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David Pakman: Catherine Crier, the youngest elected state judge in Texas history, she
has also covered national and international affairs on CNN, ABC News, Fox News, and Court
TV. The new book is "Patriot Acts: What Americans Must Do to Save the Republic". Great to talk
to you, Catherine.
Catherine Crier: Glad to be here.
David: So you go into a lot of interesting issues in the book, and it's very interesting
because I think the American right, the Republican Party, has kind of coopted patriotism for
themselves, much the same way that they've kind of coopted supporting the Constitution,
another topic we're talking about on the show today. And you argue that actually, a lot
of the legislation that has been pushed by the American right doesn't fall under what
you would consider to be patriotic, am I right about that?
Crier: You're absolutely right. In fact, one of the sort of gurus that I quote is Friedrich
Hayek, who is a conservative economist that the right loves, Reagan, Maggie Thatcher held
him up, and he wrote an article in 1960 about "Why I Am Not a Conservative".
And in it, he denounces the fact that conservatives often will support their politicians who are
elected and subvert the Constitution and the rules as long as their guys are in office.
And what we need to understand, and why I wrote the book, is if we... if we denounce,
ignore the perv-- preservation of the republic, then we are all lost. So first comes the republic,
the Constitutional system the Founders gave us, secondarily comes our ideology.
David: Well, I think it's interesting you almost said the word, that this has been perverted
in a certain sense, and when we look at, so many conservatives like to talk about Adam
Smith and capitalism and free enterprise, and there really seems, if you actually look
at a lot of what Adam Smith wrote, there's this disconnect now between how a corporation
does and how consumers and the individual customers of that particular corporation do
that, I mean, my view is Adam Smith would not agree that that's a good thing. Am I off
on that?
Crier: Not at all. I spent a lot of time talking about the origins of capitalism, and I wrote
a piece for Huffington Post, people should check it out, called "Capitalists of America
Unite: Why Adam Smith Would Be Marching Today". And Adam Smith wrote his tenants of capitalism
to protest the marriage of big government and big business in Europe, in England.
And what he said over and over again is the only way to have this broad economic opportunity,
to have the capitalist system he envisioned, was to corral the concentration of wealth
and power at the very top in private enterprise. And the only entity big enough to corral that
was government, the people's government.
So regulation is not off the boards when we're talking about capitalism. Appropriate, not
inappropriate, not overexercised, regulation is necessary, and we need to understand the
tenants of capitalism before we can carve out what appropriate conservatism or liberalism
is.
David: Well, that gets us into... when you talk about the corralling by government and
regulation, it gets into the discussion of big versus small government, which is really
where 99% of the attention goes. When you look at Ron Paul's campaign, it's all basically
based on big government is bad, but it seems like there's almost no discussion of good
versus bad government. It's all big is bad, if you are on the conservative side, and small
is good, without looking at the kind of fundamentals of what is the government actually doing?
That seems to be lost on a lot of people.
Crier: Yeah, and what people don't realize is that if you go back to the father of American
conservatism, and that was Alexander Hamilton, first thing he did as Secretary of the Treasury
was demand a federal deficit. He demanded the Supreme Court interpret the Constitution
as granting more power to the federal government. He wanted a strong federal government that
could... that could marry with the big corporatists on the private enterprise side and create
this dynamic economic powerhouse that could compete with Europe.
And so to say that conservatism is all about small government, small taxes, states' rights,
strict Constitution, has no relationship whatsoever to what conservatism was in 1789. People need
to understand what the origins were, how we got to where we are, and what policies and
programs created the crisis that we're in today, and I think they would actually be
quite surprised that, you know, a lot of the big government policies came from a longstanding
conservative impetus to utilize big government married to big corporations, and that can
be the downfall of political and economic democracy, that ensures opportunity for a
broad middle class, for a broad populace, in political and economic terms.
David: In the last minute or so we have left, I'd love to get your thoughts on how have
Republicans, modern-day Republicans, so successfully kind of taken hostage these ideas of small
government is good and conservative, and the Constitution and just using the Constitution,
as we talked about earlier in the interview, how have they successfully gone so far from
the 1780s, as you mentioned, and the original intentions? Has it been really good strategists,
is it the messaging, is it people not paying close enough attention? I mean, how has it
happened?
Crier: Well, you know, it's the fact that we submit to propaganda in the media, we are
not sort of intellectually stimulated, we don't have an understanding of our own history.
We're all to blame for this. And it only takes sort of two seconds on the internet to research
political philosophy and understanding, but most Americans are not driven to do this,
so that's the reason I wrote the book, and I would like to suggest that, you know, people
read it, challenge themselves. I believe in pragmatic, fact-based, you know, evidentiary,
you know, support for the premises that I state, and let's take a look at why we evolved
to this position, and what the crisis calls for, and I think the evidence is pretty clear.
David: The book is "Patriot Acts", we've been speaking to the author, Catherine Crier. Really
great to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us.
Crier: Thank you.
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