Guest Host - Dave Smith
Dave Smith: The American Experiment Depends on the Individual
Guest host Dave Smith began with a broad warning about the ideological direction of the country: Americans are increasingly being taught to look to government rather than themselves.
For Smith, that shift is fundamentally at odds with the American tradition. The country was built around the individual—the right to make choices, pursue happiness, own property, succeed, fail and try again without a government bureaucracy directing the outcome.
“The American dream was always a strong individual,” Smith said.
He argued that socialism turns that arrangement upside down. Instead of treating people as individuals with different ambitions, talents and definitions of happiness, socialist politics increasingly divides society into competing groups. The old Marxist language of bourgeoisie and proletariat may have faded, Smith said, but he sees the same framework resurfacing through terms such as patriarchy, white supremacy and other categories that sort Americans into oppressors and oppressed.
That worldview requires division because political power depends on convincing one group that another group is responsible for its problems.
Smith also criticized modern concepts of “hate speech,” arguing that the danger lies in allowing government or powerful institutions to decide which viewpoints qualify as hateful.
“The overlords get to choose what is hate speech,” he said.
His concern is not merely that people will be offended. It is that speech restrictions can become a mechanism for suppressing political dissent.
Plato, Aristotle and the Argument Over Human Nature
Smith traced the ideological divide much further back than Karl Marx.
He contrasted Plato and Aristotle as representing two competing visions of political life. Plato imagined a highly ordered society in which elite guardians could shape human beings, control education and determine what was best for society. Aristotle, Smith argued, approached politics from a more realistic understanding of human nature.
That distinction still matters.
Socialism, in Smith’s formulation, requires the belief that people can be reshaped into citizens willing to surrender individual ambition, private interest and personal choice for the collective. The problem is that the bureaucrats entrusted with managing the collective remain human beings too.
They still experience ambition, envy, greed and the desire for status.
That is why Smith quoted evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson’s famous observation about socialism: “Great idea. Wrong species.”
Smith’s argument was not that cooperation is impossible. It was that a political system designed around an idealized human being will repeatedly fail when confronted by actual human nature.
What Postwar Britain Can Teach America About Socialism
Rather than focusing on the Soviet Union, Smith devoted much of his argument to Britain after World War II.
Britain emerged from the war victorious under Winston Churchill. Yet voters quickly replaced Churchill with Clement Attlee’s Labour government, which embarked on an ambitious program of nationalization and expansion of the welfare state.
Smith views the decades that followed as a warning.
Industries were nationalized. Bureaucracies expanded. Britain’s global power declined dramatically. The empire disappeared, military capacity shrank and government assumed greater control over areas previously driven by private enterprise.
Smith argued that this experience matters precisely because Britain was not the Soviet Union. It was a Western democracy pursuing socialism through elections rather than revolution.
“They elected a socialist government, and England began its long slide,” he said.
The broader lesson, in Smith’s telling, is that voters do not need to elect an openly totalitarian government to gradually surrender economic and political freedom. Government power can expand incrementally, justified each time by promises to solve another social problem.
Parkinson’s Law and the Bureaucracy That Never Shrinks
Smith leaned heavily on the work of British historian and author C. Northcote Parkinson, whose 1957 book Parkinson’s Law became famous for the observation that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
But Smith emphasized another part of Parkinson’s work: bureaucracies have a tendency to expand even when the work they are supposedly performing does not.
He cited Parkinson’s analysis of the British Admiralty, where administrative staffing increased even as Britain’s naval fleet contracted.
That tendency, Smith said, is recognizable at every level of government.
Give an organization more time, it will use more time. Give a bureaucracy more money, it will find ways to use more money. Create another committee and the committee will eventually justify its own continued existence.
The problem becomes even worse when government programs lack meaningful measurements for success.
In private life or business, Smith argued, people routinely establish goals. If an investment does not work, they change course. If a program costs more than it produces, it ends.
Government often operates differently.
A program intended to reduce homelessness may continue receiving more money even if homelessness increases. Failure becomes evidence not that the policy was wrong, but that the policy needs additional funding.
“Government nowadays doesn’t have a learning curve,” Smith said.
Government Failure, Fraud and the Missing Feedback Loop
Smith also argued that the refusal to measure outcomes creates an environment ripe for fraud.
If public money is appropriated for homelessness, poverty or another social problem and is instead stolen, that money cannot serve the people it was intended to help.
