The government is to provide a peaceful setting for that endeavor and otherwise standing aside. We are not going to reverse the database or any other things. The political process has essentially left that option of rolling back the federal governments power. Host you mentioned your book is fraught with many court cases and if you can footnoted them for myself and the viewers we are not all constitutional lawyers but do play one on tv. [laughter] but when you see that these things are set in stone what happened so much so that the dynamism that one might argue has characterized the landscape in the areas has somehow evaporated . Can we get better policy for my point of view or yours. Can we change education policy and welfare policy into that kind of thing . Postcode you have changed welfare policy. Guest you have, too. Also if we could change those things in our institutions would have no so you can still continue down that road. But if you talk about the regulatory state which is the state of my concern here and that means the administrative state, you are talking about a large edifice. For example Ronald Reagan wasnt going to office and will back the regulatory state because he didnt have the authority to do so. Host can i ask you to be concreted up something that means Different Things to different listeners that in your view is in place, probably shouldnt be in place and could be ruled out. With the Social Security be an example . Guest im referring to their victory over regular suspects into some of the other agencies and all of the cabinet offices have some element of the regular host he could end couldnt remember the name that is the kind of the same sentiment . Guest what is the regulatory state to complete the font . The Education Department does a lot of things that are not involved in the regulation but also does a lot of things in the country. This is what you have to do if you want to get federal funding. The regulatory state is with all of the executive branch. Under two and i want the listeners to be quite clear on this some regulations are okay because it advances the public goods. The epa is fulfilling the constitutionally appropriate functions insofar as if you have a smokestack so im not against regulations that prohibit that would prescribe safe tunnels and coal mines although some of my friends would argue that. There are regulations which are the low hanging fruit and are good things that needed to be done and i dont want to touch those but you also have a whole lot of ways in which Small Business people come home owners, Business Card ranchers go about their dalia its the doctors, dentists, going about their dalia lives in the regulatory state in ways that do prevent them from living their lives as they see fit for pointless reasons. Host so i suspect there are viewers that are saying okay where do you draw the line tax and since you describe your self as a puppeteer in your going to draw the line different than i will so certainly that seems to be a challenging question. How do you know where to draw the line between the two . Guest but we put it in the context of my solution because like i said i have a solution to let me briefly describe because one of the first tasks is to answer the question where to draw the line. What i propose is defense cuts. I want a fund that is the bumper of the cleveland which comes to the aid of the corporations that have the little guy who has come after him and is that you have to redo the work place thats workplace thats going to cost 30,000 i want them to wanted to push back and have legal representation and i also suggest occupational defense funds. The phrase i used in the book treat the government as an insurable hazard. So its starting up the Philanthropic Fund and one of the first jobs is to say which regulations are we willing to say civil disobedience is okay and which ones are we not so i have a chapter that lays out guidelines for data such as regulations that prevent things that are not themselves. You dont go after the irs because its really hard to distinguish principle civil disobedience. Host you should describe what you mean civil disobedience on the way over here when i think civil disobedience i would expect most americans think you think about the civil rights movement. Civil disobedience against what im sure we would agree is an absolutely pernicious episode in the american landscape not to say that its resolved because clearly the problems persist in a big way. We have seen africanamericans and the police. But i bet that strikes most listeners as a clear example of not only legitimate but essential civil disobedience. In your case youre you are talking about some pretty we find things. Here is a Workplace Safety standard you think is a bad idea and a waste of time and i could find someone on the other side of that argument. That doesnt pull at the heartstrings in the way Racial Discrimination does. Guest lets talk about vocational issues. For me one of the deep sources of satisfaction is practicing a vocation that you love to do well and take pride. And to the extent that youve had lots of people in locations including physicians and smallbusiness people of all kinds where they say i cant do what i want to do in terms of providing a good or service is getting in the way with competing freedom. Host presumably they can do what they want to do not because of some arbitrary regulator also it may look very much the way to you and your colleagues because somebody along the way thought its going to hurt somebody else, so again your kind of a bit of a judge and jury it seems to me. Guest i have a different view of the governments role so for me the meaning of the experiment was the presumption of freedom so if you are practicing your craft you do that the very best you can. You are vulnerable if you are negligent or screw up otherwise its for the possession of freedom. I dont want to characterize your opinion. I would say that Progressive Movement is defined in the early 20th century terms with its dramatic origins. It was one of the first times that was assumed that the state is better and that experts