Education and so on. But perhaps our most distinguished scholar, it depends what the meaning of distinguishes commas or hl pj orourke. I always say have sort of grown up with pj. On campus was a National Lampoon i cannot quote them but they all involve drug use ethnic stereotypes or gender relations. When his afforded parents desk chief which was totally cool because they paid him why he wanted to travel to beirut in a tele evangelist retirement village was always kind of mystified. As he moved out rock n roll station to sober reflection he became a correspondent for the sobers magazine in atlanta, the Atlantic Monthly p wrote soberly client finance Campaign Reform and other adult topics he was editing a magazine on finance and investment its online its free its called for megan consequences. if you read eat the rich it will learn more about why countries get rich and why they dont during the whole year of economics and college. Thats why 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 page dominic Pay College Tuition and is x essential despair to write his latest book a cry from the far middle, its a pleasure to welcome abp. J. Orourke. P. J. , welcome back the Cato Institute microphone. Lets start by asking what is the far middle . I think its where we libertarians have always been. Radical moderates, militant moderates even. We get out of our way, we own the middleoftheroad. Everyone feels themselves to be libertarian. Always found him or herself to be caught between the poles of the angry left and the angry right, trying to be reasonable. Its not just the angry left and the angry right, its just the regular left or even the liberals and the regular right and the social conservatives. Weve always gone straight down the middle trying to use logic and we better get our message out right now because the country seems to have lost that any sense of that. Way back in 1980 i traveled with the libertarian president ial candidate clark had for a couple days tom reed of the Washington Post traveled with us and he said, you guys are interesting but you are so extreme you will never make it. I said, you know whats extreme . Sending american boys to die in countries theyve never heard of taking half of the working mans wages, thats extremism. Exactly the idea that there is such a thing as an extreme libertarian its nonsense. What people mean when they say that is actually an anarchist. None of us are in favor of anarchism. We are in favor of rule of law we are in favor of the individual, we are in favor of individual liberty, individual dignity, and individual responsibility. The last one being a tougher sublime. There is nothing abanarchy, i spent 20 years as a war reporter, ive been to mogadishu, i know exactly what anarchy looks like and i think over the summer some people in the United States got a little idea of what anarchy looks like, how well it worked portland. If theres anything extreme about us is that we are extremely reasonable, we try to think things through, we try to apply logic to the heat and the heat and the swamp amidst the sludge amidst the politics of all side which politics is really not very logical thing. It badly needs logic. Thats one of the problems applying reason and logic might make you extreme in a world of left and right wingers. At cato we talked about a Libertarian Center of civil rights, civil liberties, lower taxes, free trade, staying out of other peoples business and avoiding the stream and agendas of left and right. Libertarians and moderates or centrists really cohabit . At the moment its tough. I think a lot of people have a gut feeling, its called common sense that what we are saying makes common sense and that our attitudes make common sense. In our attitudes and positions and research and analysis does not make his headlines. We dont fall into the, if it bleeds it leads paradigm of the 24hour modern news cycle. The other half is if it abwe are just not sleazy and violent enough to attract the kind of attention that we need to dominic attract of the moment to get people away from as you point out, the extremism of their views. The world thinks of the fundamental libertarianism is that we are willing to use logic and reason and listen to logic and reason to change our minds. We are faced with a group of people at the moment who are not about to change their minds and some you worry about whether theyve got a mind to change. Theres a lot of talk about socialism this summer this past season, i saw a poll today that said 30 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 fondly dilutes of animal house wrote years ago that as a High School Student she grew up very anticommunist because thats what they taught her in her high school and in college she became very leftist like antiamerican procommunist but then she said she discovered in a little bit of maturity beyond college that from each, according to his ability, to each according to his needs is not a decision i care to lead to politicians for i do not believe in an ability to come in, comment humorously on the passing scene would carry much weight with ones comrades. Truer words were never spoken, thank you fran. I actually address that very problem in my book, which is basically asking why our kids commies, why are so many young people so leftwing. Besides the fact that they have forgotten, they are young. They have forgotten what the real horrors of communism are like, for my daughters, i figure i did the math the fall of the berlin wall is as long ago as the Great Depression is for me. Something like china opening itself to the beginnings of free trade and free market principles. Its as far back as the kellogg brand