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Oct. 27, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
53:40
Timeless Wisdom - Liberal Conservative Divide: A Debate with Air America Host Thom Hartmann
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Here are thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
My name is Richard Green.
I host a national talk show on Air America called Clout.
And I think this obviously, you know, not as many people know about it as should, but I think this is the highlight event here in Denver.
So you're in the right place.
And the reason I say that, the reason I say that is because what's going to happen between now and November 4th is exactly what we're going to see here, which is a debate about the future of America.
And so Jamie McGurk and I, when we were thinking about this, you know, who could we get?
Who would be the gold standard for the progressive perspective and the conservative progressive?
And I am honored to be on the same network as Tom Hartman.
He was an instant choice.
Jamie said, oh my God, if you can get Tom, that'd be fantastic.
And so let's give a big hand to Tom Hartman.
Tom, Tom has written about 472 books, Screwed, Cracking the Code are the last two ones, seriously, 20 books.
He's on more than 60 stations across America on the Air America network and is the non-screaming, non-Rush Limbaugh alternative to a conservative talk.
Dennis Prager is someone I've known for over 20 years.
Love him, greatly respect him, never agree with him.
But he, but he almost never, almost never.
Yeah, he said that's the biggest compliment.
But Jamie and I agreed that Dennis Prager was not like Rush Limbaugh, not like Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, that this was, whether we agree or not with him, this was a thoughtful, thoughtful conservative, and that having a thoughtful conservative with great integrity and a thoughtful progressive with great integrity would be the gold standard for everything that's going on both here in Denver and in Minneapolis and in America between now and November 4th.
And so it is my great pleasure.
And Dennis has written four books.
He's on over 100 stations.
What is it?
Happiness is a serious problem is his most famous book.
Right.
Well, we're going to get political now, and thanks so much for joining us.
My great pleasure to introduce again Tom Hartman.
Dennis Prager, it's all yours, guys.
Yeah, here's the sheet.
And this is how we are broadcasting right here with this little device.
Well, first of all, I hope this doesn't count toward the five minutes.
I just want to thank you for the invitation.
It is always a big deal when people invite people they don't agree with.
So it's completely to your credit for having me.
I just want to say that, and I have no reason.
I'm not running for office.
I don't want your vote.
I just truly thank you and think that that's critical.
It's something I try to do.
I have people that I don't agree with on my show almost every day.
And I'm not talking just callers.
I mean people I interview.
So this is a big deal.
One of the things that has troubled me, and now I guess the five minutes can begin, one of the things that has troubled me with a lot of folks on the left, and I don't care, you progressive, liberal, left, I'm not wedded to any term.
Whatever term you like, I'll use.
But just for convenience sake, I'll just say left of center, is a certain demonization of those on the right.
Howard Dean put it best.
It's a statement he made that I play very often on my show, that in contradistinction to the Republicans who go to bed, who do not go to bed worried about children hungry at night.
We're different.
We're different from Republicans.
They don't care if children go to bed hungry at night.
We do.
That's astonishing to me.
There isn't a bone in my body that thinks that because you're a liberal, you care less about humans than I do.
I don't even understand that mode of thought.
Where does that come from?
Yet it's so common that the person on the right, most of the time, not every single one, but is usually selfish, cares less about the poor, cares less about the sick.
And it's astonishing.
It's not my experience.
And I've lived in both worlds.
I'm a liberal Jew from New York.
I went to Columbia University.
I mean, I have all the liberal credentials.
And, you know, of course, lived in California 30 years.
And I just, I don't recognize these people.
I don't meet them.
I don't know who they are.
And yet, this is frequently said.
And I have to assume that the people who do that do that because they don't really feel that they have better arguments.
It's that they feel that they're better people.
But I think that there are good people on the left, good people on the right, bad people on the left, and bad people on the right.
I say that all the time.
I say it on my show.
I never say different things to different audiences.
Where do we differ?
On everything.
It's phenomenal.
That's why, Richard, when you said he likes me but doesn't agree on just about anything, it's a phenomenon that we could differ on so much.
I have not figured out where it emanates from.
That two equally decent, equally intelligent people can differ on so many things.
And yet maybe God made it that way, that it's just built in that certain people will differ with others so that the world never have absolute unanimity because maybe that's not healthy.
But in any event, I'll give you a couple.
I had 15 examples.
You could see why I'm not a liberal on my website, Prager Radio, and you could check that out.
But I'll give you a couple right now.
The thing that most, and I didn't vote, I never voted Republican until Ronald Reagan.
I always voted Democrat.
So what got me was the Cold War.
What happened was I knew communism was evil.
And my biggest concern in life since I'm a child and learned about the Holocaust has been to eradicate evil.
