Ep 51 | Over-Regulation Ends Freedom | Philip K. Howard | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Hey, welcome to the podcast.

Today I want to explore something.

We live in a society so far from what our founders envisioned that you, the individual American, have the freedom to make choices about the way you want to live your life every single day.

We're not that country anymore.

We spend our time now trudging through red tape, rules, and regulations, so much so that it is suffocating the God-given individual constitutional freedoms.

Our parties in Washington can't and won't fix the problem.

Neither side.

They're part of the DC bureaucracy that has become nothing more than a giant rule book where all of us in some way or another are living in infraction.

So where do we begin?

How do we even begin to fix this?

Well, I know I can sit down with people who even disagree with me and it feels like after a while we could fix it in two days.

Well, that's called common sense and we don't have an awful lot of that anymore.

Today I sit down with the author of a book called Try Common Sense.

He is not only the one who is really frustrated with today's political system, just like you, but he is frustrated with both the left and the right, and he has decided to do something about it.

He is trying to develop a clear plan for how we can return to the kind of democratic responsibility and efficiency that our founders intended.

Today's podcast: Radical Thinking About Radical Change with Philip Howard.

Philip, I have to tell you, I feel

like

the

audience is going to say,

I want that so much.

But

they will feel like they're on the other side of the glass with absolutely no way to get it.

Because common sense is not

a part of our life anymore.

That's right.

It's been banned by Washington.

And Washington is this isolated

foreign entity as if some force from outer space came and started dictating how to behave and how to do this or that.

And

people have kind of of lost any sense of how they can use their hands again, how they can grab hold of a problem and solve it.

We used to,

let me tell you this story.

My son, in my house, in my house, raised by me,

we were watching the original producers, the Mel Brooks film, you know, Springtime for Hitler.

And he was probably 13 at the time, and he said,

Dad,

how did the government ever allow this to be made?

I stopped the movie and I said, say that to me again?

We have gone from a country where

the fence was to keep the bad guys out and you could do whatever you wanted inside here.

Just don't break these rules.

You know what I mean?

Now you're in here.

Everything has a rule.

Everything has a rule.

And it's all basically telling you you can't do that without permission.

That's right.

And so the fundamental difference between the Soviet culture and the American culture that's described by the great people who wrote about this, Hayek Havel and others, is that in America, you had a system of law

and government that

prescribed bad things but left you free to

otherwise lead your life.

In the Soviet Union, you weren't allowed to do anything unless it was permitted.

And what's happened almost without our noticing when it happened, it's like the pot slowly getting hot or something.

In the last 50 years, we went from a system in which government got involved to protect bad things

to a system where now you can't do anything unless the government says you can do it.

It's really just the damnedest.

I have an extensive collection of American history, and after the podcast, maybe I'll take you up to one of our vaults.

I have an old,

it's made out of cloth, but it's a target of a bear, a teddy bear, done by Teddy Roosevelt.

And it was made for schools because he wanted to put shooting in every school.

He wanted a shooting range and teach kids how to shoot.

So it's this: can you hit the teddy bear?

Okay.

And it's a target.

What's so crazy about it is

at that time,

the people went crazy, crazy.

How dare you?

It wasn't because of the gun.

It was because how dare the federal government tell us what we should put and teach in our schools.

We want a shooting range.

We'll put it in.

Keep your place.

That was 100 years ago.

Boy.

Right.

So, yep.

So we've come to a completely different place where everyone feels disempowered

and

they don't feel any mechanism by which they can band together and

fix it.

Aaron Powell,

tell me,

first give me a glimpse through that glass.

What does a fixed America look like?

What does America look like

when we're using common sense and we

take your prescription and fill it?

So when that happens,

Americans wake up in the morning, they have a concern about their school system, they can go to the principal, and the principal has the flexibility to listen to new ideas, to do things in a different way.

Each of the teachers has the flexibility to try to teach in their own way and be accountable about whether they're any good at it.

There are not detailed work rules that prescribe exactly how something should happen.

You can go to the workplace, you can make judgments about someone, whether they're trying hard or whether they fit in with the other people.

You can make a joke

and not be scared of getting fired if it kind of bombs.

I think everyone should have five bisques.

They should have five inappropriate jokes every

month or something,

without getting in trouble because we've lost all spontaneity in the workplace, too.

I mean, freedom is about spontaneity.

It's about trial and error.

What's crazy is we have developed a country that the citizens are afraid to fail on things.

You don't dare say that, or you're in trouble.

And yet, the giant corporations and the government are never afraid of failure on things that they should be.

There's no responsibility.

They can just pass it off to somebody else.

That's right.

And, well, you asked people in Washington, well, something doesn't work.

Well,

who's responsible for that?

And I said, well, I don't know.

I mean, the rule made me do it

or something.

So you asked me, said, what it would look like if it were fixed.

So let's go to government.

Well, I think a safe workplace is important.

But in my world, instead of 4,000 rules where people get tickets because they don't keep the material safety data sheets exactly up to date for things that aren't even unsafe, like joy dishwashing liquid and things like that, that require you to have a material safety data sheet because no one's using your judgment.

Yeah, Yeah, seriously.

No one's using their judgment.

You only have

those sheets for things that are really poisonous.

You don't get tickets for paperwork.

And the regulators look for material unsafe conditions, focusing on industries that are unsafe, rather than going around handing out tickets.

And so what that does is it allows people, because they know now that government is actually concerned about safety, not mindless compliance.

They can go to their workplace and focus on doing their job rather than compliance.

And that uses, it's unbelievable how much energy that liberates with people.

I mean, today...

We all know it.

We've all been in a brainstorming or something where you have that negative guy who is constantly negative, negative, negative, negative, negative.

And you just give up after a while.

Right.

And so

in the world that I'm envisioning, you don't have this incredible waste and sort of suffocation of people going through the day asking themselves, can I prove that what I'm about to do is legally correct?

They're allowed to rely on their instincts of right and wrong.

And other people are free to judge them about whether they're doing their job well or whatever.

They're free and other people are free too.

And people are free to express themselves because they're not going to get into trouble.

Or if you're a doctor, you're willing to say, hey, I'm not sure this is right.

Where now you're not sure you should say that because that will be on a record someplace.

And if the wrong decision was made, you've just blown the case

without really knowing.

Right.

We had the nonprofit, IPR Common Good, had a joint venture with the Harvard School of Public Health a few years ago.

And one of the biggest problems in patient care

is legal fear by the professionals where they're afraid of speaking up.

They're afraid to say, are you sure that's the right dosage?

Because they don't want to take legal responsibility because of this unreliable, in this case, litigation system.

You know, where anybody can sue for anything in our society and nobody on behalf of society is drawing the lines of what's a, you know, a reasonable lawsuit and what's not.

So in that case, we proposed a system of expert health courts,

and we got literally everyone in healthcare to support it.

Even the patient safety advocates supported it.

People on the far left supported it.

Everyone was in favor of this because they saw what it was doing, not only to cost in terms of defensive medicine, but also safety,

sort of the quality of of care.

And of course, the people who killed the reform with the help of Harry Reid, who was then the Senate majority leader, were the trial lawyers.

Are we on the verge of

massive reform or change

sooner rather than later because this system does not work and everyone knows it.

So are we headed for

massive change one way or another?

Yes.

And so the electoral needle is swinging wildly.

I think Obama was the first shoe to drop.

