Luke Ford

Some people look outside their window and see trees of green, skies of blue, and think, what a wonderful world. Dennis Prager looks outside his window and sees dead people stacking up by the millions. How does Dennis see what you don’t? Because he’s better than you. He’s wiser, smarter and more attuned to the signs of civil war.

Is there any pundit who does not constantly stress the importance of himself and his punditry? Is there any pundit for whom self-advancement is not their primary underlying theme? Is there any pundit who notes that election outcomes in America won’t noticeably effect 99% of Americans 99% of the time? Does any pundit say that your primary purpose, meaning, excitement and morality in life should come from your family (and if you have space after that, from your friends, community and pursuits)? If people get their purpose, meaning, excitement and morality in life from their relationship with their friends and family, then they have no need for pundits. Such people don’t need Dennis Pragers except as a hobby.

They are obsessed with this image of being intellectual renegades fighting the entrenched powers. Yet the exact same rhetoric is pumped out every day on every major right wing media channel and by the popular conservative/heterodox hosts they often speak with. Sad narcissists.

— Chris Kavanagh (@C_Kavanagh) October 23, 2023

On March 30, 2023, former president Donald J. Trump was indicted by a Manhattan Grand Jury. Dennis Prager was outraged. 

In his April 4, 2023 column, Dennis wrote:

Communism — or if you will, left-wing fascism and totalitarianism — is coming to America and Canada, and (a bit more gradually) to Australia and New Zealand.

Our universities have become moral and intellectual wastelands — almost as ideologically pure as Moscow State University was in the Soviet era. As of December 2022, there were seven times more administrators (15,750) at Stanford University than faculty (2,288).

Our medical schools are embracing Soviet-like science. In more and more of them, incoming doctors are instructed not to use the terms “male” and “female.” Harvard Medical School officials use the terms “pregnant and birthing people” rather than “pregnant women.” And children’s hospitals are using hormone blockers (which, among other dangers, can impair future reproductive functioning) and mutilating perfectly healthy teenagers.

Students at elite law schools such as Stanford and Yale behave as if they were members of Komsomol, the Soviet Communist Youth League. On the rare occasions that conservative speakers come to their campuses to give a lecture, students heckle, shout and curse at them, disrupting their ability to speak in ways reminiscent of the Hitler Youth in 1930s Germany.

The greatest of all freedoms, that of speech, is disappearing.

In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, the provincial agency in charge of education has announced that the notion that there is only one correct answer in mathematics is an expression of white supremacy. The Oregon Education Department has announced the same thing. The American Medical Association has declared that no American birth certificates should list the sex/gender of a child — the child will decide that later.

Teachers across the country are robbing children as young as 5 of their innocence. They are routinely taken to drag queen shows where men in women’s clothing dance for them (sometimes lewdly). Why? Because it is the aim of most American schools from first grade to postgraduate to have all American young people believe that sex/gender is “nonbinary” — that alone in the animal kingdom, human beings are not sexually divided into male and female.

In the COVID-19 era, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health and virtually every other national medical and health agency largely abandoned science and even elementary decency (recall all the Americans who were forcibly deprived of any visitors and left to die alone in hospitals) and became tools of the Left. They and America’s Sovietized teachers’ unions ruined millions of American children by closing schools for nearly two years. In addition to the doomsday hysteria over climate change, the imposed gender confusion and the absence of religion, this has led to the highest rates of adolescent depression and suicide ever recorded in America.

Our justice department, about half of our judges and our security agencies are well on their way to becoming what the Soviet ministry of justice, Soviet security agencies and Soviet judges were: tools of the ruling party.

Our mainstream media, with few exceptions, are as uncommitted to truth as were the organs of the Soviet Communist Party, Pravda and Izvestia. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR and PBS play the same role for the Left and therefore the Democratic Party.

It was only a matter of time until the Left would arrest a former president of the opposition party.

I suspect that people who suffered under Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would not find much of a parallel with the situation in the United States today.