I hate people who commit evil and I hate evil.
I do.
I admit it.
It's passion.
I hate torture, murder, mass murder.
I hate these people who do it, the communists and Nazis who did it, and they're the biggest perpetrators of it of the 20th century.
I want dead.
I cheer when Nazis get shot.
I cheer when Japanese fascists get shot in movies.
I cheer.
I'm actually happy when they're killed.
I admit it.
I am angry about all that evil.
Communism was on the moral level of fascism and Nazism.
And after Vietnam, the left opted out of the battle against communism.
And that's when I left.
I am still angry at that.
To have only cared when there was a draft.
That was the only reason my generation protested the Vietnam War, because there was a draft and they might go.
Once far more Cambodians and Vietnamese got slaughtered after communist takeovers, there was not a single demonstration on an American campus.
The death of vast numbers of Asians meant nothing to the American left.
Nothing.
What mattered was, we want to make love, not war.
I want to get laid.
I don't want to get drafted.
That's what my generation stood for, in my opinion, and still stands for, in my opinion.
And that was what alienated me, because the battle against evil is the greatest battle humans can engage in.
But what troubles the left, in my opinion, is not evil.
It's inequality.
That's the greatest evil for most people on the left.
I don't care about inequality nearly as more as I care about evil.
I have never been rich.
I'm not rich today.
Even by a Barack Obama standard, I'm not rich.
And I've never in my life had a day, a minute, a nanosecond of envy of the wealthy or resentment of them.
If they got their money dishonestly, I resent their dishonesty, but I don't resent their being on an infinitely higher economic plane than me.
Inequality does not trouble me.
Abject poverty troubles me.
Murder, torture, rape, child abuse, those trouble me, not inequality.
The left and I are troubled by different things.
What keeps me up at night doesn't keep people on the left up at night, from my experience.
I'm generalizing because, of course, there are exceptions.
But in terms of passion, the passion of the left was not anti-communist.
It was anti-anti-communist.
Number two, there's a battle.
One more minute.
There is a battle in life.
I'll pick this one.
Oh, okay.
America.
I'll talk about the other battle later.
I believe in American exceptionalism.
I think it's the best country that has ever existed in the history of the world.
It has done more good for humanity than any country that has ever existed.
It is the only country on earth that continually sheds blood for others.
The best example is the Korean War.
America was never invaded by North Korea.
Most Americans could not spell Korea, let alone identify it on the map, but 30-plus thousand Americans died in Korea, so that at least half the peninsula not fall under communist, bleak, concentration camp totalitarianism still exists in North Korea.
No other nation has ever led, if I may use the term, crusades for goodness like this country has.
And the constant knocking of it, and it's not a knocking, I always hear this, well, you know, I love America, that's why I criticize it.
Tell that to your husband or wife.
Honey, I always criticize you because I love you.
That is one of the sickest forms of love I have ever heard in my life.
I love you and I will always crap on you.
But I really do it out of love.
I don't find that to be an admirable trait that defines love.
This is the best country.
I believe in American exceptionalism.
It's an exceptional country.
And I am an American citizen first, not a citizen of the world first.
the UN has not done nearly as much good for humanity as the United States of America.
Well said in many accounts, Dennis.
And, And thank you for joining me here.
Last time we had this conversation, I think it was at Hebrew University in L.A. a year or so ago.
I have concerns with some of the rhetoric that, and not just specifically what Dennis was using, but that I hear broadly in public discourse in the United States.
For example, the use of the phrase the left.
And I can make, by the way, the same argument on the right, but I'll speak about the left.
I would submit to you that the left in America is dead.
There is no functional left in the United States.
My grandfather, who came to this country, my father's father, came from this country from Norway in 1917, was a socialist.
And that was the left.
And he hung out with communists.
And they really thought that communism was this cool thing.
And by the time Joe Stalin came along, people had pretty much figured out that that was a bunch of nonsense.
And in fact, I had on my program about a year ago the president of the Communist Party of the United States of America, just to show how fringe and mainstream the left is.
How many members do you have?
Well, I think around 300.
This is the entire nation's Communist Party.
Communism is a system that did not work, predictably would not have worked.
It works in small groups.
It works on a kibbutz.
It works in tribes.
If everybody knows everybody, you could argue that it works because then you have social pressures that make it work.
But once it's possible for a person to be anonymous, it no longer works.
So if you were to survey most Americans, and these surveys have been done, I mean, this is no secret, you find that the vast majority of Americans, you know, like well over 95%, like our socialist police departments.
They like our socialist fire departments, state-funded.
They like our socialist public roads.
They like our socialist public education system, by and large.
A lot of people have complaints about it.
I do too.
