Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Breakout 20131208

Drops the material off, goes back into the mine. The truck does 24 7 minus maintenance and filling it up with diesel fuel. Different world. The armys actually in oshkosh, wisconsin, working with a manufacturer to design army trucks that would be selfof driving because then if you have a roadside bomb, you dont hurt anybody. And its just one more effort to try to figure out how can we risk fewer americans on the battlefield. But these things are coming down the road. On energy, of course, with the breakthrough in hydraulic temporarying and in horizontal drilling, you take a place like north dakota which went from 800 Million Barrels of reserve in 2002 to over 24 billion today and rising. North dakota has such a high employment rate, wages have gone up 50 in the last eight years. And mcdonalds now pays a bonus if you will sign up to work. Now, that actually should be the conservative answer to income inequality. We would like everybody to rise up. Were not in the business of tearing down. But we should be in the business of helping every person rise up. And north dakotas a pretty good case study. And if the federal government were actually encouraging it, we would be astonished how many additional jobs youd be creating right now. We will, we are this year the largest gas producer in the world, by 2015 well be the Largest Oil Producer in the world. Thats an enormous shift of power away from russia and the middle east, and it increases our National Security but also creates hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Natural gas today is three times as expensive in china as it is in the United States. And that just effects all of our manufacturing costs. You just see all sorts of ripple effects that are pretty remarkable. Theres a system called Regenerative Medicine which is almost like science fiction. Regenerative medicine is when they take your cells and they grow a large number of them. And they then take 3d printing in the most recent version, and they print out the organ you need. So if you need a kidney, they can print out a kidney. If you need a heart, they can print out a heart. The texas Regenerative Medicine institute is headed by a woman doctor whose specialty is growing hearts. And youll see in a few years remember the young lady who had a hard time getting a Lung Transplant because she was too young and the bureaucratic rules didnt work . Ten years from now, if were smart, if we encourage this, ten years from now therell be no waiting lines, because you wont transplant. You will replant yourself. And it turns out you dont reject you. So the net effect this is very important. What it means is you dont take any of those antirejection medicines. So you radically lower the cost, you dramatically increase the likelihood of success, you eliminate waiting lists. Its a different world. Number one problem, food and drug administration. [laughter] virtually every regenerative scientist i talk to says theyre almost certainly going to take tear products to singapore or china or japan or india or europe because the food and drug administrations hopeless. This gives you a sense of what we talk about is pioneers of the future, and then we talk about Prison Guards of the past. And imagine it was the 1840s and we had government in its modern form. The stagecoaches would hire lobbyists to pass a law to say that railroads could not go faster than a horse. [laughter] because its an unfair competitive advantage. [laughter] you may think im exaggerating. In the 1920s the newspapers got congress to pass a law that made it illegal to have radio news. [laughter] broke down in the 1930s, but there was a brief period when you could not legally have radio news. Because, you know, people protect their own selfinterest is. Very few people go out voluntarily, give up their interest for the greater good. And thats why you have this constant tension between pioneers of the to future and the Prison Guards of the past. Now, one of the areas thats going to become the most fascinating is online learning. This is being streamed on youtube, for example, tonight. Well, one of my favorite examples is right here in california. Theres a and, again, when you talk about pioneers of the to future, just as henry ford was amazing and edison was amazing, the Wright Brothers were amazing, there are people wandering around today who are amazing. Sebastian thrun was german, but hes now american because he wanted to come to an entrepreneurial, open society where you could do exciting thing things that he thought you couldnt do in germany, too conservative, too closed to new ideas. So he started working on Artificial Intelligence at car megy melon. He participated in the earliest experiments of building a selfdriving car as a project that the projects agency set up a prize. And the early cars didnt go very far. They didnt go very far, and they werent very reliable. They got better every single year. He then moved to google, he was the head of their selfdriving car project. He then decided he would teach a course on advanced computing, and heed and Vice President he and the Vice President of research for google announced they were going to jointly teach a course at stanford, and they were going to make it available online. They had 400 students in the classroom, they had 151,000 sign up. It drove the Stanford Administration crazy because how do you regulate it . And how do you know theyre getting a stanfordquality course . And why respect they paying tuition if. [laughter] they had i dont know the exact number, i think it was 43,000 completed the course. On the final exam be, the highest rated student in the course in the stanford class was number 441. That is, 440 people who were not in the class got a higher score on the final than the best student at stanford in the class. I saw sebastian after this experience was over, and he said it was very humbling. He said he always thought he was a great lecturer, and hed always loved his lectures. And he suddenly discovered that if you took the online course, which was a problembased course, you did better than if you spent the same amount of time listening to his lectures. [laughter] now, he then took from that and founded a firm called udacity. This is a good example of a pioneer of the future. The stated goal of udacity is to provide Higher Education for 90 reduction in cost. And so recently they announced at georgia tech that u, the acity was now going to take a 70,000 residential masters degree in advanced computing, and they were going to offer the masters degree online for 7,000. First of all, think about what that does to student loans. Second, if youre an adult and this is a class you really need but you live in minnesota or you live in Southern California and youre not going to move to georgia tech, you can now take it in the mornings, on the weekends, while youre on vacation. All of a sudden weve begun to liberate you from the professors schedule. Most education is stunningly inefficient. The course will be offered from 10 20 to 11 40 at the convenience of the professor three days a week. Well, thats not thats the world thats