People have been angry at bureaucracy and it's been a part of the election since Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter is actually very, very good on this stuff.

But it's really came to a head, they elected Obama, somebody nobody had even heard heard of

two years before,

you know, who promised change we can believe in.

And then that didn't exactly work out.

You know, he became

kind of a status quo, more the same.

So then they elected an outsider, Donald Trump, who promised to drain the swamp.

And if anybody is bold enough to do it, you're going to think it's Donald Trump.

And his instincts on this, in my view, are completely right, but he doesn't actually have the vision of how you fix it.

In other words, you have to re-empower people.

It's not just a question of cutting out stuff.

You have to go area by area and say, okay, do we need government oversight for clean air?

Yes.

Okay.

So how do we make that practical?

Do we need government oversight for schools?

Probably not much, no.

So

how do we get bureaucratic compliance out of the school system so local communities can innovate and put energy into their school system?

And there are all these things that need to happen, and he's going somewhat in that direction, but it's really a philosophical shift.

It's not a prune here and prune there.

It's taking 150 million words of binding federal law and regulation, which is what there is, and replacing it, let's pick a number, with 5 million words.

It's crazy.

The Declaration of Independence is one page, one big page, but one page.

The Constitution is 12, 11, 15, something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Like 7,000 or 8,000 words.

And it is some of the most brilliant stuff and lays out how we are to be.

And I don't know all of the other words that have been written, and it's killing us.

They're killing us.

Well, it's suffocating people.

People can't comply with it.

Part of the theory of it was that if you made law very clear and precise, this is what many conservative theorists thought, that at least what you would do is you would limit the power of government officials because they had to comply specifically with the rule.

What they didn't realize is that when you make law that precise, no one can comply with it.

So there's complete non-compliance throughout.

you know,

throughout America.

So that means an inspector has arbitrary power to do whatever he wants.

It's actually far better to go back to something like the Constitution, where the Fourth Amendment says no unreasonable searches and seizures, four words.

And those four words, as interpreted by the courts, make Americans go to bed feeling reasonably confident that somebody's not going to barch into their home at night.

So let's talk about

how we get there.

Because I said this to a friend the other day, and he looked at me strangely and I said, look,

believe it or not, Barack Obama was voted in by many of the same people that voted for Donald Trump.

And

even if they didn't, they're expressing the same sentiment.

I want transparency.

I want common sense.

They were freaked out by Bush and the Patriot Act and everything else, and they saw this creep coming their way, and it had been coming for a long time.

And they said, I just want transparency.

I just want somebody to speak like I speak and just get this under control.

When he didn't do it, the bar was raised.

And it was somebody who was, you know, a little more

out there.

A little more colorful

in doing it.

If we don't get it under control now, I fear the kind of people that we will run to.

Well, look who's running on the Democratic slate, and look what they're promising.

Which is the opposite of what I think people actually are feeling.

Of course.

And so what they think is that people, is that there are many voters

who want more money or more freebies, and that's probably true.

But they're misinterpreting

the alienation, which is not mainly

And studies have shown this, it's not mainly about the kind of dislocation, which is important, important, economic dislocation and wage stagnation and that sort of thing, but this sense that people don't have ownership of their own lives.

Correct.

You know, again, this kind of sense that everything is beyond

their power.

But who does?

I mean,

in our world today, in our America, the president has

ultimate responsibility for everything.

And that's, he doesn't.

He doesn't.

He doesn't.

And you go anywhere into government or really now into business, the bigger the business, the more that person

is not the decision maker.

Look, I don't know.

I just know you have to do this.

And so it becomes

Soviet style gray.

Yeah, yeah.

So everyone's in, it's like a cork in a stream, except the stream is

all legalisms and requirements.

And so instead of people waking up in the morning saying, this is the path I want to take, this is how I'm going to do it, I've got a good idea to fix the schools or make my farm work better or whatever, we all find ourselves inextrably pulled

by these requirements towards compliance.

You know, there's, I mean, there are all these

stories

that really do drive people to

resistance.

I mean,

the volunteer fireman who heard a call

that a toddler was choking at a fast food restaurant in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and they got there,

they saw this child with blue, they put it in the fire truck, they got to the hospital all within 13 minutes,

and then the next day they were suspended from duty because the fire truck wasn't...

certified for carrying passengers.

I mean, it's that kind of thing that happens all the time.

Or the teacher gets in trouble for putting an arm around a crying child.

So how much of that do you think is by design?

Because it's, I mean, it's so pervasive that

it convinces you,

don't do anything.

It's actually, it's not by design.

What it is, it's by philosophy.

This idea that you can create a perfect regulatory world where if you only follow the rules, you'll have a safe workplace.

Not true.

If you only follow, because everything requires human will and judgment, no problem in the history of mankind has ever been solved because someone followed a rule.

May I say, I think it actually makes it worse.

Of course.

I was on the Native American side of the Grand Canyon.

There are no walls.

Okay.

And I park my car and Native American tour guide is there and I'm I'm kind of looking over like how far down does this go?

And I said, is that the canyon?

Does this, is this the canyon?

And he said, oh, yeah.

And I said, how many people fall to their deaths here?

And he said, we have none.

You, speaking of America, you have them all the time compared to us.

Right.

Because you clip these walls up and everybody thinks they're perfectly safe.

And so they disengage their brain.

Well, they would make a wall that I couldn't climb over if

it was going to be dangerous.

And so they do.

Where if you don't have that,

you're thinking danger.

Right.

It's interesting.

There's actually cognitive work on this that people haven't,

which is that rules do make people go brain dead.

And in a variety of ways.

One is they think if they comply, everything will be okay.

So they're not thinking for themselves, so the point you just made.

Secondly,

People, the conscious part of our brain is actually quite limited.

It's like an 8-bit processor or something.

Whereas

it's called working memory, the long-term part, the big part of our brain, the instincts, the subconscious where we have reside our experience, our values, our training, all that kind of stuff, is subconscious.

It's accessed by the working memory.

What happens when you have too much bureaucracy that people are thinking about, it's like going through a detailed checklist,

it uses up all of their working memory and it freezes out the long-term memory.

So it actually makes people stupid.

So they need a thing that says don't use snowblower on the roof.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It makes people, it really makes people stupid.

And it also, I was talking to a senior

doctor who is at a big company the other day about this.

It also makes healthcare professionals, in that case, burn out.

Because you're so exhausted trying to keep all of these details straight of all the rules that you burn out.

And we've created this world now where 30% of the health care dollars spent on administration.

That's a million dollars per physician.

Where almost half the states have more non-instructional personnel than teachers.

They're filling out forms.

They're reporting.

That's literally crazy.

So

we have all these problems that we need to address in our society, some of which take money.

And we have all of these systems in place from Washington that literally squander,

not only squander, pick a number, half the money, but they also prevent Americans from being American, you know,

from the energy to solve a lot of issues.

So that's what needs, we need to reframe the discussion to

human empowerment.

There's not a single farmer that I've ever talked to and many, many smart people not in government who haven't at some point when we've really gotten into what the problems were with America, and they don't have to agree with me politically, and they will say the same thing.

Dude, you and I could fix this in two days.

I mean,

people

know

that there's this machinery that is stopping that if we just started using common sense, we couldn't fix it in two days, but there is a lot that would change just by saying common sense.