“This is a win-lose game,” Smith said. “If I get funding that you meant to improve some critical social issue like homelessness, and I defraud you of that money, that money’s no longer available.”
His frustration is that government frequently reacts to failure by expanding the same system rather than asking where the money went.
Smith pointed to allegations of fraud in states including Minnesota and California as examples of why government spending requires aggressive oversight. He was particularly critical of any effort to make investigations more difficult rather than strengthening accountability.
That led directly to one of his recurring complaints: where is the journalism?
Smith argued that a functioning press should be obsessed with exposing waste, corruption and incompetence regardless of which political party controls the government. Instead, he believes large parts of the national media have become political actors themselves.
Smith Says Journalism Has Become Advocacy
Smith repeatedly returned to what he sees as the transformation of journalism into partisan advocacy.
He criticized friendly media treatment of prominent Democrats and said conservative viewpoints are either excluded or presented primarily through negative framing.
“Where is journalism?” Smith asked. “They’re all propagandists.”
His concern is not simply that individual reporters have political opinions. It is that editorial institutions decide which facts receive attention, which stories disappear and which questions are never asked.
Smith said conservative guests may occasionally appear on national networks, but they often function as tokens inside a larger narrative already established by producers and editors.
He sees the BBC as an international example of the same phenomenon and rejected the idea that America’s recent cultural battles over “woke” politics have simply disappeared.
For Smith, propaganda does not have to consist of outright lies. It can work through selection—showing one story, ignoring another, giving one speaker 40 seconds and another six.
He later described that process from personal experience with local reporters.
By the time an interview reaches the final broadcast, Smith said, editors and supervisors have enormous power over what survives.
“They’re not journalists,” he said. “They’re advocates.”
Equity, Envy and the Promise Government Cannot Deliver
Smith argued that socialism’s enduring political appeal comes from its promise of equity.
The message is emotionally powerful: someone has more than you, the system is unfair and government can correct the imbalance.
But Smith rejects the premise that genuine equality of outcome is possible—or desirable.
People have different abilities, ambitions, interests and priorities. One person may value income. Another may accept lower pay for work that provides personal meaning. One person wants a large house. Someone else wants the freedom to travel.
“Human beings are simply not equitable creatures,” Smith said.
He drew a distinction between jealousy and envy. Jealousy can motivate someone to work toward something another person possesses. Envy wants the other person deprived of it.
That distinction, Smith argued, explains much of redistributive politics.
The goal moves from helping people achieve more to demanding that somebody else have less.
He views that as both economically destructive and morally corrosive.
Free Markets Produce Something Socialism Cannot: Choice
Smith contrasted government planning with the sheer variety produced by free markets.
He pointed to foreign visitors encountering enormous American stores and supermarkets and being stunned by the abundance of products available. That diversity is not created by a central committee deciding how many varieties citizens require.
It emerges because millions of individuals continuously vote with their money.
Smith argued that conservatives should even be careful about using the word “capitalism,” which he views as language inherited from socialist critics.
His preferred term is the free market.
A free market allows people to decide what they value. Producers who satisfy customers prosper. Those who do not must improve or disappear.
Government systems rarely face that discipline.
Smith extended the argument to Canada’s health-care system and to Scandinavian countries often cited as socialist success stories. In his view, those examples actually demonstrate the limits of centralized systems and the importance of market reforms.
The question is ultimately not whether government means well, Smith said. The question is whether the system produces better results.
Immigration, Assimilation and the “Colonizer” Narrative
Smith also challenged the language surrounding colonization and Western civilization.
He traced some modern rhetoric about “colonizers” to writers including Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work strongly influenced post-colonial politics and the intellectual left.
Smith argued that Western civilization has increasingly been taught to view its own history almost exclusively through guilt, making assimilation more difficult.
A society cannot expect newcomers to assimilate into a culture that its own institutions constantly describe as shameful, he said.
That led Smith to recommend Jean Raspail’s controversial novel The Camp of the Saints, which depicts Western civilization collapsing under mass migration and its own inability to defend its cultural values.
Smith acknowledged that the book is bleak and provocative, but argued that its larger theme is worth confronting: a civilization that loses confidence in its own legitimacy eventually becomes incapable of asking newcomers to adopt its values.
For Smith, immigration therefore involves more than economics or border control. It raises a cultural question: what are immigrants being asked to join?
