individualism grow where we make our own decisions rather than somebody from the top telling us what to do. >> host: mark skousen, founder of freedomfest and the author of 25 books, including "the making of modern economics." as always we appreciate seeing you here to read to thank you very much, peter. >> booktv every sunday on c-span2 features leading authors discussing the latest nonfiction books. at 8 p.m. eastern massachusetts republican governor charlie baker shares his book results where he offers his thoughts on how to move pt politics and get things done. at 10 p.m. eastern on "after words"ociologist beth truesdale looks at the future of retirement and with a working longer provides better financial security in her book, over time. she's edited wellesley college economics professor courtney coile.

watch tv every sunday on c-span2 and find a full schedule under program guide or watch online any time at booktv.org. >> weekends on c-span2 on intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's stories and on sundays booktv brings yo the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 come from the television companies and more including cox. >> homework can be hard but squatting and adina for internetwork is even harder. that's why we provide low income students access to affordable internet, so homework can just be homework. cox connects to compete. >> cox, along with his television companies, supports c-span2 as a public service. >> host: joining us now on

booktv is steve moore. his most recent book is "govzilla: how the relentless growth of government is devouring our economy - and our freedom." mr. moore, has government ever not grown? >> guest: good to be with you. love c-span. thanks honey. the book really goes to the whole history from the founding of our country and there's a lot of graphs and charts in this that show we had that kind of a relentless both of government but there have been periods, it's a good question actually, have there been periods where government has retrenched, and the answer is yes. so, for example, for the first 50 to 100 years of her country there really wasn't much growth of government. if government, the federal government basically provided the postal service, it build the roads company provide the national defense and had a court system that we didn't have all the social programs and there was no education department or energy department back then. and then of course the big, i think there were two or three

things that happen in the united states that cause the big increase in government. one was the adoption of the income tax. because remember for the first 100 years of this country the constitution actually prohibited and income tax and then we passed i believe it was the 16th amendment but don't quote me on that, i think it was the 16th amendment back in around 1913 that enabled and income tax. that provide all this new revenue for the government, and just what they did. they started spending it. you had a big burst of government at that period and then a question of the new deal era where government got involved in all sorts of new social programs and things like that that had never really existed before. and then you had the great society programs of the 1960s when we again expanded the size and scope of government and then it just keeps going up and up. but there was periods where government actually fell back. so, for example, after the civil

war when you got a massive increase in government during the civil war, then spending came way down after the civil war. after world war ii when the government spent almost half of the gdp to defeat the nazis and the japanese, then government spending went from like 48% of our gdp down come back down to like less than 20% of gdp. that's a big reduction. and and then in the reagan era we saw some cuts in spending, but nothing like what we're seeing today. incidentally, during the 2001 when we're at the height of the covid crisis for the first time in our country's history even more so than world war ii, the government became almost half of our economy because so much of the business was shut down. >> host: joe manchin ronald reagan was a hero for many on the right. rand paul does introduction to your book and he wrote when i first came to washington in the

1984, the entire federal budget was less than $1 trillion and it was reagan who introduced the first trillion dollar budget. >> guest: i was working for reagan at that time. we were not very of that, you know? but it is, i mean i tell that story because now here we are 30 some years later, it's not 1 trillion. now it's 6 trillion and it's amazing how much we've seen government grow. and in areas that think our founding fathers, one of the ideas i would like to show in this book is our founders who had the idea of a very limited federal government. now overtime obviously has expanded whether something called the enumerated powers in our constitution which basically say if these powers are explicitly given to the federal government, by the way we're having a big fight about this on issues like guns and abortion and things like that, where you divide the line between where the states have the rights and what the federal government has the oversight of these things, but i do believe that we would,

i believe antifederalists system that, let the states do it, this idea states being laboratories of democracy. if you're 50 states experimenting how do we do with welfare, how do we do with healthcare, how do we deal with our schools, , how do we provide good transportation? so states do and from each other and i think that's an ingenious system. i like to talk in the book about what i call the forgotten ninth and tenth amendments. an the ninth and tenth amendments a lot of kids don't even know what that is, but basically what those two amendments say is it all rights and powers not expressly given to the federal government reside with the states and the people, the states and the people. and i love that. i'm a kind of libertarian. i don't like big government, so that was the idea behind our constitution. i think we've moved away from that. >> host: thomas paine said that government is a necessary evil. do you agree? >> guest: i do. i do. and i think too many people