Well, and

the way,

let's continue that,

that string, because the way to give people the freedom to fix it in two days is to replace that, take worker safety, those 4,000 rules, really deep seven pages on ladders,

you know, stairwells shall be lit by either natural or artificial light.

How else can they be lit?

You know, you know, all that kind of stuff.

You know, material safety data sheets on joy dishwashing liquid.

I mean, or on bricks, you know, like bricks or toxins or something.

You know, a hard substance who, you know, defines.

Somebody's actually spending time doing this stuff.

If you replace those 4,000 rules with some rules, because there's some things that may not be self-evident, but mainly basic principles of safety, and

you have an authority structure where people are evaluated and those things get evaluated too so you don't have unfairness or arbitrary decisions.

But basically you create something that looks more like the Constitution.

Based in principles.

Based mainly in principles and rules only where you think you've got to really have a rule, not, you know, for the joy dishwashing liquor.

So have you ever heard of this book, Philip Drew Administrator?

No.

This was Woodrow Wilson's favorite book.

It was written.

I know.

I love it.

And it was written by Colonel House.

And this is

today.

This is us.

Wow.

And it was in story form to tell America how America should be run.

And it talks about all the problems.

And at the end of the book, it's just one guy who's like, I can fix this.

And they'll just, everybody will just administrate all this stuff.

But this is the beginning of this

this nightmare right that has been churning and it is what people now think that machinery is too big so where do we start let's start with the with the with the fundamental structure in outlined in your book on

how do we take it apart how do you do it step one giving responsibility talk about that yeah so in the the end game is people have to have the authority to take the freedom to take responsibility.

Everybody, officials, citizens, everybody has to have,

in the case of an official, it would be a defined scope of responsibility.

In the case of a citizen,

you don't define it.

You're free.

And the only things you're not allowed to do are the things that are bad.

And so pause there for a second.

Yes.

The role of law and the role of government generally, not exclusively, is to protect against bad things, pollution, people cheating on their contracts, crime, you know,

that sort of thing.

And the way it does things.

Almost like the Ten Commandments.

It could be like seven of the Ten Commandments.

Yeah,

exactly.

It's like the Ten Commandments.

And so

it's a series of walls, outer walls.

It says you can't pollute, you can't discriminate, you can't cheat on your your contracts.

Those walls.

And those walls define a field of freedom in which people can do whatever they want.

They can be jerks, they cannot get along with people, they can be unfair, they can be free.

They can apply their values, they can go move to a part of the country where they have things in common with other people, like the Mormons who moved to Utah, or, you know, or the Hasidic Jews are in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

They can do, oh, it's a free country.

And those negative things enhance freedom because you go through the day not worrying about whether your bottled water is polluted or not because there's no pollution, right?

Or whatever.

You do contracts with people without being too scared people would break it.

So the first thing that we have to do with each and every law is pull it back to a series of negative things that leave people free to innovate on their own.

What's happened in the last 50 years is that government has come into our daily lives and told us how to do things correctly.

This is how you teach a classroom.

Follow this script.

This is how you have a safe workplace.

By the way, you have to go to 12 different agencies to get a permit to start this little business.

And no, you can't have a kid's lemonade stand because you don't have a vendor's license.

You know, and it's all this kind of stuff that's come in.

So government has wrapped these vines around us.

And that's why people are going nuts.

because that's not what freedom is.

Law has replaced freedom.

Law is supposed to support freedom by these outer boundaries, protecting, and now law has replaced it.

It's a fundamental misunderstanding, and I had it when I was searching for religion.

I had the misunderstanding that

religion would put up a bunch of laws that I would have to abide by, and so it would affect my life and keep me a prisoner.

You know what I mean?

When those laws are just and based in God's laws, no, they make you freer than you've ever been before because you know what those outer walls are and everything else is yours.

Right.

And the test of an effective government, an effective legal system, is whether people are more free.

The test is freedom.

It's not compliance.

It's freedom.

Do we even want freedom, though, anymore, Philip?

Well, many people don't want freedom, but the greatness of this country

is freedom.

And so...

Can you define it?

Yes.

People have ownership of their own lives and their own choices.

Boy, they don't want that.

Well, you know...

I mean, I do.

I think a lot of people do.

But there's a lot of people

who want to blame everything on something else.

It doesn't matter what it is.

Well, you know,

it's like the parable of Plato's Cave, where people are in a cave and they're all chained and they don't see what's really going on outside because they're sort of prisoners in a cave and then they're given the option to leave and they say, no, we don't want to leave.

You know, it's quite safe.

And we are wired, humans are wired in evolution that if we

have enough food, We won't step outside the cave.

Who wants to face the sabertoothed tiger, right?

You know, it's safe here.

Let's just stay and get fat.

And so you see that instinct at work with the way we're dealing with children.

We don't let children go out and play by themselves anymore, not understanding that we're making them less resourceful and less able to deal with the real dangers in life when they grow up because we haven't let them be resourceful.

We were just having a conversation on September 11th anniversary about

should we really, how much should we really show our children?

And I said, have you ever read Grimm's fairy tales before Walt Disney got his hands on it?

They were terrifying.

And they were to teach children

there are dangers out there and we don't do that anymore.

We just want to protect and

it's doing the opposite.

Right.

Everyone's a winner.

Everyone gets a medal.

No one is a loser.

Some people were eaten by an evil witch because they went into a house of candy.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I don't know about, but you're growing up, but

I was really not a successful child.

And you learn a lot from failure.

People, again, that's one of the bad things about this current system.

We think that failure in a job is somehow something to be avoided, and people have a lawsuit if they don't work out in a job for some reason.

Failure is where you learn.

The people who don't ever feel pain,

They're usually dead pretty early.

Yeah.

You know, they don't, they, they're, I don't remember what the condition is called, but you don't have a feeling of pain.

Well, if you don't have a feeling of pain,

you don't know, wait, I'm about to break my leg.

Oh, wait, this is getting really hot.

That you don't have that.

Pain is there for a reason.

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

You know,

this conversation is making me think we're going from

sort of

physical resourcefulness.

It's also

true in choices that

people need to have a sense if they're part of a society

that that

they can live their values of right and wrong.

Really important

that people

fairness

and the whole rights vocabulary, that's all about selfishness.

And we're not allowed to push back and say, wait a minute.

You're claiming you have the right for your kid to get hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the budget of this school that we all share, to get to go to some

school a thousand miles away to correct something.

But no, this is something we need to discuss because it's all, it's a question of what's fair.

And we've lost the vocabulary of fairness.

And law has done that.

Everyone now, no, no, that's my, I have a legal right.

I have a legal right to do this.

No, you don't have the right to do this, say that to me.

Or what you're saying offends, I need trigger warnings in college.

I don't think anyone anyone feels that we are living in a fair space because in a fair space,

you have to be allowed to say things that I disagree with and that might really make me angry.

Right.

And I have a right to say things and not intentionally to antagonize each other or to harm one another.

That's different.

But if I'm living next to you, we don't have to live your way or my way.

I'm living one way, you live the other way.

That's fine.

Let's just move on with our lives.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And so all of these things, people need to get back that ownership and a sense of ownership of what's fair as well as what's practical.

So what is fairness?

What is it?

Fairness is what the people involved in whatever the institution is decide is fair.

It's not something that the law decides, except with outer boundaries.

You can't pollute, you can't discriminate, or whatever.