Islam, Political Power and the Compatibility Question
Smith also raised Islam as a subject he believes Western political culture is often afraid to examine.
His argument was not that individual Muslims should be denied religious freedom. He instead questioned whether political forms of Islam that seek control over law and government are compatible with a constitutional republic based on individual rights.
Smith framed that as a legitimate political inquiry rather than, in his words, an “Islamophobic” one.
“Is Islam a religion, or is it a socioeconomic belief system?” he asked.
When religious belief becomes a political program demanding that citizens surrender constitutional freedoms, Smith argued, Americans have a right to question it just as they would question any other political ideology.
He also placed Islamic expansion within the broader history of conquest, rejecting what he sees as the tendency to describe European colonialism as uniquely evil while ignoring centuries of conquest by other civilizations.
The larger theme remained consistent: Americans should not accept political terminology designed to close debate before the debate begins.
Twenty-Five Years After 9/11, Smith Warns America Is “Sleepwalking”
The 25th anniversary of September 11 brought Smith back to his own experience that morning.
He was working at the Law Enforcement Television Network, whose sister operation, the Fire and Emergency Television Network, had a crew riding with the Arlington Fire Department. Those firefighters were among the first responders at the Pentagon.
Smith recalled the uncertainty of that day.
Air travel stopped. Law-enforcement agencies protected water systems and transportation hubs. National Guard troops moved to airports. Nobody knew whether another attack was coming.
That uncertainty, he said, has largely disappeared from American memory.
“We’re comfortable. We’re asleep again,” Smith said.
He criticized the Transportation Security Administration, calling airport screening “security theater” and arguing that private airport-security operations would face market consequences that government agencies do not.
For Smith, the larger concern is complacency.
“America is back somnambulistic again,” he said. “We’re sleepwalking through history.”
Elections Are America’s Peaceful Revolution
Smith connected that complacency to one of his strongest themes of the day: elections are the pressure-release valve that keeps American political conflict from becoming violent.
“You know how America is unique?” he asked. “We have a revolution every two years.”
Citizens who are angry with government do not have to overthrow it. They can replace the people running it.
That is why Smith repeatedly urged listeners to vote in November.
He later referenced political scientist Ted Robert Gurr’s work on rebellion and political frustration, arguing that societies become more dangerous when citizens lose faith that peaceful political participation can change anything.
Smith openly expressed distrust of mail voting and said controversies surrounding election administration have weakened his confidence in the system.
But his response was not withdrawal.
It was greater participation.
“Got to vote, gang,” he said.
Katie Hobbs, Political Debate and Arizona’s Media
Smith was sharply critical of Gov. Katie Hobbs, particularly her record of vetoing Republican legislation and what he described as misleading campaign advertising.
He also attacked her reluctance to debate.
In Smith’s view, debates are one of the most important tools available to voters because candidates must defend their ideas rather than present carefully scripted advertisements.
“A real American journalist would be hysterical that a politician in 2026 would refuse to debate,” Smith said.
He argued that Arizona journalists should be aggressively comparing political advertising with voting records, vetoes and actual policy decisions rather than simply broadcasting competing campaign claims.
Smith also argued that national progressive organizations and donors have understood the importance of controlling offices farther down the ballot—secretaries of state, attorneys general, county officials and other positions that receive far less attention than presidential races.
Arizona conservatives, he said, have too often focused on Washington while losing political ground closer to home.
Gas Prices, Refineries and the Politics of Energy
Smith turned to the price of gasoline and diesel as an example of what he considers a crisis created by long-term policy decisions.
He rejected the idea that a president can simply order fuel prices lower.
The real problem, he argued, begins much earlier: refinery capacity, pipeline policy, access to oil fields, regulations and energy infrastructure.
America has gone too long without building sufficient refining capacity, Smith said. Democratic policies have restricted pipelines and fossil-fuel development while alternatives were not yet capable of replacing conventional energy at the required scale.
“We’ve got to do away with fossil fuels before we had an alternative,” Smith said. “That’s called stupid.”
He made a similar argument about electric vehicles. Smith is not opposed to new technology, but he believes government should allow the technology to improve naturally rather than trying to force consumers into one product before it is ready to satisfy everyone’s needs.
He praised Arizona’s nuclear-power capacity and asked why the country has not built more modern nuclear plants.
The governing principle, again, was choice.
Arizona Water: A Crisis That Requires Leadership, Not Blame
Water brought Smith’s argument directly home to Arizona.