think that government is a positive good. look, i'm not calling for anarchy or anything like that. i do believe you need a strong defense. i believe we need good transportation. i believe in a safety net. we are a rich country. we don't want people to go hungry or homeless in this country. we don't want people to live in deprivation. have a lot of work to do on that score, but i also think that, for example, if we're going to get somebody money, then they should have to do something in return for it, you know. so i like what bill clinton newt gingrich did back in the '90s when we had, junior, we're going to provide you with the funding that you actually have to either be working after looking for work or in a job or training. we've moved away from that right now and i think that's been a big mistake. it's one of the reasons a lot of businesses can't get workers. we are paying people money for welfare benefits but we're not expecting them to do something in return for that. >> host: what's the difference

and importance of government debt and government deficits? >> guest: i get asked that question all the time. so the deficit is the amount of the excess of the spending over the amount of revenue. so think of it as your personal finances. if you make $2000 in a month, and then you spend $2500 of that, you have $500 deficit, right? and that's what we've been running is these annual deficits. now what is the debt? national debt is a cumulation overtime of all those deficits, and so we are now, depending on how you measure it, there's a lot of different ways you can measure our debt, but at least 20-$30 trillion in debt. and debt. and again going back to 1984-85 at the time the debt was less than 2 trillion, now than 2 trillion, now we're up to 20 trillion, 20 or 25 or 30 trillion. so i'm sorry i just am worried that the story is not quite in

capitalism. i think we have to get our government spending under control. >> host: how do we do that? >> guest: good question. let's go back to enforcing the constitution. let's move a lot of these powers back to the states and the people. i think we need to have some spending caps. i do believe in a balanced-budget requirement, which i think most americans would like to see. and so a lot of it is just so, the american people have to be educated about what are government is doing. that's why i'm such a fan of c-span, because you do that every day. you educate and you provide both sides of the story, but you allow people to make up their own minds about okay what's happening with our government. i'm a big fan of "washington journal." i do that show maybe once every six weeks i watch a lot and i listen to it on the radio because it's educational. americans need to know what's happening with the government. >> host: so when government bonds are sold, where do they

go? >> guest: so that's a good one, too. i've been talking a lot about this because of the situation we're in right now. so in the last three years, two and a half years or so since covid hit, we have borrowed somewhat in neighborhood of three or $4 trillion, just in the last 30 months. >> host: and what do we borrow that from? >> guest: i'm getting to that, okay? so we spent the $3 trillion more than we brought in. so then how does a government get the money to spend the money if it doesn't have the revenue? bacher point. it goes, it issues treasury bonds. it issues, it goes into debt, people buy the bonds, the government gets the money and then spencer. so the question then is, this is a tricky part, who buys the bonds? traditionally, it's been americans who buy the bonds. in other words, for example, during world war ii we had the war debt and people would buy, it was patriotic, you would buy, whenever you would buy the war

bonds as you with contributing to the war efforts. and that's been the case where threat most of history the american citizens brought the debt so we kind of owed it to ourselves. but what's happened lately is two things. first of all foreign governments are buying a lot of our debt and guess which country is buying for most of it? china. so that makes me a little nervous because i do want to be indebted to our enemy. the other thing going on is the federal reserve board is buying the debt. now, that's interesting because what that means is one arm of the government is spending the money, another arm of the government is issuing debt, and another arm of the government is buying the bonds. now, there's one of the part of this chain. where does the federal reserve board get the money to buy the bonds? well, they print it. they print it. and what that policy is, it's called, that's called kind of nationalizing your debt. what worries me is that cycle

that it just described, that's what countries like argentina and venezuela and bolivia in mexico and, you know, and zimbabwe do. i don't have it in my wallet right now but there's a trillion dollar zimbabwe currency, unicode you think oh my god, i must be rich, trillion dollars. it's worth about 36 cents. so we appreciate the value of your currency and that makes me nervous. incidentally, there's one other step in this chain. when the federal government is buying all the debt, its issuing more money, it's printing more money, welcome what happens to the value of the dollar when the fed prints all that money? it goes down and that's one of the reasons we have disinflation right now. we are spending and borrowing way too much money. >> host: from your book "govzilla" quote we will borrow trillions of dollars and pray that the chinese continue to buy up our bonds.