None of the reasons Prager listed for how America is becoming more like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are unique to Nazi and Soviet regimes. None of the arguments that Prager lists for how America is becoming like Nazi and Soviet regimes stand up to examination. All of Prager's stated concerns about America have occurred in similarly in dozens if not hundreds of non-Nazi, non-communist nations. Hundreds of nations, for example, have restricted speech. Hundreds of nations have had institutions of higher learning decline. All medical schools have gone in false directions and have had to retract teachings. Medicine has never been a science. Justice has always been political because it has always been executed by human beings. Hundreds of nations have had people heckle and try to shut down speakers. Hundreds of nations have taught things about sex that many people today would find abhorrent. Hundreds of nations have had institutions supposedly dedicated to truth turn out to be not so dedicated to truth. Hundreds of nations have had their justice departments become tools of the ruling party. Dozens of non-communist, non-Nazi nations have had health departments operate as tools of the ruling party. 

If free speech is disappearing in America, than where is it flourishing? It not now, when? In reality, the United States today retains more free speech protections than almost any nation that has ever existed. Restrictions on free speech don't make America Soviet, they make America more like every nation that has ever existed because all nations have restricted speech. 

That the American news media is equivalent to Pravda is not an assertion that any knowledgeable person can take seriously. 

After Trump was indicted, I listened to Dennis Prager's radio show for the first time in years because I suspected it would drive Prager to revealing over-statement. Within a minute of tuning in, I found Prager's unhinged rhetoric about how life in America increasingly approximates life under Hitler and Stalin to be absurd.

Around this same time, I watched a video called "35 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Tools | Trauma Informed Counseling Skills" by Dr. Dawn Elise-Snipes, who has a PhD in Mental Health Counsel. Early in her video, she said: "The first and most basic tool is a behavioral one and that is to create safety."

A nationally syndicated radio host such as Prager telling his listeners they lived in a country increasingly akin to Nazi Germany is not a good way of creating an appropriate level of safety in listeners who take him seriously. I remembered my insight from more than 25 years ago that listening to Prager consistently filled me with rage even though I largely agreed with him and even though he was ostensibly all about happiness. It became clear to me that the man pours poison into the American soul. Enraging people is a great way of getting listeners but it makes people less happy and less effective in life. Outside of a few murder zones, life in the United States for Prager listeners is overwhelmingly safe and free (compared to other countries on this earth). Inculcating gratitude might be a wiser path for a man intent on doing good rather than inculcating rage. There are situations in life where rage is more adaptive than gratitude, such as when you are fighting for your life in a dark alley, but they are few and far between. 

April 3, 2023, Dennis said: "The USA Today is a rag sheet on the level of Pravda. 'Trump using anti-semitic rhetoric to raise money after indictment.' Let me say as a Jew who has done more to fight anti-semitism more than almost any living Jew… Who is on the Holocaust Memorial Board. Who has brought more good will to Jews than the entire Anti-Defamation League… This is a damn liar, Erin Mansfield, this piece of crap who writes this goddamn lie… [Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg] is a George Soros funded DA. That is enough to condemn him because George Soros is as close to diabolic as it gets on this planet. He doesn't even identify as a Jew… Soros has as much to do with Judaism, Jews and Israel as a rural Mongolian. And a lot of USA Today readers will believe this lie."

I doubt that many USA Today readers will change their mind because of this one op-ed. People weren't born yesterday. We haven't evolved to be gullible. The only minds that are going to be changed by an op-ed or a radio monologue are those minds looking for reasons to change. You can never change a man's mind against his will. 

"Alvin Bragg is as bad a human being to occupy that office as has existed. The man is 100% responsible for some of the murders and rapes in New York City because of his completely lenient view of violent crime."

"How do you become a bad human being? …You accept money from bad human beings. You think of yourself as a victim. There is nothing more guaranteed to produce a bad human being than the victim mentality. I got hurt, I can lash out. I am freed from normal moral demands because I am a victim."

"The indictment of an ex-president for no valid reason except that they are filled with hate, they are Third World thugs. You cannot overstate the significance of the evil that has taken place. It is immoral to tune out."

"Rampant evil is what the Left has engaged in… Twenty years ago at least, I said there was a civil war in this country. If this is not obvious to you, then bad news is not something you want to handle psychologically. The Left and the Right have nothing in common. Like Florida and California at this time have nothing in common. They might as well be different countries on the opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. Whenever I went from California to Florida, I felt like I did when I went from Western Europe to Eastern Europe under communism."

