A tootsie pop can last a good 20 minutes. Its wonderful to seeth even though i havent been to one of these in a while to see so many familiar faces and some new faces and to see a full house you really lift our spirits when people are in the building giving up your free time it tells us we are having an impact so thank you for being here. Its wonderful to see. If you are not very familiar with the Heartland Institute, we are a nonpartisan organization. We believe in free markets and we are here as lobbyists for freedoms. Advocates for freedom. We fight for freedom wherever we can. To develop, discover and promote freemarket solutions to the problems in society. We are mostly known for our work in Global Warming fighting against alarmism and sound science and realism but we address a large number of issues. The core issues over the years have been education, financial budget issues, School Choice in wparticular. Then of late weve been active fighting big tech censorship, the great reset of capitalism to be imposed upon us and environmental social government agenda. We have our Government Relations team in the legislature and weve testified and presented the testimony more than 50 occasions in the First Quarter ofof 2022 including 20 inperson testimoniesof of where most of e times weve been invited by the legislators themselves to advocate and supporter of the freemarket solutions and we do that because of the support of people like you so thank you once again for all of your support here in person and for those that donate to ther institute we are putting your money to good use. To donate more and we will keep doing more for you. Im going to turn the microphone on and before i do i want to say one more thing. A student of history, i love history. And as much as our sessions here discuss policies and politics, ive been especially fired up for this talk for quite some time. Ourra speaker i just wrote a bok that as much history as policy and governance. I purchased a book im not quite through with it yet but i read much of it. Its art compelling narrative. Its a quarter so im going to turn over to youbu for a formal introduction but thank you for being here tonight. Its wonderful to see you. [applause] usually im so loud okay that works. Fantastic. I swear we tested all this stuff dozens of times today. I want to welcome you might have noticed in the back these are friends from cspan so they are here to record this and itsar also on the heartland page. Ewe will get right to it. This is the second or third time. He graduated from Arizona State university. He switched gears again and then got a phd from the university of california Santa Barbara and mouniversity of dayton for 20 years and hes actually taught every single grade from seventh through college, so thats fantastic. He is the coauthor with the New York Times bestseller with history of the United States which is in its 31st printing with half a million copies in print. That book remains the best selling textbook in america and as you might know from the title its supposed to be an antidote to that book in the peoples history of the United States. In 2019 he founded the curriculum website that is available as a full curriculum from eight to 12 with larry himself. You can see all of these were pulled from the major library of freedom here at the Heartland Institute so seven events that made america. How trump wanted, which he offered before the election. A patriots history of the modern world into volumes and the last time he presented the american president from 2018 to talk about his book dragons layers, six president s and the war. Please welcome larry. [applause] he went out of his way to introduce me to the hollywood community. He brought me out and hosted a nice wonderful steak dinner for such people after adam bohlman, ben shapiro and it was nice of him to do that so im always grateful to andrew for leading the way and its interesting because in our home we had a nicet big yard with a picket fence and one day the dog was out there going crazy and there was a raccoon stock and as i usedo to tell my students i walked out and squeezed him so he could run off. For those of you who dont know me, everything he said is more or less true. I ended up teaching at the university in 1985 i want to write books people would read and so around 1999 or so we started work on a textbook and wanted a book that we could use in our classes that wasnt biased and ended up writing a book and never thought we would sell it to a publisher in fact we thought it would be sold out of the back of a van like with the Plastic Straws in california. A publisher did pick v it up ani went on to write three other books after that and then 2010 i was on the glenn beck show. You may remember this is when there was an audience of 3. 5 million. That means seven times that of cnn. Its just staggering how many people. And i gave him a copy and his response was i know this book. Do i know this book. Anybody thats read it knows its a a proper book and respone this is a great book so i knew he hadnt read the book. I get a call four days later and he says when you were on the show i hadnt read the book. I thought thats okay i understand. He said no i always read the guest book. I read it over the weekend. This is a great book. And he is an endorsement, he put it on his desk every night and talked about it three or four or five times a night with little yellow postits and immediately it went to the top of amazon and the following week i got a call from the publisher and said your book is going to be on the New York Times list this week. Way to go. Then i get a call a week later. Your book is going to be in the top ten of the New York Times. Way to go. Thenen i get that call and i can hear him in the background and the champagne popping. I know its going on back there. They said your book is going to be number one on the New York Times list. You dont get it. Its