these guys set up there. The money changers were changing it for them and making excessive profits out of them.

that. That was the other aspect of it. You know, we see what Christ has to say about money. He does talk a lot about it, but he talks about things like make sure you don't covet it, make sure you don't have envy for other people, make sure you don't steal it, make sure you don't love it, you know, all these types of things. And so those are all aspects of socialism, really, if you look at it, the envy, the covetousness, and the love of money. You don't have to have money to love it and idolize it, do you? No, socialists love to say that it's capitalists who are, you know, so sold on money and so into money all the time. And yet they're the ones that are always saying, it's your money we got to take.

I mean, money is all they're interested in. They're not interested in the spiritual or economic growth of the individual through his personal initiative. They're just interested in what's in your bank account. And if it's more than they think you ought to have, no matter how. worthy you were in earning it, they want to take it. So they're the ones that are absorbed with money, but not their own. They're absorbed with yours. That's right. And, you know, when you were talking about the example of the Good Samaritan, how he took it onto himself to do something about it, that is a very Christian principle that Alexis de Tocqueville saw when he came to America.

Coming to America from socialist France, he was absolutely amazed that instead of creating some kind of a committee or some kind of a bureaucracy that was going to supposedly take care of a social issue. So the people in the communities would just come together and do it themselves. That was one of the key takeaways of his book that really struck me when I read it. And that is something that we've lost in America. The idea that we can take care of these things, the attitude that everybody has is like, well, I gave it the office, right? I gave with my income tax deduction. And so the government is going to take care of it. And I don't have to do anything. about it. You know, one of my very favorite presidents of the United States was Grover Cleveland.

He was president twice in the 1880s and 90s, and he vetoed more bills than all the previous 21 presidents combined. They were often attempts to grab money through the political process. And one of his famous vetoes was of the Texas Seed bill. It would have appropriated $10,000, which is, you know, maybe a couple million today, $10,000 for drought-stricken farmers in Texas. He vetoed it. And in his veto message, he said, though the people may support the government, it is not the duty of the government to support the people. And he went on to say, in America, we've always relied upon the voluntary charity of our fellow citizens to meet such needs. It makes no sense to launder our money through a distant federal bureaucracy and be grateful for the,

for the little bit they send back. Well, the Louisville paper in Kentucky supported President Cleveland's veto, and they said, we will prove President Cleveland right. We will raise voluntarily and privately at least as much money for those Texas farmers as he vetoed in that federal appropriation. Well, they not only did so, they raised about 10 times what the federal government, just that one newspaper in Kentucky. So they proved him right that Americans are exceedingly generous if you haven't been ripping

them off through the government for 40, 50, 60, 70 percent of our incomes. I agree, yeah. When you look at it, something is very similar to what we've seen with the, I would say, the dependency and the incapacitation that a welfare state breeds, right? You kind of pacify people. You make them dependent on the state. And that's really what we're seeing with the charitable stuff. You know, you're eviscerating that spirit of trying to help somebody, just like with the welfare state.

You eviscerate the spirit of wanting to succeed and to get ahead in terms of, you know, improving your station in life. Yeah, if you've ever visited a national park, you get the hint by some of the signs that even the federal government knows the harm of dependency. I've seen signs in national parks and say, don't feed the animals. It makes them dependent. But somehow it's different when it's humans. That's right. You're absolutely right. Yeah, I don't live too far from the Smoky Mountain National Park.

And, yeah, you're right, those signs are everywhere. The other thing that's there is if you've got a predator like a bear or something's getting aggressive coming at you, what do you? You yell and throw stuff at it. And I've always used that as an example of what we should do with our government when it gets aggressive with us. Yell and don't feed yourself to it, but throw stuff at it and yell at it. So sometimes that works. Remember Henry David Thoreau had a great line back in the 19th century. He said, if I knew for certain that a man was coming to my home to do me good, I would run for my life.

That's right. There's nobody more dangerous than somebody thinks he's a do-gooder, right? Yeah. That's amazing. Well, you have a wealth of information, a wealth of experience. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. And I just want to tell people again, the name of the book is the, let's see, born of ideas, how principles, faith, and courage forged America.

And it sounds like an excellent book is something everybody needs to see because we've lost sight of so many of those principles. And the founding principles of our country. I think we can talk about the Declaration of Independence as an anniversary. I don't really recall anybody in government talking so much about the Declaration of Independence that we've just celebrated so much. Do you? I haven't really seen them stand behind the principles of that. I know that who was it that was the 150th anniversary? I think it was a Calvin Coolidge who did an excellent essay about that, if I remember correctly. But we don't have anybody like that in government anymore, do we?

No, he was a great president, and he knew the importance of the declaration. And I know the speech you're referring to. Coolidge was one of our best. Yeah. Yeah, it's unfortunate that people don't really talk about the principles. And I always, every time I look at the Declaration of Independence, it is kind of burned into my memory how they had us memorize the first half of the paragraph, the opening paragraph. They don't want you to think about that part. Therefore, we institute governments to protect those rights.