I've written several books about how bad it is and dysfunctional it is, but nonetheless, at least it's there.
And many of us are literate as a consequence of it.
And, you know, so I'm not, I'm reluctant to even call any of that the left.
I would submit to you that that's the center in America, that the vast majority of Americans hold to a set of values that were founded in the 1700s in the Enlightenment that came out of first John Locke in 1634, I think his second treatise on government, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau writing about the noble savage.
And some of it was a little over the top, but the basic idea was that for thousands of years we had been governed by very, very conservative principles that had in their core this belief in the essential evil of humanity, that we are born flawed.
We were born defective.
We were born evil.
There's a whole variety of stories about how this came about, Eve at an apple, whatever, but that the basic core of humans is evil.
And therefore, there must be, to quote Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, he said, without the restraining force, without the iron fist of church or state, to paraphrase, I don't remember the entire quote, life would be life, you know, before society had no letters, no form of transportation, no culture, and was nasty, short, and brutish.
A situation that the early anthropologists, and this is where Rousseau got into this, found actually wasn't always the case.
It was sometimes.
And sometimes it was the exact opposite.
And so the core argument that was put forward by the Enlightenment and that was followed by people like George Washington, who called himself a liberal and said he hoped ever to see America be more liberal, and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and many others of the founders, the majority of the founders, was that the essential nature of humans is good and that evil is an aberration, that evil people are an aberration.
They're twisted, they're damaged, whatever.
And as a society, we have to decide how to deal with that.
Some tribes deal with it by banishment, others by execution, whatever.
I mean, that's a discussion.
But because we are fundamentally good, we can actually decide how to govern ourselves.
And I think this question of can we govern ourselves is the question that is the ultimate cleavage between conservative and liberal.
And as I said, I don't like left and right.
Right is, you know, the Nazis were right and left is the communists.
And both of those extremes are dead and gone in the United States, although they were very active in the years leading up to World War II.
And fortunately, they're gone.
But I think that that's the main cleavage: are we going to be a we society or a me society?
Are we capable actually of governing ourselves?
Are we capable of drawing the largest number of people into participation in governance?
Or do we have to govern, do we need hyper-powerful paternalistic institutions, whether they be religious institutions or state institutions, to control us because we're so functionally evil?
And I would submit that the core, and I'll let Dennis speak on behalf of this, although I think in some part he just did, the core conservative worldview, the historic conservative worldview, is that people can't govern themselves.
John Adams referred to people like you and me as the rabble, didn't want us to be able to vote.
And although he was a great patriot, he was a lousy president.
Jefferson, on the other hand, wanted everybody to vote.
And some of his writings later in his life, particularly about ending slavery, I mean, it's something that he worked at.
I think that we're seeing now.
We're seeing that enfranchisement.
And it's a desirable thing.
Dennis.
Thank you, Tom.
And you did raise some very critical questions.
I don't think we're basically good as it happens.
And that is at least a theoretical conservative-liberal divide.
And as I said, and I preempted, I'm proud of myself.
I said, I don't care if you call it left or remember I said that or progressive.
I don't care whatever the term, so long as we know whom we're talking about.
It is so obvious to me people are not basically good that I stand in awe of those who believe that people are basically good.
You have no evidence for it.
Babies are not good.
Babies are the quintessence of narcissism.
I want mommy, I want milk, I want to be held, I want to be comforted, and if you do not do all of these things immediately, I will ruin your life.
Well, what is so good about a baby?
Babies do it.
I don't see.
Did we interrupt each other?
Maybe one more statement and then we'll interrupt as much as we want.
But this notion that we're born good is nonsense.
How many parents have ever yelled at their child, you know?
You know, Sean, you share too much.
You do.
You really have to learn to be more selfish.
I mean, as a parent of three, you spend most of your life saying, say thank you, say please, say thank you, say please.
You cannot talk that way.
You may not beat up your little sister.
We don't start off good.
This is fantasy.
I think the left lives, excuse me, progressives live in a certain fantasy world.
They would like the world to be that people were basically good.
I would like it too.
I wish.
Anne Frank was wrong.
She's always quoted in the one line of her book, which is just wrong, but she was 14.
With all respect, 14-year-olds have little to teach us.
I know for the generation that said you can't trust anyone over 30, Anne Frank is a saint and a prophet.
She was a saint, but not a prophet.
We aren't basically good.
People stink as a rule.
Some people are really good.
But the world, after the Holocaust, after slavery, after Cambodia, after Rwanda, after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, you're going to tell me that these are a bunch of weird sickos?
No, the weirdest people are really kind.
The weirdest Germans were the ones who saved Jews during World War II at the risk of their lives.
Those were the weirdos.
The normals went along.