peace pact of the 1920s as for me. They dont remember how truly bad socialism when it gets all armed up and fully running how bad it can be. They think its just either venezuela, which is some sort of weird anomaly or cuba or the communism comes with rum and cokes and kumbaya singing and old chevys. The thing what they really dont get is that marxism max symbol 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 to abthe part of society that kids are most familiar with, its called a family within a family kids are growing up, there is mom and dad doing what they can to provide the kids with what they need so its very tempting to carry this from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, the natural childish attitude into young adulthood. Thats right, hayek talked about that as the atavism of social justice that we have this atavistic instinctive sense that in the small group 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 everybody works together to eat it as they need it. We do that in the family and its hard maybe to make the obstruction 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 or be deprived if they are incapable of taking care of themselves who are not like some sort of heartless social darwinist. But you cant take the family and scale it up to the political abto the size of a nation. 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. Government operates on the basis of force in the way a family or small group commune collective hunter gatherer tribe operates on persuasion. Operates on love. Operates on close personal ties. You cannot have close personal ties with 320 million people. Limited to those problems of the individual or family or small group Civil Society as we would call it. Limited the government is supposed to be limited to taking care of those problems like war. We cannot take care of as a family. It seems to have over spilled its bounds a bit but that government is in place always at the point of a gun even in the least little thing. You get a traffic ticket and you dont pay that ticket, youre going to get find and if you dont pay that fine you are going to go to jail and if you try to escape from jail, they will shoot you. Everything right down to the parking meter on the corner of your street, when its enforced by government, its enforced by a force. I mentioned earlier i thought your two books abare better than a College Course in political economy and i should say that for people who wont read even two short readable books they could start with your chapter big fat politics in the new book. [laughter] i think they could. And try to do my best to boil this down. 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 a gun is pointed to the head of the people who are going to pay for things that the government does. Think one should always ask oneself, should my mother, do i hold my mother at gunpoint, let not go so as far to shoot her. When i hold my mother at gunpoint in order to accomplish what im ask the government to accomplish . What am i hold my mother at gunpoint to pave i95 . I personally think that something that could be privately done without danger to my mom. Bless her heart, shes no longer with us. What are 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. Might hold mom at gunpoint for that. But not to pave i95 or deliver a package to my po box. You are 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 Polarization is a sign of something good. In this one respect, when you have a nation 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 that we are not under exterior threats and we are not under sufficient exterior threat to bring us all together. America is not a naturally homogenous country. We arent joined by ties of ethnicity, barely even joined by ties of language. We are not united by ties of ancient territory, the territory is abit was of dollars in the first place and we got this frontier mentality that means we always think theres infinite war of territory out there. What binds us together is in some ways artificial, its a liberty and rules of law and we tend to unite around that liberty and rule of law when we are under real exterior threat. When pearl harbor is bombed, when 9 11 happens. We come together. The kind of luxury for us in the United States, a diverse and quarrelsome for people we are this kind of luxury to have our corals out in the open with lots of screaming and yelling the street and nonsense on the internet and blow obligation from the white house and like strange statements from the democrats in congress. We are indulging ourselves it shows that in a way it shows us we are in pretty good shape. You might think that the covid epidemic would bring us together but apparently a domestic sickness is not the same as a foreign threat in terms of causing immunity among americans. You finish this book before the pandemic laid waste to everything but i noticed you wrote an article recently where 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. [laughter] yes. The jack carol active today, who cant leave his mothers house. Incidentally, jack was living in between times running up and down the United States on the road. It is certainly a strange phenomenon. One thing that worries me is that, you might think that after a period not only with the pandemic but also with all the George Floyd Protests and the chaos that has come from that, looting and rioting and the pretty ugly counter protesting you might think we might emerge from all this wanting a new more pragmatic, more sensible limited idea of 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 our grievances festering and all of 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 