← The Gist
The Gist
Phil Gramm Hearts Capitalism, From Dickens To The New Deal
00:37:51
Former Senator Phil Gramm joins to defend capitalism’s record, arguing that the Industrial Revolution improved lives, the New Deal prolonged the Depression, and modern welfare undermines work. He supports Keynesian stimulus in theory—but only if...
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Mike Pesca
It's Friday, July 25, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. The horrors in Gaza continue. Malnutrition as reported by international organizations is worsening, and Israel's failure to effectively deliver aid has not only exacerbated the crisis, but contributed to civilian deaths. While Israeli officials dispute these figures, pointing out they come from the Hamas Ministry of Health, it's undeniable that many innocent Gazans have killed been simply for trying to obtain enough food to survive. Against this backdrop, French President Emmanuel Macron joined other European leaders in a largely symbolic gesture, the recognition of a Palestinian state. NPR described the move this way France will soon recognize Palestine as a state. They say they want to speed the peace process by leveling the playing field at the negotiating table. Now, I want to tell you, I have searched extensively in both French and English for instances of Macron using the exact phrases heard there, leveling the playing field or speeding the peace process, and I don't think that's what he said exactly. But the sentiment tracks. McCrone's message was his was an act meant to help push toward a negotiated end of the war. That is a mistake. That is a misunderstanding of how negotiations work. So for negotiations to succeed, both sides should have a realistic understanding of their positions. If not if both sides have the same unrealistic understanding, it could also result in a successful negotiation. But when one side is at a clear disadvantage and yet is led to believe that the playing field is level, they will never agree to a lasting settlement. In this case, Israel holds overwhelming military dominance over Hamas, and they know it. If Palestinians are made to believe that they're negotiating from a position of equal strength, peace becomes far less likely. Now, I understand the romantic statements of the Palestinians, how they are a righteous people who will never be defeated. And I'm not suggesting them be defeated in their souls or in their spirit but in practical terms, in the actual landmass that is current Israel, they have been defeated, and understanding that would actually lead to peace quicker than holding on to the idea that they are forever indomitable. Now, let's take another situation that may be less of a third rail. Imagine if Ukraine believed it was on the brink of reclaiming the entire Donbas region. There would be no incentive for it to enter talks with Russia, who thinks, and in this case they're right, that they have a strong hold on Donbas. In the same way, we've seen many moments in the Israeli Palestinian conflict where international expressions of solidarity or outrage at the Israelis have given some version of false hope to the Palestinian side, convincing them that victory, or at least major concessions are on their way. They might be right in that the sentiment of the world is on their side. I think they're wrong in translating that to practical gains. I don't know whether the Palestinians will ever accept a peace deal like those that were offered during the Oslo process or even at Camp David. Again, I'm not here to judge whether those proposals were fair or just. But history shows that it defeated peoples like, say, the Japanese after World War II only agreed to peace after grasping, accurately grasping, the extent of their defeat. Had they misjudged their position, more blood would have been spilled. And sure, maybe world opinion would have turned against the United States had it dropped a third or fourth nuclear bomb on Japan to convince them of their defeat. Something, by the way, that fits the definition of genocide at least as much as what's going on in Gaza. But an accurate understanding from a negotiation standpoint is what best comports with peace. I think Emmanuel Macron is smart enough to know this. His move was likely aimed at boosting his international image or scoring points at home. At best, his announcement is irrelevant to the practical realities of the conflict. At worst, it slightly deepens the illusion that Palestinians can achieve through diplomacy or what they have not been able to achieve on the battlefield. And if that's the case, it will postpone rather than promote peace. On the show today, I spiel about Are we doing this again? With outrages about civil rights violations. But first, former Texas Senator Phil Graham is here, his irascible, insightful self. He is the author of many books, and this one is called the Triumph of Economic Freedom Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism. We won't get to all seven, and they aren't all myths. But I think you'll enjoy my conversation and visit with Senator Phil Graham. Oh my gosh, we all feel buried under nonstop meetings and then you remember, wait, the what did we even say? Fireflies is your AI teammate that keeps track of it all, from key takeaways to next steps to, dare I say, action items. We're all just trying to figure out how to work smarter. And Fireflies is there to say hello. Or if you're there saying hello, it will note that you said hello, possibly even with tone of voice. It's time to upgrade your AI note taker to be part part of your team. Fireflies is the number one AI teammate that transcribes, summarizes and analyzes your conversations so you can get the most out of every meeting. 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One Low price covers everything from treatments to ongoing care. The medicine will ship discreetly to your door that comes from the office. Start your free online Visit today@hisss.com the Gist Find ED treatment that's up to 95% less than brand names@hiss.com the Gist hims.com the Gist Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan. Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. Former Senator Phil Graham was, in my opinion, always a vital intellectual force in the conservative side of the Republican Party. I can't say I would have voted for him. I never got the chance. It didn't quite get that far in 1996 where he ran for president for a short time. But as I implied in my intro just now, I always appreciated the intellectual heft and the argumentation he brought to the table. He's continued to do that in his post senatorial career. And his new book, and he writes a lot of books, is written along with Donald Boudreau and it is called the Triumph of Economic Freedom Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism. Senator Graham, welcome to the gist.
