Welcome back to the Ten Blocks Podcast.

This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is a longtime friend of the magazine and the podcast, Amity Schlaidz.

Amity is the chair of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and a scholar at the King's

College in New York City. She's also the chair of the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Book Prize,

a prestigious award given to authors

whose book reflects Friedrich Hayek's vision of economic and individual liberty. Amity is the author

of a number of best-selling books, including The Forgotten Man, which gives a history of the 1930s and the Great Depression.

The latest book, which we talked about on the podcast last year, is called The Great Society,

a New History, or Great Society, a New History.

The book focuses on the 60s and the transformation of the federal government under a series of presidents,

Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Amity, thanks very much for joining us again.

I'm so glad to be with you, Brian, and to be with the Manhattan Institute and City Journal

and this podcast.

It's interesting when I heard the name Hayek, I thought about the current situation and particularly about comparing the COVID pandemic and the Great Depression.

Why?

Because COVID is an emergency and the Great Depression was an emergency. And what Hayek said is that governments use emergencies, they exploit emergencies as occasions for power grabs. It's in Hayek's view, which is darker, the event is just a pretext.

And of course, we have all thought of the famous line by Rahm Emanuel, a panic, an emergency, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Politicians want to take great measures, not small measures.

And when there is an emergency, whether real or in quotation marks,

politicians act and believe they have more license.

Well, that was going to be the first kind of broad question I asked.

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