going to rapidly disappear despite every effort of the Prison Guards at the University System to block it. The most famous example you can go look these things up yourself. Im not making any of this stuff up. Go look up duolingo. Duolingo is a free site that teaches seven different languages. Now, it raises a very interesting question about the future of language education. It also raises a question about the ability to start teaching literacy on your smartphone so that nobody whos today illiterate has an excuse. We had a huge problem, i think in detroit the literacy rates 47 . Its an enormous problem. And were never going to get it fixed by having literacy teachers from 57 two nights a week. But you can start to think about whole new structures of learning. The most famous example, this is the khan academy. Khan is a finance year whos doing financier whos doing very, very well, and he had some nephews who were not doing well in math, and so he began doing 68 minute youtube videos explaining one math problem at a time. One of the things i discovered early on very much like Sebastian Thrun is that if he talked directly to them live, they learned less than if he taped a video and sent it to them. Partially because of the pressure, partly because they could keep repeating it until they got it, which you cant its very hard to ask a human being three or four or five or six times because you get frustrated, they get frustrated, you get can embarrassed and they get angry. But if its taped, they dont care how often you watch it. This is all art of what duolingo does. Ive occasionally taken particular sections eight times because i cant quite get it. The computer never minds. It doesnt come back and say, boy, are you stupid. [laughter] there are today at the khan academy 3,000 hours of material, and they get ten million visitors a month. Now, im just suggesting to you were at the edge of breakthroughs. Very obvious example. Every state should adopt a law that says if you need unemployment compensation, you have to sign up for online learning, because we will pay to help you improve yourself. [applause] so think about it. This is a perfect example of what i mean by breakout. The morning you say we are no longer going to subsidize bass fishing and deer hunting [laughter] if you cant get a job, were not going and this isnt the old conservativism. The old conservativism said why dont we just abolish it . Well, youre not going to abolish it. Its not plausible. Youll never get the votes. In the process, you sound like you dont care what happens to these people. And if you do say i care enough about you that i want you to actually acquire new skills so you can get a better job, its also the answer to the crisis in the middle class. Unless you upgrade our skill level as a country, youre not going to upgrade our income level. Now, what i just did is i took 100 billion weve been throwing away, and i turned it into the Largest Adult Job Training Program in American History. Without spending any more of your money. I suspect, by the way, the morning they actually say you have to do something for it, youll see a stamm drop in the number a substantial drop in the number of people taking unemployment compensation. Because if they have to work, they might as well work. [laughter] and thatll leave you with a significant change in attitude. But it all goes back to some core questions. The towppedding fathers all the Founding Fathers all believed in work. If you look at calistas books, when you look at land of the pilgrims pride which is about the colonial period, captain john smith. If you dont work, you wont eat. He didnt say that to the poor, he said it to the rich. They paid their way over. He said to they said to him you cant make us work, after all, weve already paid for it. And he said, youre right, you dont have to work. We dont have any extra margin. Were a brand new colony, so if you dont work, there wont be any food for you. But dont worry about it, youre right. [laughter] luckily, there werent enough lawyers at that point for them to get an injunction [laughter] just a small part. Now, let me carry this to onere area which, frankly, drives me nuts. And aye been on this now ive been on in this now for almost 20 years. I will say to frame this for a second, i am the only speaker of the house in your lifetime to help create four consecutive balanced budgets. [applause] and i am adamant that we adopt a balanced budget as one of our goals. [applause] i think the National Conversation for 2014 and 2016 should be very simple. Its essentially three and a half topics. Is obamacare the best we can do, or can we develop a breakout to a genuinely personal Health System that uses all the modern capabilities weve got . Thats number one, because you cant avoid it. Two, is this economy the best we can do, or can we get a breakout to the pioneers of the future liberating us once again to be the most dynamic, fullemployment, highincome society in the history of world . Three, are we, are we going to continue to steal from our children and grandchildren, or is it time to get to a balanced budget by fundamentally changing the government . And then the other issue which i list as a half issue because its not relevant right now every day, but it could bite us at any time, and that is is this, is the current policy of weakness, confusion really a very reliable National Security policy, or is the world dangerous, and do we need a much more coherent foreign and National Security policy . Thats not on the front burper right now. Unfortunately, the nature of the world as you remember 9 11, that can get on the front burner every morning. These are in refunds. This is the refund for your taxes. When i say crux, they send 585 checks to one address in singapore. They said over 850 checks to one address in lithuania. Now, at one level you have to ask yourself, how you ended up with a government so mindless and so incompetent that it could do this. 4 billion is an big money, but if you had to choose between giving it away to crooks or spending it at the National Institutes of health on research, i would argue it would probably be dramatically better to spend on research. I know this is a bold outside the box, unfair, you know what drives me crazy about congress is businesses effort to think this stuff through. And im writing a paper right now where im going to call foresight hearings. Is the difference. Oversight hearings are when a group of cant think it together and they pontificate for the opening our this is really bad i cant believe how bad this is, and im really embarrassed that this is a better than the bureaucrats come in and they all say, well, this is not quite as bad as it seems that it is pretty bad and we feel really bad about how bad it is amply want you to know we take full responsibility for how bad it is which is no mean because we all have lifetime jobs. But we are happy for you to beat up on us for a while if it means you feel better and we can then go back to continue to do whatever it was were doing which is totally stupid before we came down here. Nothing is going to change anyway. The congressman also a this has been a highly meaningful hearing