[applause] [applause] . ♪ ♪ ♪ >> hello america i am mark levin. this is life, liberty and levin. it's a great honor to have walter williams on with me. how are you. >> i'm good. >> those who don't know you, all three people out there, you are the distinguished professor of economics at george mason, a syndicated columnist, author, numerous books and essays and so forth,

libertarian/classical liberal i would say and of course you write for townhall and hundreds of newspapers across america. let's jump right into this. let's start with fundamentals. let's start with the basics. how would you define liberty? >> i do find it as people being able to engage in peaceable, voluntary exchange without interference by others , and typically down through mankind history, liberty is not a normal state of affairs. that is throughout mankind history if you've been subject to arbitrary abuse and control by others and so the amount of liberty that americans have and perhaps western europe as well is relatively rare in humankind and, i think the danger we face is that some

historians may be 200 yearsom ne says look, the normal state of affairs is arbitrary abuse and control of others, and there's this little tiny curiosity where a relatively few people have a large amount of liberty for a short amount of time, but all went back to the normal state of affairs that is arbitrary abuse and control by others. >> do you think liberty has its own demise so people who don't support liberty or who are unwitting about liberty can still use liberty to destroy liberty. >> that's absolutely right. they can use liberty to destroy liberty. if you look at totalitarians around the world, they always are for free speech. that is because they need free speech to get their foot in

the door, but after their foot is in the door they want to eliminate free speech and you see this all over the world and will begin to see it in the united states. in berkeley, that was the seed of the free speech movement. so again, i think you have to be very, very concerned because we are losing our liberty and if you asked the question, which way are we moving, tiny steps at a time or are we headed toward more personal liberty or more government control over our lives. it would have to be unambiguously the latter. >> when i was about 20 years old my father and i visitor center very close to ronald reagan and one of the things he said to me that stuck with me ever since, every day we

lose a little bit of our liberty. it wasn't supposed to be that way. the american people largely do not like politicians. they largely do not like congress, but it seems like when there's a problem, there's a big percentage of the american people in healthcare or housing or gun laws or what have you, they immediately say government should do something. they don't trust the bureaucracy, they don't trust washington, they don't trust congress, but government should do something. how do you explain that paradox. >> i think there's a temptation among all humans to want to live at the expense of someone else, that is the american people, and it's sad to say this, the american people love to live at the expense of somebody else. that is whether it be farmers, they want the farm subsidies come up businesses, business

bailouts so let's say in case of a farmer, if a farmer is having trouble and he says give me your money, he's gonna go to jail but if he goes to washington and gets a congressman to write a law enabling the irs to take my money he doesn't go to jail so the people like to use government to do things that, if they did the same thing they would go to jail so what i'm saying is that people like to use the government to legalize theft. >> what's interesting about that is it's defined as compassion so in other words, using governmen government, the law, the power of government to take something from someone and give it to someone else. would it take some thing from a generation that's not yet born. we have $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities and fiscal operating debt, trillion dollar deficit this

year and one of the most massive budgets in american history. three generations from now, to get generations from now those kids will have to deal with this so even when it comes to their own children's grandchildren duping parents who love their parents and grandchildren, do you think they delude themselves into thinking that's them, that's an ambiguous future generation and my kids will be fined? what's the mindset. >> here's the problem the big collapse will not come until 20, until 2030 or 2040. any congressman who takes steps now will be thrown out of office. the major spending in our funding is social security and medicare. when it comes to talking about doing something about social security, doing something about medicare, he's can be run out of office by the who ovd

vote in large numbers. we have to ask ourselves the question, is it reasonable for us to expect a politician to do what he considers to be political suicide. i say no. it's unreasonable to expect that of a politician so the politicians are wanting a congressman, his time to rises in two years, not 15 or 20 years, it's two years and so, that's what we have to live with. >> so that is a circular problem then, because these people will continue to do what they're doing, these politicians, in fact they grab more and more power in the private sector from the individual and yet they don't have the ability because it's public or because of their own lack of will to do what needs to be done 20, 30, 40 years out. so what happens to country. >> well, people will say what can we do.

