copy of the book, i encourage you to get one. mark's going to be signing them in the lobby. please join us. let's give mark a round of applause. thanks very much. [applause] >> thank you very much. >> i'll see you out there then. thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> you watching -- you're watching booktv, nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. >> now on booktv from the 20th annual eagle forum collegiate summit, james antle discusses his book, "devouring freedom: can wig -- big government be stopped?" >> this morning talking about the dangers of centralized control and an overreaching government and how what a profound effect it can have on society. now we should ask the question,

can big government be stopped. james apt l is the author of -- antle is the author of a new book, "devouring freedom." he's editor of daily caller news foundation and a senior editor at the american spectator. he's also a contributing editor to american conservative. he's a frequent guest on television and radio, and he resides in virginia, so close by. i want you to well m james antle, the author of "devouring freedom: can big government ever be stopped?" [applause] >> good morning. >> morning. >> well, thank you, first of all, eagle forum and heritage foundation, for having me to bulwark -- two bulwark institutions in the fighting for conservative principles in a country that often seems to have forgotten about them. so my book, "devouring freedom," is a book that asks the question, can big government ever be stopped.

and the focus of it is really what are the political prospects for limited government. we've talked about limiting the federal government for a very long time, yet we don't seem to as a movement and the republican party as a political party have made a lot of headway in that direction. and, you know, a couple of summers ago barack obama promised us a summer of recovery which didn't pan out so well, but i think this summer has really been the summer of big government. we've seen through exposures through various leaks a lot of details emerging about the national surveillance program and the extent to which ordinary americans are ensnared in the data mining and the surveillance that is supposed to be going on to protect the country. we have seen a lot of the flaws that are inherent in obamacare. we've watched the implementation of the affordable care act sort of creek and moan, and we've seen sort of this train starting to run off the tracks. and i think we're starting as a country to see what's in store

for us as this health care law unfolds. nancy pelosi said that we needed to pass the bill to find out what was in it. the obama administration, jay carney yesterday in a press conference promised that once all the different provisions of the bill kicked in, we were really going to like it. but so far that doesn't seem to be the case. and we are starting to see they're delaying provisions of the law. so even as the obama administration is finding out what's in it, they don't seem to like it very much. so that's sort of been a problem. and be i think overall with the sequester and all of the, you know, the horrifying, you know, the predictions that were made, oh, about how, you know, the economy was going to collapse if we had this sequester, and airplanes wouldn't be able to fly, and school buildings would all be, you know, bulldozed and everybody would lose their jobs, we've sort of not seen many of those dire predictions come to pass. and we've seen that maybe government can survive a little

bit of a diet. so this, in this summer of big government i think we need to ask ourselves is there anything that we could do to sort of begin to roll it back? and the sequester, obviously, while a nice start is certainly completely inadequate to the job of containing massive federal spending. you know, we're talking about even -- number one, we're talking about simply reducing the rate of the growth of government. we're not talking about cutting government when we really talk about the sequester except for there are some actual defense cuts. so the only thing that is really being cut in normal terms and in terms of actually spending less money is actually a constitutional function of the federal government. but the unconstitutional functions of the federal government are not really being cut. but even within the confines of how washington defines spending cuts, we're talking about really two cents on the dollar. and even that is spread out over a very long period of time. so if we're talking about

rolling back big government, it's going to require something a lot more than the sequester. but before we even can talk about can big government ever be stopped, a lot of people want to ask ask what is big government. do we have a big government? i would argue to to you that we have a very big federal government. between 1787 and 1987 we never had a federal budget that crossed the trillion dollar threshold. in 1987 we finally had a trillion dollar federal budget. it only took us 15 years -- it took us 200 years to get to one trillion. it only took us 15 years after that to get to $2 trillion as the size of the federal budget. it only took us to five years after that to get to the first $3 trillion federal budget. now we run budget deficits annually that are a trillion dollars. we have had deficits as large, almost as large as what the