going to be number one. I said no, thats great. You dont get it, its going to be at target, costco, walmart. I said our book is going to be at walmart . Thank you. [laughter] books everybody could read which is what my goal was, so over the years ive gone on to write a number of these others and most recently i started thinking about in the context of donald trump and what he went through not b just 2020 but through his whole administration in terms of people undercutting ends working against him from his own attorney general down. So i thought trump isnt the only one. Thereve been other president s thatbl have had this problem so when i started the book i thought i was looking at six different president s with six different stories and as i began to put it together, i realized we are always talking about the same thing. All of these were related to. Even though i start with lincoln and the slave swamp, the story starts a little bit before with the most important american that youve probably never heard of and that is Martin Van Buren who created thed modern day twopay system and prior to that we had one party and was called the republicans. It really was called the democratic republicans and you knows what that period was called, the era of good feelings because there was so little animosity. Andrew jackson runs for the presidency in 1824 and loses in the corrupt bargain. Martin van buren decided hes going to get in on the presidency but the story goes a lot deeper because you see what van buren was really trying to do was to create a Political Party that could keep the civil war from happening. He would do this by making sure that slavery could not be attacked even as the northern and midwestern states began to have more and more representatives to congress where sooner or later they would act on slavery. How do we keep this from happening in his answer was money. We will buy thesese people off. Even if you are in antislave from pennsylvania we will give you a government job if you just shut up and follow along. Hewe called it the spoiled systm or patronage. As a result, and van buren didnt get this because his goal was to keep the federal government small and the states is stronger. What hed done inadvertently was created a system in which the federal government began to grow with every single election because you had to give away jobs to get elected and by the way m the most powerful job in 1830 was the postmaster general of the unitedth states. Who said i want to be postmaster general . Nobody. Back then everybody wantedst toe postmaster general because you had 80,500 jobs that you got to give away so whoever the president appointed as the postmaster general, he had a lot of power. The whig party they are now on the same Playing Field as the democrats. I forgot to tell you the name of van burens party. So they come along they are on the same Playing Field but the only wayto they can compete is o give away more jobs so in every election theyy promise jobs and more jobs. So the government starts to grow every single election and nobody notices until 1860 because part of van burens strategy was to make sure that the presidency remained in the hands of someone who was not hostile to slavery. And of southern principles is the wayo that it was worded so you either get a democrat or a the northern man of principles inn office from 1828 and then 1860 u. S. Got a big problem because youve got the northern man of northern principles not a group of slavery in office and even thoughs lincoln says i will not act on slavery, he cant help it. He is going to because hes going to appoint the federal marshal. He is going to appoint federal judges who will rule in the slave cases. Hes going to appoint the custom commissioners that may allow off ships docking. Hes going to appoint postmasters who are going to allow abolitionist material. So lincolnsn election caused te civil war that van buren had hoped to avoid because of van buren zone system. Lincoln comes in and one of the first things he notices is he has all these armies of jobseekers lining up down the street at the time he ran the government with two secretaries. Lincoln ran the whole government with two secretaries and literally people could come inside the white house and stand there and form a long line all the way down the block waiting to talk to the president about jobs when he wasnt busy fighting a war, you know. So lincoln couldnt deal with this because his first job was to deal with the slaves. He kind of needed this to defeat the slave swamp which he did. He was the only to become completely successful in his goal. He did defeat. About the spoiled was still continued to grow. It w actually got worse because you had all these veterans who were now claiming benefits by writing of the congressman saying i need all these benefits. It grew as more and more people suddenly had magic memory restoration. Civil warhere was a and they entered so the role to begin to grow was crazy. So you literally have thousands of thousands of these jobseekers descending on washington with each new administration. One author of the day said the trains going f out would be folding into the incoming trains would be full with different people all seeking to take the jobs of those who just left. While, he didnt do a whole lot about this, but the next, and neither did hayes come up with the next guy, James Garfield ran on a program of defeating the swamp. But one small problem, he will got killed and you know who killed him, he spoiled the swamp. A stalwart and now arthur is president. He was thought to be very favorable but hes one of those rare people in washington when he gets in office he has the change of her to do the right thing and he begins to attack. But arthur had another problem. It kept him from serving a second term so hes out. I look at him as trump the first. Cleveland won the popular vote all three times and he comes in and