"If you support the indictment, you are not on the side of truth or of concern for America."

April 4, 2023, Dennis said: "We are becoming like the Soviet Union. This is not in any way an exaggeration. I took a vow never to exaggerate because you lose your credibility. I try always to understate and to calm people's fears, but we are sliding into a Soviet system. The parallels are frightening. We have political prisoners [referring to January 6 protesters]. Joe Biden would be completely comfortable in a Soviet Union setting. So would Kamala Harris. So would most of the members of the Democratic party in Congress and in gubernatorial positions. The press functions the way the Soviet press functioned — as a mouthpiece of the ruling party… When you want to jail your opponents, you can find anything. It is difficult to overstate what the Left is doing to the United States in converting it into a Soviet-type country. Putin speaks of misinformation just the way the Democratic Party and the New York Times speak of misinformation — whatever we don't want you to know."

"Sorry to be this dark about the situation now. You have to two choices in life – to fight or to check out. Ideally, you get your kids out of the schools that are poisoning their minds, their souls, their hearts, their consciences, their ability to think. We sold our soul in the early 20th Century when we said the government should educate our children."

"People want to believe that we have more in common with our fellow American on the other side than what divides us. What do I have in common with the Left? I can think of one. A Leftist believes in taking care of his family and so do I… In the realm of ideology and ideas, what do we have in common? Nothing."

"I know from years of experience with home-schooled kids that overwhelmingly they turn out happier, finer, kinder and more intelligent…"

"Alvin Bragg [Manhattan DA] is a punk."

"What groups of Americans have been added to the list of Trump supporters? If there aren't any, then it is difficult [to see Trump winning the presidency in 2024]. Do you believe Trump has added any group? [Democrats may believe] that [indicting Trump] may make him so popular [among Republicans that he wins the nomination but loses the general election]."

Caller (Victor in Chicago): "With the media being so far to one side, how can our constitutional republic survive?"

Dennis: "That's a very fair question. You're listening to one of those chances — talk radio. Talk radio reaches more people than Fox News, for example. PragerU has over a billion views a year, 65% are under 35. The Daily Wire has an enormous reach. TPUSA has an enormous reach on college campuses. However, it is true that when the mainstream media are all in one direction, and with corporations giving hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing groups and almost nothing to conservative groups, the odds are against us. The worst is Big Tech suppressing us. The suppression of dissent is the road to the Sovietization of this country."

April 5, 2023, Dennis said: "The great lack in young Americans' lives is religion. It is the direct cause, not only cause, of all the depression, lost sense of identity…"

"Do you think the American government under the Democrats is less corrupt than the Ukrainian government? I don't. Thirty four counts [in the Trump indictment] with no crime."

To sum up the level of corruption in the American federal system of government with one indictment out of Manhattan is absurd. In a big country like the United States, there have always been hideous examples of injustice. How could there be otherwise when justice is delivered by flawed humans? 

March 27, 2023, Dennis said: "I have come to entertain the possibility of a devil. It has been so diabolic what I have experienced the past three years. It is hard to explain on rational grounds the madness that has taken over."

According to the 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index, the United States ranks 24th in the world while Ukraine ranks 116. 

April 14, 2023, Dennis said: "All of Leftism is secularized religion."

He plays a clip from Joe Biden: "The single existential threat to the world is climate change. We don't have a lot of time and that's a fact."

Dennis: "Whenever he says, that's a fact, I assume he's lying. It's a signal that what I'm saying is not true.

"[Climate change] is the single best way for me and the Left to overthrow Western civilization as we know it and destroy the economies of the Western world. That would be the truth."

"All of these great threats…to take away the rights of people. He said that in Ireland. Did you see the Irish prime minister's dog start barking at him? Remarkable. I'm not using this as proof that the dog knows what I know — that this is the scummiest human being to be president of the United States in our history, but dogs are sensitive to human meanness."

"The WSJ: Biden's EPA remakes the auto industry. His new car rules are de facto orders to make EVs. They call out Donald Trump as fascist. When the government tells businesses what to do, that is one of the truth sign posts of incipient fascism."