entire federal budget was as recently as when bill clinton was president. i'd argue to you that's a pretty big government x that's an unhealthy trajectory in government growth. and unfortunately, we crossed all of those trillion and two trillion and three trillion dollar thresholds while we had republican presidents. so there's a lot of work to be done in that area. a second thing that i would say measures how big of a government that we have is the sides of our -- the size of our national debt. we now have a gross national debt that is bigger than united states economy. i would say that that's a sign of a big government. but even the gross national debt doesn't really measure accurately all of the money we owe, all of the promises the federal government has made that it doesn't have money to pay for. if you look at that, we have unfunded liabilities to federal

programs including the major entitlement programs, social security and medicare, well in excess of $80 trillion. by some measures our unfunded liabilities are twice the size of the world economy. so i would argue to you that's a pretty big government. so then what do we do in terms of returning to the founding fathers' vision of a federal government that was strong enough to protect the united states and defend its interests but limited in scope, limited by the constitution, limited in terms of its ambitions and its claims on our lives, on our money, on our options, on our freedoms? because the case that i headache in "devouring freedom" is that big government does take your freedom. even legitimate functions of government, even things that government needs to be, needs to do cost money, takes money out

of the private economy and limits your personal choices. some of those limits are necessary for a society to function. but i'd argue as the government gets too big, grows too large and become withs too intrusive the reduction in choices becomes unacceptable and beyond what the founders envisioned. also when we have a government that is essentially broke like the government that we have now, it limits a lot of our political options. there are investments that different levels of government would like to pick in things ranging -- to make in things ranging from state and local level, education, that they can't make because the public employees' pensions, they're paying retired public employees this money inthe stead of being able to provide services for the people who live in chair communities. and the federal government we're starting to see all the discretionary spending in the federal budget be crowded out by the size of the entitlement programs and by the size of the interest on the national debt. so that limits our political

options that we can have through our elected representatives as a free people. i think there are three major things that need to happen before we can start looking at rolling some of this back. the first is we need to have a limited government political party. right now the republican party has been a rhetorically pro-limited government party, and there are -- i note in my book -- periods where the relin party has lived up to this rhetoric. the three historical periods i note are during the truman administration what they called the do-nothing congress under robert taft, the congress that came in with ronald reagan when he was elected in 1980 and the first year or two of the gingrich congress that came in in 1994. most of you are a little younger than me or quite a bit younger than me, but i always used to joke, you know, the knack had one good album, and the

gingrich congress really only had two good years when it came to actually trying to cut government spending. but we need, if we're going to actually have limited government in this country, a political party that actually advocates limited government. we have a political party in the democrats that are certainly not shy about advocating for much bigger government. and president obama is very unapologetic in saying that there really aren't other institutions in american life that keep us together besides a big federal government. now, that's obviously not true. there are churches, there are community organizations, there are families, the free market is a thing that we all do together. but that is a vision that's embraced by the democratic party. there these to be something that stands against that. so that brings me to my second point. the second thing that we need is to continue to have people like rand paul and ted cruz and mike lee and, before he came to

heritage and continuing at heritage, jim demint who are fighting within the relin party to reform the party and to hold it to the principles and the platforms it espouses during campaign time and to continue to live up to those principles when it's actually time to govern. and i think that's fundamental important. and that's why the work that groups like heritage action and club for growth and freedomworks and young americans for liberty and so many tea party groups throughout the country's doing so important. because we are creating a constituency for limited government within the republican party. and we are changing the incentives for republican politicians. it is no longer a good career move to be with a republic politician -- republican politician who advocates bigger government. the reason for that is you could actually lose your job in a primary if that is your realistic possibility for politicians who have been safe for many years can point to good grades on some conservative

group's scorecards but till when push came to shove and there were major votes like the medicare prescription drug benefit, the $p700 billion wall street bailout, some of the votes to block the implementation of obamacare, where some of these republicans with nowhere to be found. now there are political incentives for them to live up to their principles because people are holding them account l. milton friedman, the great free market economist said that while it's good to elect the right people, thinking that you're going to change policy and change politics by just electing the right people is unrealistic because you're never going to elect enough of the right people. what you need to do is change the political incentives so that the wrong people will find it to be in their best interests to do the right thing. and then the third point i would raise is we cannot allow obamacare, the affordable care act, to remain intact.