You have these outer boundaries of the lines you can't cross.

But when you're running any organization or you're deciding how to spend public funds, that's what democracy is supposed to do.

You're supposed to have an argument over what's fair.

It's not about legal rights.

It's to have an argument over what's fair.

And then a decision gets made and you move on.

If you don't like it, you move somewhere else or

elect somebody new.

I'm trying to figure out, because you say

have to, you know, you can't discriminate.

I don't think there's a soul that,

well, yes, there are.

There's a few.

You know, there's always a Hitler in a bunch that wouldn't mind discriminating.

But the vast majority of Americans like people to be fair.

Look,

just don't jam it down my throat, whether it's religion or, you know, your vegan lifestyle.

Just don't jam it down my throat.

That's where the average person is.

But we're not being, we're not being,

the average person isn't being heard, isn't, isn't, their voice isn't loud enough,

and we're listening to these extremes.

Right.

Then Big Brother is making everybody go to diversity workshops, which studies show make people feel discriminatory.

They enhance discriminatory feelings.

I think, again,

just

you know, past September 11th anniversary, I did a lot of thinking about this,

about what we did that was good, what we did that was wrong, you know, how did we get here from 20 years ago?

And there's a lot of stuff there.

And one of those things is

I think this claim of Islamophobia

is a good warning, you know, but I listened back to my broadcast from September 11th, 2001.

And somebody called and said, I don't know who did it, but get him.

And I said, stop.

Stop.

That's the average person.

And

when you jam something down people's throats where you say, don't look there, don't look there,

you automatically push back and it makes things worse.

You know,

there are two

structural points I'd like to make right here.

First is,

in order for people to be practical, this is not what we're talking about now, you have to give them goals but not tell them how to do it.

So that implies a radical simplification of regulatory structures so that people have the freedom to take responsibility to meet the goal, whatever it is.

That's one thing.

In order to be

for people to feel fair and not to resist change,

you have to have a legal system that doesn't let anyone assert legal claims as a sword when they feel they want to get their way.

That's not what lawsuits are supposed to be.

That's not what lawsuits are supposed to be about.

If somebody feels offended by a bad joke in the workplace or something,

they can

And let's just assume for this purpose, it's a one-off thing.

There are lots of things they can can do.

They can speak up, say, I think that's offensive.

You know, you made a joke about Muslims and I'm a Muslim or something.

They can decide they want to work somewhere else.

That's fine.

The one thing they shouldn't be allowed to do, in my view, is bring a lawsuit for themselves.

Say, I don't think I'm getting ahead because

I, because I think these people, based on this bad joke, you know, have these discriminatory feelings.

What happens when you let somebody bring a lawsuit for any playground accident,

for any difference in views,

is that you stifle freedom dramatically.

So people will no longer, so businesses in America no longer give job references.

They're scared they're going to get sued.

You can't, you're trained in diversity workshops not to be spontaneous and to tell jokes because it might offend somebody.

And that, of course, then enhances discriminatory feelings.

You have school systems that literally ban running at recess, which Broward County, Florida did.

You ban running at recess because if you have a ban in, then you think it helps protect against a lawsuit when some kid falls and breaks his leg, right?

So

the fear of lawsuits, not the actuality, the fear of lawsuits ends up in the land of the First Amendment, meaning people don't ever say what they think.

And it means that they don't take the reasonable risk of life, like letting kids go out and play,

you know, because they're scared they're going to get sued if something happens.

So, structurally,

the only way to solve that problem

is

to not

let people use state power in the form of a lawsuit.

That's what it is.

It's state power unless a judge says, I think this crosses the hurdle of

the threshold of unreasonable conduct.

It's not a reasonable risk of life.

That rises to the fact that maybe we should let this go to a jury.

I think that discrimination in one form is horrible.

I mean, why not get to know the person and hate them for their individual reasons?

You know what I mean?

So, that kind of discrimination.

However, discrimination, as it used to be meant when I was growing up, discriminating taste.

You use some discrimination here.

What is that person's character, et cetera, et cetera?

But we've taken all discrimination and thrown it out and said all of it is bad.

Even the bad stuff.

If you're going to be free,

if you say, you know what?

I hate hate the name Paul,

and I'm not serving anybody named Paul, the people in

the community are going to go, that guy is nuts, and he will harm himself.

You know what I mean?

I'm not going to hire anybody named Paul.

I don't like Paul.

And as horrible as that sounds,

Don't you need to allow enough freedom for people to never never turn into a monster, you know, like, you know, but to be monstrous in their own way.

Yes, exactly right.

And it's counterproductive.

I've written about this.

I write about it some in Try Common Sense.

In my view, when you're talking about discrimination against groups, the rule should be

The threshold rule, and maybe it should be more narrow than this,

is that

one individual should not be able to bring a lawsuit that they were treated unfairly because it's a free country and how do you how does how does the employer prove look this person has bad judgment and doesn't get along with workers and the and the person is saying no no it's because I'm pick your

point

I'm running a business I'm I'm trying to attract clients that dress like you look like you and I keep getting these people coming in and they've got pierced noses and and tattoos I, as a business, have a right to say, I'm not hiring anybody that looks like that or not, because my clientele does not relate to that.

Exactly right.

And so.

But

that would be a group of people that could.

It could be.

You know,

I think you could hopefully get away with that.

There are dress codes and stuff that people are allowed to have.

But going back to the core, based on religion or race or something,

in my world,

you could bring a claim that there was a pattern or practice against a race.

You'd say, okay, the law prohibits that, but not that you particularly got hurt by it, just alone, because it's impossible to distinguish the personal characteristics of any given person.

from lots of other things.

You know, it's just, it's not, and it's counterproductive.

And so what happens, and there again, there are studies of this, excuse me, is that mentors,

like for example, young African Americans have trouble getting mentors in the workplace, and they think

some think it's because of racism, whereas

studies indicate, well, actually, it's because

the would-be mentors are afraid of getting in trouble for anything they say.

You're going to say mentors, by definition, say things that are negative.

You know, I don't like your writing style or whatever.

So they're in trouble.

So it ends up being

counterproductive.

I was once testifying before Congress, the House Judiciary Committee, about

something else dealing with litigation, and Maxine Waters

was on the

committee.

And

I'm halfway through my testimony.

She said, she pulls out this book where I'd written about this.

And she said, I see, Mr.

Howard, you don't believe there's any such thing as discrimination.

I said, no, that's not true at all.

We have a terrible history as a country of discrimination, and I think it's important to have the the civil rights laws to do that.

And she said, but you don't think people should be allowed to sue.

And I said, well, I think people should be allowed to sue if they can prove a pattern or practice against a group.

I just don't think that one individual should be able to sue for themselves because it ends up chilling free interaction that ends up being counterproductive to race relations.

And she looks at me and she says, well, Mr.

Howard, do you think anyone would bring a lawsuit for discrimination if they hadn't been discriminated against?

And I said, well,

I said,

what centuries you're living in?

Yeah, yeah.

I sort of bit my tongue.

I said, well, let me put it this way.

Every federal judge I know believes that.

You know, and so you need to have boundaries of,

just as you need to have boundaries of what the regulators were allowed to stop and not stop, these outer boundaries in society, you also need to have outer boundaries of what people can sue for.

If we want to restore a free society, in both cases,

people have to wake up in the morning with a pretty good sense

of their field of freedom.

