Charles its a privilege to be here with you today, lets jump right in telus what it is you would like us and your readers to take from your new book. Guest okay in the cliff notes version. The first run is that the american project as i decided is effectively dead. There are real limits to what can be done through the political process. The second process is the opportunity for opening for recreating some of the best policies in our nation. So let me just quickly say that american project i am referring to the idea that begun with the founders that individuals and families, communities can be left free to live their lives as they see fit. The role of the government is to provide a peaceful setting to that environment. Thats gone. Its not coming back, were not going to have a Constitutional Convention were not going to be looking at the data or any other things. The political process has essentially left that option of rolling back the federal governments power. Host let me jump right in there and you mentioned hovering, your book has Many Supreme Court cases and perhaps if you can cliff note them for you can for myself and the viewers were not all constitutional lawyers. But you play one on tv. When you say these things are set in stone, what happens with such that one might argue christ is characterized the landscape of these areas has somehow evaporated . Spee2. Guest let me distinguish between two things. Can we get that her policy for my pointed view or for that matter your point of view. Can we change education policy, can we change welfare policy . That kind of thing, yes we can still do that. Host you yourself i would you yourself i would argue have changed policy. Guest while you have two and also if you couldnt change those two then are two institutions would have no thing. If you talk about regulatory state which is the center of my concern here and by regulatory state the administrative state, were talking about a very large that in the way it is constructed cannot be brought back. For example Ronald Reagan did not go into the office to rollback regulatory state because he didnt have the authority to do so. Host can i ask you to be concrete about something within this revelatory state which means Different Things to different listeners. In your view is in place, could be rolled back, would would Social Security be an example . Guest no. Im referring to by the regulatory state like osha, eta, fda, 70 other agencies and all the cabinet offices have some element. Guest like the Education Department . Speak. Host is this sort of a variance on rick a lawyer he said lets close these departments and then im not saying youre referring to that im just saying is that kind of the same sentiment . Guest point number one is what is revelatory state just to complete the thought. The Education Department does lots of things that are not involved in regulation. It also does lots of things to help build cash classrooms across the country. This is what you have to do to get federal funding. So the regulatory state is intertwined with all of the executive branch. Point point number two and i want listeners to be clear on this, some regulation for a libertarian like me is perfectly okay because it advances public good, redefine. The edith the eta in my view is redoing functions like if you have a smokestack billowing smoke, im not against regulation, im not against regulations that prescribe safe tunnel thing in coal mines. Although my libertarian friends would argue with that. If there regulations for the regulatory state the really good things that needed to be done and have been done, i dont want to touch those. Now you also have a whole lot of ways in which Small Business people, homeowners, farmers, ranchers, going about, going about their daily lives, doctors, dentists, carpenters, going about their daily lives and using the regulatory state that do prevent them from running their lives as they see fit for pointless reason. Host ice up spec their viewers right now who are saying, okay where do you draw the line . And since youve described yourself as a libertarian, youre going to draw the line different then a different place and i will, and a different place and harder libertarians would draw the line. Certainly that that seems to be a challenge, where do you draw the line . Guest let me put it in the context of my solution, because unlike a book that ive written. Let me bruce lee described that because one of the first task of my solution is to answer your question. What i proposed is defense fund, i want a big defense defense fund that is philosophically funded one which comes to the aid of not corporations but the little guys. The little guy who is who osha has come after him and says you have to redo your workplace its gonna cost 30,000 dollars for some idiotic reason, and i want them to push back against that. I want want there to be legal representation. I also suggest occupation, so Real Estate Agents have a spatial defense fund area the phrase i use in the book is treat government as measurable hazard. Suppose you are starting up what i call the madison fund, one of its very first jobs is to say which regulations are we really to say its okay and which are there not . So i have have a chapter that lays out guidelines for that. Such as, regulations that prevent things that are bad in themselves, you dont go after them, you dont go after the irs because its really hard to diss english principle this disagreement. Spee1 i was thinking about that on the way over here, first of all you should described by what you mean by civil diss meaning because its particular to your thesis. On the way over i was thinking when i think civil disobedience i expect most americans think you think about the civil rights movement. Civil disobedience against what im sure we both agree is an absolutely pernicious episode in the american landscape, not to say its resolved but clearly racial robbins still exist today in a big way. Weve seen the