This is a rush transcript from “Hannity,” March 26, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: Mr. President, while you are answering questions about marijuana on the Internet, and your treasury secretary is busy devaluating the dollar, people are suffering both here and abroad. And that is our headline this Thursday night, day number 66 of false hope, loose change, “The World is Watching.”
They are watching as your Cabinet can’t get your policy straight. They’re watching while members of your party dismember your own budget. They’re watching as you continue to push for the greatest expansion of government that this nation has ever seen. And they’re watching, Mr. President, and they don’t necessarily like what they are seeing. Now just ask our first guest tonight.
He is a British member of the European parliament who turned heads when he excoriated Prime Gordon Brown and his economic agenda that is very similar to what is happening right here in our country.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DANIEL HANNAN, MEMBER OF EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT MEMBER: The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around 20,000 pounds. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.
• Video: Watch Sean’s interview
Now once again today you tried to spread the blame around. You spoke about an international recession, international crisis. We are now running a deficit that touches 10 percent of GDP in almost unbelievable figure.
Now, it’s not that you’re not apologizing. Like everyone else I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things. It’s that you’re carrying on willfully, worsening our situation, wantonly spending what little we have left.
Last year, in the last 12 months, 100,000 private-sector jobs have been lost, and yet, you created 30,000 public sector jobs.
Prime Minister, you cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit. You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt, and when you repeat in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well placed to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.
You know and we know and you know that we know that it’s nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HANNITY: And Mr. Hannan, he joins us tonight from London.
Mr. Hannan, thank you for being with us. I got to — do you realize how your message is resonating loudly and clearly in American tonight and how inspired people are by your words?
HANNAN: And you say the nicest things. Listen, I’m happy to come on this show anytime you want me. I’m pretty perplexed by the whole thing. I’m trying to think of, if you could come up with the most boring phrase to enter into a Google search engine, and I thought, speech to the European parliament, so I am completely bowled over by what you said.
HANNITY: Yes, well — look, go over every line. We now are adding, by the year 2019, we’re going to have nearly $900 billions just on interest on the debt with what Obama is spending. He’s spending more than every president from George Washington to George W. Bush in terms of the debt he’s accumulated here.
And as you point out, you can’t spend your way out of recession, borrow your way out of debt. Do you think the world is making a mistake and that we’re really all collectively going to suffer these consequences?
HANNAN: We’re all collectively going to suffer the consequences. I mean it’s not our mistake. The mistake is being made by a small number of political leaders and the small number of their advisers. You know it’s a common sense that when you’re in debt, you spend less. Now anybody except a politician can see that. Anyone can see that in their private life.
You’ve run up too big a debt, you’ve run up too big a mortgage which you try and sort it out, because if you’re either a banker or a politician, you have a different take on these things. Because, of course, it isn’t your money.
You know, that great phrase of Milton Friedman. There’s only two kinds of money in this world, it’s your money and it’s my money, in a way. We’re very careful about the second of those. But of course, for politicians, it’s all your money.
HANNITY: Yes. Anybody but a politician can see that. I think that’s going to go down as one of the all-time classics. Unfortunately, it’s true. You know, one of the things, Mr. Hannan, that we’re debating in America, Barack Obama wants to lay down $634 billions for nationalized health care.
Well, we’ve had nationalized health care in Great Britain, and we’ve had it in France, and we’ve had a single payer in Canada. My question to you is, based on what you said, I would like you to explain to the American people if this is a good idea through this prism.
I read in The Daily Mail last week that the — the your health system, the NHS, literally has a group of people that decided, government bureaucrats, that they were going to give drugs to women with breast cancer and a certain rare form of stomach cancer. The rationing body is what they call it.
Is it a good idea for the U.S. to invest in nationalized health care?
HANNAN: Now, first of all, it’s important that you understand that that’s a true story, and it’s a typical story. It’s not in the newspapers because it’s unusual. We have a rationing body that’s called, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. It’s known as NICE, N-I-C-E, which, coincidentally, there was an adult novel by C.S. Lewis in the 1940s where the NICE was this kind of Satanic conspiracy.
And in terms of them, align affects, you can sort of see the connection. I mean it’s a terrible thing to put anyone in this situation, any bureaucrat in this situation, of having to make those life and death decisions because they are literally life and death decisions.
HANNITY: So you…
HANNAN: The worse thing is for you as the recipient of health care because you’ve got no control over what you get. There’s no contractual relationship between you and the suppliers, so, you know, if they treat you today or next week or six weeks from now, where it’s too late because your condition has already deteriorated.
HANNITY: So your advice.
HANNAN: … there’s nothing you can do about it. You are expected to queue up with a smile and be grateful for what you have. And it is — it’s the last survivor of the kind of socialist post-war conspiracy. Sorry, socialist post war –- yes, I’m tired. It’s midnight. Socialist post-war consensus…
HANNITY: All right, let me ask you.
HANNAN: … in the U.K.
HANNITY: So your advice to America is to stay away from socialized health care. I think you’re very clear on that. Let me ask you what.
HANNAN: If you — listen, if you get nothing else from what I’m saying this evening, please do not make that mistake. If there are any congressman watching this who think, yes, it might be a bit fair, yes, it’d be a bit sort of cozy, you know, I promise you, it is worse for doctors. It’s worse for patients. It’s worse for taxpayers.
HANNITY: Let me ask you one last quick question here if I can, because, you know, a lot of Europe supported Barack Obama heading into this election. They were — you supported Barack Obama heading into this election. That’s why I found your comments fascinating.
Now, the United States of America — I think it’s embarrassing to get lectured by leaders of France, the European Union, president of Czech Republic, president by China, the communist Chinese, on how to run a better economy.
What has happened in terms of the faith and hope and trust and confidence that Europe once had in the president?
HANNAN: Yes, you know, I — first of all, I think I can trump your story. We have done all of the things that you’ve done wrong. We’ve borrowed more. We’ve spent more. We’ve increased the deficit and we pretended that there’s some clever plan about it. But we’ve done something that you haven’t done yet, which is, we’ve gone for the Zimbabwe option. We started just printing more money.
And I actually saw a newspaper in Zimbabwe saying, you know, the poor old Brits. Look at the mess they are in. You know, that having to do this.
HANNITY: Yes. I think you did.
HANNAN: We may have even got the excuse that we have of — so we are pitied by Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, which I think trumps even your communist.
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: I’ve got to run.
HANNAN: What made your country great, what made your people strong and prosperous and free.
HANNITY: Capitalism.
HANNAN: … that it was small government right from the beginning, right from the declaration of independence. There was a distrust of the concentration of power and a confidence in the freedom of the individual. And you know, people will always make better decisions for themselves than administrators will make for them.
And if — when you lose that, if you Europeanize yourselves, and under the illusion that it’s kind of, you know, a bit Hitler and a bit miser and you know, you make yourselves more popular in the world, you will throw away what may people actually respect you, not the least because I understand that it was something…
HANNITY: Daniel, I hope and I pray, and I mean this, that our politicians are listening to you tonight. Thank you for what you said. I hope you’ll come back on the program. We appreciate your being with us.
HANNAN: Pleasure to be here, Sean. Thank you.
HANNITY: All right. Thank you. Very inspiring.
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