Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason
2011-06-18 · Guest: Nick Gillespie (Editor of Reason.tv and Reason.com) · 53:34
The Case Against Government Subsidized Art
Bob Zadek and Nick Gillespie discuss the inefficiencies and moral hazards of government-subsidized art, arguing that private philanthropy and market demand are better drivers for cultural expression than federal grants. They also explore the themes of Gillespie’s book, The Declaration of Independents, focusing on the rise of independent voters who favor fiscal responsibility and social tolerance over traditional partisan politics.
Topics: NEA, government subsidies, art funding, censorship, philanthropy, defense spending, independent voters, libertarianism, fiscal responsibility, social tolerance, political parties
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Nick Gillespie: Editor of Reason.tv and Reason.com
- Caller (Kemper): Listener from Vallejo
- Caller (Ronald): Listener
- Caller (Evan): Listener from Portland
The Case Against Government-Subsidized Art [00:15]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, this is Bob Zadek. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at noon on 910 AM, the leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and around the country. The show of ideas, not attitude.
Today we dare to ask the question: why not create a federal agency whose sole purpose is to provide funding and grants to really crappy lawyers so these lawyers can practice their craft and produce really bad law for unhappy clients who would never pay for the service? That seems to be an idea whose time has come. In support of this idea—right—I’m happy to welcome Nick Gillespie. Nick is the editor of Reason.com and Reason TV. He was the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine for a whole bunch of years. Nick is a frequent guest on television and radio. Nick was gracious enough to join me. The reason I invited Nick on the show is because Nick recently did a piece on Reason TV which is akin to my opening suggestion, except instead of lawyers, Nick was focusing on artists. And Nick was focusing on the policy, the avowed policy of our government, to provide buckets of money so that really bad artists don’t have to, God forbid, earn an honest living. Nick, welcome to the show. Is Nick there? Okay, sorry, we’ve dropped Nick for a second. We’ll get Nick right back.
In 1965, the federal government formed the National Endowment for the Arts. The National Endowment for the Arts was created in order to funnel buckets of money to artists who otherwise, my guess, could not earn an honest living producing their art. And it was felt that we are so desperate in this country for really bad art that the only way to keep these artists producing really bad art is by subsidizing them. Now I’m told we have Nick. Nick, are you on the show?
Nick Gillespie: Hello.
Bob Zadek: Hi Nick, how are you?
Nick Gillespie: I’m good. Glad to be here.
Bob Zadek: Sorry we lost you, Nick. So in the opening of my show, I suggested that probably as a matter of national policy, it would be a really good idea to create a federal agency for the purpose of providing grants to lawyers who were really bad at their job, because this country is desperately in need of really bad law being produced by really bad lawyers. And since these lawyers cannot otherwise find clients, and it is really important to have them practicing really bad law, we ought to give them grants. Now, maybe we’re not going to do it with lawyers, but we sure do it with artists, don’t we?
Nick Gillespie: We certainly do. And I mean, I think, first and foremost, it’s just not necessary. But there it is, and it gets carved out as something sacrosanct and important when in fact it really isn’t.
Bob Zadek: And we have a huge federal infrastructure whose sole purpose it is to give money to artists and art groups who cannot produce a product that anybody is otherwise willing to pay for at whatever price the artist wants to sell. So we have decided as a matter of national policy it is more important to subsidize really bad art than, God forbid, have these really bad artists go out and do something else with their day.
Nick Gillespie: Yeah. And you know, I want to stress in talking about arts funding, I am a huge supporter of the arts. And that is, you know, I spent a decade pretty much getting a PhD in literature. I love writing, I love all sorts of art and creative expression. And that is, you know, there are two very separate questions here. One does not need to be a philistine to suggest, as I have in a piece that can be found at Reason.com, but you know, publicly financed art—art that is publicly financed by the taxpayers—is easily censored art. That’s one of the things that keeps coming up again and again. You cannot have public support for the arts without public outcry over the arts. And that, you know, it creates a tension which is good for nobody. It’s not good for the people who are forced to pay for something they don’t want, and it’s not good for the artists who might get a couple of dimes to rub together but then really have to pay the piper. I mean, this is the way the world works.
Bob Zadek: And what is important, Nick, you said “I.” The important pronoun was “I.” I, Nick, am a strong supporter of the arts, which you are encouraged to do, as I am. But I don’t want to be forced to pay for the art that you happen to like and I happen not to like. You support your art, I’ll support mine, or I’ll support no art. But why should I be compelled to support somebody else’s art?
