September 11, 2024 • 14 mins
WHO ARE THE REAL DEFENDERS OF FREEDOM? That's the question asked in this column a couple of weeks ago by my guest today at 1:00 Alexander Salter. Economist Alexander Salter disagrees. Salter is a professor of economics at Texas Tech University and a signatory of the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles. He is the author of more than 150 academic and popular articles and has authored four books. After the Democrats spent the week of their convention crowing about freedom, he explains what a lie that actually is. Read the column and join me at 1.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
There were things that were happening at the DNC that
made me think we had entered into some kind of
upside down universe. And one of those was talking about
the Democratic Party protecting our freedoms. And it was the
most bizarre thing to hear from a party who genuinely
finds a lot of the rights illuminated in the Constitution
(00:22):
distasteful and troublesome. So I wasn't the only one to
notice this. Economist Alexander Salter is a professor of economics
at Texas Tech University and a signatory of the Freedom
Conservatism's Statement of Principles. He also is the author of
a fantastic column that ran on Real Clear Politics shortly
after the DNC, Conservatives not Progressives are Freedoms Champion, and
(00:47):
he joins me today, Alexander, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Great to be here, Mandy, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
That was a really long wind up, but I mean,
I figured I needed to set it up because your
column does a really great job of clearly delineating which
party is the true party of freedom. Now, did you
see the same thing I saw at the DNC, And
is that what inspired you?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
I saw something strange, something that even now, more than
a week after the fact, I'm having a hard time
explaining a party which, for a century, political movement, of
political philosophy, for more than a century, has committed itself
to taxing us, regulating us, mandating, nudging, surveilling, is now
all of a sudden the party of freedom. Well, at least,
(01:32):
as we understand freedom in terms of the American experiment,
it means ordered liberty. It means natural rights, the rights
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Progressivism as
a philosophy is all about survey curtailing excuse me, those
rights in the pursuit of other social goals. Now, perhaps
those are legitimate goals, and we can have that debate.
(01:54):
I for one, side with the founders. But nonetheless, to
identify as a pro freedom movement is a radical departure
from what progressivism has admitted to the world. That has
been for again more than a century.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
This is very strange.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Well, don't you think, though? I mean, ultimately we see
the end results of progressivism taken to the m degree
in countries like Venezuela, right, I mean, you see what
happens when government takes over everything to create a utopia
and that branding is becoming an issue I think for
the progressive movement. It has been for a long time,
as people are seeing in real time what happens when
(02:29):
someone says I'm going to take care of you cradle
to grave. So is this just kind of a sort
of a marketing attempt to rebrand what they're doing as
freedom in an attempt to change the language in such
a way that we won't even notice that it's not.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
You have to figure it's mostly rhetorical, because look at
what they purport.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
To offer under the leavel of freedom.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
A candidate for president of the United States has just
called for price control on essential food items. Well, if
you want the freedom to purchase a good at a
low price, except that there's no goods on the shelf
to buy, am I any freer?
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Great?
Speaker 3 (03:10):
You've kept the price of food, except now I go
to the grocery store and there's.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Nothing on the shelf. That doesn't make me feel very free.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Income taxes, unrealized capital gains taxes, subsidies to new home buyers.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
That one sounds like a.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Good one until you realize all it's going to do
is drive up the cost of housing even further. From
twenty sixteen to twenty twenty, average home prices in the
United States rose about eleven percent. Terms of President Biden
has taken office, they're up approximately twenty five percent. And
when you offer a twenty five thousand dollars subsidy to
new home buyers, as Vice President Harris wants to do
(03:45):
if she becomes president, that's going to result in not
many more houses because it takes a lot of time
and effort to get new housing builds in, but it's
going to immediately jack up prices and to make housing
even more unaffordable for many Americans. What kind of freedom
is this that makes all goods and services more expensive
and harder to get? Again, this is not what most
(04:06):
Americans think of when they think of liberty.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Has the I read a column not too long ago
about it was written by a guy on the left
who said he flies a flag outside his house, and
his neighbors for the longest time assumed he was a Republican.
And his point was, you know, we've allowed certain symbols
to be sort of hijacked by one side or the other,
(04:30):
and it's time for us to take those symbols back.