as human beings, are we any different from the spanish, portuguese, the french, the british, great empires of the past who went down the tubes for doing roughly what were doing and i say, well maybe were not that different and maybe were going to share the same future as those other great empires. keep in mind, we have betrayed the founding fathers of our country. if you look at james mattis writing federalist paper 45, he was trying to convince the citizens of new york to ratify the constitution and they were afraid to ratify and he said, the powers that we've delegated to the federal government are few and well-defined and restricted

mostly to external affairs. the powers left with people in the state are indefinite. if you turn that upside down you have what we have now, the powers of the federal government are indefinite and in numerous. >> which you agree with me that in many respects we live in a post- constitutional. it's not really a federal public, it's not really a representative republic with 2 million in civil servant bureaucrat and finally a constitutional republic with five individuals on the court can decide in a 5 -4 vote if something is fundamental or not fundamental or they decide to nationalize a issue, there's no recourse. what kind of a government is this right now. >> we are moving toward totalitarianism. i'm not saying we are a totalitarian nation yet, but which way are we headed? tiny steps at a time. more government control over our lives and more liberty.

it's the latter. more government control over our lives. the tragic thing about this is that the american people have contempt for the united states constitution. contempt and ignorance because any politician who decided to uphold and defend the united states constitution, he would not get elected to office by the american people. if he says look, nowhere in the constitution is there authority for the federal government to be involved in education so if you send me to it washington i'm not going to bring back billions of dollars because is not the constitution. you'd be run out of town. >> do you think then that progressivism is anti- constitutional, anti- republic

or rousseau, hegel, marx, dewey, crawley, do you think they've succeeded? >> the jeffersonians and anti- federalist, they have not succeeded so the progressives have succeeded very well. the wilsonian objective or vision is a hard set in our economy, or if you look at the communist manifesto, at the things they want, the ten things they wanted, we've accomplished it in our country. >> and so, there are people out there, the tea party movement, the reagan revolution, constitutional conservatives that i talk to every day on my radio show, they say what we do about this.

i initially was strongly opposed to article five convention of states and i studied it, i studied the history behind it, i studied at george mason composed it two days before the end of the constitutional convention at and madison stood up and supported it and argued for it, when there was this nullification effort taking place and this is a movement, a very difficult movement in the constitution but rather than amending the constitution through congress which mason said would one day be oppressive, and needs to be away for the people through the state legislature to control the government so basically that process is that the state legislatures get together, it's convention of state. they send delegates, they come up with their ideas and they send them to the same ratification process is very difficult. 38 states have to ratify.

i've gotten behind this because i've concluded the supreme court is constantly rewriting the constitution. presidents are rewriting the constitution. everyone's rewriting the constitution. >> or ignoring it. how about we put the government back in a box. if there is a way to do that it's either that way or i can think of any other way. >> i worry about that because we have a constitutional conventio convention. >> it's called convention of state. >> convention of state, who are the kind of people who are going to be there? is likely to be benjamin franklin or george mason. >> it's going to be people like nancy pelosi. >> nancy pelosi may be there but she won't be there. [inaudible] the problem now is we don't have any of those men or women on the supreme court or in congress or in any court so as

those men and women who decided, or it was the men who decided i would encourage people to take a serious look at this. >> the article five. >> yes, i know there's a lot of talk and fear mongering, but the difficulty is getting it done. will we come back on ask about socialism. it seems to be very popular these days. ladies and gentle man, just so you know every weeknight you can watch me on levintv by going to see rtv.com or giving us a call at 844 levintv. we would love to see you there when cravings come on strong, be stronger...