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, no, it’s, you know, for me—and this I think rings true with a lot of artists who tend to, you know, and I don’t buy this, but I understand where they’re coming from—they tend to talk about art as sacred or as something akin to religious expression. You know, nobody would be in the position of arguing, “Oh, you know, what would be really great is if the government financed all religion because we recognize this as something that is important, it is individual, and it should not be subject to compulsion through taxes or through any kind of mandatory donations.” I mean, this is, you know, and so if we have freedom of religion, which also means freedom from religion, we should also have freedom of art, which means freedom from art.
There are very few places where we—and I mean, I’m a libertarian, I know you are too, Bob, with a small ‘l’—what that comes down to is that there are times when we all need to agree as a group to do something, and that’s when you have to have a political discussion where 51% of the population gets to decide for everybody else. Art, religion, any number of things are certainly not that case, which also is one of the other reasons why this is all unnecessary, which is that Americans, beyond what they pay at the box office or at the bookstore or anything like that, they shell out about $13 billion a year in philanthropic donations. We’re not talking about admission fees or ticket prices or book sales; we’re talking about donations, charitable donations to arts and other types of related cultural organizations. $13 billion a year. That’s a lot of money. It dwarfs this small, relatively small amount in the hundreds of millions that go to places like the National Endowment for the Arts and all of its state and local analogs. You know, so in fact, people are supporting the arts both by going out and watching movies, but also by, you know, giving money to the local museum and giving money to the local dinner theater club, etc. So, you know, it’s not only morally wrong and aesthetically suspect, but then it’s also totally unnecessary from a financial point of view.
Censorship and the Political Process [08:05]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, I’m talking with Nick Gillespie. The subject, among others, is: should the government finance the arts? And of course, Nick, as you pointed out, and as Thornton Wilder pointed out in a very well-known quote—Thornton Wilder, who knows a bit about the theater, said, quote, “Government should not subsidize a national theater because the voters would then become critics with the power of censorship at the polls.” So we have enough to worry about without going and voting for the elected officials who like the same movies that we like. So we cannot have—this is not a matter where we need the political process interfering with the art. Plus, we do not want elected officials compelling us to support art that we might find either unpleasant or just plain bad. We know how to pick art, and why should the government be spending our money for the art?
And of course, this topic is interesting, Nick, and we’re going to go to break in a second, but this topic is interesting because it has, as you pointed out in your Reason TV video, of all things, it has an Anthony Weiner piece, doesn’t it?
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, well, Weiner, in one of his finer moments, to a certain degree, he objected to a statue from the 1920s which was out in front of a, I believe it was a Bronx County municipal building.
Bob Zadek: It was Queens, where I grew up, Nick.
Nick Gillespie: Okay, municipal building, excuse me. Yeah, I spent some time in Rego Park myself in Queens.
Bob Zadek: I grew up in Jamaica.
Nick Gillespie: In any case, Weiner, you know, he said, “Look, this statue here is sexist. I want it removed.” And you know, when we get over the kind of chuckles at the idea that Weiner was worrying about sexism overly much, you know, that’s part of the fact of the matter is that when you have something that is supposed to represent the citizenry, everybody has to agree, which means when it comes to art, you’re always going to have—we all know death by committee and how bland writing gets, and you know, it’s worse with art. And so we can get rid of it. We don’t need totems of civilization in terms of statues, in terms of national theaters and national libraries and things like that. What we need is to embody what America is about, which is to allow individuals and the groups they voluntarily form to go about and live their lives, experiment in living, be shining cities on a hill that are voluntary, that people can enter and leave without needing passports or tax-funded shakedowns. And that’s really what art is. And again, nobody’s suffering from a lack of art and a lack of cultural opportunities. It’s all over the place because we have finally gotten a technology and a distribution system via the internet and cheap technology where people can produce and consume art in a dizzying array of places and more and more to our own kind of desires at any given moment. So this is certainly one place where we can reduce the amount of tension and anger that is often rightly caused by works of creative expression.
Art Education and Public Funding [13:07]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, talking to Nick Gillespie. The subject: should we subsidize bad or good art? 800-345-5639. Back in 90 short seconds.
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Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show. 800-345-5639. We are the leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and around the country. Today’s guest, and I am delighted that Nick Gillespie has found time to join me for an hour this morning, the topic: should the government finance the arts? We have Kemper from Vallejo on the line. Nick, Kemper, go ahead.
