{"id":22110,"date":"2013-09-14T07:50:16","date_gmt":"2013-09-14T12:50:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22110"},"modified":"2013-09-14T07:50:16","modified_gmt":"2013-09-14T12:50:16","slug":"reason-tv-george-wills-libertarian-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/14\/reason-tv-george-wills-libertarian-evolution\/","title":{"rendered":"<em>Reason.tv<\/em>: George Will&#8217;s Libertarian Evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"853\" height=\"640\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/POphmn25gVs\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that&#8217;s a lot of folly to witness up close,&#8221; says <em>Washington Post<\/em> columnist George Will. &#8220;Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In part, I owe my current happiness to Barack Obama,&#8221; continues the 72-year-old Will, who &#8220;so thoroughly concentrates all of the American progressive tradition and the academic culture that goes with it, that he&#8217;s really put the spring in my step.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Branded &#8220;perhaps the most powerful journalist in America&#8221; by the <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Will received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977 and is the author of numerous books, including <em>Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does<\/em>, <em>Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball<\/em>, and <em>One Man&#8217;s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of our Singular Nation<\/em>. A regular panelist on ABC&#8217;s <em>This Week<\/em>, Will has the distinction of having been attacked in the pages of Doonesbury and praised in an episode of <em>Seinfeld<\/em> (for his &#8220;clean, scrubbed look&#8221;). <\/p>\n<p>More recently Will has become a champion of libertarianism, both in print and on the air. &#8220;America is moving in the libertarians\u2019 direction,&#8221; Will wrote in a 2011 review of <em>The Declaration of Independents<\/em>, &#8220;not because they have won an argument but because government and the sectors it dominates have made themselves ludicrous.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Will sat down with <em>Reason<\/em>&#8216;s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch to discuss his libertarian evolution (2:16), how Sen. John McCain spurred his political transformation (4:07), Ronald Reagan (4:29), the tax code (8:45), why the Republicans are becoming more interesting (19:30), what the government should be spending money on (23:14), war hawks and foreign policy (25:19), the benefits of judicial activism (34:49), gay marriage (37:55), marijuana legalization (39:04), the importance of Barry Goldwater (40:28), Mitt Romney (45:45), the 2016 election (46:37), Medicare (48:52), how Everett Dirksen&#8217;s untimely death changed his life (50:42), why President Obama makes him happy (52:06), affirmative action (53:07), and his optimism in America&#8217;s future (57:31).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve lived in Washington now for 44 years, and that&#8217;s a lot of folly to witness up close,&#8221; says Washington Post columnist George Will. &#8220;Whatever confidence and optimism I felt towards the central government when I got here on January 1, 1970 has pretty much dissipated at the hands of the government.&#8221; &#8220;In part, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,28,53,13],"tags":[158,459,698,550,213,162],"class_list":["post-22110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-censorship","tag-congress","tag-libertarianism","tag-newspapers","tag-socializedmedicine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5KC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22112,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22110\/revisions\/22112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}