Today, they have a pretty good sense that they're not free at all.

You know, anything they do could get them in trouble.

Okay, I feel like I'm standing on the other side of the glass looking into the bakery and seeing all the good food inside.

Right.

And

because as I'm listening to you talk, and the more I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um,

I keep remembering these guys.

This is easy to sell to a group of people because they're going to have power, they're going to have money, they're going to control things, it will be their way.

Where what

we're now selling

is not

is no longer even understood because we've had it for so long, we take it for

granted.

But what we're selling is

you go your own way.

You have too much money in lawyers.

You have too much power with the lawyers.

All the politicians, the political parties, the

companies that have now spent the last 50 or 100 years retooling to make sure that they understand this system and they can control that system.

How do you beat the money and the power?

Okay, really important question.

So I'm having lunch with the senior medical officer of a big health care company, and he says to me,

What I'm worried about is not what's going to happen in this election cycle to health care and stuff.

What I'm worried about is the system obviously doesn't work anymore.

It's too expensive.

People can't afford it.

It influences coverage.

It influences relations.

It causes professionals to burn out because it's so bureaucratic.

And no one has an idea of how to replace it.

And so going back to your earlier question, yes, things are changing, the electoral needle, and there's no vision.

So point number one,

you just made the point.

Washington will never fix this

because all those people are

now generations into living this bureaucratic big brother, the law will tell you how to live, you know, sort of society.

That's number one.

Number two, neither party, as we know it, is going to fix it

because they

each,

the special, their interest groups and biggest supporters, whether it's the trial lawyers or the or the rights harpies on the left or

certain

business on either side,

they are all invested in the status quo.

Washington is not, Washington's mainly about the status quo, and both parties are about the status quo.

And while we're at it, just to be clear, there's nothing been better for the Democratic Party financially than Donald Trump.

The people who can't stand Trump pouring money into the Democratic Party.

So they do fine with this polarized, get nothing done

kind of political system.

Well, I think it's both parties that have,

they love

the

infighting.

They love it.

Completely.

So Washington won't fix itself.

The people there can't even conceive of what we're talking about, and neither parties will fix it.

So as in all great changes in society, including in our society in the 60s and in the 30s and

all the way back and the American Revolution itself, change has to come from the outside.

So we need to start, I won't call it a new party for right now.

I'll just call it a new movement.

And the new movement is based not on conservative or liberal ideology.

It's based on human empowerment and responsibility.

And we need to go...

It sounds like what our founders did.

Yes, that's right.

And we need to remake that.

And

what that means is going largely back to a principles-based government where you understand that law is not a way to control correctness in a society, but again, has this limited role of protecting mainly against bad things,

you know, and we don't let people use it for their own purposes the way people use lawsuits.

Lawsuits today are all about selfishness.

Individual rights,

the great principle of individual rights, which was supposed to be that the state can't barge into your home, take your property, individual rights is now mutated into this sword for personal gain.

It's just unbelievable.

It's turned into its opposite, where people use state power to get something for themselves.

Because I think we have, at the same time, there have been, there's been greed, there's been a loss of, when I was in high school, the required class for seniors was rights and responsibilities.

And no one wants any responsibility.

I mean, our founders never, ever, there's a few things they didn't see.

One,

one group of politicians gladly giving their power to another branch of the government.

They never thought that that would happen.

That's against human nature.

You're too greedy.

Right, right.

Welcome to Congress, right?

Right.

Yeah,

exactly.

So

how do you get responsibility?

There's one way you get responsibility is you hold people accountable when they're not responsible.

And so you were right

when they're not responsible or when they are responsible.

When they don't act responsible.

Yes, okay.

You give them responsibility and then you hold them accountable when they act irresponsibly.

In other words, don't bail the banks out when the banks were doing things that were wrong and they knew it.

Completely.

And

so people must suffer constantly.

You want responsible, you want trust in an organization.

Everybody has to know that if you don't pull your share, you're going to lose your job.

And what that does is it creates an incredibly vigorous, happy organization because everyone knows that everybody else is doing doing their share.

And that's why accountability is not a negative thing, it's really a positive thing.

Well, the same thing is true in a society.

If you have someone who

repeatedly uses the law, a parent or someone, to get things for themselves, they're threatening legal action to get for themselves, they should be shunned.

They should be told no.

The officials ought to have the authority to say no, that's not fair.

You know, you only get this much of the budget or whatever.

And they should be shunned.

They should be, it's not their legal right.

They're no longer acting in a moral way.

And so, you know, in Try Common Sense, I have a whole section about restoring the moral basis of public choices.

You have to give back to people

the authority

all through society to say what's right and wrong.

Who has moral authority?

There is no truth anymore.

We've all sullied ourselves so much

jumping back and forth for power.

Hey, well, I'll accept this because it's our side this time.

Who has moral authority?

You know, character, Emerson said, is cumulative.

You know, none of us is perfect.

We all make mistakes in life.

But we know, we all gravitate towards people with good character.

We know them.

People gravitate to your show.

They gravitate to your show because they think, among other things, you have good character.

You're smart.

You have a lot of good ideas, but you have good character.

So people gravitate

towards character.

It's just

doing that in Washington?

No, no,

no,

there's no discourse on character because it's illegal to judge people based on character.

The question is what the rule requires.

That's the problem.

The problem with this legalistic structure we've built up really only in the last 50 years is we've abandoned the vocabulary of morality and right and wrong and character and perception itself, the idea of perceiving.

I perceive that this person doesn't try hard.

Well, how can you prove that?

We're no longer allowed to make those judgments.

Well, that's crazy.

That's how the world,

you know,

some people

work out better in jobs than others.

We have to be able to make those judgments.

So we need to...

to

recreate a society where people feel then when they act honorably and they wait in line rather than demanding something for themselves, they feel they're doing that because that's what good people do.

Correct.

And instead, we have the society where we've trained people not to do that because you're a dupe or, you know, or something.

Well, you do feel that.

I mean, you get to a point.

And I think America will reach this.

I'm not sure England will reach this.

What's happening with Brexit in England is remarkable.

Yeah, it is.

You know, you have a vote,

you're moving down a certain way, your prime minister now says, I'm going to do this because we have to do this or we're not going to get a good deal.

They change the rules.

They keep saying, well, then we'll have to bring it back to the people, thinking that the people will say something different.

It's happening here, too.

But America, I just, I asked a Scottish friend of mine, I said, what is going to happen to England?

And he said, oh, I have no idea.

He said, it's screwed.

But they won't do anything.

The people won't do anything.

We're not English yet.

We're headed that way, but we're not English yet.

And you can't continually re-injure

and expect the entire population to go, wait a minute.

Right.

You know, essentially, I think

it's interesting about Brexit.

Brexit, I think, is in part a failure of hypothesis by the leadership.

I think the instinct of the British people to leave the EU is completely understandable.

I mean, speaking of the micromanagement

and also the stuff coming from the courts in Europe are...

Same thing that happened here.

You could put all the European states together and say, hey, this big principle, but do your own thing.

You're England.

They would do that, but they did what the progressives are doing to us here.

Everybody has to be the same.

Uniformity and perfection.

So we have this utopian scheme that only if we have another 150 million words of law, everything will work perfectly.

You know, not realizing that nothing's working because people wake up in the morning and they're wasting all their time trying to comply with stuff instead of teaching the kids or helping the patient or making the product or whatever.