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let me ask about socialism, bernie sanders is out there pushing socialism, they don't call it socialism because they know that words not popular but they know that's what it is. there pushing some form of socialism, free college, free healthcare they talk about scandinavia, does that create an opportunity and success? >> we might first start off with what is socialism. socialism or communism is

government ownership and/or control and, in that sense we have a lot of socialism already in our country and we find people asking for more of it but if you look around the world and you ask, in what countries are people better off and that is if you can rank countries toward countries upon the free market end of the spectrum towards it and toward the socialist end of the spectrum, you'll find that those countries toward the free market, their people are richer and also it's something else, if you rank countries according to freedom house or inman' amnesty interact and chant international you find greater freedom lead pretty toward the free market or the capitalist end of the economic spectrum

so if you want to find poverty and abuse in human rights violations, you find them in the socialis socialist/communist countries all over the world so anybody asking for socialism in our country really asking for us to have a large amount of socialism right now, they're not we are not nearly as free as individuals as we used to be in the founding fathers of our country went to war with the most powerful nation on the face of this earth because they did not want to work two weeks for king george, but you and i, were working four months out of the year in order to pay taxes. >> to think. the problem here is branding, marketing, a lack of articulate conservatives of many of the leaders, i mean i

really hear them talk about first principles, individualism, liberty, we talk about lineal's and how so many of them are liberal, there also anti- authority and we don't explain her ideas. when i hear republican leaders in congress they talk like they are gs 13 department of education and their leftists out there pushing their analog , it's like populism but in the end it's all about centralization and control but so-called conservatives and don't even counter the stuff. in my right. >> you're absolutely right in the real job that we have is to somehow be able to sell our fellow americans on the moral superiority of personal

liberty and its main ingredient which is limited government. the average american high speak because, hides the kind of tyranny from himself. for example let's say there's a lady down the street who can't mow her lawn, she doesn't have enough money to pay somebody, if you ask the average american, would you force someone to go down them over line each week and they would say no that they said would you support somebody having to go down at the end of each week and pull money out of his wallet to give her money and they would say no but you ask what about if we all put our money in the government pockets and the government sends money out to this lady and they say okay that's different, that's okay but all these three examples i just gave involve the forcible

use of one person to serve the purpose of some of the else, but that's what the american people want. too many of us want that. that, by the way a very good working definition of slavery. >> when you bring up the founders of this country, the left immediately talks about slaveowners, that they were slaveowners but first of all, all of them work, some of them were some of them wanted to get rid of the whole notion of slavery but they couldn't. abraham lincoln talks about this, this great 1858 speech debate with douglas and i want to know your opinion of this. he said these are the men that wrote the declaration of independence. there's not a word about slavery or racism in them. they left it to their children

and grandchildren to try to resolve what they could not resolve. how do you answer this. >> i think we need to recognize that slavery has been meaning mankind state of affairs for centuries. the word slave, they were among the first slaves, it turns out that africans were the last people to be enslaved and it turns out also that the western world, most notably great britain, france and the united states paid a huge cost to get rid of slavery whereby, in other parts of the world slavery still exist today in the middle east, but the west made a great effort to get rid of slavery, and also many quotations from the founders that they look at slavery as abomination, but we could not

have been a nation, you could not have had the ratification of the constitution without allowing the south to maintain slavery. >> that's an excellent point. in other words if there hadn't been a union i guess there would've been a civil war because honestly one of the primary purposes of the civil war where there is over 700,000 casualties but i also find it interesting that this would be raised, it's a dark mark in american history, we understand that, but many of the people who raise it excuse the hundred million dollar desk from marxism and they push ideology that's progeny is progressivism. is that not part and parcel of that ideology. >> and communism accounts for

the greatest destruction of human life that is hitler did not number numbers. >> and again look at the third right or communism or stalin or whatever, these are all ideologies in amount and the whole point of our constitutional system is to ensure that government is limited so the people are as free as they possibly can be in order to avoid circumstances like that, correct. >> you're absolutely correct. >> when i return i want to ask doctor williams about the gun debate that's going on today, the bill of rights and what you think about that whoa, this is awful, try it. oh no, that looks gross what is that? you gotta try it, it's terrible. i don't wanna tray it if it's terrible. it's like mango chutney and burnt hair.

