The Ricochet Podcast - The Phone Call

Episode Date: May 22, 2014

This week, Long is assente in Italy, Lileks is powerless on the phone, and Robinson is rolling with all of it. We’ve got Money & Politics podcaster Jim Pethokoukis to talk about the economy, the budget deficit, and the search for inflation. Then, Commentary’s Peter Wehner joins to discuss what happens when the Right turns on America. And we’re not talking about what happens at a red-light, either. Source

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It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Well, not really. Rob's still swanning around Europe. I'm James Lylex and I had to do most of this on my cell phone. It doesn't matter. We've got great guests. Jim Pethokoukis, Pete Wehner. It's a conversation that will give you hope. So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody, to the Technically Challenged Ricochet Podcast number 215.

I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis, which is apparently now a third-world country. The power just went off for no apparent reason. I guess we Lilacs in Minneapolis, which is apparently now a third world country. The power just went off for no apparent reason. I guess we're supposed to come to accept these things as part of a new world in which the electricity rates will necessarily skyrocket. Thanks. But of

course, we've got Peter Robinson and Rob Long. No, no, we don't. Rob is in Italy and will not be joining us because he's in Italy. What would you do if you were in Italy? Sit on the phone on Skype? Or would you go off and have pasta and the rest of it? So we'll get a report from Rob next week on everything he did European-wise.

But Peter, how are you? How are things in sunny California? The electricity is working. Sunny California is a decent... Rub it in. Rub it in. Rub it in. Yeah, it's great. Yep, the electricity does work here, and sunny California is. I'm absolutely fine. I'm envying Rob in Italy. Isn't that a new? He was in Amsterdam, then he was headed off to Budapest.

I thought he was supposed to go to Norway or Sweden or something like that afterwards. Maybe he wanted some sun as well. Maybe he's just doing the grand tour, but for whatever reason, it's sunny here, too. And it's an absolutely beautiful, gorgeous day in Minnesota, the kind that we look for, wait for, live for. But, you know, come January, it's going to be a lot colder than this. And come January, in a few years, we're going to have the Super Bowl. I don't know if you're a sports guy, Peter, but have you heard the news that Minneapolis, indeed, is hosting the Super Bowl? I had not heard that. I don't know

quite how that escaped me. By the way, at what venue is the Hubert Humphrey Astrodome still around? The Hubert H. Humphrey or the Hubert H. Horatio Hornblower Metrodome, not Astrodome, was

leveled last February in a less than spectacularome. It was leveled last February. Was it really? In a less than spectacular action. It was ground down in a demeaning way. It just picked apart into nothing. And on its face rises a huge new glacier rock assemblage that will – a huge amount of a billion dollars that will host, I don't know, six, seven games a year. So the Hubert Humphrey Astrodome, I have a sort of sentimental attachment for the Humbert H. Humphrey Metrodome as it was. Well, you're the one. Well, yes, I am the one because I was present

many years ago now for the official opening ceremony. And I wrote the speech that then Vice President George H.W. Bush delivered in the Hubert H. Humphrey Astrodome. And I remember... Metrodome, excuse me, Metrodome. I'm sure I got that right in the speech. I hope so. A representative, so Scandinavian are you all in Minneapolis, or so Scandinavian did you all still feel back in those days. There was a representative from each of the five Scandinavian countries, the crown prince of Norway, some prince from Sweden, the president of Iceland, and so it went. And George H. L. B. I had just joined his staff a month earlier. I'd already

discovered that whatever I gave him, he would improvise all over. And for a speechwriter, that's painful. I'm sure for him, having me as a speechwriter is painful, but for me, that was painful. And he delivered the text of the speech at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome flawlessly because as he told me, as soon as it was all over, there was so much echo in the stadium. Good afternoon, noon, noon, noon, that all he could do was cling to the text as I had written it. And this is the moment of triumph. He delivered the speech. He stayed with the text.

And almost the moment we got back onto Air Force Two, Mrs. Bush came back in the plane and said, that was an unusually good speech. Well done. So there you go, James. And now for all these years, that memory has been attached to an actual building. Now it's attached to rubble.

Oh, how disturbing. Peter, you're the only guy I know who actually husbands anecdotes about giving vice presidential addresses and being on the plane and hearing things like that. You're so modest. I mean, most people would lead with that, like in the first two or three years of the podcast. You had a metrodome, I'm sorry, astrodome story tucked in the back of your pocket just in case the subject should come up. That's astonishing.

Well, you're right about the acoustics. It was known as the Thunderdome and not in a happy fashion. It was so deafening in there that people, players not used to the acoustics would find themselves unmanned. Oh, but that's a sexist term. There was a great Ricochet post just the other day

about how, well, was it Frank DeSoto who wrote it? It was about, or Frank Soto, do I say DeSoto because of the car or just because I'm standing here talking on a phone? You're doing fine. The post was essentially that women are complaining that the university of iowa the hawkeyes that they painted the opposing locker room team pink in order to take the aggression out of the other team and this is a demeaning sexist assumption and this cannot stand and

that he regarded this as just another example of sort of university bred university uh distilled feminism going absolutely crazy off into another cloud cuckoo land where logic doesn't apply and where the strange non-gendered mysterious world well there were a couple of other things one there, there's a piece in National Review Online today by some guy named James Lilacs talking about this thing called Not All Men and why no men should interrupt anybody who's making

assertions such as, all men are rapists. You've got to shut up and you've got to take it. And the second thing is, and this is interesting, in science fiction apparently there's this big nebula awards, and this year they were all won by women. And everybody's saying that this is a great thing because they were all won by women. Not because they were all wonderful works, but because it was run by women.

And I hate, there are two things I hate. One of them is sort of that men's rights, you know what I mean, Peter, where you talk about the guys who go online specifically to talk about how men are getting portrait, but everywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Okay, you hate at any time to see yourself descending into the company of those of those limping mangy wolves but there there are times where you look around and you say is this confined to college or is this simply going to be the culture as we know it in 10 years right what do you think i don't know but i have to say you've struck me in a pessimistic moment i who was it there's a post on Ricochet right now, a wonderful post entitled, How Will People of Faith Live Now? And it struck me all of a sudden, I mean, it's implicit in that post, that I suspect that from the long view of history, a quarter of a century or half a century or a century from now, the Obama administration will not be remembered for Obamacare. The Obama administration will not be

remembered for this fumbling foreign policy that permitted the resurgence of Russia, that permitted chaos in Syria and so forth. I think it's likely that the Obama administration will be remembered as the moment when the government of the United States and the semi-official culture, by which I mean the mainstream media and the network of universities that have such an effect in governing this notion of political correctness, turned officially and formally and unambiguously against the fundamental beliefs of Judeo-Christian morality. There was huge triumph in, I guess, what you might call Christian press or the Christian blogosphere, when by one vote, the Supreme Court decided that a city council could go ahead and continue to open its meetings with prayer.