and im confident isnt this what you watched for most of her life . Heres how a foresight hearing would go. You spend the first time of it describing what you can accomplish. For example, and iris system whose refund accuracy level is comparable to American Express visa or master charged. Not an outside the box these are three institutions are alive. You can measure them. The second part of the hearing you are bringing people who do it well. I list those three companies from the people who run security worldwide for automatic teller machines. I always tell people one of the great virtues of mcdonalds and Similar Institution is a trainer of very young people. Liberals were crazy to attack working mcdonalds. Its the first of young kids encounter the idea that the accuracy you have to have on your Cash Register is higher than 70 . [laughter] that 70 may be passing in school because it has no meaning in the real world, but in the real world that actually would like to be like, say, 100 . [laughter] this is an enormous shock and its become a bigger shock the worst our schools have gotten but all of a sudden these little kids are going, you mean everyday . [laughter] you mean the change has to be accurate for every customer . Wont you cut some slack . What if i only do nine out of 10 . Im sincere. Dont you like me . [laughter] and this is kind of the problem over the federal government is we know how to solve this. You solve it by replacing the current bureaucratic structure not by reforming it. This is a 130 year old model that doesnt work anymore. The main event worst but certainly doesnt work now. And its a model based on paper. So youve all these nice bureaucrats sitting around with her paper when all the crooks are sitting around with ipads. [laughter] your the second great virtue that the crooks work after five. [laughter] i first learned that my best friend in high school who is a favorite successful tax lawyer. And i said whats the key to what you do quick she said i work later. He said, the irs has a rule and its a fairly late game process to issue rule and the time that have the Comment Period and then finalize the rule, i will abound a new loophole for my client to get around the rule. I will stay late enough that night that i will figure it out and they youll been taken three years to discover the new loophole that ive already found about and issue the new rule, i will abound a new loophole. He said i make a lot of money because my client thinks this is cool. [laughter] omlts of immigran immigrant con believes nothing further is a good thing. Frankly, almost every american delays not being the federal government. Ive had very few people rush in and say i feel so bad. Could i give them more . [laughter] so the second phase would be to i shall bring people who do it well. The third phase would be in a very calm way to bring in the people currently in charge and just say, explain the system. This is a system this is what i learned from taking a tutorial from the father of the call the movie. This is not about bad people. These are decent people in a terrible system. And so you have to say tell me what the system is. And then you ought to bring in experts who can say, all right, here is a system that works and heres a system that fails. If you want to get to the system that works it means you have to have these changes. I think what would be very helpful for the country at the last stage of these countries would be members talking among themselves in public and saying given what we have now learned, what do we think the systems changes ought to be . This is endemic to the president the other day to his credit began to explain i dont think he understood the implications, but he began to explain that his campaign could be effective because they work in the federal government. If you havent read this, this is the most interestiinteresti ng thing that obama has said at a philosophical level in terms of the most interesting thing he said was a never realize that buying insurance was hard. I said at the time if youre 52 and youre just now learning that buying insurance is complicated, maybe you shouldnt have tried to redo the entire country. [applause] but he said two other things. This one press conference when he was clearly totally rattled, and its almost painful the Washington Post put up six pictures of them with very different images of sorted between defeat, dismay, disillusioned and whatever the other words were. He said two other things at a personal level were passing. One was he said, he hadnt realized it would be more complicated to buy Health Insurance that it is going kayaking or ebay or amazon. The founders of google support supporting to the founders of facebook supported him. The id he didnt bring in a bunch of these guys sometimes two or three years ago and said, hi, how hardy thing will be to design a complex system which requires them to give you all their personal information so we can have a calculated to tell them whether subsidies so they never know the real cost because they would be real mad . Apparently nobody who is competent ever wanted innocent what youre trying what he is doing is much harder than ever some. Its not a fair comparison. And then the last piece was, and he said he really did believe after the last week that it was going to work. Which leads you to two possibilities. A, it is that out of touch with reality about the largest single domestic project, which he think he understands about iran . Or north korea . And b, if this thing is as big a mess as it seems to be, how come no one has been fired . [applause] if you want to talk about institutionalizing incompetence it is having people failed on a grand scale and keeping them. Because it sends a signal to everybody else that there no standards that matter. What matters is friendship and favoritism. And this is an enormous, enormous problem. But the strategically bigger thing he said, and he goes on about three or four sentences of the. He says, you know, setting up an i. T. Program for the campaign was easy because we didnt have all these federal regulations. [laughter] and then he goes on at length about the federal regulations. This raises i happen to agree. And i told someonefrom one of his assistants a couple weeks ago this is a great excuse to look at all the federal regulations because if you look at the f35 cost overruns, they are as big a scandal as obamacare but they dont get the same level after which the Defense Department today which is got to a minimum of 200 billion a year of institutionalized waste. Its true across the whole system. Everyplace you turn, our estimate is medicaid medicare we are between 70 110 billion paid the crooks every year. This begins to be real money on a big scale. It also sickens the whole system. You look around you said i could be an honest doctor or i could be rich. Gee, i think ill just rip off the government for a few months. Its really dangerous to the very fabric of our society. But theres a secondary part. Which nobody was fast enough asking which will be coming up over and over. I should mention in passing precommercial absorbing in passing precommercial uncertainty raise it on crossfire