And when they become destructive, it is our right and duty to alter or to abolish that government. They very carefully did not want you to read or memorize that second part there of that first paragraph. That's right. Do we have maybe 30 seconds to add another? Certainly. Certainly. About Calvin Coolidge? We got as much time as you want.

Go ahead. Okay. Many Americans, when they think of him, they think of the nickname that he got a silent Cal because they think, well, he didn't talk very much. Well, it's true that in social occasions, you know, receptions, he didn't care for that kind of stuff. He thought it was a lot of senseless small talk. He didn't say much.

But he still holds the record as the president among our. 47 who had the most public news conferences. If he was talking in that kind of venue as president, he could talk up a storm. But famously, at one of the dinners that he didn't really enjoy or a reception, a woman named Dorothy Parker was sitting next to him. And she said, Mr. President, I have a bet with a friend that I can get you to say at least three words. And he famously looked at her and said, you lose. God bless silent cow. Yeah, he had intelligence as well.

Yep. That's a big part of it, knowing when not to talk. That's right. He would have done much better, I think, with social media than our current president does with social media. Maybe he talks a little bit too much. But he also had grace. and dignity, and he was a kind man. I just can't say too many good things about Calvin Coolidge. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's sorely missed, I think, as we look at that in our current crop of politicians,

it's unfortunately, you don't have anybody like that to even choose from anymore. They're not on the menu, are they, or the ballot? No. No, and that in itself is a testimony against big government. The bigger it gets, the more nasty it becomes. corrupt it is. All this money sloshing around, all these powers that it's exercising on behalf of some and against others. What you end up having is a lot of good people give up on it. How many good people that you know would you love to see as a senator, but they won't run because it's a dirty business. So then you end up with the worst of both worlds, big government burned by bad people. That's right. And again, you know, when you look at

the perversion of the rule of law, it no longer is a guardrail for government, but it now becomes a weapon in their hands to wield against other people. And I think that's one of the reasons people don't want to run for it as well. They know that they're going to get hit with massive lawfare or maybe even prison over some trumped up charges or something. So it has become a very corrupt system. When I look at the amount of money that is coming out of Washington, I've said for the longest time, these astronomical amounts of money that are being spent on the elections.

And again, you want to know why our debt is. increasing that much? It's because we've got people who are collecting so much money when they run for office. When you look at the amount of money that we have for these campaigns, that is, I think, one of the best metrics of corruption that we've got. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, for the socialists or the leftists, liberals, you know, on that spectrum, it's really a racket. I mean, they like to come off as, well, we're the compassionate ones because we want to spend money on them. But you dig a little deeper and you'll find it an awful lot. of them, they're not motivated so much by compassion as they are by getting reelected.

This is the scam by which they buy votes with other people's money. That's right. It's amazing when you look at how they hang on to office. I mean, we've had so many people of both parties who have hung on long past their point of senility where they can't, they don't know anything and their staff is running it. we've even got somebody now who's hanging on to office even after he's died. That reminds me of something Mark Twain said. You know, he didn't like very many politicians, and there was one in particular that he

did not like who passed away. And then famously, Twain either wrote or said, quote, I did not attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter indicating that I approved of it. That's funny. I just saw something on social media. somebody said, Mitch McConnell is the only vegetable recently that hasn't been recalled. So I guess that's kind of where we are right now. These people love power so much they hang on to it throughout their life and beyond, I guess,

is what we're looking at. I think that's a staff that's hanging onto it from the beyond. But that's a sad state. Our founders, this is all these things we've discussed, David, our reasons why our founders said, about government, keep it small. I agree. I agree. And again, as we were talking about at the very beginning,

based on some foundational Christian principles about the nature of man, and one of those natures of man that they understood was the idea that power corrupts, going back to Lord Acton. And so they understood human nature. We don't understand that. It's amazing to me, Larry, when we look at what is happening across Western civilization, that all the lessons the last several centuries have now been forgotten or have been

countered by government schools to the extent that people don't value free speech, they don't value the due process, they don't value equality before the law, they don't value any of this stuff. And so, of course, it is rapidly evaporating. And I think that's a key thing that your book could help people with. Well, I sure hope so. And I hope more parents would take notice of what their kids are learning in school and what they're not learning.

That's right. So many times I think it's the sins of omission that the public schools are more guilty of even than sins of commission. It's what they don't call them. That's probably doing us more harm. That's right. Yes, I always thought it was important when we homeschooled to tell them, okay, this is what the schools will tell you. Now, here's what's really true. That's right.

So we would teach the controversy and tried to do that as much as we could. But I think that is something to keep in mind. and again, it is very important to understand the principles, how we got here, what made our civilization great, and the fact that when we lose these foundations, we are headed to the dustbin of history. I think that really is true. So again, your book, hopefully, it will raise some awareness. Certainly, you have done that throughout your career at Fee and at McAnaw Public Policy. So I appreciate all the work that you've done, and good luck to you.

I hope this book is heard around the world. I hope it's the next common sense. Thank you so much. Thank you, David. It's been great fun. I appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoyed it.

The common man. They created common core and dumbed down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and be. dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common.

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