But against that, we've had court after court. By the way, in every state in which it was put to a vote of the citizens except one, there's only one exception, gay marriage has been voted down. The people of this country are on record as supporting traditional marriage. It's been overturned in a series of court cases. That's a kind of cultural coup in any event that, yeah, yeah. I, I, I think the culture is turning more hostile and this is the moment, this is the, this is the moment when suddenly really simply to be

not a particularly devout, but a kind of ordinary Christian who shares basic assumptions that have governed society or an observant of cultural norms and moral norms Jew, simply taking for granted norms that have governed society for five millennia at least, to be that kind of person is to be viewed with hostility by the official by the federal government certainly and by the official culture that is a horrifying thing and it seems to me that it has happened and it's likely to get worse before it gets better how's that to cheer you up that's that's um yes that's really cheering um yes that's, um, yes, that's really cherry. Um, yes. I've studied a little bit here because first of all,

I just got a text telling me to stop washing the dishes. Apparently I clanked something. I'm sorry about that. But as more to your point, you're absolutely right. Um, it's to paraphrase John Forbes, scary. Um, you know, let's, let's just extirpate and denormalize all the founding concepts of the country. What's the worst thing that could happen? Well, we'll find out. We indeed will find out.

All right. Well, that point being made, I should make something. Oh, I'm sorry. You mentioned something about Rob. No, no, no. I'm sure he had the sense that by the end of the last podcast that you and I were turning grim. So he's decided to fritter off to Italy and enjoy himself in the sun while we glower and gloom about the United States of America. I do want a thorough report from that man. He has a lot of explaining to do.

Well, indeed. I mean, you're looking at a country, Italy, which itself has got great, gross political problems, but yet they've got a lot of churrito, which allows them to have some sort of enjoyment. I don't want to be a country that's spiraling culturally down, but nevertheless says, oh, we've got good espresso and we've got good pastry, so enjoy the decline, enjoy the decline.

Well, the funny thing is, is that if Rob were here, he would interrupt the segue that I'm about to make. If he's not, I'm going to make it anyway. And I'm still going to tell you, because I'm at sixes and sevens. My P's and Q's are not minded. I'm all pixelated here with this electric situation.

But I'll push on. And remind you that this podcast is brought to you by audible.com, the internet's leading provider of audio books with more than 100,000 downloadable titles. Imagine that. All types of literature, audio versions of many New York Times bestsellers. Well, you know, for our listeners, and that's you, everybody out there in Ricochet, Audible is offering a free audiobook, F-R-E-E, no cost to you.

This will give you the chance to try out their service. And once you do, you'll get used to hearing these things. Let's see. Audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet. Audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet. And I can't access the internet right now, but if I did, I would go to Audible and see if they had a copy of Dante's Inferno. Because it would be great to bone up on your Dante before we talk to Lob again and see if we can get him to tell us some tales of the, well, I understand that they just found the dust of Dante's tomb in some place other than it's supposed to be. Dante, of course, died in Othelio, way off, in exile somewhere,

and when they opened his tomb years ago, it was empty. They don't really know how the dust from one tomb got to the other. Dan Brown, call your agent. There's your next story. So go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet and find yourself a book and enjoy Audible's service. Peter, I'm going to ask you a little later for a spot,

but right now we've got to get with great speed and authority to our first guest. Jim Pethokouk, because he's the host of Ricochet's Money and Politics podcast, columnist, blogger for the American Enterprise Institute, and formerly Washington columnist for Reuters at Breaking Views. He's written for many publications, including U.S. News, World Report, The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, USA Today, Investors Business Daily, name of place he's

written for. We'll welcome him back to the podcast. Hey, Jim. Hey, hey. You know, of all the things that we were talking about before you came on, the one that we didn't and shouldn't was the VA scandal. Let me ask you, as a guy who knows his way around money, is this the sort of thing that money could have fixed, or is this the sort of thing that naturally accrues to a bureaucracy given a lot of money and power.

Well, after a – let me say this, that my experience with government and how bureaucracies work and how government works really began when I was a teenager working for my local city's Department of Public Works. That's where my knowledge comes from, seeing government in action. Based on that, not to mention the subsequent 30-some years, this kind of thing is inherent in government. It's inherent in bureaucracies. Sure, you can throw a lot of money at the problem, but if the structure is wrong, there's no amount of money that can't be wasted or misused. Hey, Jim, Peter Robinson here. So we've got that the budget deficit is shrinking, right? And we

also know that Ben Bernanke expanded the money supply. You've written a great length about this. And on the conservative side, the monetarist side, people have been saying, just you wait, just you wait, there will be inflation. It's just around the corner. So we conservatives have been saying that the Obama administration has been adding massively to the federal deficit and running the terrible risk of inflation. The deficit is shrinking and inflation is nowhere in sight. Have we simply been wrong? Well, I think, you know, I don't want to sort of conflate, you know, the sort of conservatism that's sort of an Austrian view, Austrian economics of how economies work. You're right. There's been conservatives, you know, have been waiting for inflation. It hasn't come.

They've been very worried about the budget deficit exploding and causing a financial crisis. There's no evidence that that's going to happen anytime soon. There is zero indication in financial markets that anybody is worried about a default unless we cause one on our own. The deficit is dropping. It's not out of the question we could actually

maybe get to a balanced budget over the next couple of years. Of course, that budget deficit is going to go right back up because of entitlement. It's really sort of the calm before the storm. But right now, that is not the problem with the U.S. economy. Basically, the same problem with the U.S. economy is the same problem with Europe. Europe has had this huge debt problem. But why does Europe have a huge debt problem? Primarily because their economy has collapsed.

And our economy collapsed as well. And so we got this huge deficit because tax revenues collapsed. That is not my concern. Near-term concern is about what the budget deficit is, what the national debt is. My near concern is this economy just isn't growing enough, and we may not have the potential to grow fast in the future, and that's what we want to fix. Okay. The economy is not growing.

I'll give you another of the usual sort of standard conservative critique is it's because taxes are too high, regulations continue to proliferate. And as a cultural matter, we know culture is important. Keynes talked about the importance of, quote, animal spirits. You have a president of the United States who's persistently anti-business, anti-capital, and so forth. And the reason the economy is not growing is because of the way the federal government has comported itself under Barack Obama. That just doesn't cut it entirely, does it? Right. I mean, I'm a believer in the phrase high causal density. When you have something as complicated as the U.S. economy, it's very hard to say it's any one thing. Do I believe the Obama economic policies of raising taxes during a slow economy and massive waves of regulation?