Caller (Kemper): Yeah, I wonder if you—I agree with you, we shouldn’t be supporting opera and ballet and elite artists doing ridiculous monuments for the benefit of every city or minimal art investment for every construction project. But I do believe that if we do support them—and I think we’re going to have to do some support just for political purposes—I’d put it all into art education. So if you were interested in learning how to do ceramics, you wouldn’t have to raise $5,000 to get a kiln you’re only going to use for one hour a month. What do you think about that? Just the art instruction, things like that, so I think you’d get good art at the top end if you invest at the bottom, and that that’s appropriate.
Bob Zadek: Why do we need to spend any government money at all? We seem to have had art for several thousand years without government support. There’s some pretty nice art etched into the caves in the mountains of New Mexico. I don’t believe those artists several thousand years ago got government subsidies, yet they did pretty nice work product.
Caller (Kemper): I can’t disagree with that. But what I would say is that if you had a candidate for any office that said we’re going to do zero art, he’s never going to get elected. So the winning position on that one, if you want to reduce it and make it effective, is not to say we’re not going to have any public education, but we’re going to say we’re going to have something like a library where it costs so little for so much of a benefit amount, and then you can be politically viable instead of an extremist outsider that’s going to not get any support.
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, you know, here is—I mean, one of the things that I would respond, and I like the way that the caller is trying to be pragmatic about things. But here is what if I were running for office in the Bay Area or anywhere else, what I would make is a different pitch. I’d say, “Here, I’m putting down five or ten grand of my favorite arts or community group that does this type of stuff.” You know, there are community centers all over the place. There are ceramics workshops and music workshops and all of this type of stuff. I’m putting that down there, and this is why I am zeroing out arts funding of all sorts, because one, we’re broke. And we know that every city, every municipality in the Bay Area is broke, California’s broke, the country is broke, every state is broke. And you can’t just say, “Oh well, you know, art only costs us each a buck a year to fund via taxes, it’s no big deal.” We’re broke, so you don’t spend money you don’t have, period.
But that doesn’t mean that you are against the art. And in fact, the reason why I like not funding art with taxpayer dollars is because I actually am a hardcore artist and I want to have the independence that comes with not having the state saying, “Okay, this is good or sanctioned expression or not.” As Bob was saying, there has historically been very little problems with finding the types of places where you could go to get the types of training and the types of materials you needed. And in fact, certainly over the past 20 or 30 years, past five years, this has been more and more the case where all of these costs have come down tremendously and there is a much richer network of voluntarily funded and voluntarily run groups that do all of this.
So you know, and in the name of being pragmatic about stuff, I’d say, “You know what? You want a government to run the courts, you want a government to keep you safe, but not to waste all sorts of money on defense spending or on cops that aren’t necessary. You want to get them out of the drug war and a bunch of unnecessary stuff that causes more problems than it wants. And that means getting out of art, because art flourishes when it is funded by people who actually are into it, as opposed to twisting the arms of poor or lower middle class or middle class people or anybody of any income level who doesn’t go to a museum or to an opera or to a ballet or to a ceramics workshop, but you gotta pay for it anyway.”
Bob Zadek: And the irony, Nick, is that a good deal of the art funding goes to what I’ll call highbrow—and I mean no disrespect—it goes to art galleries and art museums and the opera and the symphonies. People in the inner cities whose taxes support that don’t really get a benefit. This is robbing from the inner cities to support the playgrounds of the middle class and upper middle class. It’s just perverse.
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, I agree with that. And you know, there was a pioneering sociological study which has been replicated ever since in the ’60s in England by a bunch of Marxist scholars who actually argued against funding for the arts in England precisely on those grounds. That when you look at who actually—and this is true everywhere—when you look at who actually patronizes libraries, who patronizes operas, who patronizes arts groups that are funded by public dollars, inevitably it always skews towards the upper income percentages of the society. So that just is rubbing salt in the wound of where, in the name of being civic-minded and not a philistine and being non-elitist, you’re actually just transferring money to an already connected part of the electorate. Yeah, it’s not a good thing.
Defense Spending and Foreign Policy [18:56]
Bob Zadek: Nick, we have another caller from Ronald. Welcome to the show.