for any of the would like to watch but its on cnn, 6 30 p. M. Eastern time five nights a week. [applause] but heres the question which want to ask all of those supporters to come on board, if the federal government document says is such a total mess, that you couldnt work a website, why would you think you could run the Health System . Because its vastly more the website is easy. By deciding which person gets a kidney transplant, deciding who gets the right cancer treatment, these are not decisions you will made in washington, d. C. By people looking even get a website up. I think it may turn out in the long run that obama may be one of the greats trainers of conservatism in American History. We never generation. [applause] but im going to post this and take some questions someone does mccain. I want to close this with the question. I want you to understand how deeply i feel. If all we do is be negative, if we do is take advantage of every mistake they make, we will have totally failed to serve the country. The fact is you need a positive model a breakout to replace the Prison Guards. You need a vision of a dramatically Better Future to organize a energies and to arouse our excitement and to get this moving forward again. We have to have a conservative movement which is dedicated to meeting together all of the pioneers of the future, dedicated to developing and extraordinarily exciting sense of an american future and dedicated to open a program so when we know what we are doing. I am tired of personality oriented campaigns dominated by negative attack ads a whose net result is nothing positive happens for america. I wrote breakout as a starting point to the conversation for the next two years to say to people, when you run into a politician as somewhat therefore. Dont ask them what theyre against. Whats the replacement . Electric and deficit spending can find, how are you going to get a balanced budget . We dont like the current economy, what i going to do to get us to grow at the rate we ought to . Coming out of this deep of recession, we will be growing five or 6 a year. We should be pulling back into the middle class. We will be solving a lot of our problems by just the sheer dynamics of a recovery. We are getting none of that right now. Dont just tell me which are getting. Dont know what youre for. Ive been to all too many campaigns in the last 15 years that have been negative, eddie, personality oriented and they think they dont show the country well and i dont think will solve our problems with that approach. I hope you will read breakout but if you agree with me that this was an important concept inhibiting the people who think in that line in future, think about Prison Guards of the pass, we could really begin a dialogue that is future past and is very powerful in terms of bringing many people together who wouldnt know my think they were on the same side and i would appreciate it if you decide the street if you let all your friends and neighbors interface with associates and so forth know that you feel that way. Am i allowed to take questions . We are going to do a few questions. We will start with this young lady right here. If youll stand and stick your name and ask your question. Fellow. My name is danielle. Im with the chapman republicans, and our question kind of as a whole group is, how do you get students to stop, Pay Attention to liberal ideas which kind of just feel good and sound good and start listening to real issues and doing whats best for the country instead of just what makes them feel good about themselves . Good question. [applause] i think there are two parts to. One is what Margaret Thatcher said, first had to win the argument, then you win the vote. You have to think about what im going to say to a lot of liberals is they mightve been great ideas. They dont work. So i would hardly say to them, gee, go look at the porsche neighborhoods in Southern California. Do you think the government has worked likes tell me about your job prospects compared to your parents when they were your age. Tell me about your student loans. The obama people always say, boy, you now get to stay on your parents insurance until 26. My answer is, id like you have a job so you can have your own interest before your 26. [applause] mr. Speaker, my name is tom. Who do you feel that we have in government right now that could champion such an action that youre trying to promote . I think there are a lot of pretty smart people. For so i think theres some governors who are doing very interesting things. If you look at Governor Scott walker, for example, he is really had a big impact. If you look at governor rick perry. Texas kreis retaining more jobs than about 20 for other states combined. It has done so and anyway. Its not been an accident. If you look at john kasich was return ohio around the bobby jindal who has the widest School Choice program in the country. A lot of interesting governors. And candidly although some conservatives dont necessarily are not mr. In love with him but Chris Christie deserves a lot of credit. He took on a very blue state and he really has changed a lot about breakout in a way thats very impressive and i think we ought to start from there. When i work with specific people in congress, a lot of different folks in the last couple days, been talking with rob portman who knows a lot about the irs. Ron johnson who is a manufacture was elected to the city in wisconsin would be a good example. Mike barr just as a medical doctor who served in the u. S. House. Carries around bashing his a smart phone, but a smartphone has an app that does cardiology. So he can cash in your getting an electrocardiogram on his smartphone. He forgets where he going and what were trying to college. Tim griffin is a great congressman from arkansas. Florida knows the jump direction where to go when. Theres enough to be hopeful about. Mr. Speaker, we are taking questions from youtube. Weve been online all week so we have some that people had emailed him and we will start now with the first one. Because you cant see the screen, i will we get to you. How would you rate the president obamas Foreign Policy compared to that of Richard Nixon . This is from kevin jacobsen. [laughter] i dont know. Without getting myself into much trouble, it would be like how you compare a bunny and a german shepherd. [applause] i mean, i really do worry to the country for the next years but if you watch the syrian vasco, you watch whats happening in libby, there were 300 People Killed in iraq last week. You look at whats happening in egypt it to look at whats happening around the world. You look at north korea. The person who negotiated the north korean agreement said the North Koreans would not get a Nuclear Weapon at which they have exploded three since the agreement is the person who is helping organize the iranian project. You talk about learning nothing. So i am very concerned. I think obama has a fantasy view of the world. Reinforced by and inability to listen and with people around him who are at least as out of touch with reality as he is. I think thats really dangerous. And i think that weve been very lucky up to now but we shouldnt kid