No. Have those helped? Absolutely not. Would we be better without the tax hikes? Yes, we would. Has this recovery been slow? I think there is evidence that suggests that recoveries after financial crises, particularly when those crises involve big dislocations in the housing market, do

tend to be slower. So I think there is some causality to that. I think we have some longer-term problems, too, which are re-manifesting themselves. Hold it. So the longer-term problems, go ahead. Take a couple of those off. Well, I think we have a problem with not enough startups in this economy, not enough new companies. It's really your new companies that are your fast growers,

your big job creators. They bring a lot of innovation. They also put pressure on the existing companies to either innovate or die. And I think there's a lot of stats I've written about showing that that sort of new entrepreneurship, particularly, again, in the kinds of companies that are likely to become the next Google, that that's down. I think that's a big factor. I mean, people on the left have also talked about this thing called secular stagnation, that we have a chronic demand in the economy. Am I going to write that off just because it comes from Larry Summers? I'm not going to write that off. I think there's a variety of things going wrong with the US economy, Obama being one of them, but not just

that. But not just that. Okay, so let me ask you another. Let me ask the Texas question. I live in Northern California, as I think you know, and it's high school graduation season. I was with some friends at a party for a couple of kids who are graduating. We've known the kids since they were small, which means I've known the parents for a long time now. There may have been 50 people at this Northern California party, and Texas came up in that conversation. In two hours of chatting with my friends, Texas came up half a dozen times. And in every single instance except one, it was along the lines of, oh, if only I could figure out how to move to Texas. If only I could move my VC firm if only I could figure out how to move to Texas. If only I could move my VC firm.

If only I could pick up and move to Texas, I'd be able to start more companies, make more money. And the one exception was from someone who had just returned from Austin who had moved to Texas. So is this – Well, hold on, Peter. Peter, if I can ask. Yes. Do these people have trouble with their internal passports? You're a very bad man, James Lilacs.

Now go back and sit in your corner for a moment, would you please? So that actually – that really – excuse me. So let me just ask the question. The recovery has been slow. It hasn't created as many jobs as we would all have liked. And yet Texas, it has – half the jobs created in the recovery have been recreated in Texas. If it ain't an extreme sensitivity to tax rates and pro-business culture and an absence of regulation, why is Texas doing so well? Well, I think those things are important.

I think the taxes in a particular – I think what the tax rates are. I think what's going on with regulation. I think those are all huge factors. I just don't think they're the only factors to explain nationwide what's going on because even before the Obama administration, throughout the 2000s, we had a slow recovery. We've had slow job growth, not great wage growth. So I think there's a natural tendency to think that it all began in 2009, that things were somehow fine before then, and we need to get back. If we only get rid of the Obama policies, things are fine. I think things are not fine. You've seen this huge sort of what they call job polarization in the market where you've seen a lot of these middle-wage jobs disappear. You've seen growth at the two what they call job polarization in the market where you've seen a lot of these middle-wage jobs disappear. You've seen growth at the two ends. That trend continues now. It was happening before the Obama administration. So I think to focus the entire – listen, maybe that's the smart way to frame it politically.

I have no idea. Economics say, I think just to merely focus on what Obama has done and just reversing that and, I don't know, cutting marginal, top marginal tax rates, that's like the entire conservative response of what's wrong. I think you have to start with what's the right diagnosis, and the diagnosis is not just solely about Barack Obama. Thomas Piketty. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, James. I was just going to get to the Piketty point yourself. If we understand the leading voices on the left, the main cause, the main problem we all face is inequality. The point you're going to make about Piketty, Peter, was –

Well – That's actually a good radio tongue twister to check your plosives. Lickety-splickety-splickety onto Piketty. Peter's pickety point perspicaciously picked one plum point. Jim, you see, this is what I have to put up with James. He's showing off all the time. Okay, so Thomas,

you're talking about long-term problems with the economy. Pickety says capitalism has a permanent problem, which is that the returns to capital are taking the very long historical view and he takes a century's view. The returns to capital are almost always, except when world wars intervene, are almost always at a kind of fixed ratio, something like five to seven times greater than the

growth in the economy therefore owners of capital will get richer faster much faster than everybody else and inequality is not just a temporary problem in the united states and in europe it is built into this very structure or nature of capitalism to to which Jim Pethokoukis says? We'll see. We'll see if he's right. If he's right, then inequality should continue to increase year after year into levels far beyond what we've ever seen since the Industrial Revolution. So we'll have a real-world test of his thesis. But his thesis also assumes that economic growth is going to be slow going forward. And there's lots of things that we can do, regardless of what his thesis, I think to boost economic growth.

I mean, do people care? He said inequality is a problem. Do people care primarily if inequality is increasing, if they're also doing well by their own state? That's exactly- I think part of what he's saying is that that's not important. You could be doing great, but if the 0.01% are doing even better, then you're going to be miserable. Right, right. That's what I have to say.

I haven't heard anybody make this point. Somebody must have. I just haven't heard it. But Piketty goes back in this country. He does analysis in Europe. But in this country, the period with which he begins is a period of huge disproportion in wealth, huge inequality, the so-called Gilded Age, post-Civil War right up through the First World War, let's say, when the top 1% had something well over a fifth of the wealth in the country. But stop and think. Immigration to this country was massive.

That was a time of a great flowering of the arts. Those rich people were giving money away. They were founding them. You walk down Fifth Avenue in New York and you see the Metropolitan Museum. You see one great work of art after another that was a result of the philanthropy. It's not clear to me that America during the Gilded Age was a bad or unhappy place precisely because during that period, the economy was growing quickly. Isn't that right? Isn't it growth that matters more than equality? It is, and which there are plenty of people on the left who think that the focus,

the unbelievable obsessive focus on what people at the extreme end are doing isn't particularly helpful because it really ignores things like how everybody else is doing, upward mobility. And it's not just conservatives saying this, but it's certainly a wonderful election issue to talk about and to scapegoat the very rich for all our problems.

And I think that's what Pickney focused on. Listen, this guy is a left-wing economist who in his heart thinks inequality is morally wrong. And sort of the secondary question about the economic force, he believes that is morally wrong. So even if I'm doing great and I'm doing better than my parents did and my kids are doing better, if I'm doing – and they're getting better jobs and they're getting opportunities I never had, that is insufficient for him if people at the very top are doing better than ever. So that is fundamentally his problem, and he has created a very simple model to explain why that's going to continue forever and ever. And, of course, it's a model. It's a simple model. The model is not the real world.