And after reading your column. I'm like, do they just
view the word freedom as a symbol and they want
to attach it to what they're doing again, hoping we
won't notice, because everything you just laid out obviously is
not about freedom. And more importantly, are Republicans able to
push back in a way that's going to sort of
(04:52):
stop this, you know, nip it in the bud.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
I think that conservatism has within it self resources to
effectively convince the American public. No, if what you're after
is freedom, what you desire is liberty, the natural rights
proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and secured by a constitution.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Here's where you want to look. There's currently a big debate.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Going on in conservative circles over the exact nature of
the proper conservative policy stances on various issues. So you
have people who identify as national conservatives who want to
make sure that the government is affirmatively upholding our rights.
You have freedom conservatives, people who want to restrain the
growth of government. But even if you look at the
nationalist conservative side, you think, oh, that kind of sounds
(05:37):
like progressivism.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
If you read their policy proposals, a lot of.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Them could have been written by Alexander Hamilton. This is
very much a debate within the accepted parameters of what
we want the government to do for us to accept
and uphold natural rights. But when you read about what
progressives want to do again, it sounds like vintage Woodrow Wilson,
President of the United States more than one hundred years ago,
who famously said, look, the American experiment is obsolete. Separation
(06:04):
of powers, checks and balances.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
All that was a bad idea.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
All we've done is divide power without making it responsible.
So in place of our historical traditions of order liberty,
I want to unleash the administrative state. I want to
build a powerful bureaucracy led by the president. It's going
to be largely unconstrained by the judiciary, uncontrolled by Congress,
and we're just going to turn everything into one giant
bureaucracy and make things work better that way. Well, for
(06:28):
anyone who spent any length of time at a Department
of Motor Vehicles, I think that you know the.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Limit of that.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Imagine wanting to turn all of social life into the
post office and thinking that most Americans are going to say, yep,
that's freedom. It is absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
So you know what you were just talking about is
the concept that there's a better way to do it,
so we should ditch everything and start over from scratch.
That is very much a part of the progressive movement
right now, whether it is Black Lives Matter and their
stated goal of destroying the nuclear family and ripping out
(07:04):
the capitalist system. It seems that progressivism at this point
is more about destruction of what has come before, whether
or not it works or not, and more about just
sort of burning everything down in these nebulous hopes that
whatever will rise up seems better. Is that an accurate
assessment in your view?
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I'm sure that progressives don't think that they're doing that,
but I would say that is the practical consequences of
their policies. And this is one of the major reasons
that I identify as a conservative, and specifically a member of
the freedom conservative movement.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
If you go and look what.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
They're actually trying to achieve. Freedom and conservatives, they want
to strengthen the nuclear family because they recognize that it is
an absolutely necessary social institution for promoting collective harmony. They
want to make sure that we return power from Washington,
DC to state and local governments because we know that
the closer that citizens are to places where the governing
(08:02):
actually happens, the higher quality governance you actually get, the
less corruption there is. There's all these things that freedom
conservatives want to do in terms of, for example, restraining
the growth of government spending, getting a control over the
federal reserve, and monetary policy so we don't have another
several years episode of crippling inflation like we just suffered through.
(08:22):
On every one of these issues, I see progressives on
the side of making government even bigger than it already
is and less accountable than it already is, and those
two things together are a surefire recipe for poor public policy.
