December 10, 2021 • 13 mins
George Will has inspired The Armstrong & Getty Show for many years with his thoughtful, sober and reasoned observations on American politics and life. Mr. Will joined Jack & Joe to talk about his latest book, AMERICAN HAPPINESS AND DISCONTENTS: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We're always excited to have another opportunity to speak with
the great George Willie has a new book out. It's
Armstrong and Getty extra Large because four hours simply usn't enough.
This is Armstrong and Getty extra Large. The new book
is American Happiness and Discontents, a collection of reflections on
(00:21):
American culture during the most mercurial period in recent American history.
Mr will our User, I'm very well, do you just
finding dandy. We're not big fans of hyperbole, and some
might think, well, the most mercurial period in recent American history,
but it does seem like if if a culture is
a plate spinning act, and that is a lost art
(00:42):
by the way, plate spinning, but if if a culture
is a plate spinning act, it feels like every single
plate is wobbling. It does. And we now have three
foreign policy crises coming to a boil over Taiwan, Ukraine,
and the Iranian nuclear program. And domestically we're spending money
(01:02):
as though we had it, which we don't, and we're
at daggers drawn over the most ridiculous I guess, sanitizing
of opinion on college campuses and all the rest. So yes,
at the time. That does not make for cheerfulness of
this holiday. So it's not just our imagination because my
whole adult life, they've always said each election is the
(01:23):
most important election in our nation's history, you know that
whole thing. But um, it definitely does seem whether the
universities or China on the scene, or you know how
many different defund the police, all the different things. We're
in some weird territory we are. You just express probably
the most destructive political slogan of modern times, defund the police.
(01:46):
Almost reelected Donald Trump clearly has cost uh number of
House seats and gubernatorial races and all the rest. And
you do wonder about the death urge of political parties
that adopt foolish slogans like that. Well, and it's gone
beyond that as long as we're talking about the Justice Department.
On the Today's Radio show, by coincidence, we we talked
(02:09):
about several of the radical left d a's whether in
l A, San Francisco, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago. The list
goes on and on who are instituting this very very
strange experiment decriminalizing crime and the results have been just awful. Yeah,
I mean shoplifting in San Francisco is essentially a misdemeanor
(02:30):
if that as long as you shoplift only up to
n fifty dollars worths of merchandise from the very the
declining number of all Greens drug stores that are still
open because they keep closing them there because they can't
keep products on the shelves well, and it goes even
beyond that. Michael, I'm talking to our technical director here.
I'm trying to find the clip of George Gascone. There
(02:54):
it is clip number thirty four. Georgia. I think you're
going to be able to hear this. This is the
d A of l A County. I am proud of
our entire team in the l A County District Attorney's Office.
We cannot prosecute our weight out of social inequalities, income
in equalities, the Young House, the desperation that we have
(03:15):
since when is that what a d A is supposed
to do. That's amazing, isn't All kinds of institutions now
are branching out to do things they're just not supposed
to do. Universities don't educate the dcor nate newspapers like
The New York Times decided it's their job to reframe
our understanding of American history. So they come up with
(03:37):
the sixteen nineteen project and the preposterous idea that the
American Revolution was fought simply to preserve slavery. I mean,
it's lunacy. Now, you really don't expect a newspaper to
be good at American history, and you don't expect universities
to be good at uh indoctor nation, although they're doing
(03:58):
their best to acquire enough experience with that. But you
do what does wish people would stay in their lanes,
as it were, do what they're paid to do. Or
the c d C deciding how long a person can
go without paying their rents for instance, exactly housing policy
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's amazing, Um,
(04:18):
what we got you on the line hit me with
a definition of conservatism or conservative. A conservative as someone
who wants to conserve the American founding, which has three
principal tenants. One, there is such a thing as human nature.
We're not just creatures that acquire the culture we're situated in.