in the book i actually said im kind of 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, facebook, twitter, youtube and use the hashtag auntran8a events as a personal privilege after note as a graduate of vandalavanderbilt university abhe was a roughandtumble guy who made his own money. You dont have time for wealth races. His children and grandchildren went to the yacht races. My bad, david, my apologies. You probably dont remember that. [laughter] i do, actually. I wrote a piece in here about how one way we could cut down on the amount of material nv we feel toward the super rich and the United States is to make the rich uncomfortable, get them out of their tshirts and their bunny slippers and make sure they are back in top hats and part of that was, i said used to be we really didnt envy the rich that much because being rich didnt look like that much fun you had to wear these starchy clothes and you had to wear strange sports like yacht racing and breaking your neck playing polo and hitting things with a stick in the middle of nowhere called golf, even for those things we had to dress up in funny clothes you didnt want to show up at the out race in your 4 and cat from the golf course. Youd be snicker out of the yacht club. Some because of Commodore Vanderbilt being called commodore abmistakingly stuck in a yacht race. He had a small vote and a lot of small boats and the boats got bigger. Actually learn something, i learned something from reading your book because it prompted me to read something else. [laughter] when he was older he did in fact build himself an incredible yacht and take his whole family on a trip to europe that got written up in the newspapers and everything. So there was a lot of celebration of the wealthy back then but, you are right, it was not all that pleasant. Whereas these days bill gates can dress like everybody else had to go where he wants to do in an instant. Those things are more attractive. I can see envying that more than envying the plus for world. Im sorry, i didnt mean to ab like zuckerberg is wearing his underwear in public, abhe gives us impression that like his mom is still sewing nametags into the back of his tshirts and shorts for when he goes off to summer camp. If jeff is interfaced on the regulatory pressure on him in congress, he should learn to tie a necktie dude. Sorry, i interrupted you in the middle of a question. When zuckerberg did have to go hand in hand to congress, he did actually wear a suit and tie but thats the only time ive seen that. What i was going to ask was, you wrote an inaugural address in the book, are you hopeful either candidate will give that address . No. [laughter] i wrote an inaugural address in which the president says basically the office of the president isnt even mentioned until about page 8 or nine of the constitution. Actually, Vice President as president of the senate gets mentioned before the presidency does in the constitution. He said im commanderinchief, although its congress that has the power to make war and make peace, not me. Otherwise my duty is to make sure the laws that are passed by congress are enforced. Although not giving any particular mechanism by which to enforce them other than this moral suasion of being president of the United States. Really, dont credit me with all the good things that happen in the United States, and dont blame me for all the bad things that are going to happen in the United States. Im just sort of like the national janitor and im supposed to keep the holes clear and make sure the lockers are all closed. I dont think we will ever hear that. We elevated the president s presidency to such a ridiculous executive office we are not going to be hearing back from anybody soon. Thats probably right, he wrote a book called the cult of the presidency. Theres that cold and just the idea that it was envisioned in the constitution that congress should make the laws of the president would carry them out and now we wait for the president to give us a budget. Congress should be writing a budget and the president signs it unless its unconstitutional in which case he should veto it. Simple enough. Its a beautiful little constitution you can kind of if you can read small type you can get it on six or eight index cards. As opposed to the eu constitution with even the members of the eu couldnt stand and voted down. That thing is like 400 some pages long and gets into how much protein and how much fat are allowable in pork sausage it gets down to that level of detail. Which is probably why the eu is having the problem is it is right now. Let me take a question from kevin moore who says were talking a lot about polarization divided land thats the subtitle of the book dispatches from a divided land. What parallels or differences do you see between now and the late 60s early 70s which were also a pretty tumultuous and angry period. Its tempting to compare the two and the distance in time is sufficient that it allows i think the fundamental differences here were very different. The anger and divisiveness and indeed the violence in the 1960s had to do with some very fundamental issues. There was a National Draft where we were dragging people out of homes and schools and sending them off to a place they never heard of to shoot people they never met and those people were to shoot back and the vietnam war was an example of government just getting completely out of hand and killing 50,000 american kids. That was one element and divisiveness in the 60s. Another element in the divisiveness of the 60s was that the laws about Racial Discrimination were not yet really a settled case. It wasnt until the