washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up sunday morning, stephen flanagan of rand corporation discusses nato, the future of the organization, and recent comments by president trump regarding other countr ies' contributions. and in the anniversary of the three-mile island accident, consider the most serious nuclear power accident and united states. joining us, eric epstein, founder and chair of the three-mile island alert, historian and author samuel acting director for the union of concerned scientists, edward lyman. watch washington journal live at 7:00 p.m. eastern sunday morning. join the discussion. >> it is our spotlight on magazine segment on saturday morning and the editor-at-large for reason.com is nick gillespie. joining us this morning to look

at government, americans trust in government and the size of government. nick gillespie, having you on this morning in large part to your feature piece on reason.com. the headline caught air attention, everyone agrees government is a hot mess so why does it keep getting bigger? what is your answer? guest: counterintuitively, the less people trust government, it is true all over the planet but the less people trust government to do the right thing or to be effective, the more they ask government to do. there seems to be a kind of a connection between losing trust in government and feeling like things are getting out of control, both within the public sector and the private sector, and asking the government to structure and control life. in all sorts of ways, particularly economically. host: what are the main reasons americans are losing their trust in government? guest: it is an interesting question.

when we talk about trusting government on a basic level, pew research has studies going back to the mid-1960's, where 77% of americans trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time or all of the time. now it is 19%. there has been a massive and ongoing evacuation of trust in the competency and the morality of government in the biggest terms possible. why did that happen? i would argue -- it is not fully clear. there is not one single and so that answer you can point to. it is mostly the actions of government over that time. when you think about what has transpired between americans and the federal government since the mid-1960's, vietnam took place. vietnam was sold on a mountain of lies. lyndon johnson would regularly obvious kate -- about what was going on. you have things like watergate.

after that you have things like the church commission and the rockefeller commission in the mid-1970's, investigations into what the government was doing. the fbi, the cia, the national security agency. they were spying massively on the american people. things like the kennedy assassination, the martin luther king assassination, there was a sense that things were getting out of control and the government was lying about what came after. you continue through in a way in the 1980's, you have things like the iran-contra hearings, you have the savings and loan debacle. the government incentivized lending institutions to screw up so badly that the government ails it out. the 1990's had scandals, as well. in the 21st century, you have the twin issues of something like 9/11 happening and then the government not doing a good job of following through on that.

and making clear what is going on or what they are doing. again, we get these revelations from chelsea manning or edward snowden where you have an unrelieved onslaught of government acting poorly, getting caught lying to people and that erodes confidence and trust in government. host: nick gillespie is the editor in large at reason.com. he is talking about the americans' trust in government. we welcome your calls and comments. call us at 748-8000 democrats, republicans can call 748-8001. independents and all others , including libertarians 748-8002. a libertarian publication. is your view of government -- it is a mistrust of government or skepticism of government? guest: that is a good question. one of the reasons i wrote this

story for reason, we have less trust and confidence in government, government continues to grow. i argue in the piece that the libertarian argument against government that was summed up most memorably by ronald reagan , not a libertarian but a sentiment when he said , government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. that is a broadly held view now. most people would agree the private sector in general does things better, more effectively, more efficiently than the public sector. in a broad sense the libertarian argument has won the day it had no effect on the size of government. that is an interesting conundrum. i say the libertarian rhetoric is not helping and we just constantly hammer on government. this goes to your question, as constitutionally or characteristically incompetent and ineffective. i think there are places and times where the government can act effectively, could structure

certain types of markets or exchanges or give a social welfare or safety net or a backstop to people who need it. i believe in a limited government. i believe that the government should be much smaller than it is and it should pay for itself. it should not be borrowing all the time to do whatever it thinks people want it to do. i am not hostile toward government, per se. i think we need to radically decrease the size of government. host: your piece points out that as mistrust grows, spending is increasing. do you think there is a self-fulfilling prophecy for some of this, in terms of the more americans mistrust government or part of the government, the less they want to invest in making that piece of the government better that it -- better than it is now? or at least make it more

efficient? guest: i think there is -- there are a bunch of things going on and there is a broader political science debate about whether ideas actually drive politics or policy, or are they the artifact of local concerns of self interest? towards the latter argument, it is something -- most increases in government spending are german by entitlements, particularly social security and medicare, which go to people 65 and older. regardless of what arguments we are having, those programs are set to concede to grow and the beneficiaries are relatively few in number. the cost of those programs are spread out over the entire population. you have concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. that is a political nightmare where the people are getting the benefits will fight for them and win that argument because they