Thousands of non-fascist governments have told businesses what to do. It's hardly a sign of fascism. People with power frequently tell people with less power what to do. That's less a sign of fascism than a sign of being human. As Thucydides put it: The strong take what they want and the weak endure what they must. 

To those who take Prager seriously, his civil war talk has a significantly depressing effect. Prager's Youtube cohost, Julie Hartman, said December 19, 2022: "I have to tell you, Dennis, and this is a really depressing thought, and I can't believe I'm saying, I have really started to fear that I am going to see the demise and the downfall of the United States in my lifetime. I don't know if it is going to be around when I am forty. If we keep going down this path, it won't."

Dennis: "If we keep going down this road, there will be two United States."

Julie: "This will not impede my will to fight. If we descend into a civil war or if China comes for us… They are so much more technologically skilled than we are. They have a more robust military. We used to have the top military in the world and they have surpassed us."

Dennis: "I don't see China attacking us. I see China assuming we are going to commit suicide."

Julie: "China is trying to expedite the process. Look at what they're doing with fentanyl. They're trying to kill American citizens. They don't need to do much, we are self-destructing."

Dennis: "The left has been working to destroy this country for a century. They're an overnight sensation."

Jordan Peterson

On his March 6, 2023 show with Julie Hartman, Dennis said: "I asked [a major liberal] if he had ever heard of Jordan Peterson. No. I went through the list of the finest conservative minds and he had not heard of one of them."

January 30, 2023, Dennis said: "I think meat is the healthiest food there is. I got that from Jordan Peterson."

The Atlantic noted in 2018: “The famous psychologist and his daughter swear by a regimen of eating only beef. Restriction can provide a sense of order in a world of chaos—but at what point does restriction become a disorder?”

Why would anyone regard Jordan Peterson, who recently was suicidal because of a benzo addiction, as an excellent source for advice about healthy living?

Under the headline “Hastening the End“, Mark O’Connell wrote in the New York Review of Books April 20, 2023 issue:

It’s in the nature of apocalyptic movements, and of human beings, to think of history as a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end that is about to be revealed. And our current moment, with its rising sea levels and viral pandemics, its Mars-colonizing billionaires and fragmenting global orders, certainly feels apocalyptic. But there is something undeniably self-flattering in the idea of an imminent apocalypse, in that it places us—our generation, our time—at the very center of the meaning of things, as the ultimate protagonists of history.

And this is related to the somewhat grandiose appeal of the end of the world as a subject. …if you’re writing a book about the end of the world you can be confident that there is nothing more pressing to consider, and thereby be assured of your own intellectual seriousness.

By claiming he sees American in civil war and on a road to Nazi Germany, Dennis Prager places himself at the very center of things. He feels confident that “there is nothing more pressing to consider” than his ideas.

In reaction to Barack Obama’s expansion of the federal government, Dennis Prager in 2009 developed the saying, "The Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen." He wrote Sept. 1, 2009:

Those of us who oppose a massive increase in the role the national government plays in health care ("ObamaCare") do so because we fear the immense and unsustainable national debt it would incur and because we are certain that medical care in America would deteriorate. But there is a bigger reason most of us oppose it: We believe that the bigger the government becomes, the smaller the individual citizen becomes.

…Not only does bigger government teach people not to take care of themselves, it teaches them not to take of others. Smaller government is the primary reason Americans give more charity and volunteer more time per capita than do Europeans living in welfare states. Why take care of your fellow citizen, or even your family, when the government will do it for you?

This preoccupation with self includes foreign policy: Why care about, let alone risk dying for, another country's liberty? That is the view of the world's left. That is why conservative governments are far more supportive of the war efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan than left-wing governments of the same country. The moment the socialists won in Spain, they withdrew all their forces from Iraq. The new center-left government in Japan has promised to stop helping the war effort in Afghanistan.

Republican politicians such as John Boehner, speaker of the House, and Congressman David Dreier took up the phrase.

On July 25, 2011, Boehner responded to President Obama's nationwide speech on the budget deficit: "You know, I’ve always believed, the bigger government, the smaller the people. And right now, we have a government so big and so expensive it’s sapping the drive of our people and keeping our economy from running at full capacity."