I would argue that if we want to actually get
the American experiment back on track, we need to embrace
(08:43):
the principles outlined in the Freedom Conservative Statement of Principles
and put those into practice, and that's how we actually
get back things like federalism, subsidiarity, checks and balances, the
things that made America a truly great nation and can again.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
I thought last night, and I don't want to bring
you into conversation about last night's debate because I didn't
bring that up with you, but one of the things
that struck me last night was that President Trump missed
an opportunity to really remind people of what you just
said that ultimately we live in a federalist system and
with issues like abortion, those are best decided at.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
The state level.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
And we have allowed so much creep over the years,
the last one hundred years of federalism or or federal power,
I should say that people forget most of the things
that we expect out of the federal government should be
done by the state government. Is that just a function
of a poor educational system when it comes to how
things are supposed to work, that we've now just accepted
(09:39):
that this is how they do work.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Goodness that the story in and of itself. Part of
this is due to politicians and bureaucrats doing what politicians
and bureaucrats always try and do, which is get more
power for themselves. But this is also I think a
fault with us as citizens because this happened over a
long enough time time span that we really should have
waken up before now and said, this is not where
most decisions are supposed to be made. Again, as you said,
(10:08):
the system is designed such that most of the governing
we actually care about on a day to day basis
should take place at the state, local levels. Unfortunately, the
American public is legendarily indifferent to these sort of procedural arguments.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
They care much more about what.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Is done rather than who decides or what procedures we
fallow in.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Order to do it.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
If we're going to actually pull this thing back from
the brink, if we're going to get control of the
deficit in the national debt, if we're going to rebuild
an economy that works for all Americans, then we have
to actually start caring about these procedural arguments. Think about healthcare,
for example, we have this whole debate about what Washington
DC should do about healthcare, and that's an important debate,
(10:54):
but we need to add an entire other dimension to it.
The health outcomes and public health issues affecting Washington DC
are not the same as Austin, Texas, as Los Angeles,
as East Liverpool, Ohio. Pick your city, pick your locality,
pick your municipality. It's going to be different circumstances reflecting
the particulars of time and place, and so we need
(11:14):
to decentralize these major policy decisions as much as we
can so we can have more direct oversight of them,
so we can better control financing and production and distribution,
and so that we can better reflect the natural variation
in this massive country of more than three hundred and
thirty million people. We cannot continue to do this from
the top down because one size all situations solutions, excuse me,
(11:39):
are not actually going to work when you have a
country as the verse as we are.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
And that was the genius of our system in the
first place. I mean, it was the portability of being
able to go to a different state if they were
more to your liking, then being stuck in one place
where we're all under the same federal edicts. And you know,
this is such an interesting conversation. What about let me
ask you this question. And this is completely out of
the blue, just in case you wonder where this came from.
I have long been advocating, not long but long enough
(12:07):
for the complete decentralization of the departments of government. I
don't think there's any reason why the Department of Commerce
should necessarily be in Washington, d c. And with technology
being what it is now, there's no reason to have
all of these people that all work for the government
and all have a vested interest in lobbying for bigger
government to be in the same town when the rest
(12:28):
of us are out here in fly over country, right,
I mean, is there any chance or what would you think.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
The possibility of.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
That just decentralizing these agencies, putting them close to the
people they actually serve. Would that ever happen?
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Yeah, geographic dispersion of the agencies of the entire departments,
even of the circumstances call forward. That's been a proposal
that's been on the table for a while. It comes
back every now and then at the margin, I think
it would help.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
It might make sense to.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Have major offices for interior, for example, in Wyoming and Montana,
in places like that that are actually close to where
a lot of that governing takes place. That being said,
I don't think that our problem is primarily one of
concentration of these offices in one city. I think that
a lot of what we're seeing is due to the
(13:19):
fact that a lot of people just don't care about
decentralized local government. Decentralized local government is hard. It requires
active participation of the citizenry. It's very fun to lambass
the politicians and bureaucrats and judges because we think that
this is something that has been done to us, the
erosion of our constitutional heritage.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
And partly that's true.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
But we the citizens, we the people, have to also
admit our complicity that we allow this to happen, oftentimes
by allowing other people to dictate us the ordinary outcomes
of you can choose auption AARB, but federalism isn't really
on the table. Well, when we acquiesce to that, we
kind of asked for this, ye, And so I think
that having that agency dispersal would help in the sense
(14:04):
that it would actually make it easier for John Q
public to keep an eye on what the government is doing.
But that doesn't change the fact that we have to
actually take an interest.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
We have to get involved.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
We have to be ready to devote our time and
attention to public affairs at a meaningful level, even if
there's no concrete.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Payout for us.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
And that's the tall order, but that is absolutely what order,
liberty and self governance require.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
I hate it when my own personal freedoms depend on
the actions of others to be more civically engaged. That
seems like a mighty big bar for those to get over.