I mean, or

innovating.

So

we're at this point where

Americans actually

are not going to get it from Washington,

that we have to start something new.

And Brexit,

I fault the leaders only because they don't have a clear hypothesis of here's how we think it should work now.

Lay out the ten principles, here's how we should deal with the Northern Ireland-Ireland border, here's how we should do this.

And so what I think we need to do now, and I'm starting to talk to some people about doing this, is go area by area with no one appointing us

and say,

here's how public schools should work.

And by the way, we have to break the teachers' unions because they make them unmanageable.

And the way to do that, among other things, is for the federal government to say, you will get no federal funds unless you satisfy us, you state by state, that you have a method of practical accountability to sort the people who are good teachers from those who are not.

And the state can have the choice.

It either gets the billion dollars, you know, or it doesn't.

Now, you know, I mean,

let's talk about morality.

I have a feeling you and I feel the same way about teachers' unions, and I've seen it in New York.

It's obscene.

California, obscene.

It's bad here in Texas.

However,

Philip,

why do you want to hurt teachers who are in there doing this?

They have no one representing them.

You're just going to throw them to the wall.

You know, it's so interesting.

We have a daughter as a teacher.

The

teachers are among the most important people in our society.

They should be valued, honored.

And the number one way to do that, we've got to pay them fairly.

Number one way to do that is to to give them the freedom to put all of their energy into teaching.

And then hold them accountable.

And then hold them accountable for whether they fit it.

And if they think they're so good and being treated unfairly, there are checks and balances you could put in.

You give a teacher a presence.

But they can go to another school too.

You know, it's a free society.

And by the way,

the third grade teacher, somebody may be a great third grade teacher and a lousy 11th grade teacher.

And again, there are lots of studies of this.

And there are lots of different.

Peter Drucker, the great management consultant, said, teaching is the one profession that we've never figured out how to

come up with a formula for success because

it's so idiosyncratic.

It's so dependent on the teacher's personality and the funny combination of how the teacher engages with the kids at what age and gets them interested and

has them go.

And we've pretty much killed those people because you can't be you.

Oh, no.

So the good teachers, there was a study in California a few years ago.

They said the number one reason why good teachers quit teaching was bureaucracy, not having ownership of their choices.

I mean, you cannot read anything about good teachers without seeing the testimonials of discouragement,

the combination of wasting their time in bureaucracy and

other people around them who aren't doing the job and everybody everybody knows it,

bringing down their schools.

It's funny.

Well, the bureaucracy, our daughter was a teacher in a very good public school in Brooklyn.

And

I said, well, what's so great about this school?

And she said, well,

it's really, the principal really protects us, gives us a lot of authority to do whatever we want.

And I said, well, how does she do that?

Because there are all these reporting requirements.

And she said, well, apparently on Friday afternoons, the teacher spends the principal spends a whole afternoon filling out forms, certifying that we've done things that we never did.

And so this highly successful school is able to get away with it because the principal actually lies to the bureaucracy.

She puts all this, she puts all the paperwork stuff under herself and certifies things that never happened.

And the school is like one of the most,

you know, highest ranked schools in New York State.

That's crazy.

It is, again,

a government making every citizen a criminal.

Yeah.

And we are.

I mean, I'm sure this studio is certainly in violation of the students.

No, it's not.

No, it is not.

I want to go back to, you know, the moral mandate because

what we've lost

is our unum.

E pluribus unum.

We could come, we're the only nation in the history of the world to put this amount of difference together to mix people from all around the world.

You just watch the streets of New York City and you see how people who can't speak the same language even are from different parts of the world that probably have like, I don't know, camel or

yak yak someplace on them.

You know what I mean?

And they, everything moves.

Everything moves because we have a certain set of principles.

We don't have a unum anymore,

and our unum is being dismantled.

All men are created equal, it's just being dismantled piece by piece.

So, when you say we've got to have a moral revival, we have to have a moral mandate,

based on what?

Well,

the great thing about America is

not that you have people of 20 different cultures in each room and in each workplace.

It's not so much about diversity as it is a diversity of conformities.

So what happens in America is that the free society allows people to sort themselves out by interests,

by morality, by values,

by religion.

And so, as I said earlier, the Hasids are in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

The Mormons are in Utah.

There's a Russian community in Howard Beach, Queens, New York.

And yet, those boundaries are not solid.

But if you go to Salt Lake City, let's go to Provo because that's like really hardcore more.

You go to Provo.

And you go to New York City,

there's lots of differences, but it's, there's probably more things similar, okay?

You go from

Provo, or let's say New York, to parts of Dearborn.

There's not the unum there.

There's not,

they have it, the idea used to be,

we all believe this certain thing about freedom.

You know what I mean?

And so we are going to have to do this set of things.

We are now, you can go to places in California that are as white as I am, and we don't see the world the same way, and they'll allow crapping in the streets.

And I'm like,

what are we doing here?

They don't have a sense of ownership.

And so you have people who have divorced themselves from their society.

because they because Big Brother will take care of this or that's not my problem, someone else's.

And that's a real cancer in a society.

And it's true whether it's in

an unemployed part of Michigan or in Orange County, California.

And it's really important

for this culture, this great society of America, this great experiment, 200 some years old,

to resuscitate itself to give people back a sense of ownership.

But the best way to get them the sense of ownership is to make it clear that, one, they're free, and two,

that if they have a response, that other people can judge them based on their

how they behave, that

they can take ownership, and if they don't, they will be judged accordingly.

Let me just play devil's advocate.

Who are you to judge?

If I've heard that once, I've heard it a million times.

Sure, who am I to judge?

I think everybody's free to judge.

And so

in my, you know, I'm happy to lay down my chips on the poker table and say, here's the community I want to live in, where we have a say in how the schools are run, where we have a say in how we provide social services, where each of us can judge each other.

And those are my values.

Whose morality?

I'm telling you,

based on what's like who's common sense,

I assert those values.

The person next to me can say, well, I agree with that except for this reason.

And then we have a discussion, or we have an argument.

We have a disagreement argument.

Fine.

We're not even having that discussion now.

And then what happens...

Anybody who's been married knows that humans can readily disagree with each other.

It's in the nature of human nature.

Should we take this route or that route?

Should we have this for dinner or that for dinner?

It's so- I'm sick and tired of this, but that doesn't mean I hate you.

Yeah, exactly.

And so what happens is, and it's true in any firm and it's true in all activities of life, is that it's not my values I'm asserting.

I'm simply saying this is how I would do it.

And then somebody else says, well, I would do that except for this this or that.

And

the molecules bounce around and they land someplace.

And where they landed in America was all these incredibly healthy communities that built this country.

And they landed in companies and they landed in small towns and they landed

in great ventures.

You know, 9-11 was recently, someone called me two weeks after 9-11.

and said, and I was chair of the leading architectural civic group in New York, and they said, you know,

it just seems so empty looking downtown out from my window.

Somebody should put lights down there.

This is an architect friend of mine.

Somebody should put, I said, gosh, that's a really good idea.

So

what happened?

It was his idea.

I said, Justin, what a nice thing that would be.

I ran up the flagpole at City Hall, but they were too busy trying to catch terrorists.

So I said, well, we're going to have to organize this a little better.

So I got somebody who knew David Rockefeller.

I went and talked to him.

He thought it was a good idea.