(04:39):
Be Therefore, there are some natural rights. Thats rights essential
for the flourishing of creatures with our natures. See therefore,
right first come rights, and then comes government. So we
do not get what we rights from government. What we
get from government is the protection of our rights. And
(04:59):
so therefore we want a balanced government, separation of powers,
not too strong, a presidency, and a judiciary alert to
the government slipping its leash so that government will secure
our rights. What percentage of the electric do you guess
(05:20):
currently would accept that definition and when want to promote it? Well,
I it's an excellent question because the American people often
are ideological conservatives but operational liberals. They talk like Jeffersonians
that government is best, that governs least and all that,
but they want to be governed by Hamiltonians that will
give them all the possible benefits. It turns out, surprise, surprise,
(05:44):
that free stuff polls well. Right now, you have the
Biden administration saying we're gonna give everybody free stuff, and
nint two percent of the American people aren't gonna have
to pay for it. That is, everyone under earning under
four hundred thousand dollars a year. The Biden administration says
we're gonna pay for all this by burdening too unpopular,
(06:07):
minorities too wealthy, and corporations. The Biden administration clings to
the fiction that corporations pay taxes. Everyone knows they don't.
Corporations collect taxes. They passed their tax burden onto a
customers and the cost of the goods or services be
they take it away from resources that otherwise would be
(06:30):
available to their employees as compensation, and see from shareholders dividends,
which include, by the way, vast numbers of Americans through
their pension plans, that have invested in American corporations. We
would love to see, and I have a feeling you
might agree, we would love to see the basics of business,
the basics of economics, and the basics of civics taught
(06:52):
in every middle school and high school in America. I
think it's it's utterly unwise that we don't do that,
And for seeing some of the effects of that absence,
I wish every school child in America primary secondary school
would be sit down and read a short essay called
I Pencil, written by Lawrence Read many years ago, the
(07:14):
theme of which is no one can make a pencil.
No one can make a pencil. Millions of people are
involved in producing that yellow pencil with the little rubber
eraser on top and the graphite in the middle, the
people who mind the graphite, and lumbermen who grow the
trees and and saw send them to the sawmills, etcetera, etcetera.
(07:36):
The sheer complexity of a modern economy is up against
the government's fatal conceit, the government's vanity and pride in
assuming that it knows enough that it can dispense with markets.
What markets are are information gathering devices. They send signals
of information to us as to what things cost and
(07:56):
what things ought to costs, supply demand, and all that
other stuff. Government steps in and says, no, no, we
don't know that we need that. We can handle all
this with all the clever people we have in our bureaucracies. No,
they can't, and they make a dreadful mess of it.
We have been talking a lot about the the various
(08:17):
trillion dollar spending packages that have come out of Congress
in the last year year and a half, and UH
compared it to like when you're on vacation. When you're
on vacation, you buy stuff that you would never normally buy.
You spend money in a way you never normally would.
We're kind of that way as a country now, where
it's like nobody remembers what a trillion dollars means or
anything like that. Do you have any concern that we're
(08:38):
crossing a point of no return that you just can't
get out of this kind of debt. Everybody knows that
there is some point at which the ratio of publicly
held debt to gross national product becomes suffocating in a
huge impediment economic growth. Now are publicly old debt is
(09:00):
now over. It's larger than our economy. So we're going
to find out where that is, and we're going to
find out the hard way. The simple axiom of life
is this, there are only two ways to fund the government,
current taxes and future taxes. So we are piling up
future taxes on the unconsenting, because unborn future generations from
(09:24):
which we're borrowing. Yeah, I know, and that's such a
moral thing to do. I just don't understand why more
people don't get that. So amidst all of the uh,
the gloom and perhaps doom, we're discussing, it's notable the
title of your new book is American Happiness and discontents.
Where does your optimism come from when you feel it?
(09:47):
What's positive on the scene these days? Well, the first
is that the American people have made wrong turns before,
but they've corrected. Winston Churchill, who loved our country as
much as he loved as American mother, once said, the
American people invariably do the right thing after they have
(10:08):
exhausted all the alternatives. We have a way of making
life difficult for ourselves, but no one ever got rich
betting against the United States. Second, our principles are sound.
Ronald Reagan once said, I don't want to go back
to the past. I want to go back to the
past way of facing the future. Uh, the belief in
(10:30):
an open market driven society rather than a government centered society.
So I think at the end of the day, the
Americans have have a national memory of the American founding principles.
George will the new book is American Happiness and Discontents.