Civil Rights Act had been passed and begun to be enforced so there was tremendous legalized injustice in the United States, mostly at a state level, mostly in the scout gulf south but not exclusively in the south. People were angry, people died for this, people sacrifice their lives to fight this. People murdered to defend this terrible idea. That was a big big question. It resulted in a certain amount of violence, its not a surprising factor. Then you had a kind of change in the social mores going on between the older generation the greatest generation and Younger Generation, the baby boomers. We really dont have anything as comparable to right now. We have this huge changes in attitudes about sexuality of all kinds about drug use but about more fundamental things too, a lot of the arguments about over the dinner table were not about sex drugs and rock n roll, a lot of them were about racial relations, a lot of them were about the war, a lot about fundamentally ab in many ways libertarian attitude of the Younger Generation toward government versus the very conservative authoritarian attitude that had grown up as partly as a result of the depression and world war ii. Matt cricket wants to know you think the current brands of left and right populism will drive more people like him to a more liberal center, wanting to reject both of these extremes . Guest from your mouth to god zero, let us hope so. Societies do not sustain themselves wellin chaos. Societies are self organizing route and they tend to organize their way out of the chaotic experiences such as the experiences we are having right now. And so it is my greatest wish and hope and prayer indeed, that people will react to the extremism on the left and the right with an idea, not that they should agree upon everything. I would not even want oldfashioned liberalism and conservatism to go away. I just want people to argue with each other in rational terms about this. The heart of the liberals is quite nice and quite sweet. Once everything to be good for everybody. In the brain of the conservatives can be quite sharp, how dhec are we going to pay for this . What about the unintended consequences . I just want to go back to having that sensible arguments. I think it is my hope that would drive a lot of people into our fold. Civic another question from the internet right all of that said the government relies on force. Theres an important difference between illegitimate and legitimate force based on consent. I am defied by the police are running a red line part one of the implications of the difference for libertarianism . Rights, the government ought to have a legal monopoly on deadly force we dont want everything by duels or gunfights at the okay corral. We dont to constructs on deadly force. But, what can happen under those circumstances is that having giving the authority and a sentence to a thirdparty, that that third party can get out of hand. I have no sympathy with the kind of rioting and vandalism, destruction and looting that has gone on in recent months. On the other hand, we at the Cato Institute have been protesting for years about the militarization of the police. And about turning police into an Occupying Force within certain neighborhoods instead of being served wardens public order that they should be. So while i am not, well i dont have a lot of sympathy with the riots. Ive certain certain sympathy for what set them off. Coral asks, is there any possibility of curbing the use of executive orders by this and future president s . I cannot curb them in past president s. Guest that would be tough, that would require the time machine we all wish we had. And keeps not showing up. Would like to build order that on amazon but no dice. Again, you would think the lesson of the vietnam war would have fully returned the war making 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 do really seem to learn that lesson from the vietnam war. And i am not too optimistic about us learning the lesson about executive orders which have been abused by not only this president , but like the last president , the president before last, the president before that, owing on back down to certainly the time of lbj, and all the way down to woodrow wilson. We just dont seem to be able to learn that. Congress is so busy getting reelected and does not seem to remember that it is supposed to be the law, create the law of the land. Stuart and has the power to declare war. Guest yes. Yes. It has all of the powers that the presidency has taken. And you know, this goes back to one of our very best president s. Was probably lincoln who started this trend to a more powerful presidency. I think it really came into force as an attitude under teddy roosevelt. And as a practice under woodrow wilson. Something with the long history, we have three branches of our government. And one of them has been eating most of the other. And then of course, there has been a tendency by both the legislative and the executive branch that put things in the Supreme Court that do not belong there. So yeah, we have this tripod that our government stands on. And one or maybe two, maybe all three of the legs are getting pretty shaky. Deborah says she heard you speak at the university of wisconsin many years ago. And, she recalls you said you were not a libertarian, have you changed . Guest i have a feeling what she recalls as if i was a member of a Libertarian Party. Until which my answer would be and still is no. I fall into more of the conservative side of libertarianism. There are sometimes but of course it is the duty and route and the branch of libertarianism to be counseling disagreeing with each other. So