are more invested in it. on another level, what is going on in the 21st century, in particular, is we are seeing without fully talking about it, , we make some gestures toward talking about it, there has been a radical restructure of the american economy and the global economy, and of america's place in the world. this is unsettling to people. suddenly the jobs and industries you thought would take you into your sunset years disappear pretty rapidly. they grow up and they die. this is unsettling. i think part of what is driving the desire to have the government do more is this sense that the world is unsettled and unpredictable. we don't trust the government to do anything well but it could do something to secure our borders, for instance. our trade borders. to give us guaranteed jobs pensions, things like that. , i think that is what is driving it. we are not confronting any kind

of open and honest way that radical transformation that is going on in our lives. people are unsettled and they look to the government to help structure their world in a way that makes sense. host: we are talking about americans trust in government. we have calls waiting. we would go to rosetta in newer show, new york. you are on with nick gillespie. caller: yes, good morning. i want to say that have a great deal of mistrust in government. secondly, i want to ask a question. i don't know if you can answer it or not, but regarding this situation with mueller and barr, with the information that has come out so far from barr on his side with the papers in the -- and the summary of this conclusion. mueller must be watching this on tv or wherever. is it possible he could come

forward and say no, this is what i meant. this is what i am actually saying. is his tongue tied? is it against some government thing that he cannot speak up and say, this is what i meant? this is what i said? host: nick gillespie? guest: the mueller report is a great example of where the government can do something better or worse. they are investigating. the government is investigating itself and investigating the president. possible chicanery with a foreign country. i think, specifically to the mueller report, we are at the beginning of the process of making it public. the attorney general has said by mid april, the public -- with proper reductions in place, it will be made publicly available. this is a place for if the government does the right thing here and is open and transparent with that helps restore trust

and confidence in government. it shows there are some people who are honest. in terms of mueller, he has at various points spoken up directly to the press. i doubt that will happen because we have not gotten to the point where his report has been made public. host: let's hear from chris in san francisco on the independent line. caller: my question is about medicare. what are your thoughts on it and what can be done about it? guest: this is a separate issue from the libertarian rhetoric stuff. i think medicare -- everybody understands that medicare is the single biggest driver of government spending. -- government debt spending. it has automatic increases in spending. i think old age entitlements, this is part of a larger argument. an artifact of

bismarckian social welfare spending that started in the 19th century in europe. the time for old age entitlements has come and gone. they are unsustainable and the way they are funded. you need a lot of younger people who are -- you need a lot more contributors than beneficiaries. our demographic pyramid everywhere in the world is changing. certainly in the united states . we need to get rid of medicare and what we need to do or broadly is have -- if you can't afford to pay for your education, housing, your retirement your health care, , you should do it. then we have government who helps people who cannot for various reasons or for a particular period time, and we need to have a social wherefrom net that is -- welfare net that helps people. we can tax less. with something like health care, because health insurance is not as health care. we need to be growing the supply of that like getting read of

things by old licensing laws for both for doctors and nurses and nurses in pharmaceuticals. we need to grow the health care market. it operates fundamentally in the way the market for food does. we could have more better stuff at much cheaper prices but we don't allow the market to work that way. medicare is a big part of that. it structures the entire health insurance business. as well as health care delivery. it is a policy that was passed in the late 1960's. lyndon johnson called it the last act of the new deal. it is of the past and we need to start looking at how what is going on in the 21st century and how can we fund a stuff in a way that is fair and equitable and effective. host: the gallup organization did their annual look at americans trust in government. the headline is "americans trust in government to handle problems is that a new low." the report the numbers in terms of people trusting government

has a sock to the lowest point in more than two decades. 35% of americans have a great deal or fair amount of trust and confidence in the u.s. governments' ability to deal with issues, down from 45%. what is driving some of that? guest: part of it is the action of government. part of it is that there is a broader evacuation of trust and confidence in major institutions across society. it is not simply government. all the government has taken the biggest hit in many ways. people trust big business less than they used to. they trust small business less than they used to. although small business does better than big business. they don't trust lawyers, et cetera. in the particular political moments, many actors in government rail against the government. they say the system is rigged and it is all run by dark money. when you look at the rhetoric, we are in a moment of populism both on the right and left.

donald trump, elizabeth warren, bernie sanders, they spend a lot of time beating up on the government for slightly different reasons, but they say the same thing. the system is rigged, the government is corrupt, it is being paid off or is doing the bidding of these unseen actors. i think that is part of it. that the people in government, one of the ways to get into government is demonizing your opponents and saying they are bad actors. in many cases, they are. it creates a perpetual feedback loop that i think tends to drive down trust. host: what about the media's role in adding to that distrust? they took a meeting this week with the release of the ball report. -- mueller report. guest: part of what is going on, and this is a historical, but the idea that people are recognizing the press is much more motivated, either ideologically or politically in some manner.