can say you shouldnt live under the protection of freedom we will decide what is okay and whats not. We will decide this is not fair and we now live under a presumption of constraint so when you say somebody along the lines said this would cause a safety gap if somebody did the presumption this is where it really gets ideological. If i am minding my own business and havent heard anybody for someone to use the power of the state to say you havent heard anybody but im going to leave these constraints on you because you might, thats wrong. Host so i dont think anyone would disagree with that and i dont want to belabor this because there are so many thousands of nitpicky regulations i believe we could find some that ought to be disregarded but i do think that there are two important things to do the first one is kind of in the book and the second i found to be missing so i will ask you to defend. We have to get down on the cases. We have to say heres an example of a safety standard we should get rid of and if we dont get rid of that citizens ought to engage in civil disobedience to get rid of it because the ideological argument is pretty abstract and not as hopeful as we would like. Thats the first place. And the second point where i thought something was missing, so i will put this in economic terms it would seem to me before you want to engage in a fairly potentially dramatic endeavor of civil disobedience funded by hundreds of millions of dollars you would want to make a pretty strong case that what you call the regulatory state has actually hurt not just individuals because i think its hurt individuals but its also hurt the broad economy and so here i think you have a tough sell to claim and you havent even tried to claim it in the books i would ask you to claim it here. Prior to this regulatory state a lot of things were a lot worse. Growth was slower, recessions came more frequently and they were deeper. Many people were made ill by the conception that you and i were talking about a while ago that people young teenagers exploited etc. The imposition of the regulatory state to use your term doesnt correlate with the economic outcomes. Society has advanced in many ways. So i thought one thing missing was an argument why you would want to go after what you go after other than a fairly abstract libertarian discussion about personal freedom. Guest points number one is im not so much interested in the economic outcomes. The value of freedom to live your life as if it seems to transcend a lot of that. Having said that i have the trendline test and it goes like this. Take some outcome that is reasonably well measured that you want to achieve in the number of industrial accidents. Ive used one thats a classic is highway deaths per 100 miles. The trendline back as many years as you can and this would be before and after a major regulatory intervention then look at where it occurred and try to tell me that it gets better at a steeper rate and here is my proposition. I can produce dozens of trendlines in which things are Getting Better in a classic case but then Something Like the 55 per mile speed limit you have this steep reduction that continued to fly them out so the first statement is incorrectly you can take some things like the content of certain contaminants in the air. That is fairly small. Host it would be a good debate to have because im sitting here thinking of my own examples which go in a different direction than yours. I was just thinking about Social Security. Guest the reason i introduced that in the book is because of it decisions that congress and the general welfare. Host switch introduced and poverty of the the older we go overly tall from 10 or Something Like that and that shouldnt surprise any of us because of the fairly generous and Progressive Program of cash benefits to go beyond their working years. Number one is getting back to this issue of particular line drawing endeavors and what belongs in the civil disobedience category and what doesnt. It strikes me as plausible if we were to go down the road you suggest some of your colleagues argue paying taxes is just something they ought not do. Are they wrong . Guest yes i would say thats wrong in particular when it comes to the income tax. There is a classic example of my position. The way the income tax is currently administered it was approved by the constitutional amendment so for someone like me that is in love with the concept of the original founding document i would have to say what they did it the right way they passed the amendment but let me give you an example of how the other guidelines are used. Im going to use the phrase strict scrutiny to subject writes in the constitution and certain ones for more strict scrutiny than others. I would say there is no whole category of regulations but regulations to try to prescribe test practices do something for strict scrutiny. Regulations that prevent the owner of the property from doing what he or she wishes as long as they dont interfere with the neighboring property should be subject to strict scrutiny and i go through and i take a chapter or give other categories where you look for targets. Host thank you for getting down to the more granular level. Thats helpful. Ive read many of your books and you and i have argued about some of them in the past. I found this to be your most pessimistic book. It seems like youve given up on the system than the initial comment you said something about it being irreparably broken. Where you go with you that i that i found to be beyond pessimistic and into an area that felt less than democratic. The idea as i pored through the pages was the system is broken. The depth to which the system is broken with this to be irreparable and ergo democracy dont work. We have to try to find Something Else which is breaking the law. That struck me as deeply pessimistic and undemocratic. Guest you tell me how mine is different from James Madison and the other founders that were deeply nervous about democracy. Host i think james James Madison would say and i think that his actions corroborate this but if you cant fix what is broken through