The progressives have it backwards.
So the choice in real life is how do we make good people?
And here, I prefer a strong religion to a strong state.
The left progressives, liberals, whatever term you wish to use, prefer a strong state.
I don't trust the state any more than I trust anything in life.
The vast majority of slaughter, torture, rape of the 20th century came by secular large states, communist states and fascist states.
Sure.
First, yes, babies are good.
Babies, and there have been numerous studies on this, babies cringe when they're confronted with violence.
Babies inherently understand that evil is evil and that it is not them.
Babies are highly capable of compassion and do share, actually.
I guess we can agree to disagree.
And feel free to interrupt me, by the way.
Secondly, I would submit to you that the evils of the world that you've described from the Holocaust to Cambodia were the consequence of, in some cases, misplaced attempts to do good.
Certainly Cambodia, I don't think, would have happened had we not been in Vietnam.
But the larger issue is, is society so is the evil that we're seeing the consequence of dysfunctions of society?
Or is society dysfunctional because humans are dysfunctional?
And I just looked at biology.
I mean, biological systems always strive for homeostasis.
They always strive for balance, which is part of my definition of good.
And systems that are wildly out of balance tend to collapse, they tend to crash, they tend to become twisted and weird and destructive.
And in biological systems, you know, for example, if one part of your body rises up and says, I'm going to take over the rest of the body, that's called cancer.
And so this is where I think Dennis and I differ, is I would say that people are fundamentally good and some dimensions of our culture and our society are fundamentally evil and that those are things we can change.
And that was the great challenge that Hobbes, who both invented the modern liberal school of thought and the modern conservative school of thought with Leviathan, and then Locke and then Rousseau and then Jefferson and then I would say Abraham Lincoln would be probably the next in that line.
This lineage of liberalism took on because prior to Hobbes, the belief was that you had to have the king.
You had to have the queen.
You had to have that iron fist in order to keep people from going nuts.
And I would submit to you that it was the iron fist itself.
It was that dysfunctional society, that dysfunctional culture itself that produced the evil that it then said it needed to protect us from.
And I believe the anthropological record indicates that there's ample evidence to show that this is the case.
Down in two weeks, I'll be in Lima, Peru.
Dr. Ruth Shady is leading an anthropological team, an archaeological team, that has discovered a city called Corral, C-A-R-A-L.
Everybody's been looking for thousands of years for a mother city, a city that was the first time that tribal people became city-dwelling people.
And we've never been able to find one that was intact.
We've never been able to find one that hadn't been covered by 7,000 years of people building cities on top of it and was intact.
And Corral was built around 6,000 years ago, perhaps as much as 7,000 years ago, and existed for about 1,000 years.
And then there was a local change in climate that appears to have to do with a change in the sea currents.
And about where Corral is and for about 200 miles north became relatively desertified, and the city was covered over with sand and was just discovered in the last 30 years and has been extensively excavated now.
And they've found musical instruments, they've found art, they've found baskets, they've found pottery, they've found all the implements of normal life.
They have not found a single instrument of war.
This is a city that was occupied for a thousand years.
There's an enormous amount of evidence of trade with another community over on the seaco that was providing them with fish.
This community was growing grains, and there was trade, but there was no evidence of warfare at all in this city.
And I think that that, and you look at many, many groups, the Shoshone are a great example, but many indigenous groups around the world who, I mean, the Shoshone literally did not have a word for war in their vocabulary.
And so I think the question is: can we create a society that is good?
Now, just to the point of strong government, I absolutely abhor a powerful government.
I don't want the government wiretapping my phone.
I don't want the government telling me what I can do in my bedroom.
I don't want the government threatening me that I will be tortured.
I don't want the government kidnapping me and taking me off to some other country where I will be subject to torture.
I think that there's a qualitative, a massive qualitative difference between saying we're all in this together, and so we're going to have something like Social Security, which I think you would define as bigger, strong government.
And I don't consider bigger, strong government.
I consider it functional government.
I think that's the purpose of government.
And the authoritarianism that we see creeping into the United States of America right now that is starting to remind me of Milton Mayer's book, They Thought They Were Free, that I'm guessing you're probably familiar with.
And so, anyhow, I'll turn it over to you now.
Okay.
This notion of creeping authoritarianism in the United States because of the Bush administration is, forgive me, because we're both kindly types, but it's a form of hysteria that I see frequently among progressives.
You can disagree with tapping this limited tapping of anonymous calls to see if there is a foreigner that we might want to investigate and keep our children and ourselves from being incinerated alive.
You may consider that over the top.
I don't.
Neither do I. Okay, fine.
So the amount of wiretapping on Americans having an American call is zero.
