the financial crisis. in the case of the retirement programs in the effort privatize social security. we could talk about the way in which the drug benefit of medicare was initiated and administered that benefited the pharmaceutical companies are more than it should have picked this is the kind of thing i'm referring to. host: the subtitle of this book is how conservatives abandoned free-market and why liberals should too. but start with first avenue at that. how did conservatives and when did they had banned the free-market? guest: my public career started in the late 70's and especially in the early 1980s. at the time of the reagan administration and i was democratic staff director. at that time, conservatives were true believers. they had a strong body of ideas, which they defended their aggressively and imaginatively and it was quite a lot of fun to

engage in that debate. i made a lot of friends in that time and still have. host: such as? guest: bruce bartlett who was my counterpart on the joint economic committee has been a good friend for 30 years. in the most recent republican administration, i don't think there were any such avatars of big ideas. this was an administration that ran the country for the benefit of basically its own political constituency and did so in a fairly unabashedly way. you could not engage in the same kind of arguments over right is because it was essentially no one on the other side who was upholding them. host: so, a milton friedman, even though you may disagree with him politically. guest: yes, a milton friedman is someone i debated, in fact in 1990, when he reissued his television program, free to

choose. i was on the first panel. i don't consider him to be a friend and someone who who you had respect because he was advancing his ideas. in that format of debate , but a very much admire. host: those are the types of ideas from the milton friedman's of the world, which in your view that conservatives have abandoned? guest: absolutely. the conservatives abandon friedman very early. his ideas were in fact unworkable. i don't fault them for doing that, but they never advanced a coherent view of policy. host: and why liberals should also abandon the free-market. what does that mean? guest: the rhetoric of free-market is something that liberals have learned to give lip service to as a kind of price of admission to serious policy discussion in the us. that little barb, that

would apply for example particularly to this administration, to the obama administration, back in the campaign of 2008, when you look to candidate barack obama website on economic policy there was a paragraph there that was kind of an encomium to the free-market and my view is, this is something that inhibits liberals and progressives from having a clear idea of what needs to be done now. it simply ties their hands behind their back and allows them to be the number conservatives for not being true believers when of course, they are not.÷÷ host: and other well-known school of thought when it comes to economics, do you agree with the general principles of how that works? guest: i did my graduate studies in cambridge, england, at king's college.

i identified quite closely-- he was one of the great imaginative figures of 20th century economics and the person he really broke the mold in terms of thinking about how to do with a cataclysmic event like the great depression, so it's impossible not to be drawn into that orbit if you read him in the context of his time. to keynesian economics, as economist as we see them today, do they have all the answers to our present problems? i think they don't. i think we need a more strategic approach and in particular, that message has been watered down, so that it becomes a question of us throwing money at the problem, spending aggressively, stimulating. i detest the term stimulus package. i think it was a relations catastrophe and very bad choice of framing for an economic strategy, so i think we

have to go far beyond that now. still, it's better than alternative. host: what you mean far beyond that? guest: speaking in very practical terms, we have to ask what are our major problems. we have a huge problem of joblessness took 14 million who are officially unemployed and another 10 or so who would come into the labor force if people were hiring. vast problem. we have people who the american middle class has been wiped out with its houses largely because of the practice of fraudulent mortgages that were on low-income people in the last decade. so with the problem foreclosures and a problem of impoverishment. devon energy problem, climate problem, a decaying infrastructure. if you think about those issues, you recognize that we need to have a strategy that plays out over 10 or 15 or 20 years, such a framework in which the private

economy and the public sector can work together and that's what i think we need that goes beyond to say both conventional conservatives and the-- host: presidential candidates have a chretien donald trump have written several books, many of which outline their worldview and political philosophy. a democratic candidate hillary clinton has written five books. in her most recent titled hard choices, she remembers her 2008 presidential campaign and her time as secretary of state in the obama administration. in 2014, book tv spoke with secretary clinton about the book and you can find the interview on her website. published in 2003, living history is a secretary clinton's account of her time as first lady. while still in the white house she released a children's book about letters written to her family pet and also authored a coffee table book about life as first lady. and in her first book, it takes a village she

argued society shares the results ability with parents who are raising children. republican presidential candidate donald trump has also written many books. 's first several titles released in the 1980s and 90s are accounts of his business transactions and real estate companies. in the early 2000 he released several financial self-help books. in his two most recent books, time to get tough and crippled america, he writes about politics and outlined his vision for american prosperity. several of these books have been discussed on book tv and you can find them on her website, book tv.org. >> election night on c-span. watch the results of a part of a national conversation about the outcome. the allocation of the hillary clinton and donald trump election headquarters and watch victory and concession speeches in key senate house about our races

starting live at 8:00 p.m. eastern and throughout the following 24 hours. watch live on c-span on demand at c-span.org or this into our live coverage using it free c-span radio app. >> 's look at some of the current best-selling nonfiction books according to the book people book store in austin, texas. topping the list is everyday cook by alton brown, followed by exploration of the human brain. next come on the list is sofia m russo nasty galaxy. then, and pleated flood tide, military historian james horne fisher examines us operations in the pacific during world war ii, with a focus on the us invasion of the mariana islands in june, 1944. historian hw brand explores the strained relationship between general douglas carter and president harry truman during the korean war and the general

versus the president. our look at the current nonfiction bestsellers at austin's a book people bookstore continues with bruce springsteen's memoir. .. ÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