that would bring up the eternal libertarian disagreements. So what you dont think so . I think there are people guest you are open to argument. [laughter] suing your open to irony. I think the question had been about Libertarian Party. And the reason i said no, and i do not consider the United States usually at least to be a country that has what europeans would recognize as political parties. You cant get thrown out of one of our parties, if you donate so much as a nickel to either side, you have ineffective joint that party. There is no card to carry around, the parties do not have a credo. It is too vague tendencies, to big event diagrams of have a lot of overlap and sometimes dont. Its a tendency of things government should solve our problems. And another tendency that things government is our problem. And you can hold those two ideas in your mind at the same time as if anybodys ever had to sit down and a Government Office and fill out a bunch of government forms. Has simultaneously that government should fix this problem in government is the problem. They are not mutually exclusive. Im not a Libertarian Party member because i dont consider america to be a Political Party system. And also because i am involved for all of these years, deeply involved with the Cato Institut institute. And our job is to be nonpartisa nonpartisan. Our job is to analyze things sympathy analysis out there is forcefully as we can and hope that analysis makes a big difference in the way legislators and bureaucrats and executives think about things. And sometimes it does by golly. Not as often as i would like, but sometimes it does. So i consider it in a way, libertarianism to me is not a political position. That is a form of analysis. Fundamentally immoral form of analysis is which i said earlie earlier, its about the individuals principle individual liberty, individual dignity and individual responsibility. It is a way of looking at every sort of question an issue, largely through that lens of individual liberty individual dignity and individual responsibility. See when i see some interesting questions about history coming up here. Steve from kansas city wants to know, and past culture wars was there the degree of intolerance to opposing points of view that we see today . Guest will the answer to that is yes, you bet. There were lynchings about this. It is this is nothing new. And the degree of violence with which this current culture war is being conducted , is by historical standards rather moderate. I mean look to the french revolution if you want to see a real culture war. Dont have the trumbulls ruling to the street, at least not yet. People say america has never been this divided. And i say will there was 1861, though its pretty divided to me. Say what you will about modern america, but fort sumner is not taking any incoming. Sue and well, that is right. Navy was in 1960s there is definitely the 1860s. And i think it was gordon wood i heard, not long ago say, let me tell you about the 1790s. The battles between the federalists and the jeffersonians. Which partly was over American Attitudes toward the french revolution. So, yeah we have gone through this before. Now, the distinguished professor, bill fishel challenges you, is the United States not more libertarian than it was 50 years ago . He says we are not at war. People can marry whoever they want. Taxes are not much higher as a percentage of income as they were 50 years ago. That sounds like progress, how did we get here . Well, i would like to think that we helped, here at the Cato Institute. And i agree with the professor. America is a more libertarian comments much more Libertarian Society than it was 50 years ago, let alone 56 or 70 years ago. I am old enough to remember. That shows me that there is a great deal of libertarianism and the american heart. I think that it is hard for people to identify as libertarianism. Partly because as i pointed out, it is a way of analyzing things, more than it is really a political identity. But, yes. There is a strong libertarian streak, there always has been a strong libertarianism streak in the United States. We do act upon it. Maybe two steps forward one step back. It may have its pauses. And it may not get the press that it deserves. Because a lot of the good is quiet good. And that does not make news. Host , here is a sort of related question from a young man who once worked for the Cato Institute and then left it was never heard from again, max says i believe it was little orphan annie who said the moment is always a day away. Was she right . Or Summerland Julian simon wrote its Getting Better all the tim time . Guest its a little bit of both. I would like to see max, hello im glad youre watching. Maxs had quite a distinguished career since he worked for cato and he worked for me as a matter fact. He is an absolutely brilliant sky. He is now a serious Silicon Valley executive. And we wont burden him with the more direct description of his job. Anyway max, yet it is always a day away. Theres always that. But like little orphan annie it has a happy ending. And we need to stay cheerful like annie did. Host you said in your book the gulf war was a rare Foreign Policy success. But here we are 30 years later, we are still at war in the gulf. Guest well to very distinctly different kinds of war. I mean in the case of the kuwait war, as its first called the gulf war, you had a dictatorship. A huge dictatorship that just went in and stepped on the little country. That may not been a a shining example of democracy and libert liberty. But nonetheless was not doing any harm to the rest of the world. And thats just not a lesson that we once