So he and I co-signed a letter to the mayor saying, We will do this and we'll organize how to pay for it.

And that became the Tribute in Light Memorial that now goes up every year at 9-11, those twin beams that go up a mile in the sky.

It's incredibly beautiful.

It was just because

some friend of mine, his name was Richard Gould,

had the idea and he helped execute the idea.

And somebody else, me and Mr.

Rockefeller, and ultimately some others, made it happen.

That's happened in this society a cajillion times

because people in America owned America and they wanted to do things.

Sometimes it was building a business, sometimes it was doing something civic.

And it's not about asserting my idea.

It's about having an idea.

It's about having a hypothesis.

Okay.

I honestly, I mean this.

That is my favorite tribute to anything on planet Earth, is what you did.

I think that is the most stunning, most beautiful.

I think it should be done every day.

I love

the two towers of light.

I just love it.

But do you know how many birds are going off?

You know, it's funny.

So the Ottoman Society decided they were going to oppose it, right?

So everybody will oppose anything in America.

So we said, well, let's see how it works.

So we put up the first time, the lights, we put in the tests and stuff, and the Ottoman Society came.

Well, it turned out.

that it was like their dream come true.

It was like a smorgasbord at the biggest party in the world because the lights attracted insects.

And so the birds came in and there was this feeding.

The birds wished it was there every night too.

No harm.

There was no harm to the birds.

It was only a really good dinner.

So it was.

That's not the story I just read again this year.

You're kidding.

No.

No, they're still saying it takes birds off their migration path and yada, yada, yada.

You know, one night.

It's really.

Anyway, it's a,

but

America America is about people who

own

their choices and they own their communities.

And so going back to the idea of how do you, whose values, whatever, and I'm introducing a new idea here is,

is that each of us has the right and the power to come up with an idea.

I think this is the way to solve the problem.

And if you're in a good organization like yours or any other one, somebody else will say, well, I wouldn't do it that way because of this, but maybe that way.

And you go back and forth, and then you have to make a decision, and things get done.

That's the way it works on a farm.

It works that way in

all life activities.

And that's

joint accomplishment is almost always better than just one person acting solo because you get educated, right?

So we need to come up with a hypothesis.

of how this society works and we need to make it and eventually it could be a party into a party.

Here's how it's going to work.

This is how the schools are going to work better.

This is how we're going to make regulation work better.

Here's what I'd like to suggest.

You know, if we just had like

laboratories that, for instance, you want universal health care, great, we could have a laboratory, let's call it a state, and they could do it one way, and another state could do it another way.

And whichever one works out, If it does actually change things, the other laboratories will say, I like that one.

I volunteer to go and do that as well.

We don't do that.

Exactly.

Well, one of the great virtues of principles-based regulation where you set up goals, so let's be really simplistic.

Let's have good schools.

So let's say that's the goal, right?

And you have a few principles like not discriminate, but not many.

is it gives back to the states and to communities the freedom to do it in their own way so they can become laboratories.

The terror of 150 million words of binding federal law and regulation is it creates this suffocating uniformity across all states.

So no one can innovate because you all have to do it the way Big Brother in Washington, you know, there's that great story, which I have in the book, of

the guy with the apple orchard.

So he has a...

He has 5,000 rules, an upstate family-owned apple orchard, 5,000 rules

from 17 different agencies.

They have 13 clipboards in their office trying to keep track of all the paperwork and the rules.

And the rules are just extraordinarily granular.

You can imagine there being, you know, because you don't want pesticides that are really dangerous in the apples.

And, you know, so there are things

that I think government oversight is worth having.

You want to have clean apples.

But you can...

you can have those things.

You can have those be goals and maybe even rules, but 5,000 rules from 17 different agencies.

But the rules, one of the rules uh requires that when they're when they pick the apples and they're taking the apples from the from the orchard in the in the cart to the barn to be washed that the apples have to be covered with a cloth to protect them against bird droppings

now

those

i think i know

those apples have been growing on the tree for five months and the government has done nothing to protect them against bird droppings birds are in the trees.

Yeah, yeah, the birds are in the trees.

I mean, it's truly just idiotic.

So you have this stuff that drives Americans to want to pick up their pitchforks

because it's so stupid.

So get rid of all that stuff.

Have your goals.

Have your principles.

And area by area, we could do this.

You know, the other day you said in two days we could solve the problem.

Well, actually, that's not that far off.

You know, leaving aside healthcare, which is a little complicated for a variety of reasons,

because it can cost an infinite amount of money.

So how do you draw the line?

But, you know,

that's a separate discussion.

I still believe in

people.

I believe if they are free, they will figure it out.

If they are free from companies who are getting in bed

with the lawmakers,

and they all are looking at capitalism is the greatest system of charity ever.

if

everyone involved is saying how can I make things better I'll get rich I'll get rich you'll get rich we'll all get rich how can I make something that makes people's lives easier if we can get

money the the the grotesqueness of that relationship in Washington out

I still believe they will The solution will come from a group of doctors someplace.

Completely.

And so it's all about empowerment.

What's happened is there's a whole industry of people who exist solely to write and manage and report on red tape.

Not even just in Washington.

There are all these, you know, I mean,

in every category, nothing but, there's a whole industry of those people.

They are the enemy.

They and Washington are the enemy because they have a vested interest in this horrible system.

And the goal is human empowerment plus human accountability.

So how do you do this?

How do you roll this out around the country?

You say, you know, it's not a party, but it would have to be eventually.

But how do you roll this out?

Well,

so we're thinking of - I'm talking to Mitch Daniels and Bill Bradley, people from different parties and such.

I've been talking to a couple of presidential candidates, longshot presidential candidates about this.

But we're thinking of rolling out

the beginning of a campaign.

We might call it Principled America or we might call it Reboot Washington or something like that.

Based on core principles, you know, of responsibility, accountability,

rebooting all regulation, not to deregulate necessarily, just to make it work, make it practical, you know,

bringing order to lawsuits so people can't go around with a legal sword and threaten people all day long.

So we have some core principles, based on core principles, and we want to create a citizen movement, a place where citizens can sign up, either party, and say, I am interested in participating in a movement that would accomplish these goals, that would re-empower me and my friends and my community to make sense of our lives.

Still based on the Constitution of the United States.

Still based on the Constitution.

Keep the Constitution.

Still the Bill of Rights.

And the Bill of Rights, all that.

It's all about going back to what the Constitution is supposed to be doing,

which is creating a framework for a free society.

And Washington instead has become

this nanny that tells everybody

literally people spending, I mean, not all day, but half the day

worrying about legal compliance.

That's just not a free society.

We're having a problem right now with doctors, and I would have seen this one coming.

We're having a problem with doctors now, where people are becoming

practitioners, nurse practitioners or the assistant to the doctor, as close as you can without being the MD, because they know once they get the MD, they are responsible for all of that stuff.

And they just, like most doctors, they just want to heal people.

It's crushing.

It's actually

the whole thing about burnout with teachers and doctors and nurses and stuff is really is really tragic.

But these were all people who want to do good.

So we have this idea of principled America and the not-for-profit at commongood.org.

People can sign up.

It's free.

But we have to figure out a way to make this into a movement.

We just have to do.

I mean, I just hired a filmmaker.

You know, we're going to do 15 short films about the idiocies.

in daily life that stem right from

overbearing government.