that is becoming more and more apparent. we are going back to a partisan press model, which is such a -- which i think is a good thing. everyone comes to stories with presumptions or pre-existing assumptions about things, making those relevant and visible so people can understand where you are coming from while you are reporting on something. i think the media, there is a huge amount, broadly speaking, a lot of bad faith arguing going on. it is clear with the robert mueller report in the commentaries and non-editorial, places like the wall street journal and the washington post with clear -- it is clear most reporters wanted the mueller report to have a very different set of conclusions and facts. the press is broadly anti-trump and then he eggs them on and they act poorly. again we get into these loops, , really ultimately destructive and pointless recriminations.

i am not a good government person. i don't think everybody should be happy or smiling all the time but it creates an atmosphere for it is not even cynicism where people are hostile towards things like the government. host: one of the pieces we are seeing action to is the mueller report. from vox.com, robert mueller and the collapse of the american trust. nick gillespie is joining us. we are talking about your trust in government. we go to fran in toledo, ohio on the democrats line. caller: yes hello. , i think the distinction between public and private is purely arbitrary. private money is the kind of money you lose when you play monopoly. it is not worth the paper it is written on. the government has to be behind it. the idea of not licensing doctors, you could have bumbling incompetents trying to

treat people and i would be frightened about that. absolutely. i think the clear distinction between public and private has been blurred for a long time. especially in something like medicare where the government is effectively a single-payer. it pays all the bills for the services covered by medicare. overall, the public sector tax dollars pay about half of every dollar spent on health care in the country through various programs in situations. there is an erosion between public and private that makes things a little bit more confusing. it also makes it much more difficult to perform with this kind of stuff. -- reform this kind of stuff. there is no simple answer. it is going to take time and not to go into a conversation about health care, but for all of the discussions about the affordable care act, that did not fundamentally change the means by which people get health care.

we should have been having an argument or we should have been having a discussion about how do we grow the supply and a variety of the health care delivery? that would have gotten us closer to a model that would work. because we already know the affordable care act, whether you like it or not, it is unsustainable. he will need constant rejigger ing. host: mark on twitter is tweeting this. "i have not trusted our government for the last 50 years." is there such thing as a healthy mistrust of government? what would that look like? guest: absolutely. what reagan said about a nuclear arms deal with russia, trust but verify. of course we should be skeptical of anybody in power because they need to earn their authority and

they to show they are acting fairly and honestly, particularly in government. there is only healthy skepticism of people in power. particularly government power. where it becomes corrosive, i am going to get roasted by libertarians for saying this, but having cynicism towards government, which in our case i think his well-earned. it is almost impossible to go back to a pre-trump era, but one of the weird things about living in the 21st century where you had 8 years of bush and 8 years of obama, each said the government is not spying on you. you have to believe us. things came out that showed they were totally lying about that. of course you are going to be cynical. politicians and the people who work in government have massively earned our cynicism. what i would say is that cynicism can become corrosive. once you start going there, it

becomes more and more -- you don't trust anything, you don't trust anybody. this is one of the social scientists i interviewed my piece. he grew up in the soviet union. when people start the sense the system is rigged, they try to grab more and more. it creates a feedback loop that gets us to a worse and worse place. i say yes to healthy skepticism to absolute skepticism of government and other people in power. we also need to rein in the cynicism, because that does not get us to where ready to go. -- where we want to go. host: let's go to the independent line. cornelius in louisiana. caller: good morning. i wanted to bring up an idea for c-span and then i will give you my question. i would like you to do something on presidential pardons and try to have somebody in. you did something on the u.s.

bureau of prisons and that was an excellent show. my question for matt is, if we did not find out this thing that the government is spying on us through emails and phone conversations, i look at the jussie smollett case, and they have gotten all that district attorney's emails, where she was saying she would not be involved but she ended up being involved, so that was like the police spying on the prosecutor. the police and prosecutor were spying on each other. to me, we have no free thought. there is nothing private anymore. i don't think -- i guess the horse is out of the barn. we just won't have any privacy. guest: thank you. privacy is an interesting concept.

whenever we invoke it, we think we are talking about a concrete block that does not change over time. but it is a concept that changes radically. in the early part of the 20th century when telephones -- new technology is constantly affecting how we think of privacy. when phones were first being used, the supreme court ruled you had no expectation of privacy while on a phone conversation because it is an inherently public conversation. a few years later they reversed that and said you had an absolute expectation of privacy and that is why police need warrants to listen in on phone calls and things like that. our sense of privacy is always shifting based on technology and our culture. i think what the caller is getting to is interesting. this is something people in government have not grappled with. all of us are having trouble with it. we live in an age of a forced transparency because of, for a variety of reasons, more people

get more information. hacked emails keep popping up all over the place. you get caught. part of the jussie smollett case is there all sorts of surveillance cameras around and you can piece together what is going on. it is hard to maintain secrets, especially if you are acting poorly. you can try to get away with it but it is a lot easier and you spend less time trying to cover your tracks if you live particularly in government, if , you live in the light and explain what you are doing. my favorite congressman is from michigan. he is a libertarian republican. he explains every vote he takes on facebook. it is time-consuming but it is a model for how to be transparent and how to stage conversations with your constituents. i wish more people in political situations would actually act that way. where you are honest and showing your math about why you do the things you do.