he is staying up late at night in the white house reviewing all these claims from those who were not veterans and throwing them out, vetoing them saying im not going to accept this and we throw out thousands of these and so he finally worked withte congress to create something called the Civil Service act. This supposedly reformed the system. You know what happens in washington when they reform. It gets worse. So they reformed it and they took about a 10 of the total federal employees away from the president and put it in the hands of the Civil Service commission where you would take a test and however you place on the test is what job you would be eligible to serve in. But u the unseen ramification of this is now the president had to so many fewer jobs now they had to give away groups. So in our time to Wrightpatterson Air Force basea saying i believe in the Strong Defense and everybody says yay andd go to colorado to the environmental protections. Giving away the government jobs on a very small level into a very gigantic leveling it within withinthe government growth i td about all of a sudden it started to increase exponentially. Mpmeanwhile, there is another tt is the trump swamp that consisted like twitter and google into these kind of giants today. Teddy roosevelt was determined to do something about this. He feared the meeting deck. He feared the yellow press would create such a firestorm not just against b the big businesses but against all businesses and he believed in his heart he was protecting all business from this mob that would be by the yellow press. Now its interesting i like teddy in a lot of ways and i dont like him at a lot of ways. You cant help but like somebody and egg government job assistant secretary of the navy the war breaks out and he resigns and goes to raise a volunteer cavalry unit that wants to get into action and see combat. Not only does he fight but he wins and he is awarded the medal of honor and then as president he negotiates between japan and russia and is awarded a real Nobel Peace Prize. Can you imagine any modernday president receiving both a medal of honor and a Nobel Peace Prize . Roosevelts one of failure, he never ran a business. I was convinced had Teddy Roosevelt because he succeeded in Everything Else needed if he had just run a business and im not talking about the cattle ranch because that was a fantasy land, that was a playground for him. He had other people run it. Lehe didnt need payroll. I am convinced if he had run a business the antitrust activities would have been different. I dont know how but i think they would have been different. The t one of course that he doesnt take on is the media which at the time wasnt that big but over time in our time its gotten to be monstrous. So the government continues to grow. Agencies continue to grow. New agencies such as the fbi and cia were added so by John Kennedys time in office, hes he isconfronting a cia swamp and kennedys problem, his task he needs to get rid of the cia swamp but needs the cia too much to get rid of it. He n needs it for cuba, he needs it for vietnam or one time when kennedy comes into office there0 americans in South Vietnam and when he is assassinated there were 16,000 so i do not by this notion kennedys going to get us out of vietnam. Funny line from 600 to 16,000 that isnt a trendline of getting out so kennedy feelset betrayed by the cia yet still needs to use them on many occasions thats why we consider him the first failure in the group is he doesnt do anything to bring the cia. Ronald reagan of course runs on a three way pledge one to defeat the soviet union, two to build back the economy and reduce the power and size of government. Unfortunately for reagan, he needs the government, he needs the military and big business to accomplish together to so almost like kennedy he finds that he needs the agency he wants to get rid of too much to get rid of them and i will share one anecdote reagan the american president David Stockman was a true believer in reducing the size of government and they were sending out memos to all the departments how are you coming on reducing the size of your department . How are you doing on reducing the size of the budget and he gets one letter, one memo back he says and this is the guy reagan appointed that believed in reagans agenda he says we already have spent all of this years budget and we spent part of next years budget so i dont think we are going to get around into cutting this anytime soon. It was an amazing admission once youre in the swamp its a darn near impossible to rollback so by 1984, reagan had pretty much given up on his platform promises which was to reduce the size of government and he succeeded in the other two and pretty much had to give up on the third of reducing the bureaucracy. One very important thing happened between kennedy and reagan. Congress had been appointing and creating these committees, these bureaus, these administrative agencies and empowering them but once they got in place, Congress Just let them go and basically any oversight over any of these bureaucracies or Administrative States just let them go so it then fell to the courts to try to handle these but unfortunately was started to happen is the court said congress is set up this agency and gave these powers. Who are we to say that congress is wrong. Missions and even set up their own private Police Forces as some you know, epa and some of the other organizations have so that was a major change in the bureaucracy between kennedy and reagan finally we get to trump and trump came in and he basically gets all for the other swamps, you know, he gets spoil swamp. He gets the the media swamp. He gets a cia swamp fbi swamp the deep state swamp and trumps appointees. Dont help him out a whole lot Jeff Sessions, especially whos probably the worst single appointee in American History. I have to go back a long way to find somebody worse than