africanamericans and the police, but that strikes me i bet most listeners have a clear example of not only legitimate but essential civil disobedience. In your case youre talking about some pretty refined things, here is a Workplace Safety standard that you think is a bad idea and a waste of time, i could easily find someone on the other side of that argument, im sure you would agree. That doesnt pull the heartstrings or the mind strings the way Racial Discrimination does. Guest not your heartstrings, to me lets talk about vocational issues. One of the deep sources of satisfaction in life isnt practicing a vocation you love and love to do well, take pride in. Thats a big deal. To the extent you have lots of people in some locations, including positions, and smallbusiness Business People of all kinds where they say i cant do what i want to do in terms of providing a good or service, if its done in a way and impeding freedom and an important way. Host let me jump and presumably they can do what they will want to do not because some arbitrary being although it may look that way, but because someone along the way thought what you want to do is going to hurt someone else. So again you are kind of a bit of a judge and jury here. Guest well know i have a very different view of what the governments role is. For me the meaning of the American Experience is a presumption of freedom. If you are practicing your craft, the presumption is you do that the very best you can, if you make mistake and hurt someone you need to go to the court system, that goes back to the founders, you are vulnerable if you are negligent or screwup. Otherwise you have a presumption of freedom, i dont want to characterize your opinion, i, i would say that the progressive movement, im defining that in its early 20th century terms with its dramatic origins and would draw wilsons progressivism. It was one of the first time that is assumed the state was better. That experts can say no actually you should not live under presumption of freedom we will decide whats okay and what is not. We will decide if this is not safe or not ethical or not fair, and we will make these rules and we now live under that presumption. So when you say someone along the lines said this is going to cause problems somebody did, but the presumption. Okay heres where we really get ideological. If im minding my own business and have not hurt anybody, or someone would use the power of the state to say you havent heard anybody you havent anything wrong but im going to lay constraints on you because you might. Thats wrong. Host i dont think people would disagree with that, i do think that, i think there so many nitpicky regulations that we could agree that should be disregarded, but i do think there is two important things to do. The first one was in the book, the second was missing from the book so im going to ask you defend what i thought was a hole in the argument. The first is i think you have to get down to cases. I think you have to get down and say jared said charles here is an example of a safety standard that we should just get rid of, if we dont get rid of it then citizens ought to engage in civil disobedience to get rid of it because i think the ideological argument is pretty abstract and perhaps not as helpful as we would like. Okay thats the first point. The second second point, here is 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 you would want to make a pretty strong case that what you call the regulatory state has actually hurt, not just individuals but hurt the broader economy. Here i think you have a uphill climb and you havent even tried to climb it in the book so im going to ask you to try to climate here. Prior to what your calling the regulatory state a lot of things were a lot worse, actually Growth Growth was a lot slower, recessions came more frequently and where will deeper. Many more people were made ill, by the kind of things we were talking about a while ago. People of very young ages were exploited, et cetera et cetera, the ink click patients of the regulatory state to use your term does not correlate with economic outcomes in fact they have improved since then, society has imbalanced in many ways, so i felt reading the book one think that was missing was an argument as to why you really would want to go after what you go after, other than a fairly abstract libertarian discussion about personal freedom. Guest point number one is that i am not interested in so much the economic area. The value of freedom to live you life as you see fit seems to transcend. I have what i call the trendlines test and it goes like this take some outcome that is recently well measured, and outcome you want to achieve, mortality or property reduction, the number of industrial accidents, i will use one that is a classic is highway deaths per 100 million miles. Heres the thing, plop that trend line as far back as you can and you should be at it. That covers before and after a written major regulatory intervention and show me, look at where the intervention occurred and try to tell me did the good thing that was happening before get better at a steeper rate . Heres my proposition, i can produce dozens of trendlines in which things were Getting Better on highway fatality is a classic case, and regulation came in, first you cant see an improvement but then the 55mile per hour speed limit was a huge regulatory in the 1970s and it flattened out. So my first statement is empirically you can take some things like certain contaminants in the air and you can show me a trendline in the air and say after the epa came and it got a lot better. I would would say thats in actually fairly small subset. It would be a good and important debate to have. Im sitting here thinking of my own examples which go on a different direction than yours. I think theyre important, i was was just thinking about Social Security. Social security again you dont object Social Security. Guest the reason i introduce that in the book is that because Congress Talk about the general welfare. Host so Social Security is introduced and the poverty of elderly falls and that shouldnt surprise any of us because its a fairly generous, particularly Progressive Program for cash benefits for folks were beyond their working years. So that was. 2,. 