Distinguished is. I had sort of grown up with him when i was when in college. The most popular magazine on campus i cant quote them because i think they all involve drug use at note ethnic stereotypes. And theyre all for bid now. He was the Foreign Affairs desk chief which was totally cool because they paid him to travel wherever he wanted. But why he wanted to travel there. It was always kind of mystifying. And then as he moved out of the rock n roll stage and into the age of sober reflection he became a correspondent for the sober is magazine in america. He wrote about medicare reform Social Security reform. Campaign advance reform. And now as he moved into the age of rearing about retirement and College Tuition he is at a it ran an article by me. It is online and it is free and it is called american consequences. By my count. Pj is the author of 20 bucks parliament of horrors. All the trouble in the world and eat the rich. He is more one of the funniest writers around. He has more citations in the penguin diction than any other living writer. What they often miss when they talk about the humor is a good reporter. Parliament of horrors is a very funny book which also a very perceptive analysis if you read eat the rich. You will learn more about how countries get rich and why they dont then in a whole year of economics at most colleges. Those two books as a christmas gift. He has taken the careful study. In his need to pay College Tuitions and his despair to write the greatest book. A cry from the farm middle. So pj, welcome back to the institute lets start by asking what is the farm middle. I think it is where we libertarians have always been. We get out of our way. We owned the middle of the road. Weve always found ourselves. They have always found him or herself. Trying to be reasonable. Its not just the angry left. It is just the maid the regular left. We have always gone straight down the middle. We better get our message out right now. Way back in 1980. For a couple of days tom reed of the Washington Post traveled with us and said you guys are interesting they are so extreme. Youll never make it. You know whats extreme sending american boys to die in countries they have never heard of. Taking half of a working mans wages. That is extremism. The idea that there is such a thing as a extreme libertarian is nonsense. What they need when they say that. None of us are in favor of anarchism. We are in favor of the individual. Individual dignity and responsibility. There is nothing anarchy. I had been to move the show. I think over the summer if there is anything extreme about us. It is that we are extremely reasonable. With the logic to the heat in the swamp and the mess. Politics is not a very logical thing. Badly needs logic applied to it. That is one of the problems applying reason and logic. We have talked about a Libertarian Center of civil rights. And lower taxes and free trade. And avoiding the extreme agendas of left and right. But can libertarians and moderates really cohabit. At the moment its tough. I think a lot of people have a gut feeling and its called common sense that what we are saying makes common sense. What our attitudes and our positions and our research and our analysis does not make as headlines. We dont fall into the if it bleeds it leads. Im of the 24 hour modern news cycle. The other half of that is we are not sleazy and violent enough to attract the attention that we need to attack. To get people away extremism with the views. One of the things that is fundamental. Is that we are willing to use 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. Some of them have a mind to change. A lot of talk about socialism this summer and this past season. I saw a poll today that said 30 of americans have a positive image of socialism. Another humorous like they wrote years ago that as a High School Student they grew up very anticommunist because thats what they taught her in the high school. She became leftist. But then, she said she discovered in a little bit of maturity beyond college that to each according to his needs is not a decision i care to leave to politicians for i do not believe that an ability to comment on the passing scene would carry much weight. I actually addressed that very problem in my book which is why our kids are there. Why are so many left wing. They had forgotten they are young. They had forgotten what the real orders of communism is like. My daughters i did the math in the fall of the berlin wall. Opening yourself to the beginnings of free trade market principles. They dont remember how bad. When it gets all armed up and fully running. How bad they can be. They think its just been am sort of weird anomaly. And then the communism comes. They dont really get that. From each according to his ability. In his need too. You cannot have a free society that runs under that principle. But there is one little part of society that actually does operate. It is the part of a society that kids are most familiar with. Theyre doing what they can. It is very tempting to carry this from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. The natural attitude into into young adulthood. They talked about that i think as the added part of social justice. When they are moving place to place. You did operate on everybody works together. We do that in the family. Its hard to maybe make the abstraction. It works in a family. It doesnt work in a big society. You cant scale it up. Is the sweet feeling. We understand why people feel this way. We as libertarians dont want people to suffer up there and able to take care of themselves. You cant take the family and scale up to the to the size of a nation. The reason you cant do that is this thing called a government. It is necessary once you get a certain number of people concentrated in one place. The government operates on the basis of force in the way that a family or small group the hunter gatherer tribe operates on persuasion. It operates on persuasion and love. You can have close personal ties with 320 million people. We create this thing called government which is supposed to be very