And the freedom of inference, the Patriot Act, according to the Los Angeles Times, the number of complaints due to Patriot Act was, I believe, under a dozen.
It's hysteria to react against these things.
And what happened is this is what the progressives in the Weimar Republic did.
It's a field of study of mine at graduate school, the Weimar Republic.
What they did was they kept calling the judges fascists and kept calling the Weimar Republic authoritarian.
And then, as Walter Lacer, the great historian of the Weimar Republic, said, then they got the Nazis and they really knew what authoritarian was.
This crying wolf on the left drives me nuts.
There's no authoritarianism in the United States because of the Bush administration.
You can differ with it and even hate it.
But that's a very powerful term that I completely reject.
And as for your rejection of larger government, but you disqualify taxation, I will arrest you with the force of police if you don't give half your money over.
That's not a larger government.
But a one in trillion chance that I'll be wiretapped that you're panicked over authoritarianism.
But having the police available to take anyone who doesn't give half his money away under coercion, voted in by many people who give none of their money away, I might add as just a parenthetical note, that you are completely at peace with.
That is not a larger government, in your view, because it's only money or whatever, or because you believe we're all in it together, and this is the way it should be.
Tom Hartman and other good people, and you are a good person, believe that Dennis Prager and everybody else should give the following amount of their hard-earned, legally earned, honorably earned money away, and we will force them to do it with the force of police.
Moreover, they don't give enough now, so we will increase the amount.
That, however, you do not consider to be large government.
That's remarkable.
What is it, small government?
Dennis Levin said.
It's representative government.
If you walk into a 7-Eleven and pick up a chocolate bar and take a bite out of it, and you've got a dollar in your pocket, which is the cost of the chocolate bar, at that point, I would submit to you that that dollar is no longer your money.
This is the squealing that I hear.
Sean Hannity is the hero of this.
He just goes on and on.
It's your money!
It's your money!
What do they want to do with your money?
Well, I'm sorry, if we collectively, in a democracy, in a constitutionally limited, representative, democratic republic, if we collectively decided that we as a nation are going to spend a trillion dollars on a war in Iraq, or that we as a nation are going to provide ourselves with health insurance or Social Security,
or that we as a nation want to have a national highway system or whatever, the minute that if we believe, if we actually believe in democracy, the minute that we consume any of that, or actually just simply by staying here, we're saying, yes, I agree, I'm going along with this, and it's no longer my money.
The fact of the matter is that what we've seen over the last 30 years since Reaganomics is not only are they not taking, not only are we not spending our money collectively, or however you want to define it, we're spending our children's money instead.
And we're calling that ethical.
We're calling that good.
And this was the strategy that Grover Norquist came up.
David Stockman wrote a book about this, how dysfunctional this was.
That because the conservatives in the Reagan administration believed that Social Security and programs like it were socialist and were wrong, and they knew that the majority of Americans liked them, the only way that they could get rid of those programs was to essentially bankrupt the country.
It was called Starving the Beast, was the name of the strategy.
So you run the country into bankruptcy, you run up a truck, now it's $10 trillion debt, and at some point everybody looks around and goes, holy cow, we are broke.
You know, we can't do this any longer.
So there's a political strategy associated, which is very much the ends justify the means, and which I think is fundamentally dishonest.
And I don't apply that to you, Dennis, but I'm just going back to Stockman and Reagan.
But the bottom line is, yeah, if we are going to collectively live in a society that works, then we are going to have to put some of our labor, some of the efforts of our labor, which is the medium of exchange of our labor in this country is money.
We're going to have to put some of that money in to pay for it.
If we're going to agree that we want these things, we're going to have to pay for them.
And if we're collectively going to have to pay for them, we're going to have a society that works, then there has to be some mechanism to enforce that.
So, you know, I know the libertarian phrase of, you know, men with guns are going to show up at your house.
You know, it sounds really kind of cool, but there's actually an element of truth to it.
In fact, there's a very large element of truth to it.
And that's how we decided to organize our society from the very first day.
Literally from the very first day.
This government was collecting taxes from day one because we believed this country was founded on the liberal Enlightenment ideas that we can work, we can create a better world.
The word happiness appears in the Declaration of Independence the first time it ever appeared, the anti-subject of your book, apparently, the first time it ever appeared in the founding document of any country in the history of the world, the belief that it's possible to create a society that works, a society that actually elevates and ennobles people over time.
And I believe in American exceptionalism too, and I would say that we have done that.
We have been the major force for good in the world for the last 230 years precisely because of that, precisely because of those liberal values on which this country was founded.
Well, it wasn't from day one.
There was no income tax till the 20th century.
That's right.
I'm talking, of course, there were taxes.
I mean, the fire departments had to be paid for.
We all recognized it.