Caller (Ronald): Hi, this is one of my favorite kind of topics. I think, besides cutting the arts out, we should be looking at cutting out the Department of Education and the EPA, which is just killing jobs. It’s Marxist as Hades, the EPA. They killed the lumber industry out here. And let me just say a kind of final comment: I think the biggest threat to this—and we should also look at the defense, so-called defense, taking a hit too. There’s a lot of room for cutting fat there. Profiteering used to be a capital crime. And I think our biggest threat to our country, Bob, in my view, is so-called people that style themselves as conservative. They seem to be in a brain-dead cult mentality and they kind of sheepishly mimic and parrot all the propaganda and stuff about the nine-and-a-half-year war on terror, which is driving us into a ditch. It’s emotional barf. They will not look at evidence like from architects and engineers for 9/11 truth. People that are really sticking their neck out and should know what they’re talking about. I mean, so the biggest thing we need is people with a little bit of guts that’ll engage in critical thinking and independent thought so maybe we can finally wrap up four or five crazy wars that we got going. And let me just say this: war-mongering into infinity is Marxist and satanic as Hades. And it might take a while to explain that. There was a famous communist that said at a congressional hearing that the existence of relative peace is counter-revolutionary because they need destabilized conditions like what we did over there in the Middle East to Iraq. Two to three million civilians by now, it’s got to be at least two million killed, but we just want to help. You know what I mean? Foreign policy that seems to be “be nice to us or we’ll bring you democracy,” you know?
Bob Zadek: Go ahead, Nick.
Nick Gillespie: Can I jump in? I want to say a couple of things. One is that I think the idea, the implication that the caller is making that the 9/11 attacks were somehow known about or were engineered by people other than Al-Qaeda is nuts. Okay? I mean, there’s—and you know, this is not—I’m not shutting down questions or skepticism, it’s just—it’s nuts, okay? We know that Al-Qaeda, we know that Osama bin Laden and his confederates were behind that. There is no reason to question that, I think, and to do so is its own form of insanity. Having said that, the caller is absolutely correct. Defense spending since 2000 has essentially doubled. When you look at the budgets that were submitted by President Obama and Paul Ryan, the conservative Republican, each of them jacks up defense spending over the next decade. Obama even more than a conservative Republican, which shows you how much fat is in these defense budgets. Because the fact of the matter is that in 2000, in current dollars, we were spending about $400 billion a year on defense. I am absolutely certain that we could totally defend every American on the planet and throughout the galaxy for that amount of money. We’re spending closer to $800 billion. Obama in 10 years would be spending closer to a trillion dollars. We are in at least three elective wars at this point that have no clear endpoint and no clear objective, and that should be cut. It’s true that conservatives always seem to think that any defense spending is not the same as corporate welfare. It is. The real problem is that the Democrats are just as bad on this, which is one of the reasons why libertarians with small ‘l’s and capital ‘L’s and mid-sized ‘l’s get exercised about that type of stuff.
Bob Zadek: And of course, the defense spending is actually not defense spending, but offense spending. Originally, that federal department was called the Department of War. In 1947, it changed its name with consolidation to the Department of Defense. Unfortunately, its mission remained a Department of War; only its name changed to Department of Defense. We are conducting offensive, not defensive wars, and we could take all the defense spending, buy each and every one of us our own personal bodyguard and hazmat suit, and disband the armed forces for the money we are spending.
Nick Gillespie: I’m afraid that that is about as close to the truth as it needs to get. Yeah, it’s—you know, and this is one of the things that is changing, I think, is that the American people—I mean, we have been in Afghanistan now for more than twice as long as we were in World War II. And nobody even knows exactly what we’re doing there. Whereas in World War II, which was a war that was brought to us by Germany—Germany declared war on us, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor—you can argue whether or not we should have been in Hawaii, etc., but that war was brought to us in a way that we went to war with Afghanistan looking for Osama bin Laden. We got rid of the Taliban, we lost bin Laden, we ended up getting him on basically a covert mission. You know, nobody knows what we’re still doing in Afghanistan. Iraq has been spinning in the sand for years now. Libya is just the latest in a kind of bizarre adventure which at this point doesn’t even have a fig leaf of constitutionally required congressional authorization. People are sick of this, and there’s a reason why when you look at every survey, Americans of virtually every stripe, they want a fundamental reset and a rethink of our foreign policy because at this point we don’t have one. And that’s always troubling.