If it was the real world, it would be the real world. It isn't. It's a model, which people have been picking at. And we'll see if it works. There's so many things we can do other than his solution, which is unbelievable tax rates. Well, hold on a second. Being a good leftist, though, and a good collectivist, he's not interested so much in bringing people up

as he is carrying people down at the top. And there's this belief that, one, if you confiscate, two, something happens, and then three, equality. And he usually generally sees himself as being one of those people who nevertheless will have sufficient social and intellectual capital to be part of the elite. Megan McArdle, a great economist over at Bloomberg, said, all right, if we want to start taxing things like privileges, as Piketty suggests, let's start with tenure as well. Because that's a form of capital that these people are perfectly content to accumulate on their own.

Peter, you were saying before. Oh, no. That's – that tax on tenure. No, Jim, I want to say – so we have people who are now trying to scramble for the presidential nomination in 2016. It seems to me a very impressive field, but they're all busy because figuring out how to capture the Republican nomination between now and the summer of 2016 is very complicated, on top of which people such as Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal are still running states. So, Jim, you do their thinking for them. Give us the top three Pethokoukis recommendations for fixing what ails the economy.

Well, like I said, I think it is a multi-causal problem. recommendations for fixing what ails the economy? Well, I mean, like I said, I think it is a multi-causal problem. But one thing I would want to do is look at the entire regulatory state and in what ways do these prevent, A, new companies from entering the market or old companies leaving the market. One thing is that our too-big-to-fail banking system, which incentivizes banks to become super big and take big sort of macro economy-wide risk, does not encourage them, for instance, to loan to small business. And you've seen a decline in small business lending among smaller community banks. They've begun to disappear. They can't deal with Dodd-Frank regulations. That's, I think, a pretty big thing, reforming a financial system like that.

Republicans haven't been super interested in doing that. It's amazing, though, that five, six years after the financial crisis, we kind of forget that it ever happened. So I think the too-big-to-fill system – Dodd-Frank should be repealed? I think there are-big-to-fail system – Dodd-Frank should be repealed? I think there are a variety of things. Ah, okay. So – but it's complicated.

It's hard – I think a lot of things we need to do are going to be difficult for Republicans to do because there's going to be winners and losers in the business community. When you say, hey, let's cut taxes, who's the loser in that? Nobody. When you say, hey, let's go after crony capitalist regulation, which is stifling our business dynamism, there are going to be losers in that. And those losers may currently be giving you money. So what do you do? Right, right, right. You mentioned copyright law. Tell me what kind of reforms you'd like to see. I don't

think that's the sort of thing that's going to galvanize people to the Republican side. I don't think there's a lot of votes to be had for saying, hey, Mickey Mouse, put him in public domain. But for the sake of the economy, what would you do? Well, I mean, I think patent and copyright law, which is not... I mean, people heard about patent trolls. I think people kind of heard that there's something wrong with their patent law. But those kinds of things are actually in the consciousness of a lot of younger voters.

I'm not that young, but I do go to the websites frequented by the kids. And these kinds of issues, particularly copyright, does come up. So I think there is sort of an electoral kicker to what would otherwise be a pretty good idea. And yes, of course, listen, we need to have a simpler tax system that gets rid of all these subsidies. I think there's too many tax subsidies, too many spending subsidies. We have regulation which favors incumbent players. I think all those things should be the heart of, I think,

a pro-growth, pro-middle-class agenda. But you mentioned the young kids, those kids today and their crazy internet. I know what you mean when you say that they're interested in copyright reform, but essentially their basis there is the desire to never pay anything for any item ever, period. And anything that gets in the way of that

is annoying to them. I'm not sure that these are people that we can get on our side, on the GOP side, by saying that we stand for, well, copyright matters to them, yes, net neutrality matters so much more if you hear them talk. And then there's all these arguments back and forth about what net neutrality is going to do to hold back the Internet. You got a point on that, because I know that Holman Jenkins over at the Wall Street Journal

is making a big point that the metered internet is coming and that it should. Is this an issue that perhaps we could school people with? I mean, I hate to pander. I would prefer to instruct and have something salutary for the economy come out of people making correct economic decisions based on empirical knowledge, on thinking through as opposed to jerking knees about whether or not their particular ox is being gored to completely put my metaphors in the blender. So let's talk about net neutrality. Is this a bonus for the economy?

Is what's going on right now in telecommunications and mergers and the sort of thing, is that the sort of thing that we should be encouraging more of, or is this consolidation of a dying industry? Listen, I have been really looking at things from sort of this sort of, you know, cronyist perspective. When I look at net neutrality, what comes down to me is you have two sides.

Neither wants to be the one to pay in the future for expanding the internet, expanding broadband. So to me, it's like, who's going to pay in the future for expanding the internet, internet expanding broadband. So to me it's like who, who's going to pay? And the, you know, you have one side wants the other side to pay and vice versa. So that's sort of the perspective I look at it from. We've had this amazing blossoming of the internet economy which has been, you know, which has

been very deregulated. I can't believe that conservatives can't make the argument that regulating this previously unregulated sector and putting in the charge of bureaucrats, that's really the weakness on the left. They're very suspicious of business, but people who work in government, they believe that all these same bad incentives,

bad choice, that does not apply to people in government. I think you need to make the case, yeah, it really does. And you're worried about big business and oligarchies, and this is probably the problem with Piketty, that he has complete, unbelievable confidence, despite what we've seen the past hundred years, that people in government are selfless and make great choices and they don't. So, Jim, I'm trying to – I'm just trying to come up with a headline here. If you're a politician, you've got to have those two or three points. You can't just say it's complicated and everything is related to everything else. Even if that may very well be true, what's the headline on how to fix it? The headline is the U.S. economy has become less dynamic because government is discouraging and making it harder for new companies to enter the market.

And it's bailing out and supporting un-innovative incumbent players who are politically connected. So if you're, listen, if you're for less innovation and for big business to be shielded from competition and supported by the government, well, then there's one side you may want to vote for. If you believe in competition, new companies, innovating, you know, pushing these incoming players, then there's maybe another side you want to vote for. People, workers deserve a safety net. Businesses do not deserve a safety net. And we've created a safety net among U.S. businesses that have made them less competitive and lethargic. Beautiful. Beautiful. James Lilacs, as usual, you're driving the bus here.