But there was private education throughout American history.
Public education is a relatively later invention.
And people were far better educated.
The typical Civil War, read Civil War soldiers' letters, they sound Shakespearean compared to the average high school or college graduate today.
They wrote better with an eighth-grade education 150 years ago than they write today in most cases.
I taught at college.
It was pathetic the way students wrote.
Pathetic.
Okay, this is thanks to, who runs education, conservatives?
I mean, let's be honest, folks.
Progressives run education or conservatives.
In my view, progressives have ruined American education.
College education is that they took away required courses so you can actually graduate.
And I've tested college kids.
Tell me who Joseph Stalin is.
One out of 100 can identify Stalin.
They're very well up on lesbian literature, but they're not really well up.
And it's nothing against lesbian literature.
It's just that I think that one needs to know who Stalin is before one knows about lesbian poetry, that there is a hierarchy of importance in life.
I'm making your point by telling you how progressives have killed education.
You're my man.
Then you're my man.
You're making my point about the straw man argument about, you know, let's break government so we can point to it and say, see, it's broken.
We shouldn't have had it in the first place.
I've been involved in education for many years.
I've written seven books on it.
I'm the founder of a school for kids with attention deficit disorder in New Hampshire called the Hunters School, hunterschool.org.
I've been on its board for 26 years.
I can tell you that education in the United States has been in a downward spiral since Reagan.
It's a spiral that arguably began before Reagan.
It began in the 70s, but it's been in a downward spiral.
And I would suggest to you that Reagan put Bill Bennett in as head of his education department because Bill Bennett said that his goal was to destroy the education department.
Now, when you put a guy in charge of the education department who goes on TV and brags about the fact that his goal is to destroy public education, and then 30 years later you look back and say, gee, public education is pretty screwed up, I'd say there's cause and effect.
That's mind-blowing.
We did well before we ever had a Department of Education.
It is a useless bureaucracy.
Since its creation, education has deteriorated.
It is unrelated to Ronald Reagan.
It is related to the bureaucracy created by educats as opposed to educators.
I must say, I do this for a living as you do.
I've never heard Reagan, I've heard him blamed for many things, not for the collapse of American education.
That's a first.
Yes, he wanted.
Yes, no.
His goal was to save education from those who built the Department of Education.
The Department of Education has done as little for education as the UN did for Rwandans.
I will agree with you that there are many ills with the Department of Education.
I'm not a big fan of the Department of Education.
Why do we need one?
Broadly speaking, why we need something like the Department of Education is because a child born in Appalachia should not be denied a good education because of an accident of geography and birth, whereas a child born on the upper west side of Manhattan shouldn't necessarily get a much better education, but relative to the child in Appalachia simply because of an accident of his birth.
I believe that education is part of the commons.
This is one of the other core liberal founding values of this country, was the commons.
That there are these things collectively that we share that have to do with three things, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And that the purpose of government, the reason governments are instituted among men, to quote the Declaration, is to advance life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Well, what are those things?
It has to do with our air.
It has to do with our forest.
It has to do with our water.
I believe it has to do with our power.
More than half of American companies that provide electricity are owned by the communities, are owned by their own communities.
And you look at the record, they consistently deliver better electricity at lower prices than the privately owned utilities do.
Why?
Well, it's really simple.
They don't have to skim 10% off the top as dividends to their stockholders.
They're not paying their CEOs multi-million dollar salaries, et cetera, et cetera.
And I believe that we see the same thing in education.
The school that I'm the chairman of is a not-for-profit corporation.
I believe that education should be an entirely not-for-profit business, as it were.
I'm personally not opposed to not-for-profit schools competing with public schools.
I can tell you a lot of the ills of public schools.
I wrote a whole book about how Horace Mann basically set out using compulsory public education in Boston to try to break the back of the Catholic majority in Boston that the Protestant minority felt oppressed by or was afraid of, frankly.
I can tell you all the ills of public education, but the bottom line is I think education, just like I think health care, is part of our commons.
And we should collectively say, okay, we have all decided this is a candy bar we're going to take a bite out of.
And all of our kids, by the time they graduate from high school, have taken a bite out of that candy bar.
Therefore, that money in our pocket is not my money.
And if somebody says, hey, you can't have some of that.
You can't take that money.
You're stealing from me.
You're going to threaten me with guns.
That's called being a freeloader.
So here's the progressive way of doing it.
you're a freeloader if we build more things and tell you you need it and therefore you have to pay for it.
So to use your...
if we all agree, Right.
So what if we, all right, so here's a right, but it's a republic, not a democracy.
So let me ask you a question.
If the democracy voted that the tax level should be 96%, you would have no issue with that.
Is that correct?