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by the republican-controlled senate on wednesday. an exciting night in miami as the chiefs celebrate their first two books goal title in 50 years. they beat the 49ers 31 - 20. patrick holmes made super bowl mvp. now back to life, liberty and levin. >> we have this debate that goes on after these mass murders and i'm we have this debate that goes on after mass murders. were not really getting facts or information. are weakening it initially and the media turns on a dime and want to debate about the second amendment? what i'm noticing about this really, this debate over the second amendment is also debate over the first amendment. gun control. they also want debate

control. there's people who dare to say wait a minute, maybe the authorities out of figure this out or police in the schools, maybe washington doesn't have the answers or whatever, this kind of debate is not existed now, it's limited, i'm noticing the more media we have the more groupthink that's being promoted. what you thinknk about that. >> i think americans need to be educated on why the founders of our nation gave us the second amendment in the first place and they gave us the second amendment not to do duck hunting and deer hunting and to protect, they explicitly said they want us to have arms to protect ourselves against abuse of govet government. >> and see what you just said is true. factually, historically true and yet it's crazy to the left

and the media. >> that is aptly right, but even another question about the gun control in terms of reducing the crime, keep in mind guns aren't in animate object. one can put a gun right here and it can be there first century and it's not going to do anything. the people arguing for gun control as a way to reduce the slaughter that we see in the united states, there kind of saying like cars, if 30 people are killed each day by drunk drivers in our country so we want to do, you will have car control or turns out that rifles kill, there used to kill about 560 people each year according to statistics but in terms of knives knives

are responsible for about 1500 deaths. year so what he want knife control? if you use the same reasoning that people use about guns to cars and knives, you have background checks to go buy a car or a knife, i think what we fail to realize is that what has happened to our society in terms of morality and keep in mind that today it's more difficult to get a gun or rifle than it has ever been in our country. if you look in the sears catalog of 1908, there are 35 pages of sales of guns and what you do with the sears catalog, you send money and they send a gun or you walk into a hardware store and buy a gun or, for a long time, a

birthday present for a 12-year-old or 14-year-old from his father was a 22 rifle. schools had gun shooting clubs so you might say well, what has happened to guns between 1920 and today? what are guns doing differently. guns are doing anything differently. you have depths the question what has happened to people since the 1920s and what there's been, there's been a decline in morality so this is what you find happening all over our country and to have, let's say we want to have gun control in order to protect our kids in the schools, that's just plain nonsense. >> and yet it's being pushed, it's monopolizing the debate and i have to shut it off, i see gus to come on to have a

different point of view and are shut down, at least one cable channel cnn had this event the other night with marco rubio and others who were shouted down because they don't go full gun control, the host used to work for one of the gun-control organizations, whether it's climate change, abortion, gun control, it seems to me were always debating on the grounds and the terms set by the left. why is that? >> i think it's very popular. i think the left is very, very effective at selling their point of view to the american people than the right or the libertarians or conservatives, that is, were not as good with messaging as the (the left appears so caring and whereby the right does not appear as caring. what we have to do, we have to be able to sell the moral

superiority of personal liberty and morality in general. >> are there enough of us left were willing to do it. >> i don't see a lot of them in congress, i can tell you that. >> you don't see a lot of them on college campuses either. >> all right, ladies and gentlemen, don't forget during the weekdays you can watch levintv on cr tv.com and join us there or call 844 levintv. us there or call 844 levintv. we would love to see you. you leave it to me. i'll get your taxes in an ok place. what? just as soon as my audit is over, this gets my undivided attention. you take a lot of trips to the islands, phil? pretty great, right? oh phil's legally dead. fell off a boat. going by denis now. celery. long story. what do we got here. oh. not going to want to see this. i don't think this is going to work.