ourselves. The relative importance of the niceties in the world today is dramatically smaller than it was the day he took office. Everyday that hes in office its going to keep declining because foreign leaders are taking market of them and they dont find much there. Spent in the back of the room from a contractor. Im jim sharp. I of a twopart question. One is, are you going to run for president of the United States . I dont know him. Second part, what would you do about job creation . Well, look, this is not complicated. We have done this over and over in our history. The first thing you do is you favor job creators. That means by the congress as big a problem for california as anyone in the country, means less red tape, less regulation like to see the Small Business committee Holding Hearings on how many things to Small Businesses have developed that are utterly totally unnecessary and just abolish them . I think we need to go through a period of liberating people and making it exciting to be in business, exciting to go out and create jobs. It also someone who has the courage to defend business and free enterprise. As Margaret Thatcher once said, somebody doesnt permit, you cant take it away from them and spend it. So the problem with socialism is you run out of other peoples money to spend. I think we need of some of his as we know how to create jobs, weve been very good at it historically, but you dont have by having another Government Agency invest billions in fancy industries that go bankrupt. Thats a misallocation of resource. Its a misallocation of talent that can injure taking hundreds and hundreds of smart people and encouraging the go off after that will collapse and waste two or three or four or five years doing something has no future. And thats why franklin the army things, could do well. Im very big for government doing basic research. I think it has a huge impact for basic research. But trying to pretend that government can be a venture capitalist isnt until guaranteed way to go broke. To your right on going to go to the screen for another question. This one is from julia of mesa, arizona. Who are the Prison Guards of American Society today . Good question. The primary Prison Guards are interest groups, lobbyists and bureaucracies. And to some extent politicians. For example, in the Space Program with the major impediments is that both republican and democratic members of congress see the Space Program as porkbarrel rather than adventure. So they will defend the company or the Government Agency in the district or the state even if its no longer competent because its jobs. This has been a major problem for nasa which is basically not just a milk cow for politicians to waste money as opposed to being as a bold and dynamic and adventurous thinker i think you could almost go see government, county or state government, and the federal government and say, who is blocking the future . Who is blocking competition . By the way, when obama to collapses, which im fairly certain it will, the great fight the left will not have a fight. The left wants singlepayer. They think britain and canada were. Even though the canadian Prime Minister of newfoundland recently went to florida for an operation that they couldnt get in canada, and the former head of the National Health service in Great Britain died after the operation had been postponed four times. But that doesnt matter if youre a genuine socialist. There are occasional casualties in way for perfection and what the heck. The real fight will be on the right and it will be between the prison guard action of the talking part in the Democratic Party who will say, oh, insurance, i hated government bureaucrats but insurance bureaucrats are terrific. Those of us know you want to break it to generally personal Health System. Fundamentally different model this will be the big fight and youll then find out who Prison Guards are because a good example, a little firm in Silicon Valley which i always get wrong, was found about young woman who is a sophomore at stanford, dropped out, tucker Education Trust and can put it into starting a company. Spent 10 years at designing a micro testing system. Take a tiny amount of your blood, all of you have been to the doctor and had them draw lots of blood to the take a tiny amount, they can run 1000 different tests. They do it for 50 of the current cost. Their estimate is eight saves medicare their estimate is it saves medicare and medicaid combined six and 57 million over years. Unc Prison Guards emerge . Every hospital has its own web. Every National Laboratory corporation. Do you think they want to drop their prices 50 . Do you think they want to have to invest in new technology . So every time you can rent you will find there are plenty of Prison Guards around. The key is for us to develop a more and more exciting future and gradually nobody voluntarily set to mcdonalds and walmart wed like to go out of business. They just had to in the fight for customers. Eight clothing designer from huntington beach. Thank you so much for being here. My question for you is, as millions of americans continued to lose their Health Care Coverage because of obamacare, what do you foresee the ramifications of that being . I suspect its a great question that i suspect there will be a very bold attempt sometime next spring to fundamentally start dismantling of obamacare, and about half the democrats will be involved in the dismantling. I dont think when people realized by the way that the number who may get letters next october is 93 million. So you see the amount of pain out of 5 million. Well, the best estimate we have right now from the government itself is 93 million. If youre a democrat up for reelection and you think to yourself, october [laughter] gee, i wonder how that will affect their vote in november . And i think its that, you may see some very bold and dramatic fights. It will be interesting to see whether obama basically takes the position that he would rather make his own party trying to defend obamacare or whether he will, in fact, decide that he has no choice except to become flexible and fix it but it is so clearly not going to work. One more from the right side. A gentleman from palm springs. My question to you, mr. Speaker, is this. What do you think of mark lavergnes constitutional contention that he is calling for by the state to solve many of the problems of which you spoke to earlier this evening as changing our constitution to deal with those and equities. I would be much more interested if mark would expunge me who he thinks is going to get elected to that convention. I mean, if you look at the last two elections you have to assume the convention would be dominated by people who supported obama. Im not sure thats Constitutional Convention i particularly want to be a part of. So im very cautious about putting the whole thing up for bid. Second, even if he had the people who spent 85 days in philadelphia riding the original document were among the most Extraordinary People effort to try to shape human history. The idea that we are going to somehow cleverly matched that strikes me as not very clever because all of them had been