Dollars in constitutional studies, economics, Foreign Policy and so on but perhaps our most anguished scholar at least if we can agree but it depends on what the meaning of distinguished is is our Hl Mencken Research fellow p. J. Orourke. I always say ive grown up with pj. When i was in college most popular magazine on campus was National Lampoon which he edited and i remember funny bits from National Lampoon i cant quote them as i think they all involve drug use, ethnic stereotypes or gender relations and theyre all forbidden now. He then moved on to Rolling Stone where he was Foreign Affairs desks chief which was totally cool because they paid him to travel wherever he wanted. But why you wanted to travel to beirut and to a televangelist retirement village was always kind of mystifying. And as he moved out of the rock n roll stage and into the age of sober reflection he became a correspondent for the sober us magazine in america, the atlantic monthly. He wrote soberly about medicare reform, Social Security form and bank finance reform and other adult topics and now as he moves into the age of worrying about retirement and college tuition, these editing a magazine on finance and investment. You may judge its seriousness by the fact that it ran an article by me its online, its free and its called american consequences. By my count pj is the author of 20 books including holidays and hell, parliament of course, all the trouble in the world and eatthe rich. Is one of the funniest writers around. Indeed he has more citations in the penguin dictionary of humorous quotations and any other living writer but what people often miss when they talk about his humor is what good reporterand analyst he is. Parliament of horus is a very funny book but its also a very perceptive analysis of politics in a modern democracy. And if you read eat the rich to learn more about how countries get rich and why they dont and in a whole year of economics at most colleges. Thats why i recommend those two books as a christmas gift. Give your friends and family a very inexpensive College Course in Political Science and economics. And now he has taken his careful study of politics and economics and his need to pay College Tuitions and his existential despair to write his latest book, a cry from the far middle. Its a pleasure to welcome the 80 mencken Research Fellow of the Cato Institute, p. J. Orourke. So pj, welcome back to the Cato Institute microphone and lets start with asking what is the far middle . Well, i think its wherewe libertarians have always been. Radical moderates, militant moderates even. We get out of our way, we own the middleoftheroad. People always found themselves and i think everyone who feels himself to be a libertarian as always found him or herself to be caught between the poles of the angry left and the angry right, trying to be reasonable. In fact its not just the angry left and the angry rights, if the regular left or the liberals and regular right and social conservatives. Weve always gone straight down the middle trying to use logic and boy, we better get our message out right now because the country seems to have lost that. Any sense of that. You know, way back in 1980 i traveled with the libertarian president ial candidate and clark. And for a couple of days, tom reed of the Washington Post traveled with us and he said you guys are interesting but youre so extreme youll never make it. And i said you know whats extreme, sending american boys to die in countries theyve never heard of , taking half of a workingmans wages. Thats extremism. Exactly. The idea that theres such a thing as an extreme libertarian is nonsense. What people need when they say that is actually an anarchist. And none of us are in favorof anarchism. We were in favor of rule of law or in favor of the individual, where in favor of individual liberty, dignity and individual responsibility. That was the last one being a tougher sell point. But there is nothing in anarchy, i spent 20 years as a war reporter. Ive been to mogadishu. I know what anarchy looks like and over the summer some people in the unitedstates got a little idea of what anarchy looks like, how well it worked in portland. If theres anything extreme about us is that were extremely reasonable. We tried to think things through. We tried to apply logic to the heat and the swap to amass the sludge ofpolitics from all sides. Politics is really not a very logical thing and it badly means logic of likability. Thats one of the problems, applying reason and logic may make you extreme info world of left and right wingers. We talked about a Libertarian Center of civil liberties, lower taxes, free trade and staying out of other peoples business and avoiding the extreme agendas of left and right but in libertarians and moderates, can we really cohabit . At the moment, its tough. I think a lot of people have a gut feeling and its called common sense. That what were saying makes common sense and that our attitudes make common sense. What our attitudes and our positions and our research and our analysis does not make is headlines. We dont fall into the if it bleeds, it leads paradigm of the 24 hour modern news cycle and horse, the other half of that is if its sleaze, it leads and where not sleazy and violent enough to attract the kind of attention that we need to attract at the moment to get people away from the as you point out, the extremism of their views. One of the things that fundamental to libertarianism is that we are willing to use logic and reason and listen to logic and reason to change our minds. And we are faced with a group of people at the moment who are not about to change their minds and some of them you worry about whether theyve got amind to change. Theres a lot of talk about socialism this summer, this past season. I saw a poll today that said 30 percent of americans have a positive image of socialism although only one third of those could actually describe accurately what socialism was. Another humorist that i like, fran leibowitz, not to