limited. Limited to the problems of the individual as we would call it. To the government there was supposed to be limited to taking care of those problems like war. Which we cannot take care of as a family. Notice it has got its remit. It seems to have over spilled its bound. Its always at the point of being gone. You get a traffic ticket and you dont pay that ticket you will get fined and if you dont pay the fine year can go to jail. If you try to escape from jail you will they will shoot you. Everything is when its enforced by government. Is enforced by force. I mentioned earlier. I thought they were better than a College Course in political economy and i should say for people that wont read even to short readable books they could just start with your chapter big fat politics in the new book. I tried to do my best to sort of boil this down. The parking ticket is one example. Every time you ask government to do something however lovely that thing seems to be. Its asking to do it while a gun is pointed to the have of the people who are going to pay for that government. I think one should always ask oneself what i shoot my mother what i hold my mother at gunpoint in order to to accomplish what ive ask the government to accomplish. When i holder to pay for i95. Without any danger to my mom. Bless her heart shes no longer with us. What i hold my mom to gunpoint to be overrun by nazis. I might hold mom at gunpoint for that. Or to deliver a package. To my post po box. You are worried a lot in here about polarization. If everybody is divided between socialism on the left and nationalism and protectionism on the right. But you also suggest in the book that Political Polarization is a sign of something good. In this one respect. When you have a nation that is so internally polarized as we do. It does indicate that we are not under exterior threat. We are not under exterior threat to bring us all together. It is not a naturally homogenous country. We are not united by ties of ancient territory. Now had this frontier mentality. We always think there is an infinite war on territory out there. What binds us together is in some ways artificial is a liberty and rule of law and we tend to unite around that liberty and rule of law when we are under exterior threat. We come together. Its kind of a luxury for us in the United States with the quarrelsome group of people that we are. It is luxury to have the quarrels out in the open. With strange statements from the democrats in congress. We are indulging ourselves. It shows us in a way that we are in pretty good shape. You might think that the epidemic would bring us all together. But apparently, a domestic sickness is not the same as a foreign threat in terms of causing unity among americans. You finish this book before the pandemic laid waste to everything. You wrote an article recently that you talked about the pandemic and you did say that you wondered if one day there would be a great novel coming out of this called on the couch. The jack carroll act of today that cannot leave his mothers house. They were running in between times. It is certainly a strange phenomenon. You might think after time with the pandemic. We are doing writing in the counter protesting. We may have merged from all of this wanting a new more pragmatic sensible limited idea of what the government is and what it does. And what it should be. On the other hand, spending seven months locked in the house with all of our grievances festering and with all of our grudges growing and getting angry and frustrated this might lead us to emerge from all of this angrier at each other more than ever. Thats how human nature works. I say in the book. That i am betting on human nature and unfortunately i dont mean that in a good way. I should point out that we will be taking questions from all of you which you can submit by way of our webpage. Right now i have to as a personal privilege note that as a graduate of Vanderbilt University i take exception to the suggestion that they went to the yacht races. He was a roughandtumble guy who made his own money. He did not had time for races. My bad david. My apologies. I do actually. I was talking about a piece in here how one way we could cut down on the amount of envy material that we feel towards the superrich in the United States is to make the rich uncomfortable and get them out of their tshirts. Part of that. It used to be we really didnt envy the rich that much. It didnt look like it was that much fun. You even have to wear strange sports. And even for those things you have to dress up in funny close unit wanna show up in your plaid cap. They were mistakenly in the yacht race. They prompted me to go read something else. When he was older he did in fact build himself an incredible yacht. He got written up in the newspapers and everything. There was a lot of celebration of the wealthy back then youre right. It was not all that pleasant whereas these days bill gates can dress like everybody else and go where he wants too. In an instant those things are more attractive. I can see him being that more than and being the plus four world. Im sorry. I just wanted to finish up a thought. Jeff zuckerberg i mean mark zuckerberg. Honestly, he gives us impression that his mom is still selling nametags into the back of his tshirts and shorts for when he goes off to summer camp. If jeff is can a face down all of the regulatory pressure on him in congress he should learn to tie in neck tie dude. You ask in the middle of the question. When he did have to go hat in hand to congress he did actually wear a suit and tie. You wrote an inaugural address in the book. Are you hopeful that they would get that address. I wrote it in which the president said basically the office of the president isnt even mentioned until about page eight or nine of the constitution and the constitution. It gets mentioned before the presidency does. In the constitution. I am commander and chief although it is congress that has the power to make war and peace not me so i am the commander in chief and otherwise my duty is to make sure that the laws are passed by