The Declaration of Independents [25:01]
Bob Zadek: And Nick, that’s a perfect segue for when we come back. I’m going to ask you about the book that’s about to be released, the book you wrote with Matt Welch, which gives us all reason to be optimistic. 800-345-5639. Bob Zadek talking with Nick Gillespie. Back in 90 seconds.
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Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show. 800-345-5639. The leading libertarian talk radio show in the Bay Area and around the country. Talking with Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason TV and Reason.com. Nick, before we leave the subject of government funding of the arts, there are two little tidbits I’d like to share with you and with the audience. First, the mission of the National Endowment for the Arts from their website: “To advance artistic excellence.” A few years ago, the NEA paid $1,500 to a poet for a poem. And I know the whole poem by heart that they paid $1,500 for. I’m going to share with you that poem: “Light,” spelled L-I-G-H-G-H-T. Yes, that’s it. $1,500 that artist got for that poem. And this is money to advance artistic excellence. There’s a little brick-brat for you, Nick. $1,500.
Nick Gillespie: Well, you know, this is where when everybody pays via taxes, everybody’s a critic and you get a right to demand your money back or your share of it. So it’s, you know, again, I like experimental art, I like strangeness in art, and you know, this is exactly the reason why—I don’t know what the context is of that. I might have been willing to pay five bucks to experience that on some level instead of the 82 cents or whatever it is per year we’re spending to fund the NEA through our taxes. But that’s exactly right, that nobody should be forced to pay for something that they don’t want to pay, especially when it is clearly not a core function of government. And I don’t think that the production of poetry is a core function of government.
Bob Zadek: Now Nick, I read about the book that’s about to be released that you and Matt Welch have written, The Declaration of Independents—not “Independence” E-N-C-E, but rather “Independents” as in independent voters. And I read an excerpt of the book and it sure gave me hope. Tell us a bit about the premise of the book.
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, it’s called The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America. And essentially, the starting point of the book was that Matt and I were combing over voter affiliation records over the past 30 or 40 years. And one of the most striking things is that the number of people, the number of voters willing to tell pollsters, “I affiliate with the Republican Party or the Democratic Party,” has been crashing downwards. In 1970, the Harris poll started doing this, and 49% of Americans said, “Hey, I affiliate with the Democrats,” and about 35-36% said, “Hey, I affiliate with the Republicans.” Now those numbers are down to the low 30s for Democrats and in the 20s for Republicans. The one place where growth has been strong and constant is in independents—people who say, “I don’t affiliate with either the Republicans or the Democrats.”
And that’s, you know, it’s an interesting thing that we see in other areas of American life, such as say brand loyalty. Nobody says, “You know what? I’m going to keep buying Oldsmobiles or I’m going to keep buying Plymouths,” and not simply because those brands don’t exist anymore, but because people realize that the minute that you tell somebody who has power over you, “Yeah, I’m in, whatever you say goes,” they take you for granted and they give you crap. They give you a bum product. And you know, so we were looking at this and we’re figuring out what’s going on where we have more choice and more power at the local coffee shop where we can tailor and personalize what we want to drink, what we want to consume, the clothes that we buy, the colors that we get paint, the t-shirts that we make. Everything is becoming more individualized, more decentralized, more—you know, we have more and more power to make decisions and choices in our lives that are very important to us, except for the areas that government controls.
And we realized from this, and it goes with our libertarian ethos that informs Reason.com, Reason TV, Reason magazine (the print version), which is that life is richest where politics is the smallest, where you don’t have to seek that consensus on what you’re going to eat today, how you’re going to dress, who are you going to marry, where are you going to work, how are you going to work. And what we’re trying to do with the book is talk about how we have this weird parallel universe going on over the past 40 years. In those parts of our lives where government has shrunk away and where the economy or the cultural arena has been deregulated, either through law or through technology or through innovation, things are going pretty good. We can now travel more freely because airlines are deregulated. We get goods cheaper because trucking was deregulated. We have craft beer because homebrewing was deregulated. All of these things were done by Jimmy Carter in the late ’70s along with Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader, for God’s sakes. They helped usher in a world that is richer and more interesting and more innovative.