Because the people voted it.
5149 vote in the country.
That's democracy.
And the 51% pay approximately 3% of the federal income tax.
And the other people pay 97%.
But it doesn't matter.
They should still pay more because the people who don't pay their income tax should decide how much those who pay should.
This to you is equitable and fair.
And building more institutions and then yelling at people, hmm?
It's a straw man?
Straw man.
Well, no, no, I'm just asking, at what percentage would you say it's extortion?
I would submit that that's a straw man argument because the fact of the matter is, there is an element of democracy to our republic because it's a representative democracy.
We elect representatives who behave on our behalf, and we throw them out when they don't, ideally.
But there's a couple of things about taxes that I think people fundamentally misunderstand.
I did my show from Denmark last month.
In Denmark, if you earn, if you're middle class, you pay 53% income tax.
That's the average.
And the minimum wage is $17 an hour.
And what they found was that when, and what we found in the United States, by the way, because we had a top marginal tax rate, if you earned more than $3.2 million in today's dollars, you started paying 91% income taxes starting in around 1917, actually, was when it started getting jacked up with World War I. It went down for a while during the 20s and then it went back up again in the 30s and stayed there until John Kennedy dropped it to 71% and then Reagan took it down to the 20s.
But think about it for a minute.
In the workplace, in the marketplace of work, in the marketplace of labor, if I'm hiring somebody and I know that they're willing to do that job for $30,000 a year, there's a job that's worth, and there's a whole bunch of people who will do it for $30,000 a year.
It's hard to find anybody who will do it for less than that.
And obviously people would do it for more, but that's the floor for that job.
Take-home pay, $30,000 in their pocket.
And they're paying, let's say, 10% taxes.
So I'm paying them $33,000 a year.
Now, what happens if the taxes go to 80%?
Well, let's say 50%.
What happens if taxes go to 50%?
Now that $33,000, half of it's being taxed, their take-home pay is $17,000, $18,000.
They're not going to work for that anymore.
So I'm going to have to raise the pay to them to the point where they still walk home at the end of the day with $30,000.
For wage earners, taxes don't matter.
And you can see this in every country across the world where there have been very high taxes, very low taxes, and there have been changes.
And you look at these trends over multiple decades, including the United States, and you absolutely see this.
For people who are living on present income, when taxes go up, wages go up.
When taxes go down, wages go down.
We saw massive tax cuts in the 80s.
We've seen right now the average wage, the average working person in the United States is making less than they were in 1973 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
On the other hand, for people who live beyond the means of their demands, in other words, for people who are what I suppose some would define as the rich, people who have large, you know, taking large portions of this money and investing it or saving it, as taxes go down, their income goes up dramatically.
And as taxes go up, their income goes down.
So there's this regulating stabilizing effect.
We've got like eight minutes because you've got to leave.
Let me just check this for a second.
How would you like to divide the eight minutes?
Maybe summary statements and some free-for-all.
Okay, why don't you respond to that and then do your summary statement?
I must admit the notion that with higher taxes, wages go up.
If we don't count for inflation, okay, this is a motto that I have lived by and have never found violated.
Whenever I hear about studies, like you told me about babies being good, and that there were studies that show it, it reinforces a belief I have that when studies either reinforce what is intuitive or they're a phony study.
I think they're phony studies.
Babies are not good.
Babies are utterly narcissistic.
Every parent knows that.
The studies are baloney.
A lot of studies are baloney.
The notion, it's so counterintuitive that we would have to spend the day here for this to be dissected.
Taxes go up, therefore wages go up, but we're not talking inflation, obviously.
Therefore, it would seem to me that employers would love it because with higher taxes, they have more money to pay their workers.
This is awesome.
Who pays these workers?
I assume that it is private individuals.
No, it's private corporations.
Yes, private corporations.
They're advocating for medical health care.
They want to pay more.
Right.
They are because they don't want to be stuck with what the United Auto Workers has stuck on them for medical care.
That's why that's correct.
That is exactly right.
But no, I'm not making your point whatsoever.
Yours was a non-sequitur.
The reason that now GM doesn't want to raise our taxes.
GM wants to get rid of the burden of taking care of the medical care of its workers.
They don't care how it's done.
They just know they have been stuck with agreements that have shattered and helped shattered.
So did the terrible management and ridiculously boring cars that they have made.
I mean, there are a lot of factors why they have done this.
Look, we have only these few minutes left, so I'll say a few final words, say a few final words, and we'll wish everybody well.
Look, on taxes, let me make one final comment.
I am for a consumption tax.
Okay, that's the fairest thing in the world.
You pay on what you spend.
I think liberals and conservatives could unite on that.
There were just as many on both sides who were against it, and there were just as many on both sides who were for it.