congress and they are in force. They did not had any mechanism by which to enforce the certain moral suasion. Dont credit me with all of the good things that happened in the United States and dont blame me for all you for all of the bad things that happened i am just like the national janitor im supposed to keep the holes clear. I dont think we will ever hear that. To the executive office that were not to be hearing that from anybody soon. That is probably right. There is the colts. And theres also just the idea if it was envisioned in the constitution. And now we wait for the president to give us a budget. Congress should be writing a budget. And then the president signs it unless its unconstitutional in which case he should be tow it. Simple enough. It is a beautiful constitution. If you can read small type. Even the members of the eu credit stand and voted down. How much protein and fat are allowable in pork sausage. I could sound to good sound to that level of detail. It is why they are having that. Let me take a question. Divided lands. Dispatches from a divided lands. What parallels or differences do you see between now and the late 60s. Thats also a pretty tumultuous time. It is tempting to compare the two. In the distance in time is sufficient that it allows for comparisons but i actually think of fundamental differences here. The anger and the divisiveness. In the 1960s have to do with some very fundamental issues. There was a National Draft where we were dragging people out of homes and schools it was an example of government and getting completely out of hand. And killing 50,000 American Kids that was one element. The laws about the Racial Discrimination were not a settled case. There was tremendous legalize. Not exclusively in the south. And people were angry. People died for this. People murdered to defend this terrible idea. That was a big question it resulted in a certain amount of violence. The kind of social change. With the greatest generation. And the Younger Generation. We dont really have anything that is comparable to right now. You have the huge changes in attitudes about sexuality of all kinds. But about more fundamental things a lot of arguments over the dinner table werent about drugs and rock n roll. A lot of them were about a fundamentally libertarian attitude of the Younger Generation towards government versus a very conservative attitude that had grown up as partly a result of the depression and world war ii. Among the older generation. The issues that divide us in the 1960s and early 1970s were actually issues of greater moment. Matt wants to know do you think the current brands of left and right populism had them more in a Libertarian Center. Wanting to reject both of these extremes . From your mouth to gods ear. Let us hope so. Societies do not sustain themselves while in chaos they are self organizing. And they tend to organize their way out of the chaotic experiences. The experiences that youre having right now. It is my greatest wish and hope and prayer indeed that people will react to the extremism on the left and the right. Not that they they should agree about everything. I would even want oldfashioned liberalism to go away. I just want people to be able to argue with them at rational terms. They can be quite sharp. What about the unintended consequences. I just want to go back to having the sensible argument. It is my hope that it will drop a lot of people into our fold. I hope so. Another question from the internet the speaker said government always relies on force. I agree to be fined by the police that i am running a red light. What are the implications of this. The government has an auto had a legal monopoly on deadly force. We dont want everything settled by duels or gunfights. So we deliberately create a construct that has a legal monopoly on deadly force. What can happen. It is given the authority and a sense we at the Cato Institute they had been there for the militarization. And turning police into an Occupying Force within certain neighborhoods instead of being the warns of public order. While i dont have a lot of sympathy with the riots. I do have a certain sympathy with what set them off. Is there any possibility of curbing executive orders by this in future president s . I guess we cant curb them in the past president. That would require the time machine that time machine that we all wish we have. It just keeps not showing up. I keep waiting to be able to order that on amazon. No dice. You would think the lesson of the vietnam war it wouldve fully return the warmaking of powers to congress to keep president s from military intrusions on their own where they sometimes go to congress for some kind of permission. And sometimes dont. According to their mood. As far as i can tell. We didnt really seem to learn the lesson from the vietnam war. Im not too optimistic about with the orders that have been abused. The president before last. With the time. All the way down to woodrow wilson. We dont be able were not able to remember that its supposed to be the law and create the law of the land. And has the power to claremore. This goes back to one of our best president s. To the more powerful presidency. I came into forces and added there. And something with a long history. With three branches of the government. One of them might be eating most of the other and then of course there has been a tendency from both. To throw things into the lap of the supreme court. When we have this tripod that our government stands on hearing maybe all three of the legs. Its getting pretty shaky. Debra said she heard you speak at the university of wisconsin many years ago in she recalls that you were not a libertarian. Have you changed. I am feeling that what she recalls i was asked whether i was a member of the Libertarian Party. The answer still is no. Its probably more of a conservative side of libertarian. I was open to the argument. You are speaking with ironing. I think the question have been about the Libertarian Party. The reason i said now is cause i dont consider the United States usually to be a country that has what european