On the social side, we’re all a little bit like Tiger Woods—not because we’re all sex addicts, but because he is a mix and he’s self-consciously a mix. He calls himself a “Cablinasian”—Caucasian, Black, Indian, Asian. We’re all mongrels and we’re all hybrids of different—we’re all mutants like the X-Men, and we like that. We like that mixing, and people don’t look as negatively on mixing and trying out new things. So that’s all going great. And then on the other side, when you look at politics: K-12 education where the government schools have a 90% monopoly share; healthcare where the government already spends half of every healthcare dollar and they’re making a bid to take on the other 50%; retirement where we’re stuck, we have to build everything around Social Security, which is a system that is already giving almost negative returns on people’s money that gets put into the system, and for people like me, if you’re under 50, you’re going to get squat if you get anything out of it. So we’re asking in the book: why did things flower so well where politics is out of the equation and people are free to experiment and try out new things, and why is it so bad in the political arena, in the politically dominated and regulated spheres, and how do we bring that same choice and innovation and dynamism in this one area into the political arena?
The Libertarian Moment [34:16]
Bob Zadek: Nick, is there any indication, focusing on the growing political class who self-identify as independents—can you drill down and can you determine that as to these self-identified independent voters, they tend to have certain characteristics? Are they—do they tend to be more progressive, do they tend to be libertarian, or is there no way to measure that?
Nick Gillespie: It’s a mixed bag, but it’s clear that the general impulse, I would argue—and we argue in the book—is broadly libertarian in this sense. It’s not that everybody wants to privatize the sidewalks and mandate two-minute love every morning in the town square for Ayn Rand or something. But that people believe that individuals should be left alone to make decisions about stuff that matters to them. Broadly speaking, the independent movement is somewhat similar to the Tea Party in that they are fiscally conservative. They want a government that doesn’t spend more than it brings in. They’re worried about debt and they’re worried about spending more and more on government programs that either go to fewer and fewer people or deliver less and less of a good service. And they’re also socially tolerant. They don’t care—I mean, like things like gay marriage. We now have, in a short period of time—I mean, the gay rights movement only really dates back in a public way to about 1969. The issue of gay marriage is only about 15 or 10 years old, and it’s already effectively been legalized in various places. And whatever position you have on that, it’s clear that that’s not where the action is. People don’t care about that. They’re socially tolerant.
When you look at the change in American society from when Barack Obama’s parents, a white woman and a black man, got married, a majority of Americans were against mixed-race marriages, and now nobody cares. I mean, it’s totally unexceptional when you cross these types of lines. So there’s a huge swath—the independent voter tends to be socially tolerant, or they recognize that politics is not the place where you make a stand about social issues. That comes through personal experience and voluntary association, church groups and things like that that don’t force people to be a certain way, but rather lead by example. And then on the other side, they’re saying, “You know what? We need to stop spending money that we don’t have.” And we need to stop state governments like California, which in the middle of this past decade, as soon as they had a little bit of money to rub together, they doubled and tripled down on the amount of benefits that they were going to give state workers. They expanded state programs. You know, in California—and Reason Foundation that publishes us is based in Los Angeles—I mean, you’ve got a redevelopment agency in California that spends billions of dollars and has literally nothing to show for it. And people are finally saying, “You know what? Yeah, this is the type of growth in government that we need to cut.”
At the federal level, since 2000, federal spending has increased in inflation-adjusted dollars by something like 65%. And I dare anybody to find where the hell all of that extra money went. It was, you know, it’s not even—if you go on a shopping spree and you go to a furniture store, at the end of the day you might have big credit card bills but you’ve got a lot of furniture to sit in. We don’t even have that, and we have gone on a massive multi-trillion dollar spending binge. And independent voters are finally saying, “Enough’s enough. Your credit card is maxed out, and we’re chopping it up.” And so in that sense, the independents are broadly speaking, I would argue, libertarian in that they want a responsible smaller government that costs less money and they don’t want to be talking about social issues through the political arena as much as through other venues.
Third Parties and Structural Impediments [38:20]
Bob Zadek: As to my listeners out there, 800-345-5639. If you are a self-identified independent, what’s your leanings? Are you basically progressive but self-described independent, or is Nick correct that independent voter is really a surrogate or another way to say libertarian? And Nick, the strange thing is, as to these self-described independents, why aren’t they self-identified libertarians if that’s where they tend to be? Is there a reluctance to identify oneself as a libertarian, so you just play your cards close to the vest and—
Nick Gillespie: I think it’s less and less. It’s that and because libertarian is kind of hot. And when you look at somebody like Ron Paul in the Republican Party, you know, he’s the hot and happening character in a lot of ways. But it’s also that people are still getting to understand what libertarian means with a small ‘l’, which is that it’s a different choice. We’ve been for generations offered either Avis or Hertz and that’s it. You know, but in fact, and you’re either a liberal or a conservative. And what people are realizing now is that those are not the only two choices. Being a libertarian means that you can believe in a government that is small but efficient and does a few things very well and then leaves you alone. And that that doesn’t mean that you’re some kind of right-winger.
