there s a great economics group. i work on energy subject, have been working a great deal on that and i ve also been trying to reflect about my experiences and see if there is anything that can be learned from them. i wrote a book to try to do that. host: and that book is called issues on my mind. what is the main issue on your mind today? guest: of the main issue is that the world that the united states had a great deal to do with constructing after world war ii, in fact we conducted a security and economic commons that served us and serve everybody well. that is being torn apart right now. and we have to understand what s happening and we have to be ready to interact in a constructive way to build a more coherent world than the one that is developing could get. i reflect my experience is on the different ways that we need to go about. we have some real opportunities in front of us. we have some issues. a lot of the things i propose or talk about are so controversial n
that muslims, where muslims are enjoying western freedom that must be pulled back and they must be made to conform to a very very narrow authoritarian conservative interpretation of islam. the view that the west must be brought to heel for this vision, this interpretation of islam is also dominant and that is what i call islamism. there are people that say what you mean is islam and i understand what they mean. i use it for a particular reason because it s in order to allow for the fact that there are muslims who are not extreme who do want to sign up to western values and we must acknowledge that and there are muslims who don t. those who don t buy call and others call islamists because they are trying to impose their doctrine and views on people that are not muslim and trying to impose the most hidebound antifreedom interpretation of the religion at its most narrow on muslims. so i called those people islamists. they are no threat to us. they say the whole time what their i
davis/bacon, but also concern about construction industry wage rates which were so high led to the white house conclusion that wage and price controls might work nationally. of course, they didn t. and shortly after wage and price controls were invoked, i was put on a committee with herb stein and jim lin to plan our exit of wage and price control. in the meantime, jim hodgson and other cabinet members seemed to spend and i occasionally replacing jim spent almost every day at the white house in cabinet-level meetings trying to ameliorate wage and price increases or come up with decisions on various wage and prices across the country which was bizarre. in remember, george schultz was john connolly and george schultz both had a role in administering that program and arnie weber was the executive director. and then don rumsfeld was, too. well, in an interview with secretary schultz said he was against wage and price control. i think it s true. it was connolly that
the wine industry. it was truly bizarre. it was a nightmare. but one funny incident. the television networks came in to see me. i don t know why i was designated as the person to see on this, but the office of the legal counsel assistant attorney general, he had not yet been appointed to the supreme court, came in my office as well because the network ceos and their general counsels were asserting it was unconstitutional to impose price controls on the network. the first amendment protected their right to set prices. bill and i had a short conference in which we agreed that this was ridiculous. as a legal matter. but i told bill, let me handle it a different way. i said, you know, gentlemen, if we conclude that price controls on the networks are constitutionally dubious, it would follow that we would have to suspend any wage controls on the network. oh, well, we don t want that. that was the end of that. but if you would have used that argument, you could have also found
a separate body. the republicans supported that. democrats were opposed, and we ultimately compromised on that. also at issue of some controversy involved the development of the initial standards, and large industry had developed consensus standards. we provided in the legislation that the consensus standards would go into effect initially. it was probably now that i think back on it an example of a situation where large industry wants federal legislation that would reduce competition from smaller companies. since the consensus standards were agreed upon by large companies and imposed more of a requirement on small companies who weren t as safety conscious. the republicans were in favor of consensus standards, and the democrats compromised on that. then the big issue then one big issue on which we lost as i tried my very best to convince the congress to allow the occupational safety and health administration, osha, in develops standards to take into account cost benefits. t