Episode 169: George F. Will on “American Happiness and Discontents” with Don Boudreaux and John Tamny

In this episode we get to talk with George F. Will about his latest collection of essays, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020, and also about his magnum opus, The Conservative Sensibility.  Joining in on the conversation are John Tamny, Vice President of FreedomWorks, editor of RealClearMarkets, and author of When Politicians Panicked,  and Don Boudreaux, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, research scholar at Mercatus Center, who runs the go-to blog for free market economic thinking, Cafe Hayek. Always witty and erudite, George offers up his views on today’s pressing concerns, queried, challenged and amplified by John and Don, two very smart men.  Among our questions: How and when do Americans recover the liberties lost from over two years of government  lockdowns and mandates?  Why did so many libertarians acquiesce? Public choice theory says that people in government are not any different than people in the private sector. Is this still true? A prosperous and free society depends on trust. Will America’s government health establishment be able to recover the public’s trust? Can woke progressivism’s long march through American institutions be reversed? And more: on families, voting rights, campaign finance, college campus fragility, social media’s power, judicial restraint, closed questions in an open society, majority rule, self-regarding versus other regarding acts, China’s future … almost everything except baseball. We’ll get to that next time. Definitely worth a listen.