In a May 14, 2012 three hour show with Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt said: "At the Baltimore retreat of the National Republican Congressional Committee [in 2009], Dennis gave this big speech. I had to follow him. I’ve now learned go before Dennis, don’t follow Dennis. And so he gave this big speech, standing ovation, he had turned around like Beethoven, couldn’t see that they were standing, I had to poke him and say turn around and look at the audience. And what brought them to their feet was the saying the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen…"

"I saw grown men…now the hardest-bitten, the most cynical, the toughest to reach audience in the world is an audience of radio program directors and general managers. They are absolutely cynical about talk show hosts, because that’s all they ever deal with. And most of them, not Dennis or me, are prima donnas, and they are very difficult to deal with. And so when you get a whole bunch of them, a hundred of them in a room, it’s a tough audience. It may be the toughest audience, because they’ve heard every shtick, they’ve seen us for years, there’s nothing we can do or say to get them to actually listen to us. They’re just ah, it’s Prager, it’s Hewitt, it’s Bennett, it’s Gallagher, it’s Medved. They just turn us…it’s Pastore, whatever. However, the last time we were together at a Salem general managers meeting, reduced to tears by my friend Dennis Prager, because he talked about why he is so much a fan of this radio network and of Christians…"

June 10, 2010 at the Ronald Reagan Memorial Library, Dennis said: “He was the first one to make me aware that the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. That’s my motto but that’s his sentiment. He made me aware that this is not merely an economic difference between left and right but a philosophical and moral difference. It makes worse people, big government.”

April 6, 2011, Dennis said: “I’ll never forget when I was a kid [nine years old]. There was a man who was a high school math teacher, Mr. Joe Salts. What a sweet man. A member of the synagogue. He was hit by a hit-and-run driver on the West Side highway. He was blinded. The synagogue took care of this man for the rest of his life.

“The impact it made on me watching my father have people over to the house to see how much will you give, how much will you give. I have tears in my eyes. But as the state gets bigger, he just applies at some agency and has a bureaucrat take down the details.”

“Here’s another victim of the big state in terms of goodness because they say, why should I take care of my neighbor? The government will.

“This man blinded in the auto accident. The man was a member of the synagogue. The biggest thing DeTocqueville noted was how many free associations Americans made. Because the government was weak, people had strong civil society.

“I remember being a member of the Simi Valley Rotary Club. It was all men. They would get together every week. These guys, almost none of whom were wealthy, they were hard-working middle class. And you know what they devoted every meeting to? What charity they would engage in. But as government takes over more and more of charitable work, what need do you have for these charities? But we need people to join societies. The bigger the government, the more atomized the society.”

May 1, 2012 at the Reagan Foundation, Dennis said: “His famous sentence, ‘Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’, proved to me that one line can change a life. A great idea can be encapsulated in one line.”

Is it true that the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen? For example, on March 13, 2023, the US Defense Department noted: “On March 9, 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration submitted to Congress a proposed Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 Budget request of $842 billion for the Department of Defense (DoD), an increase of $26 billion over FY 2023 levels and $100 billion more than FY 2022.”

If the defense budget were half as much, would American citizens be bigger? If so, how? I don’t see it. If the defense budget were twice as big, would American citizens be smaller? If so, how? I don’t see it.

American states spent $538 billion on education in 2022. How would American citizens be smaller or bigger if the states spent half as much or twice as much?

Public restrooms in the United States tend to be poor, nasty, brutish and rare. If instead they were lavish and plentiful, would American citizens be smaller? If they provided thick luxurious toilet paper instead of the cheapest kind, how would American citizens be smaller? How are we enlarged by reduced spending on public infrastructure? If we spent twice as much on public parks or public roads, how would American citizens be smaller? If we had nicer airports, nicer public transport, how exactly would America citizens be smaller? If Americans had Medicare for all like all other first world countries, how would we be smaller? If we spent twice as much on law enforcement and had an accompanying rise in public safety, how would we be smaller? If we doubled prison sentences for violent crime, and therefore spent twice as much on such prisons, how would we be smaller? I have spent about 12 years of my life (as of 2023) in Australia, which has more lavish welfare spending than America. Australians don’t seem to be smaller than Americans. They have different values. While Americans venerate freedom, Aussies venerate fairness. Why is one value inherently superior to the other?