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ten different types of hotdogs. that's available to any person in the united states. there are people in the planet who has ever lived like we have lived, kings, queens, we want to travel across the country, we get annoyed a park plane is delayed. it's air-conditioned, heated, your fairly comfortable and you complain about tight spaces, even live from the east to the west coast in

about five hours. and capitalism, individualism, liberty, get this. if i wake up at two in the morning i can go to a 711 and by anything i need. if you need a drug because you are sick you get at the same day or the next day. how can you explain that we liv live, and i mean all americans quite frankly have access to these things that the vast majority, created by us and our ancestors, yet it goes absolutely unnoticed. they have air conditioning, microwave ovens, et cetera and i think all this riches was a fruit of capitalism and it's a

fruit of ingenuity. sometimes i asked my students, i say how come george washington did not have a cell phone. he could've benefited immensely from having a cell phone to stay in contact with his troops. well, i'll tell them, all material to make a cell phone was around the time of george washington. it was also around the time of the cavemen so what's different? what was different and why we have cell phone today and george washington didn't. it has to do with the human brain. human ingenuity human beings being free to explore things. that's why we have why we enjoy the riches that are unprecedented. it's the healing brain allowed to be free to do those things

and lying at the root of it is people's desire to have more of something that is, in a free market system, the way that you have more of something is to please your fellow man. why is bill gates so rich? did he take your money? he didn't rob you, what he did, he found some way to please you. he found a way to please millions and millions of people and they voluntarily plunked down $400 for you look at ford when he made the model t, he did something to please his fellow man. he enabled his fellow man to be able to buy a cheaper car so, that's the root of our richness, the human mind and the desire for each of us to want to have more for ourselves and in a free market system, the way you get more for yourself is by pleasing

your fellow man. prior to capitalism, the way that people became rich was through plundering and enslaving their fellow man but the free market made it impossiblpossible for people to amass huge amounts of wealth by serving and pleasing their fellow man. >> and socialism and communism destroys that entire market. >> oh yes. it destroys that entire initiative. >> absolutely. >> and socialism and communism are really about redistribution, right, they're not about creating wealth and opportunity. >> there about taking from some and giving to others. >> when we come back i want to ask you about this. what did the framers and the founders been by equality? doesn't mean the same thing it means today, and can you have a free people if the pursuit of those people is equality?

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equality, we here at all time, wage equality or income

inequality and it is spoken of as if the government should step in and make sure people have the same plainfield. is that what the framers meant by equality? >> i don't think so. he was put best buy my late colleague milton freedman. he said those people who put equality before liberty are not likely to have much of either but those people who put liberty before equality are likely to have a large measure of both. when people talk about inequality of income, in a free society, the reason why there is inequality of income is because one person satisfies his fellow money and more than another but then there are other issues that

produce inequality caused by government such as occupational licensing laws like in new york city, at one point, to own and operate one taxi you had to go out and buy a medallion, a license that cost $700,000. that has the effect of nine people. these taxicab owners will pay politicians political contributions to keep such a restriction. so i think what we need to do, we need to make sure there is a level playing field, that each person has a right to pursue his own objectives without interference by others. >> isn't that the point of the constitution which basically says okay government, this is what you're involved in, the founders were saying look, equality, meaning we want to

be treated the same way under the law as every body else. we don't want to be targeted by the crown or whatever and mistreated so equality, you should be treated the same regardless of race, religion, height, weight and anything else as best as we can do in a perfect world, but you can't possibly have equality when you have individual human beings in a relatively free society pursuing their own interests. some people may work harder than others, some may work smarter than others and some may produce what more people want and yet again we get bogged down in this debate about this anticapitalist argument about equality. >> and the only kind of equality that's consistent with liberty is equality before the law. any pursuit of any other equality is inconsistent with liberty. >> you can look at these purchase of police state

regimes that try to wrench liberty out in the name of the people, there still not equal. >> or their equally oppressed. >> yes, they're dirt poor and starving to death. that's something we can live without. we'll be right back. ♪ ♪ ♪ when crabe stronger...strong, with new nicorette coated ice mint. layered with flavor... it's the first and only coated nicotine lozenge. ..

breaking tonight, president trump rules out moving his state of the union beach until after the impeachment vote. here's the president earlier tonight with sean hannity. >> any thought to delay the state of the union. >> no. i'm good habit, it will be done, we will talk about the achievements that were made, no one has made it cheap men's like with mate. >> and another alert for you tonight, john kerry overheard in iowa discussing his potential late entry to the presidential race because of the possibility of bernie sanders taking down the democratic party. he addressed the issue on