And where the solution isn't to get rid of government, but to get rid of the micromanagement from government, to give back to people the freedom to make choices for themselves.

So we're going to do 15 movies that we're going to launch sometime in the fall.

I mean, we're talking about one two-minute clip.

Yeah.

You know, that in order to begin to get people thinking about this in a different way.

And ultimately, if we get political leaders, like in this elected campaign, if we get Donald Trump or some of the Democrats talking this way,

I think this idea has legs.

The whole idea of human empowerment and people in Washington.

Philip, we talked for 20 minutes when I was in New York and I invited you down.

I think the secret,

you're running out of time,

and I think the secret is being able to convince people

because they've already done

the Tea Party, they've already done the, you know, the women's, all of that, and they just don't believe in any of it anymore.

They just don't.

And you have to find a way to tell them,

there's a door to this bakery.

You've had your face up to the glass the whole time, and I understand how you feel, but there is a door, and here's the door, and it will work.

You know, what the Tea Party did not have, and this is all in hindsight, the Tea Party was great.

I mean, it was just an unbelievable, spontaneous, fantastic thing, fantastic movement.

What it didn't have was an alternative, coherent governing vision.

It said, we don't like Washington, and the implication, just get rid of it, but then when push comes to shove, people don't, in fact, want lead paint on their toys or, you know, whatever.

So they didn't have a coherent vision.

What we have and...

is a coherent vision for how we would deal with all these things, how you make government officials accountable, how you make regulation so it doesn't,

so you don't have to spend half the day filling out forms.

You know, we have a vision for how to do that, how to get infrastructure approved so you can fix the broken bridge this year instead of in 10 years.

You know, it's amazing.

And

unfortunately, I've been looking for it for the last 15 years.

I'm looking for the

I'm looking for the beatdown in the well of the Senate that happened in, what, 1850

with with Sumner.

Sumner, yeah.

And

that came from a sense that I think Americans feel right now,

neither one of you, the Democrats and the Whigs, neither one of you are serious about solving these problems like slavery.

And he was beaten down and out of that came Democrats and Whigs come together to form a new party that was about a new principle.

And without the internet, I mean, with newspaper and barely telegraph, the Republicans took over in six years

from nothing to six years.

Right.

So what history will tell you is that what we know that we're in a period where change is the ground is shaking, you know, with with Trump's election and Obama's election and lots of other stuff going on.

The Tea Party, you know, we know the ground is shaking.

The move for socialism.

Yeah,

the ground is shaking.

It could go anywhere.

It's like the Russian Revolution or something, right?

So you could go anywhere.

When change happens will depend on

a confluence of events that cannot be predicted.

You know, somebody gets beaten on the floor of the Senate.

I mean, you know, or whatever.

I mean,

9-11.

I mean, something happens that you can't predict.

However, what's really important to do now is before that happens,

is to create a vision which people begin to understand

is the one that would actually give them back what they want,

which is a free society, not a benevolent dictator, not a,

you know, but a free society in a democratic state where people in different communities have a sense of ownership, not only of their own lives, but of their communities.

And

we're committed to building that vision.

I've got all these really important people signed up, Al Simpson, Mitch Daniels.

I was talking to Jerry Brown the other day, former Democrats and Republicans.

Everybody knows it's broken and they can't figure out how to talk about it.

Well, I think we can talk about it.

I think you can talk about it.

It really is as simple as empowerment, responsibility, accountability,

and let people be judged.

It's so funny in the modern world.

we won't let anybody, it's so politically incorrect to say, you know,

I don't want to work with you, or I think you have lousy ideas.

We're not going to do that.

That's the currency of a free society in America.

You're talking about all those people in the street, and it's a people are judging each other all day long and finding all day long.

That's the currency.

Our society is going against human nature.

Yeah, completely.

Completely against human nature.

Yeah.

I want to run something by you.

And

it's something that I'm...

It's a timeline question.

I've been watching financial markets and watching what's happening all around the world.

The whole world is just on the brink.

And

financial institutions are on the brink.

And especially overseas, we now have sovereign funds moving billions of dollars into America.

We are the last great hope of the world right now.

No questions asked.

Money doesn't talk.

It screams.

And when European countries are taking money out of Europe and they're sending it over to us,

they know, please, America, don't fail.

Right.

Okay.

So if we fail, the whole thing goes down.

Would you agree with this premise so far?

Yes.

Okay.

Um

We're the anchor.

Yes, we are.

Let me give you another premise.

I'm just going to lay a few things out and then I'll tie them together.

Would you agree that Donald Trump does not get elected if we have bad financial

storms?

We go into a deep recession, something bad happens, that we get a repeat of

the election of 08 where we got to try something different.

Probably, yes.

Probably.

I've talked to many heads of big corporations who, quite frankly, 10 years ago hated my guts because they were so progressive.

They're now looking at this field of Democrats, and they're all saying the same thing.

I'll vote for Donald Trump.

I'll practically vote for the Antichrist over them because they're telling us,

I'm going to take the free market and I'm going to turn it upside down.

Here's the question.

If someone like Elizabeth Warren becomes the candidate for the Democrats or is a vice presidential candidate under somebody like Biden or very empowered

for something to do with the financial sector,

everybody with big money will bake that in and they will start to protect.

They'll start to pull money out and do different things.

And

the more you talk about

as a socialist that I'm going to turn this economy inside and out, the faster we would go, which would lead to a loss of

the

Republican because the media and the Democrats are so good at saying it's evil capitalism that's doing to this.

We need a change.

I think you have a very short time period to get this going.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I think that what's happening in the current electoral cycle is

that Donald Trump is actually writing the scripts for the Democratic candidates.

He could not have done a better job

because

people will vote for him, even if they don't like him,

rather than a socialist loony of any sort.

So I

Unless there's real turmoil.

Unless there's real turmoil.

That's right.

And so

I do think there's a short time frame.

Do you agree with the premise that you have to do that?

Yes, yeah, yes.

The markets will change if that is

the market.

I mean, I'm not, I don't think, I don't have ultimate wisdom on markets.

I think there's been a flight to safety, which is why

all that money is coming to the U.S.

I mean, it's such a weird market when when you've got zero it's effectively zero interest rates around the world and stuff I mean it's it's you know or negative right it's um

so it's but those are all symptoms of of a deep problem and a deep uncertainty with with where we're going

uh but i think that there's a power

There's a power and a vision

that's different than the power of politics.

And if we were able,

starting today with this podcast, if we were able to actually start building a narrative that your listeners and others, you know, and then political leaders seize upon about remaking a practical America where people are empowered to to be themselves and be choices, and that where government performs its useful roles in a practical way, not in a micromanagement way, where financial markets are overseen, but they're not strangled, you know, which is what Elizabeth Warren probably wants to do.

That vision,

I think, will not only attract popular support, will also attract, in any smart politician, political support.

So I don't think you need to go and play politics in the way, you know, give a lot of money to people and try to influence them.

All you need to do is come up with an alternative vision, which no one has done yet, that's sufficiently attractive.

Hey, yeah, I would rather have that.

I'd rather have schools that work than schools that spend half their money on bureaucracy.

Right.

You know, it's just so completely obvious.

I'd rather have hospitals and nurses spend all their time on patient care instead of compliance.

Well, hopefully, this will be a first step.

And if you're listening to the podcast, try common sense.

That's the name of the book.

Start there.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.