involved in writing constitutions for a decade. They all had written colonial and state constitutions. They had written the articles of confederation. These guys have been thing about this a lot. There is nobody today, not a Single Person who has that depth of understanding with practical self govern that those people have. Spent another online question. This one is, we know that the heavily bureaucrats bureaucrat obamacare is asking for negative consequences. If given the opportunity to formulate health care policy. How do you propose we approach the Americas Health care debacle . First of all and is unimpressed with your reach in terms of the different places people are running from. I action on the way out to be was writing a paper on this topic which starts with an assumption that obamacare is going to collapse and that the real fight would be between singlepayer and then write splitting between the old order and the effort to create a new order. So going to talk a minute i get about the new order. You can go to encourage productions. Com and signup and we send out at least two newsletters a week for free. We also let you know when other things are published about this kind of stuff. Im going to give you three Core Principles for how i think we should approach fundamentally rethinking this and ill let you apply it to them. The first is, it should be built from the individual back, not from the larger system down. I would give you two examples. We are trying to write a health bill of rights right now for americans. You absolutely should have the right to know that your own medical record. He should have the right to know price and quality. None of the insurance covers will tell you price and quality. None of the labs will tell you what they charge. They are all contracted. None of the medical Device Companies are upset about this tax, none of them wanted to what the price of their equipment is. If you went to hospital for hip replacement and 25 different options, you would know, have any idea which one works better or which one cost more. I always tell people, you cant have a market if theres no price and quality information. So i want to empower you to play a major role in your health, which means you will inevitably deal with your doctor. You will do with your dentist or farms. In an ideal world you wouldnt have this current pattern where the Insurance Company creates a Narrow Network and you find out that the is no longer the Network Scenario go to someone youve never met before. And the whole process becomes very depersonalized. Would get along when i think its bad medicine because doctors and nurses and pharmacists have to deal with the entire person. So my first point would be you want it to build around you to my second point is we ought to start with the Information Technology that now exists. A doctor in san diego wrote a book on the he invented some device and he was on nbc one night. As others were fogarty turned and put it up to the chest of the patient, read in realtime what it said and then said to the reporter, last year that wasnt 800 test. Like that. What if you designed the system to maximize the flow of information . And to maximize needs and continues to this as we start getting into all sorts of prison guard problems. You want to start for example, anybody could have their own ekg on their cell phone if they wanted. This will drive your doctor crazy. [laughter] that doesnt mean you shouldnt be allowed to do it. Finally, you want to maximize the rate of innovation, not minimize it. The two areas i focus on our Regenerative Medicine which for example, if we could replace your kid isnt putting on kidney dialysis, the quality of your life goes up, the ability to get work, you stay up, youre still a taxpayer and the process, you choose lead a lot better in the event life. And so Regenerative Medicine is a big deal. The other really big deal which is very hard to get to in washington is research. You take autism, alzheimers, parkinsons, mental health, you have a whole list. If we can make the kind of breakthroughs that are possible in the next 10215 years, we will save trillions of dollars. And save millions of people from agony. You just cant get this across. So you in this thing a tiny amount issued even though the you know in the budget that youre just going to be crushed in the out years. So build it around the person and their doctor and the pharmacist and dentist. Built it around Information Technology that is current and future Technology Come and maximize the rate of innovation thats whats going to save the most lives and the most money. And is also by the way going to create the highest value of american jobs. If you 80 of the world of breakthroughs in health an in te next 30 years in the United States, we would have more highvalue jobs than you could imagine because as the whole planet gets richer they all want to live longer. So health is both a cause but also an enormous opportunity for high income jobs. We will be one more question so we can go to the book signing. Hi, mr. Speaker. Twopart question. Under president washingtons administration, hamilton brought us from the huge ward at two on the way to becoming a world class economy. Not quite the policies were seeing today but can you learn from what hamilton did write . The second part, the Housing Market crash compared to the crash of 29, both of those lead to Big Government influence and the people looking to them. What do we learn from the cause of both of those and be prevent those things and how they can to prevent people from expecting Big Government . Look, you raise a very important and its always a very sophisticated question. Let me start by saying i believe the Federal Reserve should be audited annually. I think that this [applause] you cannot have a public official with the scale up our the chairman or chairwoman of the fed has. And have no accountability. This is a very dangerous model. And its a model that invites cronyism and as a model that advice behaviors that are really destructive. Second, i personally the only job of the Federal Reserve should be stable money. I think we are gambling on creating a bubble of unbelievable proportions. This whole model by which they been floating more and more paper. At one point bernanke said if he had to get in a helicopter and throw money out just to make sure there was enough money, i think that is a remarkably onesided and, frankly, wrong image of what the Great Depression was all about. I think that they are they are running enormous dangers of creating a crisis of too much money. The only reason inflation hasnt gone up is if the economy is so weak, this is a brief side the. This inflation is the point of money multiplied by the speed of money. Its quantity times velocity. So if you have lots and lots of money but nobody spending it, the net of the to multiplied is pretty small. The morning you start seeing the economy improve, you watch, you will see inflation go through the roof. We have never had this much paper just sitting out there floating. It also allows you to avoid solving all your big problems. The family that is given a huge credit, unlimited credit card and told nothing