Right now, Alexander Salter. I really appreciate the conversation. I
find it very very interesting. Your column grabbed me right
away and I enjoyed it. I linked to it today
on my blog at mandy'sblog dot com for the listeners.
(14:47):
I hope we can chat again in the future.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Thank you so much, Mandy
There were things that were happening at the DNC that
made me think we had entered into some kind of
upside down universe. And one of those was talking about
the Democratic Party protecting our freedoms. And it was the
most bizarre thing to hear from a party who genuinely
finds a lot of the rights illuminated in the Constitution
(00:22):
distasteful and troublesome. So I wasn't the only one to
notice this. Economist Alexander Salter is a professor of economics
at Texas Tech University and a signatory of the Freedom
Conservatism's Statement of Principles. He also is the author of
a fantastic column that ran on Real Clear Politics shortly
after the DNC, Conservatives not Progressives are Freedoms Champion, and
(00:47):
he joins me today, Alexander, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Great to be here, Mandy, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
That was a really long wind up, but I mean,
I figured I needed to set it up because your
column does a really great job of clearly delineating which
party is the true party of freedom. Now, did you
see the same thing I saw at the DNC, And
is that what inspired you?
Speaker 3 (01:09):
I saw something strange, something that even now, more than
a week after the fact, I'm having a hard time
explaining a party which, for a century, political movement, of
political philosophy, for more than a century, has committed itself
to taxing us, regulating us, mandating, nudging, surveilling, is now
all of a sudden the party of freedom. Well, at least,
(01:32):
as we understand freedom in terms of the American experiment,
it means ordered liberty. It means natural rights, the rights
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Progressivism as
a philosophy is all about survey curtailing excuse me, those
rights in the pursuit of other social goals. Now, perhaps
those are legitimate goals, and we can have that debate.
(01:54):
I for one, side with the founders. But nonetheless, to
identify as a pro freedom movement is a radical departure
from what progressivism has admitted to the world. That has
been for again more than a century.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
This is very strange.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Well, don't you think, though? I mean, ultimately we see
the end results of progressivism taken to the m degree
in countries like Venezuela, right, I mean, you see what
happens when government takes over everything to create a utopia
and that branding is becoming an issue I think for
the progressive movement. It has been for a long time,
as people are seeing in real time what happens when
(02:29):
someone says I'm going to take care of you cradle
to grave. So is this just kind of a sort
of a marketing attempt to rebrand what they're doing as
freedom in an attempt to change the language in such
a way that we won't even notice that it's not.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
You have to figure it's mostly rhetorical, because look at
what they purport.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
To offer under the leavel of freedom.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
A candidate for president of the United States has just
called for price control on essential food items. Well, if
you want the freedom to purchase a good at a
low price, except that there's no goods on the shelf
to buy, am I any freer?
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Great?
Speaker 3 (03:10):
You've kept the price of food, except now I go
to the grocery store and there's.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Nothing on the shelf. That doesn't make me feel very free.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Income taxes, unrealized capital gains taxes, subsidies to new home buyers.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
That one sounds like a.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
Good one until you realize all it's going to do
is drive up the cost of housing even further. From
twenty sixteen to twenty twenty, average home prices in the
United States rose about eleven percent. Terms of President Biden
has taken office, they're up approximately twenty five percent. And
when you offer a twenty five thousand dollars subsidy to
new home buyers, as Vice President Harris wants to do
(03:45):
if she becomes president, that's going to result in not
many more houses because it takes a lot of time
and effort to get new housing builds in, but it's
going to immediately jack up prices and to make housing
even more unaffordable for many Americans. What kind of freedom
is this that makes all goods and services more expensive
and harder to get? Again, this is not what most
(04:06):
Americans think of when they think of liberty.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Has the I read a column not too long ago
about it was written by a guy on the left
who said he flies a flag outside his house, and
his neighbors for the longest time assumed he was a Republican.
And his point was, you know, we've allowed certain symbols
to be sort of hijacked by one side or the other,
(04:30):
and it's time for us to take those symbols back.