But do I have time for one or two more questions for Jim Pethokoukis? What do you think? I'm driving the bus, I'm on one of those old tiny bicycles that has a really big front wheel and a really tiny, you know, one of those bone shakers. By all means, go ahead. I love what he's saying, but if I can just interrupt. These are great points to make because they're popular without being populist. I'm not seeing Huey Long pounding the table here and demanding that these rapacious whales be broken up and the blubber distributed to everybody else. It's possible to make these points without making people lose faith in free enterprise and capitalism, which you're pointing

to is that unholy combination of government and business, which I think is across the board, is a popular idea. Anyway, Peter, go on. Okay, so Jim, here's sort of my last question for you, my last set of questions. The Federal Reserve, huge new liquidity in the economy, vast, unprecedented since the crisis of 2008. Quantitative easing 1, 2, and 3 has pumped all kinds of money into the economy. Inflation is not here. Despite predictions of monetarists, inflation is not here. But the question then is, does the Fed know how to wind down this liquidity if inflation does begin to appear? Can they end this act if the economy begins to grow a little bit more briskly?

If inflation does threaten, can they soak up that liquidity deftly and quickly enough to avoid damaging the economy? an inflation of even a percent and a half would make debt service for the federal government so much more expensive that that declining deficit we've been talking about would turn right around and start to go up all over again. Well, I think embedded in that question, and by the way, I disagree with sort of the premise that it's been monetarists. Usually it's your Austrian types who've been worried about inflation. Some sort of very old school monetarists might, but there's a huge wing of the monarchs. What would Milton Friedman – you've studied all these guys.

What would Milton Friedman say if he were still with us? I think he would be absolutely in favor of the entire quantitative easing program, particularly – He would. Including the latest round. Listen, in 2013, not only did we have – we've had decline in spending. We also had huge tax increases in 2013. Yet we had better job growth and better GDP growth in 2013 than 2012. And why do I think that is? I think it's because of the quantitative easing program.

Look, you have Europe and the United States, two economies, which are in these huge shocks. One has 12% unemployment, and it's had like a double dip, maybe a triple dip recession. The U.S. growing, like it to grow faster, but it's growing, adding jobs. What's the big difference in those two economies over the past few years? One is that a very active central bank, and the other has not had a very active central bank. I think the central bank is why we have not gone into a double-dip recession. Now, going forward, I'm not terrified of slightly higher inflation if it's also coming with higher growth. But that was really the problem, again, in Europe is that growth collapsed. So you can

get slightly higher inflation, but if you're getting higher nominal growth, then that's actually easier to service. And remember, the big example that people worried about inflation point to, and there's going to be a bond market catastrophe, was really 1994 when you had a big backup in bond yields. But that year was also a pretty good year for the economy and the stock market. I'm not in this business to protect bond investors. The economy can do just fine. It's done it before. They think they can wind it down. I don't think it has to be a flawless wind down to avoid catastrophe.

Well, we're not going to give you a flawless wind down here. We're just simply going to say how much we've enjoyed talking to you. And I feel optimistic and enlightened and informed. And that's why we have you on the podcast, Jim. Thanks a lot. We'll see you on the podcast, Jim. Thanks a lot. We'll see you later. Thanks, Jim. And we switch and pivot and go eat instantaneously

without even a soup sole of a pause to Pete Wenner, who's our next guest, the senior fellow at Ethics and Public Policy Center, previously working in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, and the last of which is that he served as deputy assistant to the president. We welcome you to the podcast. Mr. Whittier, you recently have a piece noting that the right, in some ways,

seems to have turned on America. And I hear this, I see this even on our own beloved ricochet, where people are saying, it's to the point where you've got to pack your guns and cosmoline and get some canned goods and sit down and wait. It's to the point where you've got to pack your guns and cosmoline and get some canned goods and sit down and wait. It's not good. It's not a healthy spirit in any side of the political spectrum. But it is distressing to see the right give up on America when supposedly the right is the ones that encapsulate, hold, and preserve the values that we need to come back to. Do you think that elements of the right are overplaying their hand?

I worry about it a great deal. I worry for practical, utilitarian, political reasons, and I worry about it in deeper philosophical reasons to deal with them in order on the practical side of things. I just think that this is a very bad message to send to the American people, that essentially you think that the country that we represent and that lawmakers want to be elected to represent is essentially a mirror image of Nazi Germany, to quote Ben Carson, who's a Tea Party favorite. So I think that there's a kind of disdain for America that we used to associate, actually, with with the left the new left back in the late sixties and early seventies there's a kind of contempt uh... for for what america has has become so i think that uh... when voters hear that kind of thing they do they think a it's wrong

and be the biggest wildly out of touch with uh... with what their concerns are they're concerned about things like uh... the cost of of tuition for higher education and K-12 elementary school and health care costs and so forth. So to have a party or a movement use that kind of extreme, I think serrated, edged language is, I think, very, very bad. But on a deeper level, philosophically, it worries me too because I think, one, it's unmoored from reality.

But as you were saying, there is a tradition within conservatism that understands the greatness and what's precious about America. That doesn't mean that we're Pollyannas, that we don't understand that at particular moments in time we have real and deep challenges, but that's really quite different from a fundamental indictment and speaking about it as if it's a malicious regime. Well, I know Peter Robinson wants to leap here, but I have to ask this. I think there are two components to the right's reaction, one of which is, as Kevin D. Williamson of National Review pointed out, the right is actually

angriest about the federal government. Not America, it's the federal government that we're talking about, and that's a valid point. But the other are the people who are upset about the changes in the culture, which they feel are injurious now and down the road. And that's everything from drug legalization to gay marriage. They feel as if the culture that they know, the culture that built the country, is not only slipping out of their fingers, but is being actively reconstructed so that they are the bad guys for believing what used to be quintessential bedrock virtues. So these are really two kinds of criticism here, the criticism of the government, which

we can turn around, and the criticism of the culture, which I think is a more difficult issue. Yeah, that's a very intelligent way to frame it, and I quite agree. Look, there's no difference with me or virtually any other conservative if the argument is that their problems with the federal government is too large, needs to be reliminated and reformed. And I made that argument more times than I can count. I'm part of a recent project which actually puts forward a whole series of conservative reforms to try and relimit and improve the federal government. So my concern and the reason I wrote the piece that I did isn't that there are conservatives who are critical of the federal government, the Obama

administration, simply the rhetoric that we hear, I think, increasingly, which I think is extreme and almost downright anti-American. In terms of the changes in the culture, yes, you're quite right. I mean, there are some deep changes that are going on that I think are challenges to traditional conservatives. But we have to have an answer for that. We have to figure out a way to persuade people to move their minds and their hearts in directions that we think we have to be able to explain to people in a very real way why the kind of social arrangements that we're in favor of would advance human flourishing and human dignity. One other point I'd make about the culture is I co-wrote an essay in 2009 in Commentary