is due for 10 years. Well, its pretty hard to turn to get to say no, were not going to go to disneyland because we cant afford it. So we havent dealt with any of our underlying structural problems. We are nowhere close to do with a balanced budget. And yet what hamilton did if you read the first report on the debt, he did two things. He created a and he insisted that we honor our debt. And that we pay for it and that we do so with hard money. This was a deliberate design to get the world to trust us. We are very close and ill be very interagency how the new chairman does because she is ostensibly very much on the proinflation prosoft money side. I do not like the Federal Reserve bank is powerful. I do not like it being this sick of it. I think it is a very great danger to the entire fabric of our society and when he does a very serious and significant reform in the system. Let me say once again, you guys are brilliant. You do a perfect job here. We are looking forward to meeting people and signing books and we always seem to have such a great time when we can and we thank all of you for coming out tonight. [applause] ladies and gentlemen, he has been here 12 times but we want him back 12 more. And to help give them an incentive for coming back, yes, im presenting this one of the kind numbered limited edition, limited to the number we can sell any gift shop, what would nixon do coffee mug. [applause] take it right out there and away you go. We would like to for me. Tweeted should the buck, twitter. Com booktv. When it comes to metal mining, the district surpasses anything that is heretofore existed in excess of 1. 2 million ounces of silver is that makes the district the number one silver mining producer in the history of the u. S. They want to keep them sharp. The blacksmith was an important job. They cant see very well. A probable acid last time they were here. When attempting back in there doing a technique called scaling. They want to that nice solid sharp sound. If this sounds like a hollow sound, hey, there is listening to the. I cant see the very well but it sounds fun. Thats where getting their goods and tools as our scaling all that loose rock off. Working hard scaling all that loose rock back to the nice solid rock before they start all over blasting. They like to hold their hands still for safety but a lot of them didnt get our natural instinct is to hold them like this. But they had tricked. They like to use the thumbnail to give them a target. That type of Energy Injury might put you out of business. The safeway was to hold them like this. They hated, turned a corner of a turn, hit it, turn it a quarter of turn. These hang of these if you dont do it that way. This is whats called the started the. They start with a short one, move on to the longer hand drills. Some believe they blow out there light torch to conserve them. The coeur dalene mining district is one of the richest in the world. Find out more this weekend as booktv and American History to be look at the history and literary life of coeur dalene, idaho. All weekend on cspan2 and today at 5 p. M. Eastern on cspan3. Heres a look at some of best selling nonfiction books according to the los angeles times. This list reflects sales as of december 1. A look at some this weeks best selling nonfiction books according to the los angeles times. Next from the Chicago Tribune printers row lit fest, Douglas Foster talked about his book after mandela. He spoke with author and journalist Alex Kotlowitz for about 45 minutes. Nelson mandela died on decembe december 5. Thanks. This is a real treat to be here today with the. We are old friends. For those of you not familiar with his work, doug was formerly editor of mother jones. Doug and i are also colleagues at Northwestern School of journalism. Its a thrill to be or to talk about his recent book, after mandela which i think is a beautifully written account of contemporary south africa. I think a profoundly important book. Made we can talk some about the. I think it is profound import not on because it would help us understand whats taking place in south africa but i think it also, it has many lessons for us here in the u. S. As well as elsewhere. As countries emerge from years of tyrannical regime and theyre trying to sort of find a way to some kind of democratic government, some kind of democratic system. Thought that we would begin may be talking a little bit about mandela investment in use in the hospital now. I think its fair to say that he is near death, and i always found it interesting, i said the dog that he found his book after mandela, not after apartheid. One of the questions i have to begin is a couple days ago an activist in south africa ask the question, would weve been much better off if mandela had served a second term . Right. So he said we would have been better off if he had had a second term because quote, because he was a committed democrat, unquote. I think it raises all kinds of interesting questions about the history because, of course, mandela whistle was old by the e was released from prison. He had been in prison for 27 years, and that kind of delay in a transfer of power to a new government, liberated nonracial south africa, meant that he really was in a position where the only wanted to serve for five years. I think this question about the Mandela Legacy gets raised, and also an assumption that everything since mandela stepped aside from power in 1999 has been a devolution. And i think in some ways this book is an answer to that. It says yes, a lot was lost both by the fact that there was 27 years in prison, the oppression and apartheid the lead to kind of constraints on what the new south africa could become your but also that its a more complicated story than that and that there is a new generation emerging that will shape the country postapartheid, postmandela, posttransition. Im curious, you know, i mean in reading the book its clear that they have had very troubled governments, both the ability to deal with the aids epidemic to incredible poverty and trying to one of the things thats interesting to me is the difficulty people often have the at one point during the opposition and next being in charge. We saw that here in this country postcivil Rights Movement where theres a wonderful book i think about often about a small town and southern georgia, the civil Rights Movement came late to the county and those who sort of really were in opposition to the sheriff and ultimate power, how difficult, difficulty they had once they had any kind of power. And so i guess i wonder why, what happened . Its the big question in a place like this. Obviously, people came back from 30 years in exile come in the case of the successor to Nelson Mandela in 1999. Mostly living in london. And all of a sudden in charge of running a country that he didnt know that he left as a young man of 19, coming back and needing to run the place that was bankrupt the he described former president described walking into the office in Union Buildings after being sworn in and finding nothing. No computers, no pencils, no pins. No paper, and which to manage this developing country. So i think part of it is that that