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Phil Graham
Oh, thank you, Mike. And thank you for those comments. I wish my mother alive to Europe.
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Mike Pesca
But then again, your mother, I don't know when she passed. But you were a Democrat for a bunch of your life, as any successful politician in Texas must have been.
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Phil Graham
Well, I was a Civil War Democrat. The I never met a Republican until I was grown and there was no Republican elected official any level in my district and I didn't really think that party mattered. I thought what mattered was what was in the interest of the country and the people of my congressional district when I ran for Congress. But when I got to Washington, I found out it mattered more than I thought. So as you might recall, what happened is I was the author of the Reagan Budget in the House. And then after the election in 1982, the Democrats threw me off the Budget Committee and I could have changed parties. President Reagan asked me to change parties, but I didn't feel right about it. So I thought I ought to give my voters a chance to say whether they wanted me to stay on as a Republican. So I resigned and went home and ran again as a Republican.
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Mike Pesca
Let's talk about the seven myths. And I have to say different Readers will come to the idea that these are myths in different ways. So some of the things you didn't have to convince me about, such as capitalism being a great engine to combat and alleviate poverty, you address that as if capitalism is the cause of poverty. I'm on board. Capitalism is the greatest poverty prevention program man has ever invented. Others of these I do still believe in. And I don't know that you've totally debunked the myth. So let's start with one. The Industrial Revolution, of course we needed it, of course it delivered these fruits of capitalism. However, what you try to do in the book, and I'll let you lay out your cases, prove that even during the Industrial Revolution, even during the times of Dickens and Oliver Twist and the, the urban landscape of London, things were good. So they were good or just better than they had been before?
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Phil Graham
Well, they certainly weren't good by current standards. They were terrible. But you've got to remember that from the fall of the Roman empire until about 1800, there was no real economic growth in the world. People pretty much lived like their grandparents had lived. And then with the Enlightenment and idea that people own the right to their own labor and their own thrift, and the manifestation of that Enlightenment was the Industrial Revolution. And by every measure it was a workers revolution. Now we have the Marx, of course agrees that the Industrial Revolution was the greatest thing that ever happened in terms of production, that capitalism, as he said, had done more to increase production than all the other systems in the world combined and had done it in only 100 years. So the debate is about who benefited. And of course the critics say that the capitalists benefited and the workers were impoverished. But by every objective measure, and fortunately in Great Britain where this started, they were measuring everything in the 19th century, from morbidity to mortality to the number of children who died before they were five years old, nutrition levels, real wages, and by every objective measure between 1800 and 1900, in the industrial Revolution, mankind saw the well being of people on this earth rise faster than had ever happened in the history of the world. So now you've got to remember before the Industrial Revolution, poverty was so present, so ever present, that it was normal that people accepted it. The idea that it could have ever gotten, we could have ever gotten rid of it was unthinkable. When Dickens wrote Christmas carol in 1849, it was inconceivable to Dickens that poor people could ever be better off unless they, they were given charity. But what he didn't understand in 1849, the Revolution was already on the way, and real wages were rising and rising rapidly. So by 1900, the whole world had changed. Now, we look back at it now and we say, my God, look how poor people were. But those people left the farm, left the rural areas to come to the cities because they had freedom and opportunity. And as bad as the conditions were in the cities, in many ways they were worse on the farm.
