Its effectively dead and there are brill limits to what can be done in the political process. The second proposition is the opportunities are opening for free creating some of the best qualities of the american project so let a just say by american project them referring to the idea that came with the founders that individuals and Families Communities can be left free to live their lives as they see fit in the role of the government is to provide a peaceful setting for that endeavor but otherwise standing aside. You are not going to have a Constitutional Convention and you are not going to reverse held in v. Davis or anything else but that is essentially that they option of rolling back the federal governments power host want to jump right in and you mentioned helvering. Your book is fraught with Many Supreme Court cases and if he can footnote them for myself and our viewers. We are not all constitutional lawyers but you play one on tv. When you say that these things are set in stone, what happens such that the dynamism that one might argue is characterized the landscape in these areas has somehow evaporated . Let me distinguish two things. Can we get better policy for my point of view or for that matter from your point of view . Can we change education policy welfare policy, that kind of thing. You yourself i would argue have change policy. Guest you have too. Also if we can change those things that are two institutions would have no reason for being there. You could still do it in that realm but if you talk about regulatory state which is the center of my concern here the Administrative State whatever you want to call it you are talking about a very large edifice that in the way it is constructed cannot be rolled back. For example a Ronald Reagan could not go into office and rollback purgatory state because he didnt have the authority to do so. Host can i ask you to be concrete about something within this regulatory which probably means Different Things to different listeners that in your view is in place and should be in place in your viewing could be rolled back . With Social Security be an example of . You mentioned helvering. Guest im referring to by the revelatory state the usual suspects osha, eta fda and the cabinet offices of some element. The Education Department . Guest it has lots of regulations. Host is this little bit of a variance on Rick Perry Comey couldnt quite remember the name but close this department that department Education Department and im not saying you agree but is that the same sentiment . Guest point number one is what is the regulatory state . The Education Department has lots of things that are not involved with regulation and sometimes lots of things that dont last that the country. You want to get federal funding and of course everybody does so the regulatory state is intertwined with all of the executive branch. Point number two and i want the listeners to be clear on this that actually some regulation for a libertarian like me is perfectly okay because it advances public goods classically defined. The epa in my view is fulfilling constitutionally approved it functions insofar as if you have billowing noxious smoke, not against regulations that prohibit that, not against regulations that once safe coalmines. Im a softy on this. Their regulations which are the lowhanging fruit of the radio tory state good things that needed to be done and have been done i dont want to touch those but you also have a whole of ways in which Small Businesspeople homeowners farmers and ranchers going about their daily lives doctors carpenters going about their daily lives in the radio tory state in which to prevent running their lives as they see fit for pointless reasons. I suspect there are viewers there right now who are saying okay jared and charles particularly charles where do you java line and since you describe yourself as a libertarian and a softy libertarian youre going to draw the line differently than i well and in different places where other libertarians may draw the line so certainly that seems to be a challenging question. How do you know where to draw the line . Guest let me put in the context of my solution because i have a solution in this book so let me briefly describe that because one of the first tasks is to answer your question where you draw the line. What i have proposed his defense funds. I want a big dif funds fund the stone tropically comes to the aid not of corporations but for the little guy. The little guy. Osha has come after him and says you have to redo your workplace and is going to cost 30,000 for some idiotic reason i want them to push back against that. I want there to be legal representation in the same way that you have authority and i suggest occupational defense funds, Real Estate Agents have an occupational defense fund and the phrase i used in the book treat government is an insurable hazard. So suppose you are starting up what i call the philanthropic funds. One of its first jobs is to say which regulations are we willing to say are okay and which regulations are we not so i have a chapter that lays out that, such as regulations that prevent things that are bad themselves. You dont go after them. You dont go after the irs because its really hard to distinguish principle civil disobedience. Yes go. Host first of all you should describe what you mean by civil disobedience because its particular to your thesis but on the way up or hear, when i think civil does obedience i suspect most americans think that if you think about the civil rights movement, civil disobedience against what im sure we he would agree with an absolutely pernicious episode in the american landscape not resolved because clearly racial problems persist in a big way to this day particularly we have seen visavis africanamericans and the police. That strikes me and ill bet its a clear example of not only legitimate but essential civil disobedience raid in your case you were talking about some refined things. Here is a Workplace Safety standards that you think is a bad idea and a