I can't wait to curl up with it. Any glass
of fine California wine, George, always a pleasure. Thanks so
(10:52):
much for the time I was delighted to be with you.
Have a good day, terrific. Thanks. If you don't read
George Will's columns in the Washington Post. You're you're missing out.
You know. He often has the best take on whatever
the big political story is that's going on at the time. Well,
and if like us, you've felt your attention spanned shrinking
during the twenty one century, I love the collections of
columns because you sit down, you do, you read it,
(11:13):
you enjoy it, you contemplated then you know, I mean
maybe you put it down for a while. Yeah, I
don't know. You know that whole nobody's ever gotten rich
betting against the United States. Of course, that's true up
until the point it's not, which is actually a George
wilfrase um. It's true until the point it's not. Then
then then then we're in a different spot. And nobody's
ever tried this before, nobody has ever tried running this
(11:36):
kind of debt and uh and seeing how it's gonna
turn out. Yeah, sports franchises are like countries, except that
the timetable is is compressed mightily. Obviously you're talking about
a great sports Uh you know, what do you call it?
A dynasty? Maybe four years, maybe four or five six
years at the out at the outside and in the
(11:59):
midst of it, and it said it's height. You're thinking,
how could this possibly end? We have all the pieces,
and then it does. And you know, obviously a country
can exist over a few centuries. What was that reading
about the other day? It was um, Oh, gosh, it
had to do with um, with the ancient world, Oh
it was. It was the various periods of the Roman Empire.
(12:22):
And at one point they casually throw out this sentence
about and I can't remember what region it was, but
it doesn't really matter. It said, uh, and and there
followed a piece a period of relative peace and prosperity
that lasted for two hundred and fifty or so years.
And I was like, wait a minute, you just YadA, YadA, YadA,
two hundred fifty years the entire length of our being
(12:44):
a country. Yeah, damn near so on, you know, in
the measuring stick of empires, it was a tiny little period. Um.
And and it just it reminds us and again not
to be gloomier or like crazy pessimistic and negative, but
it does remind you that if you screw up, you
can end your empire. It is not impossible, you know.
(13:09):
You you trade the Bill of Rights, for instance, from
the New England Patriots to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and
all of a sudden America is losing again to you know,
I think you follow me. There you go. Extra large
We're always excited to have another opportunity to speak with
the great George Willie has a new book out. It's
Armstrong and Getty extra Large because four hours simply usn't enough.
This is Armstrong and Getty extra Large. The new book
is American Happiness and Discontents, a collection of reflections on
(00:21):
American culture during the most mercurial period in recent American history.
Mr will our User, I'm very well, do you just
finding dandy. We're not big fans of hyperbole, and some
might think, well, the most mercurial period in recent American history,
but it does seem like if if a culture is
a plate spinning act, and that is a lost art
(00:42):
by the way, plate spinning, but if if a culture
is a plate spinning act, it feels like every single
plate is wobbling. It does. And we now have three
foreign policy crises coming to a boil over Taiwan, Ukraine,
and the Iranian nuclear program. And domestically we're spending money
(01:02):
as though we had it, which we don't, and we're
at daggers drawn over the most ridiculous I guess, sanitizing
of opinion on college campuses and all the rest. So yes,
at the time. That does not make for cheerfulness of
this holiday. So it's not just our imagination because my
whole adult life, they've always said each election is the
(01:23):
most important election in our nation's history, you know that
whole thing. But um, it definitely does seem whether the
universities or China on the scene, or you know how
many different defund the police, all the different things. We're
in some weird territory we are. You just express probably
the most destructive political slogan of modern times, defund the police.
(01:46):
Almost reelected Donald Trump clearly has cost uh number of
House seats and gubernatorial races and all the rest. And
you do wonder about the death urge of political parties
that adopt foolish slogans like that. Well, and it's gone
beyond that as long as we're talking about the Justice Department.
On the Today's Radio show, by coincidence, we we talked
(02:09):
about several of the radical left d a's whether in
l A, San Francisco, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago. The list
goes on and on who are instituting this very very
strange experiment decriminalizing crime and the results have been just awful. Yeah,
I mean shoplifting in San Francisco is essentially a misdemeanor
(02:30):
if that as long as you shoplift only up to
n fifty dollars worths of merchandise from the very the
declining number of all Greens drug stores that are still
open because they keep closing them there because they can't
keep products on the shelves well, and it goes even
beyond that. Michael, I'm talking to our technical director here.