generation came back from exile to a country they did know. And that the presidency is in hands of somebody who is skilled, largest hit by having part of the guerrilla army, the formation, the armed wing of the anc and the chief of intelligence. Slate got this succession of people from different parts of the Liberation Movement taking over who had been out of the country for longer to time, or had been imprisoned for laundries of time. And to a certain extent that shape some of the mistakes that have been made in the last yea years. Does thabo mbeki talk but what surprised we came back after all those years and except . Want to thank you quickly learn when you interview people or politicians and political power is nothing ever surprise them. So the main thing that upset him every time i was into being and is, i would ask that question what would surprise you to what was unusual, what jumped out at you . Every, i would say that he would lean back, take a look at me with a lizardlike look when you know you have irritated him. And that would come. Know, my brother, never surprised. Never admit you were surprised. I think the things that surprised thabo mbeki certainly who was the second president of the liberated south africa was extent to which the division between people in rural areas and those people who have migrated and were part of the kind of hybridizing, modernizing urban experience, but that divide had if anything, grown deeper while he had been away. The differences between the socalled people from rural areas who have indigenous beliefs and the people who are more westernized and christianized, that that kind a dividing line really posed huge challenges to the anc in coming, governing a liberated country. That had their goal that was announced in 1994 of becoming a nonracial, nonsexist, nonhomophobic and more a galloping society. Big dreams for a very troubled place. So just to be clear, so why was it that they didnt like the idea that they could have been surprised by what they saw . Well, because if you come up in marxist leninist thought end you have done the right of study about the objective conditions that are shaping history, then the last thing youd ever want to admit is something caught you by surprise. Youve got this wonderful line early on in the book, and of going to just read it in which you write you were intrigued by how a society stitches itself together in the wake of horrific traumas. And for me its a very resonant because i think a lot about violence in this country. I think a lot about the western and how individuals and committees try to wind their way after experiencing such trauma. I would love to your thoughts about what this meant for south africa, coming out of what was really an incredible he violent period. You know, i came to this story after maybe 25 years of covering stories like it in my native california and in latin america, particularly in central america, in peru, argentina. Much other people are being better than war correspondents than being under fire. I tend to be the kind of person who comes in after a story has been forgotten for a while, and the thing that intrigues me is exactly this point. What is it that takes, that it takes for people to figure out after horrific trauma in which unbelievable things have been done and find the room, the space, the social space, psychological space, economic and social justice space in order to gain some traction to make Something Better . And thats what i was interested in looking at here. I think, i think back to the friends of mine who were correspondents in 1994 in south africa who were sent to cover the election, who went fully expecting that they were going to cover i dont how many people in the room remember what the kind of run up to the election was like. They were 12,000 people who were killed in violence between the ifp and the anc, and the full expectation was that there was going to be huge amount of violence and he was going to be a disaster. And largely, the election came off largely nonviolently, very peacefully. And i think that moment is one of the things that sets the tone in addition to the truth and Reconciliation Commission, and those places in South African life since then where people really expected explosions and huge amounts of violence, and they didnt have it. So i think every time there is an expectation of the catastrophe which media is really good at predicting and covering when it happens, we are not quite as good as getting into the intersystems of what makes people turn away, shift away, sometimes in flight ways that making the overtime and create a new kind of way of being. Can you talk about the place of the truth and Reconciliation Commission . Watching it from a distance is the part that both i think was the most exciting and exhilarating and to think in some ways the most difficult to understand. Yet, i think, again, the truth and Reconciliation Commission got huge attention around the world and brought a kind of i would say oprah like treatment, what was going on in south africa. I would just contrast that with we the people in the township might talk to you if youre asking about the truth and Reconciliation Commission. They might say we have the truth, but not justice. We got truth and not necessarily reconciliation, except reconciliation that ran in one direction which was the protection from criminal charges of people who had committed horrific crimes under apartheid. So i think it is, that is a contested part of the history. It is true though that if you travel around the country you will meet people, you and the family members of people who disappeared during apartheid who will say, i was able to talk to the archbishop. I was able to talk to get other people on the commission, and i found out where my son, where my sons body was. You know, its a difficult, complicated history and hard to sum up in a line or two. But when you talk about one in justice, part of the whole conceit and truth in regulation is, in fact, it wasnt after justice, right . In some ways taken issue with just a notion of the truth and Reconciliation Commission but it wasnt how it operated at our function but just the very notion of having this idea of forgiveness which is the ultimate what it was about. But there was a provision for compensation. They are the commission was i think there was an expectation, still is an expectation on the part of laws of people who were involved in the struggle that those who are part of the whites benefited under apartheid, would at some point actually express some kind of deep grief over what took place, and i think that quite hasnt happened. So the process of the truth in Reconciliation Commission is that people came and spoke their pain and discovered lots of information because police officers, people have been part of the army unit who had disappeared and killed people, came forward and gave details, but theres a certain kind of quality of it. Maybe thats because its under justice. Which has a number of implicati. But one of which is, obviously, that their notion of their nations history is very compact. They really did not experience the struggle against apartheid. And the other part