As a conservative, I love the sound of Prager’s maxim, but it doesn’t stand up to examination.

Dennis wrote: “Those of us who oppose a massive increase in the role the national government plays in health care (“ObamaCare”) do so because we fear the immense and unsustainable national debt it would incur and because we are certain that medical care in America would deteriorate.” Medical care in America has changed in America because of Obamacare, but has it deteriorated? Are Americans noticeably smaller because of Obamacare? Obamacare cost the federal government $1.683 trillion for the first ten years. If it had only cost $300 million, would Americans be bigger? If it had cost $4 trillion, would Americans be smaller? A 2020 academic analysis of the full cost of the 2003 Iraq invasion put the figure at $1.922 trillion. If the war had turned a profit, would Americans be bigger? If the war had cost twice as much, would Americans be smaller?

If the American government housed all of its citizens and insured that all of its streets were safe and clean, would Americans be diminished by that?

Dennis wrote in 2009: “Here are five reasons why bigger government makes less impressive people. 1. People who are able to take care of themselves and do so are generally better than people who are able to take care of themselves but rely on others.”

We could hire our own police and build our own roads and privately raise funds for a national defense, but it is more efficient to do it through government. How are people worse because of government roads and defense? A man who does zero housework but earns a million dollars a year relies on other people to take care of many parts of his life for him. How is he worse for doing what he does best instead of vacuuming, shopping, and tending to children?

Dennis wrote: “Even if one believes, as the left does by definition, that the ideal society is one in which the state takes care of as many of our needs as possible, one must acknowledge that this has deleterious effects on many, if not most, citizens’ moral character. The moment one acknowledges that the more one takes care of oneself, the more developed is his or her character, one must acknowledge that a bigger state diminishes its citizens’ characters.”

If you concentrate on doing the things you do best in life and rely on others to do things you comparatively do less well, how is your moral character diminished by that? If you rely on the state to provide parks, police, roads, and schools, how are you morally diminished? As is typical with his public pronouncements, Prager makes assertions but he does not propose testable hypotheses.

“The essence of good character is to care of oneself…” How is one not taking care of oneself if you leave much of life to government or to your spouse or to your community while you focus on other things?

“The more people come to rely on government, the more they develop a sense of entitlement…”

If you rely on police to enforce the law, instead of hiring your own police, are you bad? If you rely on the government to provide roads and parks, what bad things happen to you?

“First, the more one feels entitled, the less one believes he has to work for anything. Why work hard if I can look to the state to give much of what I need, and, increasingly, much of what I want? Second, the more one feels entitled, the less grateful one feels. This is obvious: The more one expects to be given, the less one is grateful for what one is given. Third, the more entitled and the less grateful one feels, the angrier one becomes. The opposite of gratitude is not only ingratitude, it is anger. People who do not get what they think they are entitled to become angry.”

If you feel entitled to roads or parks or defense, whether it comes from individuals, a community or the government, how does it follow that you don’t need to do anything in exchange? If you make deals with people that in exchange for you providing X, they will provide Y, do you not need to work? If a society makes a collective deal that they will jointly provide certain goods and services, persons will have to work to fund that. If public goods and services are lavish or poor, how exactly are people made bigger or smaller by that? When I am in Australia, I notice that by and large, public facilities are cleaner and nicer than they are in America. Australians aren’t noticeably angrier than Americans, in fact, they seem to be happier.

“One of the effects of the welfare state on vast numbers of European citizens is disdain for work. This is in keeping with Marx’s view of utopia as a time when people will work very little and devote their large amount of non-working time writing poetry and engaging in other such lofty pursuits. Work is not regarded by the left as ennobling. It is highly ennobling in the American value system, however.”

Americans, by and large, work longer hours than Europeans. How exactly are Americans ennobled by that? In my adult life, I’ve had periods where I worked longer than average hours and other times when I’ve worked fewer than average hours. To whatever extent hard work ennobled me, it is not exactly clear. I know many people who work hard and work long hours. I’m not clear on how they would be less noble if they devoted more time to friends and family.

