CEI’s Iain Murray Interviewed on New Book, Stealing You Blind

CEI Vice President for Strategy, and director of CEI’s Center for Economic Freedom, Iain Murray has a new book, Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You, and was interviewed by The Daily Caller on the matters he examines in great detail in Stealing You Blind:

1. Why did you decide to write the book?

Ever since I arrived in the United States (I’m an immigrant from Great Britain, where I was a government employee), all my dealings with American bureaucracy have convinced me that the system isn’t run for the benefit of the taxpayer or the recipient of government services, but for the benefit of the bureaucracy itself. With government sucking up a third of the economy — half if you include the cost of regulation — we are left with a system that really amounts to a massive swindle on the American people.

2. What are some of the more outlandish programs our government is spending money on?

Where do you start? There are grant programs to study how sick shrimp react on treadmills or feed cocaine to monkeys to find — surprise, surprise —that they get addicted to it. Other grants have been used to organize a robot hoedown and to study how Farmville affects social relationships. Those are small beer compared to things like High Speed Rail, however — which isn’t high speed and no one will use. That’s pretty outlandish when you think about it.

3. While those examples of government waste will certainly make headlines, they are not really what threatens our long-term economic health. What programs are really killing us fiscally?

If you add all the congressional pork projects together you get $30 billion annually — a lot of money. But our big entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security — cost us $2 trillion, and are going to cost a lot more. Then there’s the cost of the regulations government imposes on us —$1.75 trillion a year. In a $12 trillion economy, that represents a significant portion of our national wealth.

Full interview here. Buy Iain’s book on Amazon. It will soon be released for Kindle, which you can pre-order here for automatic delivery.