people joke about how the house has held 20, 30, going on 40 votes to repeal obamacare, and they say, oh, why are they wasting their time with this, the repeal bills won't go anywhere, the president won't seen them, the president was reelected, the supreme court has ruled on this. you know, why are we bothering to do this? well, i'd say there's a very good reason of why we are trying to keep obamacare repeal a live issue, and i really think this is a fundamental issue in terms of whether we are ever again going to return to manager like a limited government in this -- to something like a limited government in this country. obamacare is not going to work, and you can already see the administration is kind of conceding this when they're burying a lot of the major enforcement provisions ahead of the midterm elections because they know people are going to lose their jobs as a result of the employer mandate. so let's delay it until we don't have to face the voters again for a couple years and met some of the benefits kick in first

before the costs. so obamacare is not going to work. and they're not going to be verifying whether people are eligible for the subsidies that obamacare offers whether their income requirements really meet the standards to receive these subsidies, so the costs of core components of obamacare are going to go up in the next year. so we're going to see it bend the cost curve over the long term in a negative way, in increased costs. the way the problems with obamacare will be resolved is one of two ways, and there really are only two choices here. what the democrats and the liberals are going to say is that everything wrong with obamacare is a product of what they've allowed to remain in private sector hands. they're going to say it's the insurance companies which even though they're actually mandating that we all buy the insurance companies' products, they're going to sayst the remaining private sector components, so we need more government involvement in health care.

not less. you know, government is the only mayor institution in american life or when it fails in some way, the answer is to give it more money and more power. i don't -- i can't think of any other institution that when it fails, we say it needs to have more of our money and more power and more ability to do things. but that's, essentially, how the federal government works. so it will either move towards much bigger government role in health care toward a single payer system like they have in canada and many european countries, or what we will do is we will repeal and reform obamacare. we will gradually untangle the web of mandates and regulations and subsidies and begin to promote a genuine free market in health care in this country. there are really, there really is no third way. obamacare as it exists currently is something of a third way, but it's not a stable situation. it's not going to remain under the current circumstances forever.

so if we move in the more free market direction, we will see our into it -- entitlements move in a more free market direction. if we move in the direction of single payer, if we move in a direction where we look back at the first two years of obamacare as being a good period of time in terms of private sector influence in health care, we will never be able to achieve the aims of a limited government political movement. so that is why obamacare is a fundamental, fundamental issue, and every vote that can happen that points to the structural problems of this law and keeps the idea of reforming and, yes, repealing this law as a live political issue is still a worthwhile political exercise even if it cannot achieve immediate results. you have to lay the groundwork for this in the way that we were

able to lay the groundwork for repealing the catastrophic health care component of medicare in the late '80s. that bill became such a disaster that even the democrats were willing to vote to repeal it. and we've seen that even the democrats have been willing to vote to repeal the 1099 reporting requirements under obamacare for small businesses, and democrats in the senate have been willing to repeal the medical devices tax to obamacare. we had more than two dozen democrats vote for provisions that would suspend the individual mandate and codify the delay of the employer mandate. so i think that this needs to be a fight that we continue to fight. i don't think we can afford to give up. and i think that this is a central front in rolling back and potentially stopping big government. reforming the republican party, having a limited government political party in this country and actually standing up against obamacare. and with that, i'll open the floor to any questions that you

might have. >> that's wonderful with. thank you, that was a great talk. will has. [applause] some questions? oh, yes, you right there. oh. >> hi, i'm spencer, i go to the college of william and mary. in our fight to limit government more generally, doesn't -- isn't there a role to be played by the courts when it comes to striking down more laws that exceed the commerce clause? is that an ace in the hole that we have? is there any realistic chance of that, or is it entirely going to have to be congress and a different president? >> well, it's kind of interesting because the constitution was designed with this idea that we had a limited government of enumerated powers and that interstate commerce actually meant commerce that happened between the states. but we've somehow redefined that

