From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

It can't succeed unless there's a partnership between a president and a Congress so that what is done can't be reversed very easily.

This is your host, Scott Bertram, and that's Dr. Paul Ray, our first guest on today's program,

talking about reversing the nanny state.

Dr. Ray is Professor of History, Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee chair in the Western Heritage,

and member of the graduate faculty here at Hillsdale College. We talked at length with

Dr. Ray about the nanny state in the U.S. in efforts to roll it back. Dr. Ray, thanks for joining us.

It's a pleasure to be with you. You're also the author of the book Soft Despotism, Democracy's

Drift, which is on point with what we discussed today, which is the nanny state.

This is a phrase, a term that many people have heard, or perhaps have even used, how do you define that phrase, nanny state?

Well, the welfare state is a nanny state. And it involves us ceding to the government, a great deal of power over our lives,

in return for a promise that our welfare from cradle to grave will be looked after by a benevolent government.

It's a natural outgrowth, at least I argue in that book, of something that comes with

commercial democracy. And what comes with commercial democracy is, well, a couple of things. One, the commercial

side. The fact of the matter is that commercial societies are dynamic, that there are

economic ups and downs, there are recessions, depressions, there are periods of great prosperity.

There's also technological change. You start off working in one job and literally the job is

eliminated by technology. And so you've got to retool and do something else.

All of this means is on the one hand, we know a prosperity that no one in human history

before us is known.

And on the other hand, we live in a situation of insecurity, a just simple insecurity, which is to say, things are changing all around you.

This, to some degree, goes with the territory of commercial democracy, and therefore the desire to have somebody else take responsibility for

...