the rest of the world to learn, to do that kind of thing. Or there goes hollins, there goes denmark, there goes belgia belgian. Its a very same sort of thing that set off world war ii. It was the invasion of poland and violation of belgian neutrality. So we went in, with a great deal of force and exercise that force with very considerable wisdom. And stopped in we were done. As a limited operation. I was there for the whole thing so i can speak with a little bit of authority here. In terms of leaving the socalled area in the department of iraq that was closest to the gulf, they rebuilt after that were hoping to get rid of saddam hussein. We did nothing to support them. So one might honestly say that we stopped too soon. But we didnt stop. When mission was accomplished, mission was accomplished it was done. Coit was restored to sovereignty i was back there not too long after words and they had rebuilt the place. That was a very different matter from the sort of quagmires we have involved ourselves in sinc since. So yeah, i do think we have to distinguish between them. Im not somebody who believes that force should never be used in international relations. Im afraid there are times when nothing else will do. Sue and heres an interesting question that comes from carlos and chile. He says it is common to hear as an argument, this outrage would never happen in the usa. And im not sure if he means he hears that insula or we say that in the United States sometimes producing its going on in the rest of the world. He says here this would never happen in the usa. Until you scratch the surface and discover theres plenty of bad government going on in the United States. Why do you think the image overseas is so much better than reality . Guest it is comparative to a certain extent. Just looking at ourselves, looking in the mirror, we see all of our faults. Just as i see my 72yearold self every morning in the mirror. One of the reasons i dont shave anymore, is to keep from having to look at that mirror. Its easy enough for us to see our faults. But when you go around the world, you discover the faults the rest of the world has, its a great comparative experience. I do not know of chile and i cant speak to the situation right there. But my experience in most of the world has been corruption is far more obvious and evident and pervasive in all levels of government than it is here in the United States. Not that we dont have our problems. The kind of ethnic and racial hatred that we so deplore here in the United States and rightly so, is much worse in many parts of the world. I mean, i covered the bosnian war. I mean nobody on the face of the earth other than a servant of bosnia can tell a servant of bosnia part. I think when i witness my first battle it was the un spell of shooting the unpronounceables. But boy the hatred was there, they could tell. And so many other, or rule of law is better our expression of Free Expression is better than places like england or developed areas of europe. And our economic opportunitie opportunities we would not have anything, would not be thinking about immigration if this were not a fantastically attractive placement economic point of view. So comparatively speaking, we are doing really well and we things to be proud about. Host so to get back to complaining about her own country, you are very critical of congress. Bob wants to know, do you think term limits would move congress into thinking more about the Public Interest and less about their own . Guest thats interesting. Thats an argument i had with catos expresident , and i went back and forth. Ed was always very much in favor of term limits. I was dubious about them. I thought the likelihood was, especially with seats in the House Speaker of representatives that the likelihood was instead of there being like one long time rather corrupt and ineffective forever holder of that seats, perpetual congressperson, that seat would belong to a certain interest group. So you would always have even if it changed every two years, you would always have that labor seat from michigan. That certain like farm seat from somewhere in the corn belt, that social conservatives see from somewhere down south. That innercity seat. So it would just be changing so ed do you want a dog who knows where all the bones are buried . Do you want a dog whos going to dig up the whole yard . And then one day over cocktails is ed and i sometimes had, ed said to me, pj, after 25 years of argue with you about term limits, let me say over thing. Everybody in washington is opposed to them. I sit ed, you just won your argument. Host yesterday think that is a good point. If all of the special interests and politicians are against it, there must be something they think it would be due to their power. Guest yes indeed. Host is the u. S. And the new of a great awakening with woke culture being where the new religious waves . Suite two oh lets hope not. That culture seems to be you need to be perpetually aware of injustice. Too not be able to sleep or eat or drink because her so much injustice out there. And all this injustice is hooked together and one sword of big injustice blob. And youve got to spend all your time being aware of it. And being aware of it, seems to consist of mainly talking other people see her off about it. And bothering other people who were supposed to be sufficiently aware or not aware at all. And this just does not seem to me like a kind of fun thats going to last very long. I think it is going to its extremely boring. I think its going to bore its practitioners and its proponents. I think we will get over this. Past experience of great awakenings in the United