Magazine on cultural indicators, and it was really interesting to me because in the early 1990s when I worked with Bill Bennett, we put out some call the index of leading cultural indicators and it's actually took also indicators nineteen sixty to nineteen ninety on fifteen eighteen issues uh... drug use uh... crime uh... out of wedlock births welfare uh... so on and so forth everything in that thirty year period got better and on and most things got some significantly worse

and there was a sense of despair. Bob Bork wrote a book called Slouching Toward Gomorrah and essentially said, look, there's no way to turn us around because the culture is so corrupted that these trends are simply going to continue and essentially swallow up America. But somewhere in the 93, 94, 95 period, things began to shift on a whole range of issues. And over the next 10 to 12, 15 years, a lot of indicators got better. Crime got spectacularly better. We had huge drops

in welfare rolls. Abortion rates went down. Teen pregnancy went down. Drug use went down. And now there were different reasons you'd have to disaggregate these issues. And some of them were because of policy. Some of them were changes in terms of how people lead their lives. But the moral of that story is that despair is not warranted, and it's not the right way to approach things in politics in any event. This is a strong, wonderful, resilient country, and its capacity for self-renewal is impressive and we shouldn't discount that. Peter Robinson here. I want to make sure I understand your argument. Your argument is not that things are better than Ben Carson. Well, if Ben Carson compared the United States to Nazi Germany, that's just a terrible overreach that he no doubt already regrets, good man that he is. But let's say Kevin Williamson.

There's no real difference between your analysis of what ails the country and there's a lot that ails the country and Kevin's. Your point is that this is the United States of America. If you want to consider yourself a good citizen, you are not allowed to give up on the country. Opting out is – that's fundamentally your point. Opting out, encouraging others to do so even implicitly, the notion that it's useless, that the public life of the nation is so toxic that the only sane thing for anyone to do is concentrate entirely on his private life, on semi-public associations, on the people we know and trust.

This is Italy in the dark ages. You can't trust anyone except your family. That's what you're arguing against. Not the analysis of what's wrong, but the impulse to drop out. Is that correct? Yeah, Peter, that's beautifully put. That's exactly what I'm arguing against and what does concern me, this temptation to opt out or indeed this temptation to flat out turn on America and to speak of it ways that uh... are untrue and strike uh... almost everybody uh... as completely uh... untrue and i quite agree humble you know one can be

theoretically pessimistic but i just think practically you have to be optimistic i think you just have to you have to face the problems you have to be uh... in the real world about about what we're dealing with then you have to come up with proposals and solutions that can work. And then you have to persuade your fellow citizens that those things can work. I think the other thing that I would say is we just shouldn't be ahistorical about this, particularly conservatives.

The United States has had a lot of problems throughout its history. I think there's a tendency among some on the right to have a kind of pristine past. And we had slavery and segregation for most of our history. The person that you worked for and that so many of us consider a beloved figure, Ronald Reagan, when he took over in 1980, this country had gone through a terrible decade in the 70s, in many respects worse than what we're facing now. And he had the capacity to turn it around in an amazingly short period of time. And Reagan is a good example in some ways, as you know better than I, because you were one of the people that were the magicians with the words. They were all true to Ronald Reagan's deepest philosophy. And that was his capacity to see America as a city on a hill. Pete, let me ask one more. You mentioned again, obviously quite rightly, that beginning in the 1990s, a lot of indicators

turned around and things started to get better. Okay. There's one, I believe, that's a kind of subtext to a lot of politics. And in some ways, it's the subtext to the feelings of despair. This is my theory, at least. Now, let me give you a couple, and it has to do with the family. My theory is that it underlies almost all aspects of the conversation, that it really is responsible for a huge proportion of the disquiet on our side. Now, the facts, I believe it was 1965. I say the facts and now I'm not going to be able to get all this quite right, but this is approximately correct. I believe it was in 65

that Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then at the Department of Labor, issued this ringing report on the decline of, he used the term that was current at the time, the decline of the Negro family. And he talked about the breakdown of the family in urban America and how you simply could not expect a better future for children who were raised in a situation in which the family was fragmented, broken down, totally unstable. And when Moynihan wrote that report, the rate of illegitimacy among African Americans was, as I recall, 32%.

All these years later, the rate of, excuse me, I think it was 25%. In any event, today, that rate among Caucasians is over 30%. Among Hispanics, it's over 50%. And among African Americans, it's over 70%. What hasn't gotten corrected, what hasn't turned around is the breakdown of the most fundamental unit in society, that without which nothing else can go as we'd hope it would go. Right? Isn't that – go ahead. Yeah, I agree with most of what you said, but I want to insert an important caveat.

You're quite right. I think that the overall out-of-wedlock birth rate, when Moynihan did his report, was around 5%. Today, it's 41%. So more than four out of every 10 births are out of wedlock, and among African Americans it's well over 70%, and you're right about Hispanics, it's over 50%. Secondly, that there's no question that the social science research indicates that if you come from a broken family or a family that never forms,

your life prospects are going to be much harder and much more difficult. And third, I agree that that social indicator and that kind of collapse in family structure is driving a lot of the pessimism and concern. It's a real concern of mine. And it is the one area that has shown itself to be most beyond the reach of public policy solutions and government solutions for the obvious reasons. You're dealing with an area of human life that is, in some respects, farthest from government. But here's the caveat that I wanted to make.

One of the reasons I wrote the essay that I did was precisely the fact that during that period from 93 till 2009, that is the period where you had enormous recovery within the country, the out-of-wedlock birth continued to increase. And there were very serious crime experts, James Q. Wilson, John DiIulio, and others, who predicted a coming crime wave at the end of the 1990s because he said there is a bulge, there is a group of young males who are going to hit late adolescence in the 90s, and it's going to make the kind of crime that we had been seeing in the late 80s and early 90s look like a walk in the park. Charles Murray wrote a very important essay in the Wall Street Journal in 1993 called The Coming Light Under Class, and Charles is a friend of mine and I respect him.

He's made a tremendous contribution to conservatism. He said, the problem with out-of-wedlock birth illegitimacy is it drives everything else. And in fact, what I found in the essay that I co-wrote with you all, is it doesn't drive everything else. That is, even as out-of-wedlock birth rates went up, drug use went down, crime went way down, welfare rolls went down. That doesn't mean that out-of-wedlock births aren't important or pose a challenge to us. But I do think that this kind of pessimism that says, look, if the family collapsed, nothing else works, I don't think that's warranted.

