The Bill Walton Show

Did you know there was no health insurance until 1930 and that 90 percent of today's medical care did not even exist in 1950? Yet, health insurance has not evolved to match the innovation or the demand. On this week's edition of "The Bill Walton Show," economic author John Steele Gordon and I discuss how our antiquated health insurance system has utterly failed to keep pace with modern medicine, h...

By some estimates, the cost of government regulation in the U.S. exceeds $2 trillion. An amazing number. And while we're paying a fortune for existing regulations, major new ones are coming out at the rate of 3,000 per year, so fast that the White House can only do a cost-benefit analysis on less than one half of one percent of them. But there's hope. This week on "The Bill Walton Show," Wayne Cre...

TBWS44 2019_01_10 Halper Stark - China is a mass of contradictions. Intellectual property thief. America's largest trading partner. Home to 476 billionaires. Choked with air and water pollution. A rapidly aging population. And leadership eager to project its national will. China is plowing ahead with what one of my guests, Dr. Stefan Halper, call its "three warfares." What are these and what can t...

TBWS43 2019_01_03 Moore - Ronald Reagan was a winner who believed in the boundless potential of America. Sound familiar? It's one of the reasons Donald Trump is succeeding despite the relentless criticism. He "has a finger on the pulse of millions and millions and millions of Americans." He beat 17 other candidates to get elected and then outsmarted Congress and his own advisers to get a much bett...

TBWS42 2018_12_13 Cass - Economic growth is strong but far too many Americans feel left behind and hopeless. This is leading to huge problems that neither political party is ready to address. But author and scholar Oren Cass and I tackle them in my new podcast.

Lower taxes and less regulation are great for business, but some are thriving in high-tax states like New York and California. On my new podcast, Ralph Benko explains the "Tamny Axiom". Hint: there's something more valuable in those states than low taxes. ​

People look to the government to prevent future financial crises and too many trust that politicians and economic experts can create policies to protect us and our 401(k) plans. We shouldn't rely on them. These experts are smart, mostly well-intentioned people but they can't prevent the next crisis. No one can. Why is that? And why is a future crisis inevitable? I discuss these and many other ques...

TBWS39 2018_10_18 Wallison - Since the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, progressives have kept claiming that government bureaucrats know better than the rest of us. But putting more power into the hands of administrative agencies instead of our elected representatives leads government by the people to the road to extinction. American Enterprise Institute's Peter Wallison and I explai...

TBWS35 2018_09_26 Benko Nammo - Why do 53 percent of millennials prefer socialism to capitalism? Probably because they don't know what socialism is and neither does Bernie Sanders and others who embrace it. But how bad can it get? Democrats might be moving further to the left but it's absurd to compare them to Marxists, right? My podcast guest, Ralph Benko, says you might be surprised at how simil...

Over the past forty years, since Deng Xiaoping began his policy of "Reform and Opening," the People's Republic of China (PRC) has evolved from a less developed country to the second largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world. Over the past 25 years, it has also steadily transformed the People's Liberation Army (PLA) into a force that is capable of influencing regional, and increasingly glob...

"Any rational observer of the Democrats' non-stop character assassination machine can see that something is seriously sick in our republic. Instead of allowing Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee were permitted to use trumped-up, hip-pocketed charges to stage a show trial more in tune with a totalitarian system." Stella Morabit...

The next time you feel the urge to join a major protest to condemn the elite, powerful forces who are supposedly making your lives worse, don't bother. The event is most likely organized by elite, powerful forces who are getting rich off your activism while you don't make a dime or a dime's worth of difference. From Occupy Wall Street to the endless disruptions in the recent Supreme Court confirma...

Social Security is not secure at all. Many people think the government is setting aside the money they pay in taxes and it's waiting for them when they retire. It's not. The government is giving your hard-earned tax dollars to current retirees and running huge deficits. And the problem is only getting worse. Listen to our full discussion on the growing entitlement crisis and how to solve it.

Sunday evening comes around and you wish the weekend had just one more day. You are just not feeling it. Monday morning, whether you'll be sitting at a desk or outside on the construction site looks to be a drag. You wonder if you're lazy, or is it something else? According to John Tamny, it's something else. John, the editor of Real Clear Markets and the policy director at Freedom Works, spoke wi...

It's long seemed obvious that if we want to truly fix education, actually make it work for the 21st century, we need to kill a stockyard full of our sacred cows. And we had just the man for the job on The Bill Walton Show this week. Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of "The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is Waste of Time and Money," desc...

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." Sun Tzu, The Art of War So how does Donald Trump measure up to this ancient adage? His supporters, and count me among them, believe...

Football and Family with Jimmy Kemp and Lamaar Thomas

The Three Languages of Politics with Arnold Kling

It was the 21st episode of The Bill Walton Show, but there were a lot of firsts. For the first time, we warmed up for a show. It was not the cacophony of listening to an orchestra prepare to perform, although the difference between the sounds made during the warmup and the actual performance were almost as dramatic. Instead, there was deep breathing, sighs big enough to be felt in every bone in th...

Sunday evening comes around and you wish the weekend had just one more day. You are just not feeling it. Monday morning, whether you'll be sitting at a desk or outside on the construction site looks to be a drag. You wonder if you're lazy, or is it something else? According to John Tamny, it's something else. John, the editor of Real Clear Markets and the policy director at Freedom Works, spoke wi...

Famed economist Milton Friedman called America's highway system a "socialist enterprise" and he was right. America's roads are in desperate need of repair and the federal government is clearly incapable of maintaining them efficiently. Drivers pay tens of billions of dollars in gasoline taxes every year and our infrastructure problems only seem to get worse. Instead of taxpayers forking over trill...

How would you react if the government put facial recognition cameras everywhere and kept tabs on your every move - right down to to how many squares of toilet paper you are using? It's happening in China, as the communist government there clamps down on freedom and ramps up its economic and territorial ambitions in its quest to become the dominant player on the world stage. A big part of that ambi...

Did you know when you text someone that you've landed at the airport, you're using far more advanced technology than your plane's air traffic controller?  It's a shameful fact that some of the methods they rely on today have not changed since the 1930's. Over 60 countries – including all the developed nations - have modernized their systems but ours is stuck in the past thanks to politics and spec...

America's K-12 education system and institutions were designed in a different era for a different society, and we are at grave risk today from this obsolete system, which fails to prepare all children to succeed as adults. In fact, the system we have now was never designed or intended to reach all children. Look into a classroom and it looks pretty much the same way it looked in the 19th century....

Just this year, the Chinese Communist Party held an election in the Great Hall of the People where Xi Jinping was voted "President for Life." The vote was 2,958 for and six against. With this vote they proclaimed that China is now realizing its dream of national rejuvenation, and it's grand strategy to restore its Empire. This move only adds fuel to mounting evidence of Chinese economic and milita...