that is a way to build trust as well as get better arguments and find out better information. host: a few more calls. we will go to walter in north carolina on the democrats line. caller: good morning. thanks for c-span. what i want to say is since world war ii, the democrats have brought this country down. they have tried to invoke socialism in this country so they can control people. and, i believe -- host: walter, we lost you there. sorry about that. we will go to stanley in massachusetts on the independent line. caller: yes. common sense should be used for all reasons for government. externally, going to other countries, government should be protecting the common person.

not the other way around. we want government to protect us for common reasons and less for external use for other countries. i don't know why we have to backwards and got turned upside down. host: nick gillespie, go ahead. guest: one of the things i will pick up on part of the topic when you look at the behavior of , government in war, this is a major reason why trust in government is as low as it is . we are still technically engaged in wars in afghanistan and iraq. we have never had a clear understanding of what the purpose was. everybody understands these wars, whether you think they were a good idea or turned out poorly, they have been prosecuted terribly. personally, i think going in and occupying afghanistan and iraq

was misbegotten has a concept. question that we did a poor job. government said he was going to turn iraq into a flourishing democracy and change afghanistan. there are certain things that have happened, but it is a real showcase of government not understanding what it was doing and mucking up stuff as it went along. then hiding a lot of bad stuff that happens in these situations. host: let's get one more call here. john is an old one, maryland on the democrats line. caller: this trust in government issue, one thing i would say why people feel that way, there is a right wing media that for decades has been pushing the narrative -- and it started with reagan -- it is a propaganda thing that government is not trustworthy.

but secondly, i had to laugh when you said private markets were more trustworthy and more efficient. just thinking in terms of health care, left to the private market, they would just drop anybody who got sick and do anything they could to make a profit. host: thanks a lot there. guest: there is a lot there. in general, private markets work pretty well. you can see that with -- it is not like private businesses are beyond scandal or anything, but in every city where there are taxis that are publicly regulated, and taxi commissions. uber and lyft come in there is a lot going on , to make a functional market.

in terms of health care, we need to be having a broader discussion. if it is true that insurance companies do drop anybody with any kind of pre-existing condition, that was not the case beforehand. sometimes people payed higher premiums, sometimes people could not get coverage and states would assign risk pools to deal with that kind of problem. that is something we should be talking about. the idea that insurance companies are inherently crooked and rotten, etc. that is not , actually true. i don't think. when you have functioning markets, those kind of bad actors are easier to spot and then easier to regulate or come up with a market-driven alternative or something supplied by the government, like an assigned risk pool. host: the piece is " everyone agrees that the government is a hot mess, so why does he keep getting bigger anyway?" our guest is nick gillespie, always a pleasure.

thank you for joining us. guest: thank you. >> on capitol hill next week, the house will consider the authorization of the violence against women act which expired in february. it aims to prevent abuse and provide resources for victims and include a provision on domestic violence and firearms. it is also possible members will take up a senate-passed resolution to end u.s. military involvement in yemen's civil war. in the senate work continues on a bill that would provide $13 billion in aid for areas affected by natural disasters. also, a resolution to shorten the amount of time the senate considers certain nominations. watch the house live on c-span and the senate live on c-span2. sunday night on "afterwards," former tripadvisor george papadopoulos details his role in the 2016 presidential campaign

in his book " deep state target: how i got caught in the crosshairs of the plot to bring down president trump." >> i was actively trying to leverage what i thought were these mens' connections to russia. i thought it was in the interest of the campaign for candidate trump to meet with vladimir putin. >> you believe it was a primary objective of the campaign? >> yes. donald trump had been espousing for months they need to work with russia at a geopolitical level, economic level, to combat isis. >> sunday night at 9:00 p.m. eastern on book tv on c-span2. ♪ >> c-span's washington journal live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. sunday morning, stephen flanagan

of rand corporation discusses nato, the future of the organization, and recent comments by president trump regarding other countries contributions. we will discuss the 40th anniversary of the three-mile island nuclear power plant accident in pennsylvania, considered the most serious nuclear power accident in united states. joining us to look at the event is eric epstein, founder and chair of the three-mile island alert. and actinger, director of the nuclear safety project for the union of concerned scientists and when lyman. watch c-span's washington journal live at 7:00 a.m. eastern sunday morning. join the discussion. york isng us from new dr. jonathan that soul, author of this new book "dying of whiteness." what prompted you to write this book? guest: