David Harsanyi is scheduled to be on our podcast November 7th. If you don’t know David, he is an award winning columnist for the Denver Post and he has written a book called Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children.
FrontPage.com has an interview with him that is pretty good:
FP: What inspired you to write this book?
Harsanyi: Witnessing the implausible acceleration of the nanny state, I wanted to lay out, not only the sheer number of invasive laws dictating personal choices, but also explain how we got to a place where an American can’t smoke a cigarette in his own bar.
FP: Can you talk a bit about your own intellectual journey? What influenced you in your youth to respect individual rights and to find government intrusion loathsome?
Harsanyi: As with most people, my ideology and my attitudes about life were informed by parents and family. My mom and dad defected from communist Hungary in 1969, so the importance freedom – particularly individual freedom — was instilled in me early and often. When I was younger I was drawn to Ayn Rand books and other works of fiction celebrating individualism. Though I would love to tell you I incessantly read Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in my early 20s, I’d be lying. It was more people like PJ O’Rourke, who masterfully mocks the excesses of the state, and Milton Friedman, who made economics accessible, that did the trick for me. If had to label myself, I guess classical liberal would be best.
FP: What is your book’s main argument?
Harsanyi: Small things will lead to big ones. When we hear about tag being banned in Colorado Springs, or we hear about dog house zoning laws in San Francisco, or “health zone” initiatives in Los Angeles, we may just laugh and shake our heads. But when you bundle together of all these various piddling intrusions, it manifests into a growing movement that endangers liberty on a larger scale. I argue that both political parties – on every level of government – is guilty.
This should be a great interview so mark November 7th on your calendar.