be confused with on leibowitz of animal house, wrote years ago as a High School Student she grew up very anticommunist because thats what they taught her in her high school and in college he became a leftist like antiamerican procommunist but then she said she discovered in a little bit of maturity beyond college that from each according to hisability , to each according to his needs is not a decision i care to leave the politicians or for i do not believe an ability to comment humorously on the passing scene would carry much weight with ones comrades. Sure words were never spoken, thank you. I actually addressed that very problem in my book which is basically i asked why our kids, is, why are so many people so left wing . Besides the fact that they have forgotten, their young. Of course theyre young so they forgotten what the real horrors of communism are like. For my daughters, i did the math. As long ago as the Great Depression is for me and Something Like china arming itself the free market principles, thats as far back in history as the kellogg brand peace pact of the 1920s is for me. They dont remember how bad, truly bad socialism when it gets all armed up and fully running, how bad they can be. They think their venezuela which is some sort of weird anomaly or cuba or the communism comes with rum and cokes and cool by ossining and chevys. So they dont really get that but the thing that they really dont get is that marxist maximum from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. You cannot have a free society that runs under that principle, but there is one little part of society that actually does operate from each according to his ability, to each according to his need and that part is the part of society that kids are most familiar with. Itscalled a family. Within afamily , kids are growing up, theres mom and dad doing what they can to provide the kids with what they need. And so its very tempting to carry this from each according to his ability, to each according to his need natural childish attitude into young adulthood. Alas. Thats right. I had talked about that i think as the atavism of social justice. That we have this atavistic, instinctive sense that in the small group of the family, the clan, the group moving from place to place, 10,000 100,000 years ago you did operate on everybody works together to get the food and then everybody works together toeat it as they needed. And we do that in the family and its hard maybe to make the abstraction that it works in a family, it doesnt work in a big society. You cant scale it up. Its a sweet feeling, we understand why people feel this way. And we as libertarians dont want others to suffer, be deprived if theyre incapable of taking care ofthemselves. Theyre not like some sort of heartless social darwinists. At all, but you cant take the family and scale it up to the political, to the size of a nation. And the reason you cant do that is this thing called government which is necessary once you get a certain number of people concentrated in one place. You need something called government. And government operates on the basis of force in the way that a family or a small group, a commune, a collective, hunter gatherer tribe operates on persuasion. It operates on law, it operates on close personal ties. You cannot have closepersonal ties with 320 million people. And so we create this thing called government which is supposed to be verylimited, limited to those problems of the individual orthe family or the small group , Civil Society as we would call it. The government is supposed to be limited to taking care of those problems like more. Which we cannot take careof his family. Notice that its gotten, its remit has gotten somewhat larger. It seems to have over spilled it sounds a bit but that government is in place always at the point of a gun. Even in the least. You get a traffic ticket and you dont pay that ticket, youre going to get finedand if you dont pay that fine , youre going to go to jail and if you try to escape from jail, they will shoot you. Everything right down to a parking meter on the corner of your street is when its enforced bygovernment is enforced by force. I mentioned earlier i thought your books, parliament of horse and eat the rich are better than a course in political economy and i should say for people who wont read even to short readable books,we could just your chapter big fat politics in the new book. I think they could. I tried to do my best to sort of boil this down and you know, the parking ticket is one example. The other example is every time you ask government to do something, however lovely that seems to be, you are asking them to do it while the gun is pointed to their head of the people who are going to pay for the things government does i think one should always ask oneself, would i shoot my mother, if i hold my mother at gunpoint, lets not go so far as to shoot her but would i hold my mother at gunpoint in order to accomplish what ive asked thegovernment to accomplish . So what i hold my mother at gunpoint to pay for i95 . I personally that thinkthats something that could be privately done without any danger to my mother. Theres her heart, shes no longer with us but when i hold my mom at gunpoint to save us from being overrun by nazis . I might. Being overrun by nazis would be an extremely bad thing. I might hold mom at gunpoint for that but not to pay for i95 were to deliver a package or po box. Your worrying a lot in here about polarization. We worry a lot at cato about polarization. What happens to liberalism if everybodys divided between socialism on the left and nationalism and protectionism on the right but you also suggest in the book that political polarizationis a sign of something good. Yes, and in this one respect. When you have a nation that is so internally polarized as we do, screaming and yelling at each other, it does indicate at least in the case of the United States historically speaking, it does indicate where not under exterior and were not under sufficient