“Along with disdain for work, one witnesses among Western Europeans a preoccupation with not working. Vacation time has become a moral value among many Europeans. There have been riots in countries like France merely over working hours. In Sweden and elsewhere, more and more workers take more and more time off from work, knowing they will be paid anyway. In Germany and elsewhere, it is against the law to keep one’s store open after a certain hour, lest that give that store owner an income advantage and thereby compel a competing store to stay open longer as well.”

I see strengths and weaknesses in the various approaches to life. I don’t see how it is clear that the American way is inherently and universally superior. How are citizens rendered smaller or bigger by government regulations about shop hours and minimum vacation times? Australians all get a minimum of a month holiday a year. How are they made smaller by that?

“Not only does bigger government teach people not to take care of themselves, it teaches them not to take of others. Smaller government is the primary reason Americans give more charity and volunteer more time per capita than do Europeans living in welfare states. Why take care of your fellow citizen, or even your family, when the government will do it for you?”

If you vote for government to tax you more to provide social services instead of your giving charity and volunteering, why is that inferior?

“This preoccupation with self includes foreign policy: Why care about, let alone risk dying for, another country’s liberty? That is the view of the world’s left. That is why conservative governments are far more supportive of the war efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan than left-wing governments of the same country. The moment the socialists won in Spain, they withdrew all their forces from Iraq. The new center-left government in Japan has promised to stop helping the war effort in Afghanistan.”

From the perspective of 2023, it seems like those who wanted out of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were more right than those who wanted to stay in.

“Of course, there are fine idealistic individuals on the left, and selfish individuals on the right. But as a rule, bigger government increases the number of angry, ungrateful, lazy, spoiled and self-centered individuals. Which is why some of us believe that increased nationalization of health care is worth shouting about. And even crying over.”

According to Wikipedia (checked on April 20, 2023, the following governments spent the lowest percentage of their GDP (the following list is in ascending spending order): Somalia, Turkmenistan, Haiti, Venezuela, Sudan, Iran, Equatorial Guinea, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Yemen, Guinea, Nigeria, Guatemala. How many Americans wish their country operated more like these countries? How many Americans would think citizens of these countries are so much bigger and more impressive than Americans?

The only countries that have distinctly lower government spending than the US that Americans might like are Singapore, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Ireland, Peru. How many Americans would consider these countries dramatically superior to their own?

Here are countries that spend more on government as a percentage of GDP than the United States, listed in ascending order of government spending as a percentage of GDP: Norway, Latvia, Cyprus, Estonia, Malta, Canada, Maldives, Montenegro, New Zealand, Brazil, Luxembourg, Serbia, Japan, Poland, Slovakia, Netherlands, Vanuatu, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Croatia, Portugal, Tonga, Iceland, Slovenia, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Italy, France, Ukraine.

According to the 2023 World Happiness Report, the ten happiest countries are, in descending order: Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and New Zealand. All of them have bigger governments than the United States.

On their Aug. 2, 2022 show, Prager’s Youtube cohost inadvertently gave a good rebuttal to his claim that the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. Julie Hartman said, “I was driving up to Starbucks and I thought… that the road is paved and I don’t have to worry about getting shot, I can go to a Starbucks and I don’t have to worry that my drink is contaminated, every step we take, we are so lucky.”

June 2, 2022, Dennis said: "Reagan changed me with one sentence. 'Government is not the solution, it's the problem.' That is what made me a Republican. Everything resides on small government. In the 20th Century, 100 million civilians were murdered. Who murdered them? In every case but Rwanda, big government."

In the Mishna, Rabbi Chanina, the deputy High Priest, said: “Pray for the welfare of the government (lit., monarchy), for if not for its fear, a person would swallow his fellow live.” Big government kills people, but in the absence of big government, we return to the state of nature where life tends to be “nasty, brutish and short.” Without a strong government, people devour each other.

For the challenge of crime, courts, public schools, highways, parks, passports, as well as food and drink and air and water and driving safety, government is the solution. How else would you enforce standards? What countries that don’t operate police, courts, highways, parks and passports would you like to emulate? When Dennis said, 'Everything resides on small government', what did he mean? What exactly resides on small government?