what -- and i apologize for the ignorance of this question, but to the chinese own a great state in the american government? >> guest: so, you know, it's a tricky question because some people would say, well, because they, what's the old saying, if you load the bank $500 you are in big trouble. if you owe the bank $5 million, the the bank is in trouble, right? so there is to some extent where the chinese buying our bonds? because they have confidence that americans will repay those bonds. they think they are the best, the saying about the american dollar is that where the lease rotten apple in the cart, right? so the dollar is strong right now relative to all these other currencies like the euro and the peso and other, because people do have confidence in america that we will repay our desperate and i do, too. but at some point when the debt

gets so big, then that causes real hardship. and it needs by the way for the next generation a lot of the taxes they are going to be paying, peter, are going to go to the chinese because they are going to be paying taxes to repay the debt that we issued. so that's why i use this term physical child abuse in the book. by that i mean, you know, you and i own all the people in this room, and his conference, we are all maybes in her 30s, \40{l1}s{l0}\'40{l1}s{l0}, \50{l1}s{l0}\'50{l1}s{l0}, '60s. our government is borrowing borrowing borrowing. who's going to pay off that debt? our children and grandchildren. >> host: in a previous anti-american federal reserve. for about two days in 2020 your phone was blowing up because your name was floated. >> guest: it was more than two days by the way. more like two months. >> host: your name was floated as potential -- trencher i was nominated by president trump i worked for trump as a senior economic adviser during the campaign and had work with them in an unofficial he was the

president. quick story is on this he called me and asked me to do, get on the federal reserve board. i've never actually really thought of it before, and you don't say no to the president when he, so then had to go what does a federal reserve governor do? i knew what the federal reserve board does what it was a blue shirt the responsibility of all the governors. but what happened was as soon as i was really nominated all of a sudden all these, and it didn't even know at the time when the president asked me to do this that i would have to go through senate confirmation. my advice to people is if president ever ask you to do job and yet to go through senate confirmation, say no. because you put under the microscope. all of a sudden, literally these reporters were calling girls i dated in college, you know, did he ever mistreat you? you know, look, i'm just saying. i have skeletons in my closet and i found a lot of them. just one quick story about that though is i i called the presa few times and said mr.

president, this isn't going well, you know, and i don't want to embarrass you so i said, i think i should probably resign, you know, step aside. and he was one who gets a emphasis on i remember about donald trump he's a fighter. he said no, i want you to keep going it's like you are a boxer, get back in the ring, you know. and then finally when he became clear i didn't have the votes in the senate we finally withdrew. it was a painful experience because, you know, every day is like oh, what did i say back in 1987 or something that offended someone? so you know, it was an experience that i, i think, look, i said at the confirmation if you want to attack my ideas, yeah fine, that's perfectly -- but to dig up all the dirt on the and things like that, that's the ugliness of our current political system, and i said,

i'm not a saint. i've done things that i'm not proud of or said think i'm not proud of, but i'm surprised by the way, peter, this kind of toxic nature goes on the people are going to not want to do these positions in government. i know a lot of people who are well-qualified to say i'm not going to go through that. >> host: back to "govzilla", california is the textbook example of financial mismanagement. california has a big budget surplus try to do you know where they got it? from uncle sam. what happened was during covid the federal government gave all this money to california and, look, i don't like it when the federal government gives money to states because think about it this way. the only way that the chinese government can give money to california is by taking the money from the other 49 states, right? it's just a glitzy game of we will give this money, so i don't want the states, the federal government to do that. but california is really i think

in really terrible shape or what's happened in san francisco, los angeles, the problems with almost as good of the problems with poverty, the problems with schools. people are leaving california. this is one of the themes of the book. loo states like california i grew up in the chicago area, illinois is losing a lot of its -- caterpillar just left illinois which is one of its iconic companies. boeing just left illinois. elon musk you know is really famous now. he left california. using a lot of people just moving away from these high tax, high regulation states and to think they better get their house and order. by the way you know where they're going. a lot of them are going to states, texas and 40 come to make states that have no income tax. >> host: steve moore, you sidetracked me a little bit here but is elon musk a hero of yours or use somebody who is good for the country in your view? >> guest: boy, that's a complicated question because he's really changed his

political philosophy over the last 20 years. when he started with all this companies like a solar power company and tesla and spacex, he was getting all the government money. we called him the $5 billion bid because i don't think there was anybody who's companies got more money than elon musk did. but i do, i do like the fact that he is kind of woken up to the dangers of wokeism and that he is now -- for example, he wants to, he's an advocate of free speech and i am, too. you have the right to say what you want to say. i have the right to see what i want to say. this i did that i don't like what you're saying so i'm going to shut your voice down. i don't think that's, you know, we're a pretty rare in this country among all the countries in the world that we do have a bill of rights which are really to be sacred. the right of assembly, the right

of religion, the right of free speech, you know, the right to bear arms, the right of a fair trial, all these things are really in history they are not very public so i admired that about elon musk. >> host: at the end of "govzilla" yet some reforms were you suggest to maybe get us off this hamster wheel of debt trejo a lot of our thought experiment. [speaking in native tongue] asked me about any of them. >> host: i do, i do. term limits for congress that you i've always like term limits. i believe that we should not have a permanent political class. class. and i don't know what the term, i would go for something like maybe two terms in the senate, that would be 12 years and to send, and maybe four or five, six terms terms in the house, so ten, 12 years and house. then you get back to it. that was really the way the country, the recent mi any term limits were not as in the cost to it because nobody ever thought we would have this permanent political fight. if you go back to the early years of our country, i mean