exterior crap to bring us all together. America is not a naturally homogenouscountry. We are joined by ties of the city, barely even joined by ties of language. Were not united by ties of ancient territory, i territory that wasnt ours in the first place and we got this frontier mentality that means we always think theres an infinite war onterritory out there. What binds us together is in some ways artificial. Its a liberty and rule of law and we tend to unite around liberty and rule of law and were under real exteriorthreats. And harvard respond, when 9 11happens. We come together so its a kind of luxury for us in the United States, a diverse and quarrelsome group that we are, its a luxury to have our quarrels out in the open with screaming and yelling in the street and nonsense on the internet and bloviating from the white house and these strange statements on the democrats in congress. But were indulging ourselves. It shows us that in a way were in good shape. You might think that the covid epidemic would bring us all together but apparently a domestic sickness is not the same as a foreign in terms of causing unity among americans. You finish this book before the pandemic lay waste to everything but i noticed that you wrote an article recently where you talked about the pandemic and you did say that you wondered if one day there would be agreat novel coming out of this call on the couch. Yes, the jack carol lack of today cant leave his mothers house where incidentally jack was living in betweentimes running up and down the United States and on the road. It is certainly a strange phenomenon. One of the things that worries me is you might think that after a period not only with the pandemic, but also with the George Floyd Protests and the chaos thats come from that including rioting and the pretty ugly counter protesting, you might think we might emerge from all of this wanting a new more pragmatic sensible limited idea of what the government is and what it does and whatshould be. On the other hand spending seven months locked in the house with all our grievances festering and all our grudges growing and getting angry and frustrated, this might lead us to emerge from all of this angrier at each other than ever because thats sometimes how human nature works and i say in the book, i spent that im kind of betting on human nature and unfortunately i dontmean that in a good way. I should point out we will be taking questions from all of you which you can submit by way of our webpage, facebook, twitter, youtube and use the hashtag cato events. Right now i have to as a sort of personal privilege note that as a graduate of Vanderbilt University i take exception to your suggestion that Commodore Vanderbilt went beyond racism, he was a roughandtumble guy who made his own money. He didnt have time for well praises. His children and grandchildren who went to the operations. My bad david and my apologies. I do actually, i was talking about a piece in here about how one way we could cut down on the amount of and the, material and the that we feel towards the superrich and the United States is to make them , to make the rich uncomfortable, get them out of their tshirts and their bunny slippers and make sure that there in top hats and part of that was i said it used to be that we didnt really envy the rich that much is being rich look like it was that much fun. You have to wear all these starchy close and they had strange sports like yacht racing and breaking your neck playing polo and getting things with a stick in the middle of nowhere called golf. And even from those things you have to dress up in funny close and you didnt want to show up at the race in your plus force and your plan on the golf course. Or youd be snickered out of the yacht club. And some are because of Commodore Vanderbilt be called commodore, and mistakenly took in the yacht race. He had a small boat and then he had a lot of small bones and the boats got bigger and i learned something. I learned something from reading your book. When he was older he did in fact call himself an incredible yacht and take his whole family on a trip to europe got written up in the newspapers and everything so yes, there was a lot of celebration of the wealthy back then but youre right, it was not all thatpleasant whereas these days , bill gates can dress like everybody else. Go where he wants to in an instance, those things are more truck attractive. I can see and being that more than envying the plus for world. Im sorry, i wanted to finish up but zuckerberg is like wearing his underwear in public. I guess if youre a zillion dollars you can wear your underwear in public but he gives this impression that his mom is still selling nametags into the back of his tshirts and shorts for when he goes out tosummer camp. I think if jeff is going to face down all the regulatory pressure on him in congress, he should learn to tie a necktie, dude. Im sorry david, i caught you in the middle of the question. When zuckerberg did have to go in hand to congress, he did actually wear a suit and tie but thats the onlytime ive seen. What i was going to ask was you wrote an inaugural address in the book. Are you hopeful either candidate will give that address . Number i wrote an inaugural address in which the president says basically, the office of the president isnt even mentioned till about page 8 or nine of the constitution. Actually the Vice President as president of the senate gets mentioned before the presidency does in the constitution. He said and im commanderinchief although its congress that has the power to make war and make peace, not me. So im the potential commanderinchief and otherwise my duty is make sure that the laws that are passed by congress are enforced although im not giving any particular mechanism by which to enforce them other than the sort of moral persuasion of being president of the United States so really, dont credit me with all the good things that happen in the United States and dont blame me all the bad things that are going t