so that basically anything that happens -- breathing, existing, you know, each expiring -- counts as a form of interstate commerce. so we've kind of stood that on its head. and the other part of the constitution we've really stood on its head is it's somehow seen as illegitimate for the federal courts to strike down laws that federal laws that are outside of the enumerated powers under the constitution, but it's perfectly okay usually using the 14th amendment to strike down state laws that don't touch on any constitutional provision. i would like to see us move to a point where the composition of the federal judiciary was such that it was more active in restraining the federal government. i think there are two problems with that. one is that a lot of even qualified conservative jurists because they have resisted for so long judicial activism and the be overturning of state laws

have become more reluctant to move against with federal laws. particularly central laws that have strong support or have endured for a long period of time. so they'd be reluctant to second guess congress many that way. and secondly, it's become very difficult to confirm judges who are actually strict constitutionalists. so we've kind of had to find sort of covert ways to get conservative judges confirmed. and then you never really know exactly -- you can know if somebody's a conservative judge based on some of their institutional affiliations, but you don't really kno what kind they've going to be. so i think it would be very difficult to roll back a big government primarily or even substantially through the judiciary. and i think the obamacare case proved that. there certain he were enough republican justices on that court to have a different outcome, but clearly, that just didn't happen. >> james, you mentioned four

good senators who see the value of limited government. but there are a lot of republicans who don't see the value of limited government. but those four senators had to win in relin primaries against -- republican primaries against candidates who saw big government as good. >> that's correct. >> talk about the value of the republican primary. >> i think the most important thing if we're ever going to have the republican party be a truly limited government party is to have pet live republican primaries. and the fact that you see so many big government republicans who are afraid of competitive primaries and afraid of state conventions where conservative activists actually have a voice and are even trying to alter the presidential primary process to make them less competitive, to make the establishment candidate more faved, think, just indicates to you how important this is in the fight for the soul of the republican party. not all of these primary challengers are going to win, and even some of the primary challengers, they always point to the candidates who win their primaries and go on to win the

general election, maybe they made some ill-advised comments, maybe they weren't just very good candidates. but even in those cases, they are sending a message to the republican establishment that if you just use conservative rhetoric during campaign time but your votes don't reflect conservative values when it comes time to govern, it sends a message to those republicans that they need to actually listen to their constituents, and they need to be a little scared. when you look at a guy like robert bennett who'd been in the senate for several terms, when you look at o -- orrin hatch having to fight to keep his senate seat, although he ultimately prevailed, the entire infrastructure in kentucky mobilizing against rand paul and losing, i think that sends a very large message to other republicans. and i think it's influenced the republican leadership. it's sent the republican leadership a message that the tea party is a faction to be reckoned with.

>> mitchell -- [inaudible] this fall i'll be attending middle tennessee state university, and in listening to everything that you said, i have a variety of questions about spending and how that might be affected by inflation and about parties, etc., but there was one that it seems like this whole issue in general not just what you talked about, but including that and everything else seems to come down to something that has some very deep implications. so i ask is this question with a great deal of gravity because of the implications. at what point would you say, if ever, that we would go past the point of political finagling and political fighting and start a real fight to actually perform some liposuction upon the government going past merely the political ross? at what point have we gone past the pen and to the sword? >> i mean, i think one of the things that you have to keep in mind is that big government has -- the government has grown largely because the american people have been willing to allow it to grow and have

actually deseared a lot of -- desired a lot of its growth. many of the biggest federal spending programs are the ones with the most popular support. and i talk in my book about the fact that there are a lot of people who when asked by pollsters say very sensible things about cutting federal spending, but when they're asked about which programs they would like to cut, all of the programs they want to cut are very small parts of the federal budget, and the programs that they want to protect are huge parts of the federal government. there is a woman who was interviewed by "the new york times," she was a tea party activist, and she said, you know, i don't remember the exact words, but she basically said i want small government, and i want unreformed social security too. well, you can't have that, or dick morris before the election saying, you know, mitt romney really needs to -- and by the way, dick morris correctly predicted the romney