I don't think it's empirically warranted. So it's not an ideal solution. And I'm open to ideas about how we deal with the collapse of the ideal of a nuclear family itself has become changed from the aspirational goal to just another option. And that if you go in the public sphere and you say, this is a preferable mode of social construct, man, woman, child, et cetera, et cetera, that if you attempt to, in their words, to privilege that idea, that you are making the people who don't conform to that norm feel bad. And then at a certain point, it almost becomes hate speech to make distinctions.

And when that happens, then all of a sudden you find yourself marginalized and driven out of the public discourse because certain things no longer must be said. They can't be said, and once more, it's even wrong to defend the people who say them. As we've seen with HGTV, with Duck Dynasty, and the rest of it, people make statements, and in a public capitalist system, their employers are free to do as they wish. But then it becomes a matter of demonizing the people

who defend others' people's rights to say something. And that, I think, is where a lot of people fear that the social changes make them want to just shut up, because there's actually, you can feel your livelihood in danger if you support somebody who says something that was coinciding with what the president himself believed in 2008. That there's so much clamor to make sure that everybody says the right thing, that it is dangerous actually to say things that you construe are wrong by what society has suddenly decided. You think that makes sense? That people want to drop out simply because they feel that there's a personal...

It's just not worth the candle to stand up for some things. Yeah, I think there's a lot to that. I mean, we've seen that with the Brendan Eich situation with Mozilla and other places. And there's no question that for some people on the left, not all, but some people on the left, if you were for the traditional family in a post-same-sex marriage, that is, in their estimation, akin to being in favor of slavery or segregation. You really ought to be destroyed, destroyed at least professionally, and have your reputation eviscerated, if nothing else. But that's quite a lot, and that's a real, real problem, and I think it's quite a deep problem. It's an alarming degree of illiberalism in a liberal society, a liberal society in a classic sense.

I would say that on this issue of, I suppose what the challenge has to be for conservatism is if there's a way to disaggregate the argument of what the so-called nuclear family, you know, from same-sex marriage debate, and to talk in a way that is going to make the case for why marriage and why two parents are better for children. Right now, that is the reality in which we live. We're going to have to increasingly make our peace, inner peace, with the world and the country that is in favor of same-sex marriage. That doesn't mean that people should make the case against it.

There is a case that can be made against it, but people should be allowed to make it. But I do think that if we're not able to disaggregate the marriage debate from same-sex marriage debate, that is problematic. And in terms of more broadly, how do we win back that argument, and how do we restore the idea of marriage as an institution? I don't know. I mean, it may be that, you know, like the laws of physics take over,

maybe there are some kind of laws of social science that take over, and that it will begin to dawn on people in a way that it hasn't yet, that for the sake of children and for deep and authentic, compassionate reasons, we really do want kids to have families that stay together. And we have to win the argument in that way. We have to win the argument that convinces hearts, not minds. There has been some progress, I will say, on the issue of divorce, for example. The divorce rates in the early 1980s were considerably higher than they are today, and especially for upper class, people in the upper class. Divorce is increasingly a rare thing.

And my own suspicion is that when the history of this period that lasts, say, 40, 50 years are written, that it'll be the divorce revolution, which will be judged to have done much more damage to children and to families than same-sex marriage, even if one believes same-sex marriage is wrong. But I think that a lot of this springs from the same philosophical currents that really gained strength in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It's astonishing to think how much we're living with problems and challenges now from that period of time. Agreed. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. We really enjoyed it, and it's been enlightening and gives us more optimism. And optimism is what we all need as much of as possible as we go through the next couple of election cycles. Thank you, sir. I hope to have you on the podcast again. Thanks so much, gentlemen.

I enjoyed it. Bye-bye. Interesting point about the divorce rate. I hope to have you on the podcast again. Thanks so much, gentlemen. I enjoyed it. Bye-bye. Interesting point about the divorce rate. I hadn't thought of that. I remember back in the 70s when I was growing up, in the sitcoms,

if there was a divorce, it was generally because, well, the Mary Tyler Moore show is a great example. Lou Grant, salt of the earth, absolute bulwark. His wife, Edie, left him because she'd, in the popular song,

she'd never been to me, and off she went. And this was a brave thing. This was something that we were supposed to applaud. And this is always what bugs me about the left when they decide to change a cultural norm, that it's not enough that we have to sort of get used to it. We have to applaud it. And that's what I find so interesting about the cultural conversation we're having on

now. Eurovision, their winner is a bearded man in a dress. They are completely free to have a bearded man in a dress win a contest. I don't care. If a man wishes to wear a dress and have a beard, I don't care. I really don't. What I find interesting is the idea that I am expected to be all leapy and clappy about this and approve, and it's almost as though you'd better find that damn sexy, you're committing some sort of disapproval or just lack of interest is equated with disapproval and intolerance and the rest of it.

And it's not enough to change the norm. The norm itself has to be shut down in the mud-faced first until it stops twitching, and everybody has to agree this is not the norm. It is the norm. It absolutely is the norm that men don't have beards and wear dresses. Now, you can say that's a social construct and that may well be for certain reasons. But to say something is normal, you can't say something is normal anymore. I see the word normal as this. It is normal for people to have ten fingers. Would you agree with me, Peter?

I would agree with you, James. It is normal for people to have ten fingers. Now, let's say that there's somebody who has nine fingers. They lost one in an industrial accident or at birth. It did not happen. Or they have 11. That is an abnormal situation when measured against the general idea that people have ten fingers. It doesn't mean they're wrong for having nine fingers. It doesn't mean they're a bad person or immoral

or should be castigated and driven out of the community. It just means that's not the norm. Don't pretend that having nine fingers is the norm in the sense of what everybody else generally for the most part has. And so that's what I find the most disconcerting about the social arguments that we're having here in the culture is not so much that we're saying we are allowing things into the mainstream now.

It doesn't bother me to say that previously marginalized people now have a place at the table in American culture. I think that's actually a good thing. But it's not enough. It's not enough at all. You have to define normal in order to accommodate a small percentage, which pleases the people who I guess use terms like cis-normative and expect everybody else to understand what they mean. Does that make sense or does that just sound like a justification for more prejudice and more lack of justice?