I'm trying to find the clip of George Gascone. There
(02:54):
it is clip number thirty four. Georgia. I think you're
going to be able to hear this. This is the
d A of l A County. I am proud of
our entire team in the l A County District Attorney's Office.
We cannot prosecute our weight out of social inequalities, income
in equalities, the Young House, the desperation that we have
(03:15):
since when is that what a d A is supposed
to do. That's amazing, isn't All kinds of institutions now
are branching out to do things they're just not supposed
to do. Universities don't educate the dcor nate newspapers like
The New York Times decided it's their job to reframe
our understanding of American history. So they come up with
(03:37):
the sixteen nineteen project and the preposterous idea that the
American Revolution was fought simply to preserve slavery. I mean,
it's lunacy. Now, you really don't expect a newspaper to
be good at American history, and you don't expect universities
to be good at uh indoctor nation, although they're doing
(03:58):
their best to acquire enough experience with that. But you
do what does wish people would stay in their lanes,
as it were, do what they're paid to do. Or
the c d C deciding how long a person can
go without paying their rents for instance, exactly housing policy
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's amazing, Um,
(04:18):
what we got you on the line hit me with
a definition of conservatism or conservative. A conservative as someone
who wants to conserve the American founding, which has three
principal tenants. One, there is such a thing as human nature.
We're not just creatures that acquire the culture we're situated in.
(04:39):
Be Therefore, there are some natural rights. Thats rights essential
for the flourishing of creatures with our natures. See therefore,
right first come rights, and then comes government. So we
do not get what we rights from government. What we
get from government is the protection of our rights. And
(04:59):
so therefore we want a balanced government, separation of powers,
not too strong, a presidency, and a judiciary alert to
the government slipping its leash so that government will secure
our rights. What percentage of the electric do you guess
(05:20):
currently would accept that definition and when want to promote it? Well,
I it's an excellent question because the American people often
are ideological conservatives but operational liberals. They talk like Jeffersonians
that government is best, that governs least and all that,
but they want to be governed by Hamiltonians that will
give them all the possible benefits. It turns out, surprise, surprise,
(05:44):
that free stuff polls well. Right now, you have the
Biden administration saying we're gonna give everybody free stuff, and
nint two percent of the American people aren't gonna have
to pay for it. That is, everyone under earning under
four hundred thousand dollars a year. The Biden administration says
we're gonna pay for all this by burdening too unpopular,
(06:07):
minorities too wealthy, and corporations. The Biden administration clings to
the fiction that corporations pay taxes. Everyone knows they don't.
Corporations collect taxes. They passed their tax burden onto a
customers and the cost of the goods or services be
they take it away from resources that otherwise would be
(06:30):
available to their employees as compensation, and see from shareholders dividends,
which include, by the way, vast numbers of Americans through
their pension plans, that have invested in American corporations. We
would love to see, and I have a feeling you
might agree, we would love to see the basics of business,
the basics of economics, and the basics of civics taught
(06:52):
in every middle school and high school in America. I
think it's it's utterly unwise that we don't do that,
And for seeing some of the effects of that absence,
I wish every school child in America primary secondary school
would be sit down and read a short essay called
I Pencil, written by Lawrence Read many years ago, the
(07:14):
theme of which is no one can make a pencil.
No one can make a pencil. Millions of people are
involved in producing that yellow pencil with the little rubber
eraser on top and the graphite in the middle, the
people who mind the graphite, and lumbermen who grow the
trees and and saw send them to the sawmills, etcetera, etcetera.
(07:36):
The sheer complexity of a modern economy is up against
the government's fatal conceit, the government's vanity and pride in
assuming that it knows enough that it can dispense with markets.
What markets are are information gathering devices. They send signals
of information to us as to what things cost and
(07:56):
what things ought to costs, supply demand, and all that
other stuff. Government steps in and says, no, no, we
don't know that we need that. We can handle all
this with all the clever people we have in our bureaucracies. No,
they can't, and they make a dreadful mess of it.