george washington is a perfect example, there was no two term limit turkey could assert, he was most popular president in history come he could assert until his death. but he said no, we don't want a ruling class, we don't want a monarch. that was one of the great things about george washington, it's time for someone else jewel. i would be a big advocate for that and having more of a citizen legislature with people from farmers and businessmen in teachers and nurses, people who know about america really making a lot of these decisions. right now it's mostly lawyers and lobbyists who run washington. >> host: you also suggest a federal spending limit. but at some point aren't we in so deep? >> guest: that would be important. spending limitations work when you put in place. in other countries and in states such think it would work but you're right, we have dug ourselves in a pretty deep ditch but peter, , don't you think mae we should stop digging? you know, that's by warning in

this book. let's at least stop digging a ditch deeper. this year alone we are going, you know, joe biden has been bragging about all, we're only going to run $1 trillion deficit this you. when you and and i got starn this business could you have ever imagined trillion dollar deficit? now that's heralded as some kind of a and proven? do you know how many zeros are in a trillion, peter? >> host: nine? >> guest: no. that would be 1 billion. it's 12, 12 zeros. >> host: thank you. glad to learn that trejo a lot of people, that's a problem though, isn't it? most people, you can't, i can't, you can't, people watching the show we can't tell if it's 10 million, 100 billion. the numbers are so large we become anesthetized. we are immune to these numbers. in other words, if i told you that government wasted $200,000 on a program can you would take

that's outrageous. $200,000, that's more money than i make him or something like that. but if i but if i said it's $20 billion, you know, okay, you know, you can't even comprehend it. >> host: two more recommendations before we let you go. privatize federal assets, what does that mean? >> guest: this is an important one. the federal government owns a huge amount of land in this country. i am forgetting exactly, but west of the mississippi it's over 50% of the land area is owned by the government. the government has not been a very good custodian. now look, i'm not talking about our national parks. i'm not talking about our national treasures. i'm not talking about advertising the smithsonian or yosemite or yellowstone, but there's a whole huge amounts of land that could be, the government could get money by selling it. by the way one of the ways the

united states government raise revenue for the first 100 years of our country before we had income tax of you know what one of the major revenue raisers was, land grants with the federal government so late and i was revenue is collected to do his purposes. so this is in perfect tradition with our country. but it's not just land. there's buildings, there's huge amounts of energy resources that we have in this country. i mean we are a very richly endowed country with energy, minerals, and those kind of things. we estimate there's about $50 trillion of assets like a buried treasure under our land. why don't we lease that land and that people pay a fee to get at those resources and then we use that money to reduce our debt? i think that would be a great thing to do. >> host: and back to "govzilla" and your recommendations, no federal dollars to millionaires.

trejo yeah. this is something great, the late great walter williams who, i know you had them on the show, a very famous economist, a black economist who was just became an icon. he and i came up with this idea of like let's just say that nobody who makes over $1 million or no company that makes over $1 million gets any federal money. think think of how much money we could say. most of the people listen to the show say yeah, like right now there's a bill before congress that's probably going to pass and probably will be signed into law although i'm fighting against it their calling the china bill. this is a bill that would give all this money to intel and are chipmakers, and it's just corporate welfare. it's like why should the federal government be giving money to intel? intel, they want to build new chips and we office alwae number one in technology but we are number one in technology. you look at our great companies like google and apple and amazon

on it on, microsoft, those companies didn't do it by getting government money. they came up with great ideas and the unabated, and silicon valley is a great example of how just the free enterprise system can work. i don't like the psyche of the government getting all this money to industries because i think a lot of it wille wasted. >> host: steve moore come his most recent book is called "govzilla: how the relentless growth of government is devouring our economy - and our freedom." thanks for being on booktv tragedy that you, peter. good to be with you again. >> booktv every sunday on c-span2 features leading authors discussing the latest nonfiction books. andy p.m. eastern massachusetts republicanovernor charlie baker shares his book results where he offers his thoughts of how to move past politics and t things done. at 10 p.m. eastern on "after words" sociologist beth

truesdale looks of the future of retirement and whether working longer provides better financial security in her book over time. she's interviewed by wellesley college economics professor courtney coile. watch tv every sunday on c-span2 and find a a full schedule unr program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's stories, and on sunys booktv brings you the latest nonfiction boo and authors. funding for c-span2 come from this television companies and more including midco. ♪ ♪ ♪