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Mike Pesca
I want to move to the Great Depression. What is the myth there that you're trying to explode around the Great Depression?
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Phil Graham
The myth there is that capitalism fails and that government came in and saved the day. My sainted mother and my grandmother went to their grave believing that Franklin Roosevelt saved the country and got us out of the Depression. That's a myth. The reality is the Depression started as a financial crisis, not any different than the panic of 1907. But the difference was the Federal Reserve act of 1913 created the bank in 1914, and this was the first real test that it had. Its obligation in being created by Congress was to be a lender of last resort to help end these financial panics that we had over and over and over again in America. But when the stock market collapsed and when the financial panic took hold, the Federal Reserve bank stood by and watched a third of all the banks in the country go out of business. The money supply fell by a third. And then Congress passed a smooth hole, a tariff that converted a financial panic into a worldwide depression. And then first Herbert Hoover, who by no means was a conservative, who started the New Deal, and then Franklin Roosevelt came in. And in the environment of the 1930s, Roosevelt's hostility to American business induced investors to simply stop investing. And we were in a depression for 10 years. Now, nobody looks at the data from the League of Nations that shows that we were among the last countries in the world to come out of the Depression, that Britain, Argentina, Japan, Germany, Austria all came out of the Depression long before we did. Only France that had policies very similar to us was in the Depression as long. And the Depression didn't end with a war. The war eliminated unemployment. You put 14 men in uniform, you do something about unemployment. But not until the 1950s did living standards get back to where they were before the Depression and equity values get back to where they were because policy changed.
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Mike Pesca
Do you believe. Do you ever subscribe to the idea of Keynesian stimulus targeted for certain economic situations, or are you a huge skeptic of that? In all cases, no.
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Phil Graham
Look, I think Keynesian economics can be effective. The problem with it is that governments want to use it when you have a real economic crisis and when you don't. Keynes would have never been supportive of running the kind of deficits we're running now. Never. So I'm not. There's a lot of wisdom in what Keynes says. The problem is government adopted Keynesianism because it gave them a basically an excuse to do what he wanted to do. But they didn't follow Keynes guidelines as to when he thought you ought to run surpluses, when the economy was good to pay off the debt you incurred when it was bad. When's the last time that happened?
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Mike Pesca
Well, as you know, the political incentives don't align in that way almost ever. I mean, there are probably, I don't know, a dozen Republicans who would list deficit reduction or debt reduction as their number one priority. Probably zero Democrats. There are some Democrats who think it's a serious problem, but they would always put some other item plank in their agenda higher. And those planks usually cost money. And even among the Republicans, even If there are 100 or 200 of them who nod and say yes, we should reduce the deficit, when given the choice between that and foregoing a tax break, they'll never choose foregoing the tax break.
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Phil Graham
Well, in a sense, when I came to Congress I was a little bit advantaged compared to the situation now in that we'd had nine years of 9.2% inflation on average, the interest prime interest rates were 21.5% when I put my hand on the Bible and the inflation rate was 13%. So there was a crisis and I knew it. And the people who elected me knew I was very serious about it. And so, you know, the idea of being squeamish about asking able bodied men and women to work in return for welfare benefits is so alien to me. And today, by the way, if you count all transfer payments as income, which the census doesn't, the average household in the bottom 20% of income recipients is getting about $65,000 a year and only 36% of the prime work age persons in the bottom 20% work. So I don't understand this squeamishness, but there's this thinking, Mike, that's emerging in the Republican Party, this sort of new approach that because blue collar workers are beginning in larger numbers to vote for us, that we need to give them something. My response is if they wanted something from the government, they wouldn't have voted for you. If they wanted something from the government, they would have gotten it from the Democrats. And the idea the Republicans are going to compete with the Democrats The Democrats are spending our money. And finally, why would people vote for a phony when they can have the real thing? People voted for us because they wanted more opportunity and more freedom. They were tired of woke politics being jammed down their throat and proselytized to their children. And Republicans, excuse me for being critical if you're a Republican office holder out there, but Republicans have lost their way in terms of forgetting why people elected them.