And after reading your column. I'm like, do they just
view the word freedom as a symbol and they want
to attach it to what they're doing again, hoping we
won't notice, because everything you just laid out obviously is
not about freedom. And more importantly, are Republicans able to
push back in a way that's going to sort of
(04:52):
stop this, you know, nip it in the bud.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
I think that conservatism has within it self resources to
effectively convince the American public. No, if what you're after
is freedom, what you desire is liberty, the natural rights
proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and secured by a constitution.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Here's where you want to look. There's currently a big debate.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
Going on in conservative circles over the exact nature of
the proper conservative policy stances on various issues. So you
have people who identify as national conservatives who want to
make sure that the government is affirmatively upholding our rights.
You have freedom conservatives, people who want to restrain the
growth of government. But even if you look at the
nationalist conservative side, you think, oh, that kind of sounds
(05:37):
like progressivism.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
If you read their policy proposals, a lot of.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Them could have been written by Alexander Hamilton. This is
very much a debate within the accepted parameters of what
we want the government to do for us to accept
and uphold natural rights. But when you read about what
progressives want to do again, it sounds like vintage Woodrow Wilson,
President of the United States more than one hundred years ago,
who famously said, look, the American experiment is obsolete. Separation
(06:04):
of powers, checks and balances.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
All that was a bad idea.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
All we've done is divide power without making it responsible.
So in place of our historical traditions of order liberty,
I want to unleash the administrative state. I want to
build a powerful bureaucracy led by the president. It's going
to be largely unconstrained by the judiciary, uncontrolled by Congress,
and we're just going to turn everything into one giant
bureaucracy and make things work better that way. Well, for
(06:28):
anyone who spent any length of time at a Department
of Motor Vehicles, I think that you know the.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Limit of that.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Imagine wanting to turn all of social life into the
post office and thinking that most Americans are going to say, yep,
that's freedom. It is absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
So you know what you were just talking about is
the concept that there's a better way to do it,
so we should ditch everything and start over from scratch.
That is very much a part of the progressive movement
right now, whether it is Black Lives Matter and their
stated goal of destroying the nuclear family and ripping out
(07:04):
the capitalist system. It seems that progressivism at this point
is more about destruction of what has come before, whether
or not it works or not, and more about just
sort of burning everything down in these nebulous hopes that
whatever will rise up seems better. Is that an accurate
assessment in your view?
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I'm sure that progressives don't think that they're doing that,
but I would say that is the practical consequences of
their policies. And this is one of the major reasons
that I identify as a conservative, and specifically a member of
the freedom conservative movement.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
If you go and look what.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
They're actually trying to achieve. Freedom and conservatives, they want
to strengthen the nuclear family because they recognize that it is
an absolutely necessary social institution for promoting collective harmony. They
want to make sure that we return power from Washington,
DC to state and local governments because we know that
the closer that citizens are to places where the governing
(08:02):
actually happens, the higher quality governance you actually get, the
less corruption there is. There's all these things that freedom
conservatives want to do in terms of, for example, restraining
the growth of government spending, getting a control over the
federal reserve, and monetary policy so we don't have another
several years episode of crippling inflation like we just suffered through.
(08:22):
On every one of these issues, I see progressives on
the side of making government even bigger than it already
is and less accountable than it already is, and those
two things together are a surefire recipe for poor public policy.
I would argue that if we want to actually get
the American experiment back on track, we need to embrace
(08:43):
the principles outlined in the Freedom Conservative Statement of Principles
and put those into practice, and that's how we actually
get back things like federalism, subsidiarity, checks and balances, the
things that made America a truly great nation and can again.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
I thought last night, and I don't want to bring
you into conversation about last night's debate because I didn't
bring that up with you, but one of the things
that struck me last night was that President Trump missed
an opportunity to really remind people of what you just
said that ultimately we live in a federalist system and
with issues like abortion, those are best decided at.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
The state level.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
And we have allowed so much creep over the years,
the last one hundred years of federalism or or federal power,
I should say that people forget most of the things
that we expect out of the federal government should be
done by the state government. Is that just a function
of a poor educational system when it comes to how
things are supposed to work, that we've now just accepted
(09:39):
that this is how they do work.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Goodness that the story in and of itself. Part of
this is due to politicians and bureaucrats doing what politicians
and bureaucrats always try and do, which is get more
power for themselves. But this is also I think a
fault with us as citizens because this happened over a
long enough time time span that we really should have
waken up before now and said, this is not where
most decisions are supposed to be made. Again, as you said,
(10:08):
the system is designed such that most of the governing
we actually care about on a day to day basis
should take place at the state, local levels. Unfortunately, the
American public is legendarily indifferent to these sort of procedural arguments.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
They care much more about what.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Is done rather than who decides or what procedures we
fallow in.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Order to do it.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
If we're going to actually pull this thing back from
the brink, if we're going to get control of the
deficit in the national debt, if we're going to rebuild
an economy that works for all Americans, then we have
to actually start caring about these procedural arguments. Think about healthcare,
for example, we have this whole debate about what Washington
DC should do about healthcare, and that's an important debate,
(10:54):
but we need to add an entire other dimension to it.