I think what we are—and one of the things we argue in the book, The Declaration of Independents—is that we’re in the beginning of a libertarian moment where when people realize we have spent all we can spend and it hasn’t gotten us where we want to go, we need a new way to think about things. And the libertarian, which takes fiscal responsibility and social tolerance, that’s the way forward because when you look back, that’s what has given us everything that is really cool and good about America. And there is a huge amount of great stuff out there.
Bob Zadek: Nick, I like that. Libertarianism is hot. This is Bob Zadek talking to Nick Gillespie. 800-345-5639. Back in 90 seconds.
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Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show on Fox News Radio 910 AM. Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show where libertarianism is hot, in the words of my guest Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason TV and Reason.com, former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine. Nick, thanks so much for that tagline, I happen to like it a lot. Libertarianism is hot. And what’s interesting is, I find—and maybe I’m just adding more drama than it should be, but I don’t think so—I find that the country right now, and maybe it’ll boil down to the 2012 election, the country is making almost the same decision as to who we are and what kind of country we are as the founders tried to make in the spring and summer of 1787 when they were drafting the Constitution. And they didn’t have as much freedom as we have today to make that decision. The founders, they were in an all-or-nothing world. If they didn’t cobble together a political structure that was going to work, many of the founders believed it was all over, there was never going to be another chance. That was the moment that the planet was waiting for.
Today, if we do another four years of where we have been trending since Bush II, it may be almost too late. And it’s as if the Tea Party movement has sprung up and it’s a bottom-up movement, it’s not a top-down movement. There’s no leader saying, “Follow me, boys.” It’s a bottom-up movement that the voters, who I always have faith in, have just sensed what I sense, and that is they have jumped up and said, “Whoa, we better stop.” And I think this is the moment to stop. And I think it’s not an accident that so many people have sensed, Nick, just what you have pointed out with the growth of independent voters, that we better get aggressive and we better stop now. It’s time to put the brakes on. It’s a very exciting time politically.
Nick Gillespie: Yeah, I agree. And you know, I do think when you look, there’s a fairly long-term trend here of 40 years of essentially uninterrupted growth of independent voters, of people saying, “Enough with the Republicans and Democrats already, we need a different way of talking about things.” Which, we’re always going to have two parties because of the first-past-the-post electoral system we have, but what those parties mean and the policies they pursue can be very different. One of the brutal facts of the 21st century is that Barack Obama is effectively continuing all of the major landmark legislation of George Bush before him. We’re practicing bailout economics, we’re intervening willy-nilly around the world, we’re spending too much without any regard for how much money we’re taking in. States everywhere are in the same problem because they spend too much money and you run out of money at some point.
So I do think people are starting to get this. We just had a midterm election where it wasn’t an embrace of the Republicans, it was a rejection of the status quo, which happened to be Democrats this time, of people who failed to even pass a budget for God’s sake at the federal government. They said, “Okay, get out,” you know, we’re bringing in almost 90 new freshman congressmen. That’s pretty good stuff. That’s going to happen again and again because voters loosely affiliated, bottom-up, true grassroots change is more viable now because of ways of communicating with people and organizing people, whether it’s through the internet and through social media and things like that. This can happen, and it’s going to happen until the government gets behind or the politicians understand that all of the bailouts have been wildly unpopular. The wars we’re mired in are unbelievably unpopular. People want more choice when they send their kids to K-12 education, and they’re forcing it. Charter schools are up, all sorts of alternatives to traditional public schools are up.