waste of time. I could easily find someone on the other side of that argument and im sure you agree. That doesnt pelot the heartstrings of the mind strings that Racial Discrimination does. Guest not your heartstrings may be. Host to me. Guest lets talk about vocational issues. To me, one of the deepest sources of satisfaction in life is practicing a vocation that you love and love to do well and take pride in. Thats a big deal and to the extent that you have lots of people including physicians and Small Businesspeople of all kinds where they say i cant do what i want to do if the terms are providing a good or a service is getting in the way and impeding freedom and a really important way. Host let me jump in here. Presumably they can do what they want to do not because of some arbitrary regulator be in the bonnet although it may look that way to you and your colleagues but because someone in the way thought what you want to do is going to hurt somebody else. But again you were a bit of the judge and jury hear it seems to me. I have a very different view about the governments role is so for me the meaning of the american experiment was a presumption of freedom. So if you are practicing your craft the presumption is you do that the very best you can. You are vulnerable to the tort system. Host that goes back to our founders. Guest you are vulnerable if you are negligent or screw up otherwise theres a presumption of freedom. I dont want to characterize your opinion. I would say the Progressive Movement im defining that as early 20th century terms whether its dramatic origins. It was one of the first times that the state knows better and experts cant say no actually you should not live under the presumption of freedom leaving aside whats okay and whats not. We will decide if this is not ethical. We will decide if this is not there and they will promulgate these rules and we now live under presumption of strength. So when you say somebody along the line said this is going to cause a safety problem, somebody did that a presumption, heres where we got it ideological. If i minded my own business and i have not heard anybody, or someone uses the power of the state to say you havent heard anybody and you havent done anything wrong but im going to lay some strengths on you because you might, thats wrong. Host i dont think anyone would disagree with that the way you have queued it up. And i dont want to belabor this because there are so many thousands of regulations that i guarantee we could find i guarantee ought to be disregarded but i do think that there are two important things to do. The first one was in the book and the second one i found to be missing from the book. Its a bit of a hole in the argument. I really do think we have to say gerald says to charles heres an example of a safety standard that we should just get rid of and if we dont get rid of it then citizens ought to engage in civil disobedience to get rid of it because i do think the ideological argument is pretty abstract and perhaps not as helpful as we would like. Thats the first. The second , and heres where i thought something was missing. Im going to put this in economic terms. It would seem to me that before you want to engage in fairly potentially dramatic endeavor of civil disobedience funded by hundreds of millions of dollars at least as per your hypothesis, you want to make a pretty strong case that what you call the regulatory state has actually hurt not just individuals because i think you hurt individuals but also our economy. Here i think you have a tough hill to climb and you havent even tried to climate. In the book and i will ask you to climate here. Prior to what you are calling a blow to the regulatory state of a lot of things were a lot worse actually growth was a lot slower. Recessions came a lot more frequently and they were much deeper. Many more people were made ill by the kinds of externalities you and i were talking about a while ago, people of very young ages etc. Etc. The imposition of the regulatory state to use your term does not correlate with worse economic outcomes. In fact economic outcomes have been proven. Society is advanced in many ways. Theres an idea that could have advanced better but i read in the book the one thing was missing was an argument as to why you would really want to go after what you go after other than a fairly abstract libertarian discussion about personal freedom. Guest point number one is im not interested in the economic outcome. The value of freedom to live your life as you see fit seems to transcend a lot of that. I have what i call the trend line test in the trend line test takes an outcome that is recently while measured, an outcome that you want to achieve whether mortality Poverty Reduction a number of industrial accidents. I will use one that is classic. Heres the thing, that trendline back as many years as you can and does covers before and after and major regulatory intervention. And then look at where the intervention occurred and try to tell me if did the good thing is happening to forget that are at a steeper rate and heres my proposition. I can produce dozens of trendlines in which things are Getting Better and its a classic case and regulation came in. Something like the 55mile per hour speed limit theres a huge regulatory intervention. You have a steep reduction was flattening out and continue to flatten out some eye for statement is empirically you can take some things like certain contaminants in the air and you can show me a trendline. After the epa came and they got a lot done. Thats a fairly small step. Host its an important debate to have you no because im sitting here thinking up my own example which probably would go on a different direction than yours but i think its important. It was just thinking about Social Security. Social security again you dont object to Social Security. Guest the reason i introduced that in the book is it was a decision by Congress Instead of the social welfare. Host Social Security was introduced in the poverty of the elderly falls and that shouldnt surprise any of us because its a fairly generous particular Progressive Program of cash benefits for people beyond their working years. So i guess that was. 2. 