We have been talking a lot about the the various
(08:17):
trillion dollar spending packages that have come out of Congress
in the last year year and a half, and UH
compared it to like when you're on vacation. When you're
on vacation, you buy stuff that you would never normally buy.
You spend money in a way you never normally would.
We're kind of that way as a country now, where
it's like nobody remembers what a trillion dollars means or
anything like that. Do you have any concern that we're
(08:38):
crossing a point of no return that you just can't
get out of this kind of debt. Everybody knows that
there is some point at which the ratio of publicly
held debt to gross national product becomes suffocating in a
huge impediment economic growth. Now are publicly old debt is
(09:00):
now over. It's larger than our economy. So we're going
to find out where that is, and we're going to
find out the hard way. The simple axiom of life
is this, there are only two ways to fund the government,
current taxes and future taxes. So we are piling up
future taxes on the unconsenting, because unborn future generations from
(09:24):
which we're borrowing. Yeah, I know, and that's such a
moral thing to do. I just don't understand why more
people don't get that. So amidst all of the uh,
the gloom and perhaps doom, we're discussing, it's notable the
title of your new book is American Happiness and discontents.
Where does your optimism come from when you feel it?
(09:47):
What's positive on the scene these days? Well, the first
is that the American people have made wrong turns before,
but they've corrected. Winston Churchill, who loved our country as
much as he loved as American mother, once said, the
American people invariably do the right thing after they have
(10:08):
exhausted all the alternatives. We have a way of making
life difficult for ourselves, but no one ever got rich
betting against the United States. Second, our principles are sound.
Ronald Reagan once said, I don't want to go back
to the past. I want to go back to the
past way of facing the future. Uh, the belief in
(10:30):
an open market driven society rather than a government centered society.
So I think at the end of the day, the
Americans have have a national memory of the American founding principles.
George will the new book is American Happiness and Discontents.
I can't wait to curl up with it. Any glass
of fine California wine, George, always a pleasure. Thanks so
(10:52):
much for the time I was delighted to be with you.
Have a good day, terrific. Thanks. If you don't read
George Will's columns in the Washington Post. You're you're missing out.
You know. He often has the best take on whatever
the big political story is that's going on at the time. Well,
and if like us, you've felt your attention spanned shrinking
during the twenty one century, I love the collections of
columns because you sit down, you do, you read it,
(11:13):
you enjoy it, you contemplated then you know, I mean
maybe you put it down for a while. Yeah, I
don't know. You know that whole nobody's ever gotten rich
betting against the United States. Of course, that's true up
until the point it's not, which is actually a George
wilfrase um. It's true until the point it's not. Then
then then then we're in a different spot. And nobody's
ever tried this before, nobody has ever tried running this
(11:36):
kind of debt and uh and seeing how it's gonna
turn out. Yeah, sports franchises are like countries, except that
the timetable is is compressed mightily. Obviously you're talking about
a great sports Uh you know, what do you call it?
A dynasty? Maybe four years, maybe four or five six
years at the out at the outside and in the
(11:59):
midst of it, and it said it's height. You're thinking,
how could this possibly end? We have all the pieces,
and then it does. And you know, obviously a country
can exist over a few centuries. What was that reading
about the other day? It was um, Oh, gosh, it
had to do with um, with the ancient world, Oh
it was. It was the various periods of the Roman Empire.
(12:22):
And at one point they casually throw out this sentence
about and I can't remember what region it was, but
it doesn't really matter. It said, uh, and and there
followed a piece a period of relative peace and prosperity
that lasted for two hundred and fifty or so years.
And I was like, wait a minute, you just YadA, YadA, YadA,
two hundred fifty years the entire length of our being
(12:44):
a country. Yeah, damn near so on, you know, in
the measuring stick of empires, it was a tiny little period. Um.
And and it just it reminds us and again not
to be gloomier or like crazy pessimistic and negative, but
it does remind you that if you screw up, you
can end your empire. It is not impossible, you know.
(13:09):
You you trade the Bill of Rights, for instance, from
the New England Patriots to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and
all of a sudden America is losing again to you know,
I think you follow me. There you go. Extra large
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