That makes sense. I actually – I'm still thinking all of this through, but I think I may actually take a harder line than you and a harder line than Pete Wehner. Pete Wehner said, well, we have – frankly, he sounded pretty much resigned to gay marriage. He was willing to defeat – to accept defeat, it sounded to me. There is a case to be made for single-sex marriage and people should be free to make it. That was about the extent of his willingness to fight on that issue. I just, I can't help thinking that what's taking place amounts to a kind of cultural coup. It did not take place by democratic means. Every case in every state, as I said, except one, where gay marriage was put to the voters, they rejected it. What has taken place is the

imposition of a new cultural norm by the judiciary. And that is just wrong. And I can't believe I'm the only person who feels that it is, who feels, frankly, angry about the way this has taken place. I think that the country is storing up trouble for itself on that point. That is the procedural point. And, you know, there may be some fight in that issue. I understand exactly what you're saying. And I, too, share those sentiments. But at the same time, let me ask you this. If we were to say that instead of imposing it by judicial fiat,

that actually what was being done here was hastening along an inevitability in the change in the social structure of the country, and that why should people be forced to endure 50 years of not having their rights when actually the court has peered into the future and made that decision for us? In other words, didn't they just nudge us along to our better place? No. They imposed their values on the rest of the country.

That's all anybody knows. Who knows where the country might be 50 years from now? You can't say that. That's the idea that courts have the right to nudge us along to our better place is the whole living constitution argument. If that's the case,

that the courts get to adjudicate according to the social norms that they and other members of a cultural elite share, then the rule of law is gone. That's an old argument. However, James, we're wading into deep waters here when we should be lightening it up and moving toward a close. I hereby cede every remaining shred of argument that I have for the purposes of this podcast at least. I wasn't intending to go there. I just sort of wanted to wrap up and figure out exactly. I'm just anticipating the comments, for example.

I think it's probably been about 90 minutes since Ricochet had a good knockdown drag out on SSM. And I have to say that whenever I see the acronym, whenever I see SSM in a comment board or something like that, I immediately think, solid state memory? Why are we debating about solid state memory here? Well, I suppose that we should wrap ourselves up here. I found this to be rather exhilarating because I hate doom talk. I just do. It doesn't lift the soul. It doesn't give you fuel to fight on. It just drags you down to that point where you're sitting around

with like-minded people having despaired on America. And I love to think that our third century is going to be more glorious than our second it's entirely within our power but it'll be different if the country will be a different place but it's a different place now than it was 100 years ago as well there are things that we got out of the body politic that needed to be extirpated for heaven's sakes um so you know did we have a golden age in 1914? Comparatively to some things in the culture today, yes, we did, compared to other things. God, no. So, yes, there's no reason, there's no reason whatsoever that I can't believe in my heart of hearts,

in the essence of my pith, that my power will be on within the next day or so. If I can believe that, I can believe almost anything. You know, I don't know what happened. A gopher ate a transformer. The guy's working up the block. You know, if I was looking at these guys as they were digging in the yard up there and all of a sudden one of them spading on the boulevard, all you could see was his skeleton blinking on and off like in the cartoons, then I would know that he'd hit something. You mean to tell me that the power's been off for hours and you still haven't done? James, the first thing any good citizen does when the power goes off is figure out whether it's just his house or the whole neighborhood. Well, I always have that same feeling. I'm on automatic payment, aren't I? What I did was I called up, on my little phone here,

I called up the energy company's page, and indeed it did report outages in my neighborhood. And I love the fact that when the power used to go out, you used to call the power company to tell them. And that instinct is still strong with me. As if I'm going to reach a guy who's looking at a huge board with blinking red lights and says, oh, the power's off? That's what those lights on our board are all about. Thanks a lot for telling me. We'll get somebody right on it. Of course they know. Of course they know. But then again, you never know exactly how the grid works. So if you go two blocks from your house and you see the traffic lights working and everything

else, then you have no idea. But I'm pretty sure I've paid my bill. Pretty sure. Well, in any case, folks, thanks for hanging on with us. The Technically Challenged Ricochet Podcast. I hope I haven't sounded too bad. We miss Rob, but Rob

will be back next week regaling us with tales of the continental tour that he's taking. Peter, what have you got coming up for the week? What excitement do you have to look forward to? Excitement, excitement, excitement. You know, oldest child has returned home

and begun a job. It's just exciting to me. It's not exciting, but it is deeply gratifying that I have produced one child, at least, who's employable. And so I'm just watching her make her way through her first week of a full-time, permanent job, and it is a beauty to behold. What's the job? I have given myself over to, you see quiet these quiet pleasures of life i've reached that age in which i sit in the rocking chair in my mind and simply watch the world go by and say oh well that worked out better than it might have what's the job she's working james is northern california she's working

in downtown palo alto at a high-tech startup don't ask me more than that because it gets complicated in a hurry it escapes my it it exceeds my abilities to explain pretty quickly, but it's, it's young. They're smart. They provide three meals a day. That's just astounding to me. I, who all my working life had to pack a brown paper bag for lunch. They give these, it's one of those where they give them three meals a day with the result, of course, that we hardly ever see her. She's off there having dinner with her friend. Anyway, she seems to be enjoying it and she's employed. All I envy kids working at the hip, vital tech center job today, the thrill that it must be.

But then I think back and say, well, I was lucky enough to come into newspapers at the tail end of manual typewriters and smoking in the office and a bottle of bourbon in the bottom drawer. So I had that at least. It's better she works at a startup than a wind down. And wind down we do now. We thank audible.com for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. That's audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet, where you can go with your free trial, free book. Listen to it.

You'll be hooked. You'll be an audible customer for life. We thank our guests. We thank you, of course, and Ricochet for joining. That's right, for joining and pledging at those various levels, some of which I know are expensive, but keep this thing that you love going into the future, the glorious future of the third century of America, America 3.0. But let's stop with the fundamental transforming bit, okay? Let's just incrementally slow, slow. Folks, thank you a lot. I'm James Lilacs talking on a phone instead of a microphone. Peter, we'll see you later and we'll see all of you in the comments. James, hang on. This just in.

This just in. Rob has just posted a photograph of what looks to me – he's just posted a photograph from the Cipriani Bar. And with that, James, good luck until the power comes back on. Great. He's got to rub it in. EJ, get on that. Now. Thanks, folks. See you later.

Next week. Bye-bye. ... ... ... If you don't answer, I'll just bring it on the wall I know he's there, but I just had to call And he'll be hanging on the telephone And he'll be hanging on the telephone I heard your mother, now she's going out the door Did she go to work or just go to the store All those things she said I told her to ignore

Oh, why can't we talk again Oh, why can't we talk again Oh, why can't we talk again They've been hanging on the telephone They've been hanging on the telephone It's good to hear your voice, you know it's been so long If I don't get your calls then everything goes wrong I want to tell you something you've known all along They've been hanging on the telephone.

Ricochet. Join the conversation. I had to interrupt and start this conversation Your voice across the line gives me a strange sensation I like to talk when I can show you my affection Oh, I can't control myself Oh, I can't control myself Oh, I can't control myself

We're hanging on the telephone Hang on there I do Oh, hang on there I do