You would immediately abolish the underground economy in this country.
Pimps and people selling drugs would have to pay taxes just as much as priests, ministers, and rabbis do.
And you pay on what you consume, and you have a net safety net for the poor so that they don't pay for their bread and their butter.
Obviously, that is clear.
That's built into what's called the fair tax.
I don't know why it's called that.
I don't like the name.
It should be called the no-income income tax or the no-income tax.
But in any event, that would be the solution.
Then we wouldn't have to worry about taking money away from people who work hard.
I mean, people who work hard should be rewarded, not penalized.
But having said that, let me give one final example.
I told you about good and evil and my estrangement from the progressive world on that big issue.
And I include Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein was a mini Hitler.
And I use that word very, very carefully because I'm very sensitive to the Holocaust and what really is, in some ways, its uniqueness.
I understand opposing the war.
I respect people who oppose the war.
I said it on my radio.
I say it to this day.
I'm saying it to you.
However, once this monster is removed, I just don't see why people don't think that goodness is increased on earth.
The amount of cruelty on earth, if it could be measured in units, has been, in fact, reduced with the removal of Saddam Hussein.
And it will be reduced further as Iraq stabilizes.
To see this as some sort of monstrous thing to remove a monster is to me a little backwards.
And finally, I want to give one little case example.
And that is the issue of bilingual education.
Perfect.
It's perfect.
All I need is one minute.
Here was an example of where, see, when liberals, progressives get an idea, they enforce it.
And I think that for many people on your side, meaning well is far more important than actually doing well.
And bilingual education is a perfect example.
We don't want kids to suffer by having to learn English, immersed in English, kids from Guatemala, Mexico, Vietnam, wherever it is.
So we will give them half the day in their language and half the day in English.
What you ended up is with kids who didn't speak either language well.
I thank God my parents did not live in the age of bilingual education.
My parents came from homes that did not speak English.
They spoke Yiddish.
I would not be an American talk show host today if my father were raised in a bilingual education.
Thank God he was immersed in English and I have no accent.
You ruin kids with bilingual education, but it doesn't matter.
Studies say that it's good for kids and compassion.
And if you say studies and compassion, liberals fall over.
It's two members of the Holy Trinity.
But it doesn't work.
Immersion works.
Israel has more immigrants per capita than any country on earth.
They have never had bilingual education.
They only have immersion.
And yet liberals continue to believe in bilingual education, not because it works, but because it's compassionate.
And that's not good.
What works is the what is compassionate.
Speaking as someone whose first language was Yiddish, and it was.
And you have the life-firmus neuro...
I have...
Most of it is gone.
It's long gone.
When I go to Mir Sharim, if I'm there more than a half hour, I can actually have conversations with people.
Norwegian in Yiddish?
Yeah, it's a long story.
And together here.
Yeah, and, you know, I keep talking about it.
Yeah, I know it is.
Let's wrap to fill in here.
Anyway, I also, though, I don't want to get into it.
But my point, I agree with you.
I think, you know, we moved to Europe and moved to Germany for a year, stuck our kids in the local public school.
Nobody in that school spoke any English, and they were fluent in German at the end of the year.
Hal and Shelley Cohen and Louise and I helped start a, Hal and Shelley did the majority of the work, started Or Shalom, which is now the largest child caring facility in Israel, and moved there with their kids.
Their kids are all fluent in Hebrew, just bang, just like that.
I mean, yeah, it works.
It absolutely works.
And I'm an opponent of bilingual education as well.
Because, you know, and again, I think that this is a straw-man argument.
On the other hand, I'm also an opponent of xenophobic, language, xenophobic education.
You know, in many countries in the world, by the time you graduate from even middle school, you're speaking two or three languages.
And I think that's a good thing because languages inform us about culture.
If you want to learn about another culture, learn their language.
And so, anyway, my final point is, and this is the one that I think that, and I know this will make you crazy, Dennis, that there was a defining moment in Michael Moore's movie, Sicko, where he turned to the camera and he said, ultimately, we're going to have to ask ourselves as Americans, are we a me society or a we society?
And I think that's the ultimate question.
That's the big cleavage.
And, you know, I refer to libertarians as Republicans who want to smoke dope and get laid.
I think that there's a large movement on that side to basically reinvent America as a me society.
And obviously, communism and socialism attempts to reinvent America as a we society that are dysfunctional.
I think that there's a middle ground.
And I think, frankly, that middle ground is where most of the Democratic Party and some of the Republican Party is at.
It's an American middle ground.
And I think we would be well served by acknowledging it and perhaps even recalibrating some of our language on both sides.
So I want to thank Tom Hartman, Dennis Prager Review.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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