presidency -- said mitt romney needs to start running on government spending and not talk about medicare, medicaid, social security or the defense budget. well, all right, now you've just ruled out basically 80% of the federal budget. actually, a little bit more than that. so i think, you know, before we talk in sort of revolutionary terms, there needs to be a revolution in terms of the public's view of these things. you know, i think we're a long way away from where we can say that this is entirely something that's been imposed on us by, you know, these faraway, distant bureaucrats although i do think there is a substantial element of truth to that a. but there's also we have to look within ourselves, and we have to look at the voters. the voters are demanding a lot of this. and the democratic party is, it became as big a government party as it is because its clients are dependent on government and demand more and more government all the time.

>> steve eenson from bethel, university. the last question you mentioned several very conservative senators, these senators are from kentucky, utah, texas, generally the most conservative senators are conservative states and the most conservative congressmen are from rural districts. i think realistically if the republican party is going to be a more limited government party as we're talking about, you're going to start having more senators from purple states and congressmen from suburban districts that are elected and limited government candidates. but typically in these more urban or suburban districts or purple states you're not going to have the more conservative candidates winning in primaries. so i'm just concerned how realistic is that to expect the party to truly be taken over by more limited government candidates? >> sure. that definitely is a major challenge because what we've seen really since the rise of the conservative movement with the founding of national review in 1955 and some events before

that, we've really only had two movement conservatives nominated for president by the republican party. we had barry goldwater in 1964 who went on to lose and then ronald reagan who went on to win two terms. now, george w. bush while i have a lot of criticisms of him in my book, was definitely somebody who was somewhat influenced by the conservative movement and had some movement conservatives in his administration as his father did. but he was not really himself a philosophically small government kind of guy. and i agree that a big problem in terms of actual conservatives winning the republican nomination is the fact that a lot of the conservatives who would be qualified or who are seen as qualified to be president come from, you know, rural districts, or they come from southern states, and there becomes more of a regional and cultural battle in the minds of a lot of people.

and i think the other problem is that frequently what ends up happening is that the conservative candidate who appeals most to grassroots conservatives in the republican primaries -- and here i'm just talking about presidential primaries -- tends to be the candidate, the conservative who doesn't have the organization or the money to really go the distance in a fight with the establishment candidate. and the conservative who is maybe a bit better prepared, that had more money and better organization tends to for whatever reason not connect as well with grassroots. so i think those are two problems. i think, though, the key -- and that's why in "devouring freedom" i talk about free market values -- i think republicans have to identify other government programs, areas where big government is affecting the voters in those districts and run on those issues. i think you can't -- i think you can have nationalized principles, but you can't always nationalize issues. and you have to be speaking to

issues that actually affect the voters in your district and in your state. there are a lot of criticisms i'd have of some of the more famous blue state republicans like giuliani and christie and weld, but on the core issues they were running on even though they were liberal on everything else, on the core issues they really emphasized in their campaigns, those were conservative issues. >> thank you. thank you very much. here's your program so you can have it, but let's give him a round -- >> thanks, everybody. [applause] >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week. in "battle for ground zero: inside the political struggle to rebuild the world trade center," elizabeth green. c-span: provides a comprehensive account of the construction of the 9/11 memorial and the reconstruction of 1 world trade

center. jesse welker presents a collection of conspiracy theories in the u.s. from the colonial era to the war on terror in "the united states of paranoia: a spear si theory." in the great dissent, how oliver wendell homes changed his mind, thomas healey, a law professor at seton hall university, reconstructs the debate from an opponent of free speech to a supporter. christina hoff summer, a resident scholar at the american enterprise institute, argues that society has shifted so much attention to females in the academics it's caused males to fall behind in "the war against boys: how misguided policies are harming our men." jonathan schwartz, professor emeritus of political science at the university of arizona, argues that republicans and democrats have drifted from the common ideologies of freedom and equality that the majority of americans agree with