 Hi, I'm James. And I'm Anthony. And this is Words and Numbers. So today we're going to be equal opportunity offenders. Right. Let's offend everybody. Let's show the world why classical liberals like us tend to have exactly no political friends. Right. Because really what we're looking at today is this very strange set of circumstances by which not only does power shift from the American left to the right and vice versa, but ideas and attitudes tend to shift from the left to the right and vice versa. What ends up happening is as one power, as one group achieves power at the highest level, and today we'll largely be talking about presidential politics, and that makes it nice and simple. As one group achieves that level of power, they often take on the arguments of the other group that was empowered just recently. And the voters seem not to notice. Yeah, that's the weird part, right? So when we hear now, and there are any number of perfectly good reasons why we hear this, that Donald Trump, the American president, is overstepping his authority, most of the criticisms we get are of course from his political enemies, who did not lodge the same criticisms when Barack Obama held the same office and behaved in many of the same ways. And just to underline it here, they're absolutely positively correct that Trump is overstepping his authority. The problem is a lack of consistency. Right. They missed the memo in the eight previous years. And so did the other party. Yeah, when their guy was doing it, there wasn't much of a problem. Of course, for the eight years prior to that, there was a big problem, right? Because then of course it was George W. Bush, and you know, simply by virtue of the R after his name, everybody with a D had to go after him, right? It's almost as if both parties honestly believe that the other party can literally never have a good idea. And they honestly literally believe that people from their own party can do no wrong. Right, right. And both of those things are patently absurd if you know anything about human beings. Because the human beings who I meet on a daily basis are wrong quite a lot of the time myself and you included, right, were often mistaken. So there's that. And this notion that the other guy is always somehow evil is every bit is as crazy. Right. And all that ends up happening at the end is we go through four or eight year cycles of one half of the country beating on the other half by doing the same things that the first half had done to the second half in the previous four or eight years. And so you get things like, you know, people excoriating George Bush quite rightly for for waging wars and killing people in foreign lands absolutely right there to excoriate him for that. But then President Obama turns around does the same thing and you get the reverse of the people who gave George Bush a pass now getting on Obama, the people who were on George Bush, giving Obama a pass. And now it flips around the other way. Now that we have a Trump in office. Yeah, no, that's right. And it should be becoming at least apparent, if not completely obvious to everyone that that there's a real problem here. And the problem isn't the party. No, it's not. But when we've gotten to the point where the American left is digging in its heels and speaking out not only in favor, but in loving favor of the idea of federalism and states rights, how did we get here? This is not how that party was founded. It's never been part of that party's governing ethos. But now, now that there's President Trump, well, that's a good political tool. But maybe, just maybe, and I'm gonna throw a bizarre idea out there. If exactly half of the country or, you know, somewhat less, maybe 45% or so, 46% of voters every year, regardless, regardless of who holds the highest office. But if about that number of people, about that percentage in American politics believe that the federal government has gone too far and is in the process of going too far, maybe it's the case that it's not about the parties and it's not about the men, but it's more about us. And it's about how much authority we've ceded to the government in the first place. Right. That maybe we're better off saying something like, no one should have that much power, not even someone I really like. Right. Well, as I frequently say, government is a very big stick. And once you take it out and put it on the table, someone who's bigger than you is going to pick it up and beat you with it. And that's what's been going on here. One party gets to the majority. They pick up the stick as they're beating the other one. Yeah. Making your point even more forcefully, I think, is Thomas Payne who said that government is the greatest reflection on human nature. Where we're left is with two parties in the end really espousing the same things, right? There's differences around the margins. But generally speaking, the two parties are stand for, if you look at what they do rather than what they say, they stand for the same thing. And the politicians love this because, of course, what happens is they get to take turns, right? Republicans are in this time. The Democrats are in next time. But we keep on doing the same thing which is growing the power of government. And that benefits only one group and that's the politicians. That's right. And anybody with, I think, even the dimmest eyes can see that the power of government has grown exponentially over the years, right? And that's actually what politicians want. They want more power and more authority. The Constitution has a limiting factor. I mean, that thought is nearly laughable at this point. And if you think it's not laughable, and this is, as Anthony knows, a question I ask of high school students all the time as we travel around the country talking to them, I just ask a simple question. Can you name for me one thing that the federal government has no hand in regulating whatsoever? Right. And that list, that list of things that you can name is incredibly short and it gets shorter year over year. Like things you could number perhaps on the fingers of one hand, right? If you thought carefully. Yeah. If you really thought through every position. Because I've heard you, I've heard you ask that question and it's funny to watch the students start thinking about this. And of course, the knee-jerk reaction is breathing, right? And immediately you've got, you know, environmental controls on the air, right? So you go down to where I've seen students end up is by saying, well, there's one thing that government can't regulate and that's thought. Yeah. As long as you never act on that thought, that's exactly correct. But the minute you act on the thought, we will prosecute you for your thoughts too. That's what hate crime is. We're prosecuting you because we don't like the thought that was in your mind as you did this other thing that we were already going to prosecute you for anyway. So no matter how you look at it, sure, government has grown. How much has it grown? It's grown so much that we can find precious few things in this nation that are not regulated in some way. And I would submit and I suspect you would too, that politicians love it this way. This is exactly how they want it. And if they can keep us thinking that whatever the other party is, that's the problem. And not politicians generally. They're going to get away with murder from that point forward because they'll just take turns and grow the authority of the government year over year over year, which is precisely what happens. So when people like Antony say things like there's not that much difference between the parties, trust me, we know the rhetorical differences between the parties. We know the difference between their platforms. We're looking at where the rubber meets the road here, where they do what they do, not where they say what they say, and where they do what they do in the land of revealed preferences. Well, it's pretty clear what they want. They want more control over the lives of everyone who lives here. And using this tactic, they get it. They absolutely get it. This is interesting because there's lots of rhetoric that goes around about the evils of profit seeking. And we can have a whole several discussions on that. But the fact is, what we tend never to talk about is the evils of power seeking. And I submit that the reason we tend to talk about one and not the other is because profit is very, very easily measured. We've got dollar measures. We can count them up and say this guy's got this much, and this guy has less, or whatever it is. We can measure profit accumulation. But measuring power accumulation is a much harder thing, right? There's no unit of power. How do you count this? And so consequently, power, which becomes a commodity, just like money, power ends up being something that politicians pursue. It makes their lives better clearly. They accumulate it largely under the radar because we just can't measure the thing. Yep. No, that's right. And we end up cursing them for it. And I think rightfully so. But then we fall right into their game and we play by their rules. The only way that that's ever going to change is when both groups of people in American society take very seriously the proposition that all power needs to be limited. Right. Because what do you know? We already have a document that covers this. And it's theoretically the controlling law of the land. So we might actually want to take a good long look at it and then do the really crazy thing and reapply it. Reapply it in total, in sum. Because it actually would work if we would have the nerve to do it. So there it is. And we'll be back next week to talk about something else, probably something more fun, but not something more important because it's hard to see how anything becomes more important than this. But in the meantime, have a look below. Click through on fee.org and take a look at the other video offerings that they have and read the links below. We'll see you next week. See you next week. See you next week, James.