He recalled learning about Arizona’s historic battles with California over the Colorado River and described water as a defining political issue in the state for generations.
Today, long-term drought and declining Colorado River supplies are creating another confrontation.
Smith questioned whether the Hobbs administration has been an effective advocate for Arizona and said residents deserve more than partisan finger-pointing.
He also reflected on the dramatic decline of Lake Powell, remembering areas he explored as a Boy Scout before they were submerged behind Glen Canyon Dam. Falling water levels have now exposed some of those landscapes again.
Tucson, Smith noted, historically relied heavily on groundwater and possesses substantial aquifer resources. The Central Arizona Project later became another essential component of the region’s supply.
The question is whether Arizona’s leaders are protecting those resources and planning far enough ahead.
For Smith, water is precisely the kind of problem government exists to address. It requires competent technical leadership, infrastructure and cooperation rather than ideology.
Housing Is a Need, Smith Says—not a Government-Created Right
Smith challenged Tucson’s declaration that housing is a human right.
Housing is obviously essential, he said, but declaring something a “right” changes the relationship between citizen and government. A legal right generally means someone else now carries an obligation to provide it.
Smith believes that approach can destroy personal responsibility and encourage government to continually expand its spending.
He made a similar argument about Tucson’s fare-free transit system.
Rather than charging even a token amount, the city has removed the direct connection between using the service and helping support it. Smith argued that reduced accountability has contributed to disorder on buses and around transit stops.
The problem is not assistance for people who genuinely need it. He noted that reduced-cost and free passes existed long before fares disappeared entirely.
His objection is converting a public service into an entitlement without asking what consequences follow.
Tucson’s Ward System and the Problem of One-Party Government
Smith devoted considerable attention to Tucson’s unusual city-election structure.
Candidates are nominated from individual wards, but the general election is decided citywide. That means voters outside a ward help determine who ultimately represents residents inside it.
Smith believes the system undermines genuine neighborhood representation.
In a traditional ward structure, Ward 1 voters would elect the Ward 1 council member, Ward 2 would select its own representative and so on. Tucson’s citywide general election makes it much harder for a politically distinct ward to elect someone opposed by the broader city majority.
Smith argued that this contributes to one-party control and reduces accountability.
“The problem with a one-party system is there’s no accountability,” he said.
He urged Republicans and independents to recognize the potential power of a coalition in local elections, particularly with future races for mayor and council approaching.
Education Should Produce Citizens, Not Subjects
Smith connected Tucson’s political problems to education.
He questioned whether students are graduating with the literacy and practical skills required to build independent lives. Schools once offered vocational programs and shop classes that allowed students who were not pursuing university degrees to leave with marketable abilities.
Those opportunities have diminished, he argued, while academic outcomes have remained troubling.
Education should prepare people to become citizens, Smith said—not subjects dependent upon government.
He drew a distinction between citizenship and entitlement. Citizens possess rights, but they also have obligations to the community and political system that protect those rights.
That includes staying informed and voting.
If citizens abandon those obligations, Smith argued, government does not become neutral. Power simply flows to the people who continue participating.
Welfare, Dependency and the Difference Between Jealousy and Envy
Smith also questioned welfare systems that can make work economically irrational for people near the bottom of the income scale.
He recalled research from decades earlier suggesting that a young family receiving a package of public benefits would need a substantially higher salary to replace the total value of those benefits through employment.
That creates a trap.
If going to work leaves a family financially worse off, government has unintentionally created an incentive not to work.
Smith again returned to envy as a political force. Taxing success at increasingly higher rates can become less about raising necessary revenue than punishing people for having more.
His preferred model is one that encourages people to look at another person’s success and ask how they can build something themselves.
The alternative is asking government to take the successful person’s property away.
Pima County Spending and the Fight Over the Expenditure Limit
Smith connected the philosophical argument about taxation directly to Pima County’s ballot.
He criticized the proposal to alter the county’s expenditure limitation, describing it as a mechanism that would allow county government to spend substantially more money by recalculating an older baseline.
Smith’s objection is not simply that government spends money. It is that county leaders have not convinced him they are using existing resources effectively.
He singled out Supervisors Jennifer Allen and Andres Cano for particularly strong criticism and praised Republican Supervisor Steve Christy as a consistent dissenting voice. He also said Democrat Rex Scott has, at times, shown a willingness to make decisions independently.