1 was getting back to this issue of particular line drawing endeavors, and what belongs in your civil disability category and what doesnt. So you take take taxes out of the mix, it strikes me as extremely plausible that appeared to go down the road we you would suggest some of your colleagues would argue that paying taxes is just paying taxes is something they should not do. Are they wrong . Spee2 yes, i would say thats wrong and particularly when it comes to the income. I think the income taxes idiotic, the way the income taxes currently administered i you think is idiotic in many ways. It was approved by constitutional amendment so someone like me who is very much in love with the concept of the original founding document, i have to look at the limits. Let me give you an example of how the other guidelines i use. Im going to use the phrase scrutiny. We will subject to rights in the constitution under strict scrutiny than others. I would say say there is no whole category of regulation you say you can disobey all of these but regulations that try to prescribe best practice in a vocation, they are subject to strict scrutiny. Regulations that prevent an owner of a property from doing what he or she would do at that property is like they dont interfere with neighboring property, those sick should be subject to strict scrutiny. I go through and i take a chapter and give other categories and say this is where you look for targets for civil disobedience. Host thank you for getting down to a more granular level. I read many of your books and you and i have argued about some of them in the past, i actually found this to be your most pessimistic book. It seems like you have given up on the system in your and where you go with that i found to be beyond pessimistic and into an area that is less than democratic. The idea was as i poured through the pages the system is broken the death to which your system is a broker and leaves it to be irreparable, it cant be fixed. So democracy wont work and we we will have to try Something Else which is in fact breaking the law and a civil disobedience contacts. You not talking about felonies, that struck me as both deeply pessimistic and somewhat undemocratic. Defend yourself and those. Those. You tell me how my attitude toward democracy is any different than James Madison. James madison and the other founders were deeply nervous about democracy. Host i guess to answer your question James Madison would say, and i think his actions you know more about this than me, i think his actions show that if you cant fix whats broken through the system then you either have to lift it or you have to try to use the system to change it. Guest now medicine didnt write the declaration of independence but it certainly is a founding dr. On 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 so they had the king of england in mind, youre talking about. Guest come on they were talking about the role of government and when governments, because anglin when governments do this its the right of the people to establish to do that. Host i dont disagree with you with your quotation of texture. My thing is i dont think they were thinking of the workplace regulations. Guest they were thinking about faction so when madison discussions factions at the terrible danger and that pose, if you substitute faction for the word special interest which is a 21st century word what they were describing was what we have. Here i will appeal to an economist who is not an ideologue on either side, wilson came up with a theory of sclerosis in government which is epidemic and inherent in advance democracy. Host and certainly one that you can say blocks from where he speaks. Guest exactly, its going to happen in any advance democracy, theres no way of stopping it because of the asymmetry of the power of a small group to organize versus organize a large group. Its a part for my libertarian views on things, he had a hold of the truth about the current state of the youth, the United States, states, the current state of japan, it will be soon the true of china if it isnt already whereby sclerosis sets in and you have government of the special interests by the specialinterest. I spent five chapters in the first part of the book justifying civil disobedience 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, and you should because our audience needs what i do that right now. Spee2 let me get to a story that prompted this book. Without many details because i dont want my friend to be identified, its a true story. My wife and i have a friend who has a Small Business that employs latinos as are kinds of businesses do, the difference between him and everybody else in his part of the country as he documents it. He spends 2030 grand 30 grand a year to do this. What happened is by doing the right thing and documenting them he sorta made himself an easy target and he has been relentlessly harassed by regulatory agencies not because because he doesnt pay good wages or living conditions, he does but there are things that you can obey. You can have enough nativeborn americans working for you to apply with certain regulations because its hard to get nativeborn americans to take those jobs in a bunch of other things. So one time he had a stupid allegation and that he was going to fight it in court and they said if you try that will put you out of business and he knew that is exactly right. Thats not an uncommon story, i had this image, i was furious when my wife told me. I could barely stand to listen to it and i had an image of a lawyer tapping him on the shoulder and know that he is technically a violation of this revelation and we dont care, we are going to l