1 is getting back to this issue of reticular line drawing endeavors and what belongs in your civil disobedience category and what doesnt. You take taxes out of the mix. It strikes me as extremely possible that if we were to go down the road if you suggest some of your colleagues would argue that paying taxes is something they ought not do so they are wrong . Guest yes, i would say that is wrong and particularly when it comes to the income tax. Thats the sick example of my decision. I think that taxes idiotic. The way the income tax is currently mistreated im sure you think is idiotic and it was approved by a constitutional amendment so for someone like me who is very much in love with the concept of the original document i have to say look they did it the right way. Host let me give an example of how the other guidelines are used. I use the phrase strict scrutiny is the phrase they said we will subject rights of the constitution to more strict scrutiny than others. I would say there is no full category of regulations but regulations that traded prescribed best practice in a vocation are subject to scrutiny. Regulations that prevent someone from doing what he or she wishes with a property as long as they dont interfere with a the neighbors property that is subject to scrutiny and id go through a chapter where i give categories, this is where you look for targets. Host first of all thank you for getting down to the granule lover or annular level. You and i have argued about some of them in the past. I actually found it to be your most book. It seems like you have given up on the system in your initial comment he said something about the american project is being a preferably broken. And where you go with that is i found to be probably beyond pessimistic and into an area that felt less than democratic. The idea is i poured through the pages was a system is broken. The depth to which the system is broken leaves lease it to be reparable, cant be fixed and democracy wont work. We are going to have to try Something Else which is in fact breaking the law in the civil disobedience context. You are not talking about that struck me as deeply pessimistic and somewhat undemocratic. Defend yourself. Oscar you tell me how my attitude toward democracy is any different than James Madisons. James madison and the other founders were deeply nervous about democracy, deeply. Post goes to answer your question i think James Madison would say and i think his actions, you know more about this than me but his actions corroborate this that you cant fix whats broke into the system but then you either have to live with it or you have to try to use the system to change the system. I think thats a madisonian and you can correct me if im wrong. Guest it certainly is a founding document of authority that when government becomes abusive of its proper powers it is not only the right but the duty of the people to rebel. Host they have the king of england in mind. Guest come on jerrett, they were talking about the role of government and saying when governments is because when governments do this is the right of the people to establish new host i dont disagree with your quotation of texture. My thing, i dont think that they were thinking of workplace regulations. Guest the federal standards, when madison discusses the terrible danger that posed if you substitute for the word faction special interest which is a 21st century word as opposed to an 18th century word what they were describing was what we had happened and here i will appeal to an economist who is not an ideologue on either side as far as i know. Olson as you are aware of came up in a series in government which is endemic in advanced democracies. Host answered by one you could see blocks from where we sit traded. Guest exact weight and its going to happen in any advanced democracy. Theres no way of stopping it because of the asymmetry of the power of small groups to organize resistance. So completely apart from my libertarian views on things i think there was a truth about the current state of the e. U. , the current state of the United States, the current state of japan. It would also be true of china if it wasnt already whereby you have government of the special interests by the special interests for the special interests. I spent five chapters in the first part of the book justifying civil this obedience on grounds that a lot of these dynamics do not lend themselves to solutions. Host a couple of things. I still havent given you a chance to say what you mean by civil disobedience. Guest let me give you the story that prompted this book without many details because i dont want to be identified but is a true story. My wife and i have a friend who is a smallbusiness that employs latinos as certain kinds of businesses do. The difference between him and everybody else in this part of the country is hes documented. He spends 20 or 30 grand a year to do this but what happens is doing the right thing and documenting them he has made himself a visible target so he has been for lack of a harassed by a far different with her agency is not doesnt pay good wages are provided living conditions, he does but there are things that you cant have enough nativeborn americans working for you. Its really hard to get nativeborn americans to take those jobs but a bunch of other things. Once i find the obtuse allegation on going to fight this in court and the bureaucrat i was talking to said you tried that and i will put you out of as this and that was right. Thats not an uncommon story. I have this image and i was furious and i could barely stand to listen with it. Tapping the bureaucrat on the shoulder and saying we are taking this. We know he is technically in violation of this regulation and we dont care. We are going to litigate this to the max and are sclerotic legal system is such that we can do that and make life miserable for yo