Smith’s language toward Allen and Cano was harsh, describing them as activists rather than public servants. His underlying argument was that county government should focus less on ideological causes and more on services affecting the broad population.
Local Elections Can Still Change the Direction of Government
Despite his frustration with Tucson and Pima County politics, Smith pointed to Marana as evidence that voters can change local government.
He praised the current town council and argued that local elections often have more immediate consequences for daily life than national races.
“You are revolutionary if you can change the power base in your community,” Smith said.
That was why he kept returning to the same three words:
“Vote, vote, vote.”
Smith argued that local officials decide roads, taxes, policing, public services, zoning and spending. Yet those elections often receive far less attention than presidential politics.
That imbalance gives organized political groups enormous influence.
Property, Gas Stoves and the Meaning of the Pursuit of Happiness
Smith’s defense of individual liberty eventually came down to something as ordinary as a stove.
He loves to cook and strongly prefers gas.
That preference became his example of why government planning becomes intrusive even when the policy goal sounds noble. Proposals to discourage or eliminate gas appliances may look minor in Washington, but to the person whose daily life is affected, they represent another decision taken away.
“You can’t have freedom without property and your control over that property,” Smith said.
He noted that Thomas Jefferson considered language involving property before settling on “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.
Smith likes the broader formulation.
The pursuit of happiness can mean different things to everyone. For one person it may be a farm. For someone else it may be a business, a hobby, a vehicle or simply the freedom to cook dinner on the stove he prefers.
Government cannot define that happiness because it is individual by nature.
“My Body, My Choice”—Until Government Disagrees
Smith argued that progressive politics often applies the language of personal autonomy selectively.
“My body, my choice” is treated as absolute in the abortion debate, he said, but disappeared for many on the left during COVID vaccine mandates.
He sees similar inconsistencies in government efforts to regulate food, vehicles, appliances and other personal decisions.
To Smith, the principle should work in both directions: either adults are generally responsible for making decisions about their own lives or government is.
His answer is the individual.
The Constitution, he emphasized, exists primarily to limit government power rather than to limit citizens.
Abortion, Roe and the Coming Argument Over Personhood
Smith closed one of his final philosophical arguments with abortion.
He is unapologetically pro-life and said age, parenthood and time with his grandchildren have only strengthened that conviction.
But he focused specifically on the legal question of personhood.
Smith argued that Roe v. Wade largely avoided resolving when an unborn child becomes a legal person. If the Supreme Court were eventually to recognize fetal personhood under the Fourteenth Amendment, he believes the constitutional debate over abortion would fundamentally change.
“If the Supreme Court rules that an unborn child is a person, that child is now protected by the Constitution,” Smith said.
He expects that legal question to return eventually and believes it could become even more consequential than the reversal of Roe itself.
A Tucson Double Murder and Questions the Media Should Ask Carefully
Near the end of the program, Smith returned to a recent Tucson case involving two people killed outside a gay establishment.
He criticized local coverage and argued that reporters should aggressively examine motive, associations and the suspect’s background rather than immediately filtering the story through preferred ideological narratives.
Smith speculated about whether the suspect’s religious associations could prove relevant and called for reporters to investigate the individual’s mosque, imam and influences.
Those questions, however, remained questions in Smith’s discussion; he did not present evidence establishing a religious motive. His broader complaint was that journalists should investigate facts before settling on explanations—whether those explanations involve Christianity, Islam, politics or any other ideology.
For Smith, that is what separates journalism from advocacy.
The Choice Between Abundance and Control
Smith ultimately tied the entire discussion—from British socialism and Tucson government to energy, water, elections and property—back to a simple choice.
He wants what he called “a life of abundance.”
A society in which people choose their careers, own property, buy what they want, pursue success and decide what happiness means for themselves.
Socialist politics, he argued, repeatedly promises compassion but inevitably requires someone else to make those decisions.
“We’re going to end homelessness,” Smith said, describing the familiar political promise. “Okay, how?”
That is the question he wants voters to ask every time government demands more money or power.
What specifically will change? How will success be measured? What happens if the program fails? And when does the government give the power back?
For Smith, those are not technical questions. They are the dividing line between citizens governing themselves and subjects being governed by others.
The American system gives voters a mechanism to answer them without violence.
That mechanism is the ballot box.
And Smith’s closing message was the same one he returned to throughout the morning: use it.