The health outcomes and public health issues affecting Washington DC
are not the same as Austin, Texas, as Los Angeles,
as East Liverpool, Ohio. Pick your city, pick your locality,
pick your municipality. It's going to be different circumstances reflecting
the particulars of time and place, and so we need
(11:14):
to decentralize these major policy decisions as much as we
can so we can have more direct oversight of them,
so we can better control financing and production and distribution,
and so that we can better reflect the natural variation
in this massive country of more than three hundred and
thirty million people. We cannot continue to do this from
the top down because one size all situations solutions, excuse me,
(11:39):
are not actually going to work when you have a
country as the verse as we are.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
And that was the genius of our system in the
first place. I mean, it was the portability of being
able to go to a different state if they were
more to your liking, then being stuck in one place
where we're all under the same federal edicts. And you know,
this is such an interesting conversation. What about let me
ask you this question. And this is completely out of
the blue, just in case you wonder where this came from.
I have long been advocating, not long but long enough
(12:07):
for the complete decentralization of the departments of government. I
don't think there's any reason why the Department of Commerce
should necessarily be in Washington, d c. And with technology
being what it is now, there's no reason to have
all of these people that all work for the government
and all have a vested interest in lobbying for bigger
government to be in the same town when the rest
(12:28):
of us are out here in fly over country, right,
I mean, is there any chance or what would you think.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
The possibility of.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
That just decentralizing these agencies, putting them close to the
people they actually serve. Would that ever happen?
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Yeah, geographic dispersion of the agencies of the entire departments,
even of the circumstances call forward. That's been a proposal
that's been on the table for a while. It comes
back every now and then at the margin, I think
it would help.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
It might make sense to.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Have major offices for interior, for example, in Wyoming and Montana,
in places like that that are actually close to where
a lot of that governing takes place. That being said,
I don't think that our problem is primarily one of
concentration of these offices in one city. I think that
a lot of what we're seeing is due to the
(13:19):
fact that a lot of people just don't care about
decentralized local government. Decentralized local government is hard. It requires
active participation of the citizenry. It's very fun to lambass
the politicians and bureaucrats and judges because we think that
this is something that has been done to us, the
erosion of our constitutional heritage.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
And partly that's true.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
But we the citizens, we the people, have to also
admit our complicity that we allow this to happen, oftentimes
by allowing other people to dictate us the ordinary outcomes
of you can choose auption AARB, but federalism isn't really
on the table. Well, when we acquiesce to that, we
kind of asked for this, ye, And so I think
that having that agency dispersal would help in the sense
(14:04):
that it would actually make it easier for John Q
public to keep an eye on what the government is doing.
But that doesn't change the fact that we have to
actually take an interest.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
We have to get involved.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
We have to be ready to devote our time and
attention to public affairs at a meaningful level, even if
there's no concrete.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Payout for us.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
And that's the tall order, but that is absolutely what order,
liberty and self governance require.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
I hate it when my own personal freedoms depend on
the actions of others to be more civically engaged. That
seems like a mighty big bar for those to get over.
Right now, Alexander Salter. I really appreciate the conversation. I
find it very very interesting. Your column grabbed me right
away and I enjoyed it. I linked to it today
on my blog at mandy'sblog dot com for the listeners.
(14:47):
I hope we can chat again in the future.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Thank you so much, Mandy
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