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Mike Pesca
Well, I think that some Republicans would say, well, Phil Graham's analysis is a little outdated. He's saying they voted for Republicans because they want conservatism. They don't want conservatism, they want Trumpism, which maybe has some elements of anti woke certainly, but economically I don't see too much conservatism in, in his policies.
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Phil Graham
Well, you let me tell you what, there is an economic root in the Trumpism and it's the economic root of modern populism, as I would call it. And that is the welfare system now is so generous that when you count all transfer payments as income to the recipients, you've got a situation now where you've got the bottom 60% of income earners in America that basically have the same income. And yet in some of those households, you've got husband and wife working and then in another household and people living right down the street, they're not breaking a sweat. And I think people resent it. But trying to give welfare to the people that are working is not what they want. They want everybody to pull their own weight. I don't want to sound like Archie Bunker, but that's basically.
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Mike Pesca
Well, that might be that. I think you're probably right. In terms of the politics of it, though, if you, if you spin out a very sympathetic story, and a lot of these stories are true about the person who is not getting by and used to have government money and now doesn't. And you could always find sympathetic stories. Maybe a portion of the voting public will disagree. But I think the big point there is you would know even if you do a total reform on welfare, whatever we call welfare, TN tanf the parts of Medicaid that would be considered welfare, that's not most of the budget. That's not even close to most of the budget. Right? The military, the nondiscretionary Social Security spending is big. The military is big. In a year, interest payments are going to be even more than the military. And that's where the real cutting has to come. No.
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Phil Graham
Well, Medicaid, remember that almost 90% of Social Security is funded by the payroll Tax, the Social Security payroll tax. So Social Security is now taking only about $88 billion out of general revenues. Every dollar of Medicaid comes out of general revenues. So. And look, this deal about. They're taking stuff away from people. Don't forget that during the Biden years, during the pandemic, during the Biden years, we spent more money in two years than we'd ever spent in three years. And so now people are saying, my God, if you go back to where you were on this trend line before the pandemic, you're taking benefits away from me. Well, the benefits were for an emergency which has passed. And in our discussion in here on the chapter on poverty, chapter on income inequality, these are the kind of issues that we talk about.
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Mike Pesca
Yeah. And Macedo and Lee, who I had on the show, wrote a book about the pandemic. They point out that pandemic spending, pandemic stimulus spending was more than even adjusted for inflation, the spending to alleviate the Great Depression. So compare the two, the pandemic and the Great Depression.
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Phil Graham
Well, and don't forget that the people's bank balances exploded during the pandemic. And part of the reason the economy came out of it strongly and continued was that people had this built up savings from the pandemic. Well, they did because they were getting more in the pandemic than they were making. And the last Trump stimulus should have never been adopted. And the first Biden and every other Biden shouldn't have been adopted. We were already well on our way to riding the economic ship by then. But again, giving away money is popular.
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Mike Pesca
And giving people a dollar's worth of services for 70 cents in spending is very popular. Yeah. Now, do you think in your perfect world, would the United States never run a deficit? I'll ask that.
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Phil Graham
Well, in my perfect world, they would run deficits in deep recessions. The problem is, to be a perfect world, they've got to be willing to run surpluses when the economy's strong. And I would be fearful that the world I'm in was not perfect and that if you don't have some kind of binding constraint, that it will be abused. So, yeah, if I could run the world and, and do it the way Keynes originally proposed, I think it had merit. The problem is, once you, it's like if you give government power to do good, you've got to understand that once they've got the power, they're not always going to do good with it.
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Mike Pesca
Would surpluses and deficits always even out in a perfect world? I asked this because I think history shows that there was a very short period during the presidency of Andrew Jackson when the United States wasn't in net debt. And if you look at the history of the United States, it's been extremely beneficial to its citizens, the world, the flourish, human flourishing. So there seems to be a correlation between having some level of debt and a very successful government.