But people, you know, we all want this change and we want it faster and we’re going to get it. And we’re already routing around the government in a lot of ways. But we’re pushing to go in through the front door and say, “Look, government, here are four or five things that you need to be doing and keep on top of and just do that and take less of our money and take less of our time and wrap us in less red tape. We will take care of the stuff that matters to us individually, and then we’ve got roads, we’ve got courts, we’ve got a few other core functions that you guys can help with. And you better do that more efficiently.” I think we’re very much moving there. And you know, one of the hopes of the book, The Declaration of Independents, which you can buy now—Declaration2011.com, we have information and ordering information—but you know, one of the things we’re hoping to do is to give name to this phenomenon of the rise of independents and of understanding libertarianism in a way which makes sense out of most of our experiences, which is that we’re pretty good judges of what we want out of our lives. And what we need is not more people to get them for us, but for fewer people to be in the way of us being able to make decisions about the things that matter most to us: the education of our children, our healthcare purchases, our retirement funding, how we choose to live, how we choose to work. These are not things that, like you said, to bring it back to arts funding, these are not things that should be subjected to a majority plus one vote. This is stuff that’s individual and it’s up to us to come up with that. And we know that we are smart enough and powerful enough to do that. So let’s get on with the future already.
Closing Thoughts [48:19]
Bob Zadek: Nick, it was inevitable that today’s conversation, particularly your book, invited discussion of third parties, and we have a caller from Portland, Oregon. Evan, welcome to the show.
Caller (Evan): Oh, thank you, Bob. Hello to you and Nick. And my question is for Nick and Bob, I’d like your opinion also. If a libertarian was looking to run for office, is it better to run as a Libertarian Party member or is it better to try to get into the Republican Party and use your libertarian principles there?
Nick Gillespie: You know, I have to admit that I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about partisan politics too much. And I think that you can do it any number of ways. I mean, when you look at people like Ron Paul and his son Rand Paul, who are firmly ensconced in the Republican Party, they have changed a lot of political discourse and I think they’ve had a beginning of influence and it’s only going to grow over time. It’s also true that a number of libertarian candidates, LP party candidates over the years have both influenced a lot of people as well as cost a lot of elections for either a Republican or a Democrat. I think you can have influence either way. I will say this: I don’t think in the end that politics is what matters most. You know, very few people—when we come back in a hundred years, nobody’s going to remember who was or wasn’t Speaker of the House or House Majority Leader in 1960. But they will remember the creation of the birth control pill. That people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are in the long run going to be much more influential on society than Michael Dukakis or George H.W. Bush. Which is not to say politics doesn’t matter, but that the whole point of politics needs to be to get to that world beyond politics where stuff really happens, where life is really lived. So I’ll leave it at that.
Bob Zadek: Evan, I’ll just chime in, we only have a few seconds before we have to say goodbye for the day. But my view is the Democrats and Republicans have built in so many structural impediments. The deck is so stacked against third parties, from funding to access to media to primaries, that to me, you cannot—it’s very, very difficult practically to win an election as a third-party candidate, unfortunately. And I think we are seeing the way Nick described in his book, the perfect workaround: by creating a growing mass of independents who are not affiliated with a party. Those independents, as Nick pointed out in his book, will for the most part be libertarians. So a third party is being created, what I’ll call off the books. And that’s the way it’s going to prevail. But as a practical matter, because the Democrats and Republicans have so much built in, both statutory and practical control, it’s very hard to make it as a third party. Evan, thanks so much for your question.
Caller (Evan): All right, thank you.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, host of the Bob Zadek Show. I’m speaking with, and we only have a minute or two, Nick Gillespie. Nick is editor of Reason TV and Reason.com. And Nick’s book, which will give us all a great reason for hope, is The Declaration of Independents. It describes the growth of independent voters in this country, which I find, Nick, as being so life-affirming, because independence at the polling booth is the same thing as saying independence in my life. It’s the same thing. If you’re an independent voter, you’re an independent liver.
Nick Gillespie: I agree with you completely. And you know, we have gotten to a point where, you know, I think people in the country are ready to kick the training wheels off. We are ready to take control of our own lives. This is, you know, over the past 30 years, over the past 40 years, over the past 250 years, everything has been moving towards decentralization of power. You know, first from kings and monarchs down to republican forms of government, small ‘r’, you know, representative government, to the individual. We now have, because of technology, because of increases in wealth and education, because of a sense of empowerment that we share of a networked, globalized, mongrelized world, individuals have more power now than they’ve ever had before in so many important ways. And you know, let’s finish the revolution. You talked about the founders. We can build off of what they started by taking this to the next level where we say, “You know what? We are finally going to have that limited government which allows us to deal with the things we need to, but to get on with our own lives.”
Bob Zadek: Nick, the ballot box, the last frontier. Thanks so much for joining me, Nick. This is Bob Zadek saying see you next week, noon to 1:00. Nick, thanks again.
Nick Gillespie: Thank you.