the system then you either have to live with it or try to use the system to change it. Guest medicine didnt write the declaration of independence but its a founding document of authority that the government becomes abusive of its proper powers it is not only the right but the duty of the people to rebuild. Host said they had the king of england in mind as youre talking about. Guest they were talking about the role of the government and saying its not because england has done this but because then the governments do this its the right of the people to establish. I dont disagree with the quotation of the texture. I dont think they were thinking of the workplace regulations. Guest when you get to the federalist ten or 51, i get them mixed up but when madison discusses the faction and the terrible danger that opposed if you substitute the word faction and special interest that they were describing is what would have happened and here i will appeal to an economist whos not an ideologue on either side as far as i know whose work i describe in some detail but as you are aware they came up with a theory of sclerosis which is endemic in the democracies. Host and you can see from blocks when we speak. Guest its going to to happen in any democracy. There is no way of stopping it because of the asymmetry of the power of the groups to organize versus how difficult it is to organize large groups so completely apart from my views on things i think they had hold of the truth about the current state of the eu and the United States and japan and it will be true of if china isnt already whereby sclerosis sits in and you have the government by the special interests and for the specialinterest. Ive done chapters in the book to justify the civil disobedience on the grounds that a lot of these dynamics do not lend themselves to the solutions to the process. Host i still havent given you a chance to say what you mean by civil disobedience and you should. Guest that they but think of the story that prompted this book without many details because i dont want my friend to be identified. We have a friend who has a Small Business that employs latinos. But the difference is he documents them. He spends 20 to 30 grand a year to do this but what happened is doing the right thing and documenting them he made himself an easily visible target so shes been have asked by regulatory agencies not because he doesnt pay good wages were perfect good living conditions, he does but there are things that you cant have enough nativeborn americans working for you to comply with certain regulations because its hard to get nativeborn americans to take those jobs. So finally one time he thing he said was a particularly stupid allegation im going to fight this and they said you tried that and we will put you out of business. And that is not an uncommon story. I was furious when my wife told me. I could barely stand to listen to it. I should imagine a lawyer standing up out of nowhere saying we are taking this mans case. We know hes in violation of the regulation. We dont care. We are going to litigate this and our legal system is such that we can do that and make life miserable for you so we will reimburse him for it and then i said to myself you can write a book and thats what happened. But what im trying to convey is i want to certain categories of regulation to become de facto. Host but youre talking about and i dont mean this in to be more negative but were talking about legal harassment basically just writing them up in court. Tying the regulator up in court. I want to get back to that but i just want to know to understand what you were talking about. By the way one of the ways i think that this is a full Employment Program for lawyers. What i want to do and this is similar he has a book called the rule of nobody that makes the same point. The analogy that i use is on the interstate highways. If theres not a traffic jam at several miles above the speed limit. Technically we could all be stopped. They stop people who are going crazy fast with a stop people who are driving erratically. Okay its not perfect. The perfect thing would be to have a speed limit of the person should go about so lets have have commonsense enforcement and regulation. So what i want is an example thats not in the book i encountered a bartender that had been fined for not carting a person in a place where you are required to card everybody. You dont want kids and bars. The card was her father. The idea that if a pure crack here that and not laugh and say forget it, but it was a 3,000 fine and that stupid. I want no harm no foul. Host that sketch back to my accusation that theres something undemocratic. Guest youre correct in saying that. Host now that we have established again the kind of granular meaning of civil disobedience in the world i want to get back to that because when i look out at the world, i see a lot of the problems he identified and the anecdote youd just told is one of them. Problems exist, overzealous regulation, you wont find myself or anyone else in the real world questioned those assertions however in my view they included the meaning which matched together the system that is broadly representative of the majority of the electorate wants with all of its blemishes. What makes me nervous about by the people is that it sounds like a relatively small group funded by billionaires taking things into their own hands that purports to fight this that ive mentioned this matchup that we call democracy thats very messy and has embarrassing corners in the wrong way. From my point of view the constitution was trashed. It was 1943 when nbc tried to fight the federal committee qishan system because the legislation had asked for faremack were bulldozed rules on licensing. Always before all legislative power is vested in a congress of the United States, there had to be an intelligible principle in regulation whereby administrators apparently there are limits because Congress Said we want to accomplish this and they were specific about what they wanted to accomplish. That was a requirement. In nbc versus United States the Supreme Court dispensed