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Phil Graham
Well, you're the. But Hamilton's argument was that a certain level of outstanding government securities was beneficial in giving people an outlet for thrift and in promoting financial markets. But we have got now fully developed financial markets. So again, in an ideal world where you could speed recovery with deficits and then make it up when the economy is in full, where all eight cylinders are working, it might make sense. The problem is that's not what happened. We can't throw out our history. We can't act as if, if something happens over and over and over again that it's not going to happen in the future. So one of the reasons that I have always supported a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is that whatever you lose, you're going to gain far, far more.
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Mike Pesca
Phil Graham, along with Donald Boudreau is the author of the Triumph of Economic Freedom Debunking the seven Great Myths of American Capitalism. Thank you so much, Senator Graham.
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Phil Graham
Oh, thank you. Thank you, Mike.
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Mike Pesca
And now the spiel. This week a story out of Jacksonville, Florida caught national attention. Months ago, a 22 year old motorist named William McNeill was pulled from his car and punched repeatedly by police officers during a traffic stop. The clip that most people saw in the one that fueled headlines began with the moment that his car window was smashed by police and he was punched in the face. News outlets reflected that framing headline. What we know about the violent Jacksonville traffic stop that went viral. ABC news and William McNeil's violent arrest in the US has gone viral. Amnesty International. The incident was viral and violent. After breaking his window, Jacksonville police punched McNeil. But only later did the sheriff's office release the full video. In it we see McNeil stopped for failing to turn on his headlights during inclement weather and for not wearing a seatbelt. Officers asked for his license. McNeil says, no, I'm not giving you my license. He claims that the stop is illegitimate. He tells them they need to call his supervisor. He closes his car door on him. The officers warn that if McNeil doesn't open his door, they would break the window. McNeil still refuses. Then came the footage that went viral. It should be noted that a Knife was found in the car. Drug paraphernalia. He was driving with a suspended license, and he pled guilty to driving without a seatbelt. One reason the story spread so quickly is that McNeil hired attorney Benjamin Crump, who specializes in high profile cases of alleged police brutality. Five days ago, Reverend Al Sharpton introduced Crump on his MSNBC show. These words, joining me now is civil rights attorney.
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Phil Graham
I call him the.
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Mike Pesca
Many do have joined me calling him.
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Phil Graham
The Attorney General of Black America. Attorney Benjamin Crump.
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Mike Pesca
It's a familiar moniker. Three years ago, a local Ohio station described Crump in the same terms as a crusader in the fight for racial equality. Crump is often referred to as Black America's Attorney General. I don't know what or should happen in the case of William McNeil, but it seems like we've returned to a moment where individual viral snippets of violent police encounters are once again going to be elevated into national narratives, usually without full context. For a time, we had pulled back from this pattern. I don't want silence on such incidents as the police beating of a motorist in Memphis that deserved our attention once the full context was known. But for this one to become a cause of Amnesty International, I do not know if it best serves society. And I also know that Benjamin Crump's prominence in the middle of these stories do not always, in fact, do not often comport with what the news media should be concerned with. The truth. In several cases, Crump's words proved contradicted by facts. Here's the most prominent example. Jacob Blake, the man shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Crump, hired as his lawyer, claimed that Blake was unarmed. That statement spread widely and inflamed public outrage. But video later proved Blake was holding a knife throughout the encounter and refused repeated commands to drop it. He was trying to enter a car, not his, with two toddlers inside. He was shot. This led to protests. This escalated into violence, and this included the now infamous shootings by Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people during the unrest. Crump is not wrong. He should not be discounted. But he should be treated as a neutral observer. He's a plaintiff's attorney. He's not the black Attorney General or the Attorney General of the United States. The Attorney General of the United States should also be treated as an interested party. Police departments should be treated as interested parties. Yet in the ecosystem of news and social media, virality often overrides editorial judgment. Do not give up your editorial judgment when it comes to even figures you view as heroic like Benjamin Crump, because they're sometimes wrong. And when they are, it can and has led to tragedy. We're seeing a similar dynamic in another recent story, this one specifically out of Tennessee.
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- [36:41]
Mike Pesca
Dollars for information leading to the arrest.
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Advertiser
Of the person responsible for displaying a new on the job site last week. Work at the site resumed today, but.
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Mike Pesca
The Tennessee Builders alliance says that the.
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Advertiser
Noose investigation is a top priority. The alliance issued a statement saying in.
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Mike Pesca
Part, hate has no place on our.
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Advertiser
Job site or in our industry for many years.
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Mike Pesca
Any news related discovery, regardless of context, would become a major story. Local, national and in the overwhelming majority of those cases, no hate crime was ever proved. Often, no hate crime ever occurred. Sometimes the hate crime was real. 2019 student at the University of Illinois placed a noose in an elevator. We don't know why he was expelled. 2018 a noose was found in a black employees area of an Aurora, Illinois warehouse. That's an ongoing suit, but have also reviewed dozens of such incidents and found tens of cases where the initial fear was mistaken, to name a few. Fair Lawn, New Jersey. What was thought to be a noose was identified as twine used by a utility company to install new cables. University of Delaware. 2022 Three Ropes initially believed to be nooses turned out to be remnants of paper lanterns from Celebration, Oakland, California. A couple of years ago, black fitness instructor installed rope loops around trees and a park as part of an outdoor exercise routine. When they were discovered, officials including the mayor, responded as if they were still a hate crime despite the clear explanation. Even with evidence of a lack of racial intent, local leaders said the incident carried the symbolic weight of a noose. And Most famously in 2020, a garage pull rope was found in the work area of NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, one of the few black drivers in the sport, and was thought to be a noose. Pretty much closed down the sport for a long time. Was later confirmed by the FBI to have been placed months before Wallace's team even used the stall. It's used to open a garage door. Then there was this incident in Gilroy, California at a Kaiser facility last year. Police opened an investigation.
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Advertiser
Police are trying to find out who.
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Mike Pesca
Put up a noose at a Kaiser Permanente in Gilroy.
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Phil Graham
Yeah.
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Mike Pesca
Disturbing story. Crawford's Michael Thomas following it for us from Gilroy. Michael hey, good morning everyone. You know, Kaiser officials say that this news finding is painful. Painful and triggering. And they plan to get to the bottom of it, finding out who did it and why. Now, the reason I play that clip entirely in keeping with the tone of initial reports of news is found was just to get to this phrase at the tail end of Kaiser's statement. Now it also went on to say investigations are still underway, but we are not waiting for the conclusion of these reviews to acknowledge the trauma this incident has caused. Here is another alternative course of action. Do not allow yourself to be traumatized by the ambiguous. Given the fact that the vast majority of these looped ropes turned out to be something other than intentional hate symbols, we, and especially by we I mean the news, should report on them and think about them with circumspection. I do understand why a major corporation like Kaiser wouldn't want to appear dismissive. They're managing reputational risk. But society at large doesn't benefit from jumping to conclusions. It actually doesn't make us more vigilant. It just conditions us to potentially overreact to what is benign or meaningless. An argument can be made that the lack of, I'll use the word again, vigilance in the face of a bona fide hate crime would make us worse off. I think that's true if we were to be dismissive of the actual. But I've reviewed, like I said, Almost 20 events of high profile ropes said to be nooses reported across local and national news, and there were not hate crimes in any but two of them. So the idea that we're vigilantly confronting racism, we're not. We're just dramatizing confusion. And there was a moment, until very recently, until I saw this Tennessee story, that I thought we were out of this habit. And now we're drifting back. I do not know what will cause a recalibration or if there will be one. For about a decade, these were very popular stories to report on and then ignored when investigations turned up nothing. And what got us out of that loop, if you will, wasn't this. It wasn't the actual facts on the ground or in the trees, was always more about the narrative impulses of our psyches and our newsrooms. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist. Astra Green runs our social media. Ashley Kahn is our production coordinator. Michelle Pesca vacuums up all the information and spits it out again. Improve. Thanks for listening.
- [41:46]
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