States, which have mostly been religious but not always. There is a populist great awaking at the end of the 19th century. Past history of these things as they have their 15 minutes and then we move on. Here is a question that relates to you professionally. But also to the states of the country. It seems to me in your book you imply at some point that all of the people who read books are rich or baby boomers or something. Are you worried about a decline in literacy or seriousness in United States . Guest oh absolutely. You note reading is hard. Even if what you are reading something is fluffy and light is insubstantial as i write. Reading is still hard work but have to translate those words in the page in your mind, you have to create mental images to go with those words. Just watching junk on television or the computer is a much easier experience. And i am worried we are losing the discipline required for even light reading. And that means our view of things is going to be increasingly superficial, sensationalist, and short. Very brief Attention Spans. One thing about reading, even if youre reading just the worst sort of murder mysteries or geopolitical thrillers, not even the wellwritten ones, but the badly written ones, it requires a concentration span. In a concentration span is very useful in every other endeavor in life. Thats what i tell my kids, get off that screen, open a book. Any book pretty could be Agatha Christie i dont mind, i dont care, just read. You will gain information from the book but you will gain the Attention Span that you will find worthwhile everywhere else in life. So when i do wonder do you think your teenagers because of their texting have actually written more words as teenagers and you ever did . Guest but they were short words and they were misspelled. [laughter] said one true, but they knew what they meant. Guest i suppose youre right. [laughter] yeah, you cant say that writing is gone out of style because texting is brought right back in. Was the last time someone actually wrote you a letter sealed up in an envelope . Host thats been a while. Host here is a question that i dont think economist can answer so we will pose it to yo you. Guest yeah right go ahead. They know what theyre talking about and i dont, so i can answer. Host has the pandemic wiped out the economic or will it come its sort of back. Is it that . Guest you know, what we know historically about disease epidemics, is that economically we tend to recover from them pretty quickly. Which is one of the reasons that until this thing came along we had sort of forgotten about the spanish flu epidemic, even though it took a number amount of lives and caused a great deal suffering. Because we tend to recover very quickly from these. This one may be a little more difficult because instead of recovering from the disease itself, forgetting all the suffering that went into it and sort of not remembering the dead people, in this case were essentially the middle of an epidemic will trying to limit and prevent that epidemic from reaching full force and doing the most amount of damage an epidemic like this in every period of the past would have done much much more damage than this one. And these prevention, this mechanism of prevention are themselves very disruptive. We are paying a price for this. And, with very bad leadership in washington. Pretty confusing science and changing science about this is very hard to tell when it if we are doing the right thing. So it may be a slower comeback. In the historical past, as should the black plague in the shoe died from it, and about half of the people did, it was not so good for them. That actually probably put an end to the surface system. It caused a labor shortage in europe that resulted in the rise of the middle class and small proprietorship by previously oppressed peasants and so on. So the net benefits of the black plague economically speaking, were probably positive. But economics is one of those things like war, we count the victories we dont really count the death. Stu went awry think were about out of time for it so i just want to ask you, your new book is a cry from the far middle. Is there a take away you want people to get after reading that book . Guest yeah, going back to just being mad at each other. Its like anybody who has been in a marriage or partnership over longterm, knows that you dont or family, if you dont maintain that kind of close relationship without having arguments. Theres always a stage in the ardent with a sick kitchen sink comes in. Or instead of arguing whether to buy a new car, which is where the argument started out, it gets down to will you leave wet bath towels on the bed all the time. And your socks are all over the floor and so on so forth. We seem to have reached that point. America needs marriage counseling to keep the argument on the subject. And let us argued by all means, let us argue as much as we want and as hard as we want. And even the yelling and shouting is fine. But let us confine the argument to the subject at hand and quit hating on each other. Three to write great read the book is a cry for the far middle part its available literally wherever books can be found. Want to thank everybody for joining us. We had a lot of questions come in. And i apologize were not able to get to all of them. The video recording of this event will be available on catos webpage, hopefully later today. Feel free to go back and watch it again, posted on facebook, tell your friends about it. We look forward to seeing you at our next event, thank you pj, thank you everybody. And now on cspan2s book tv, more television for serious readers. High everyone. I am chelsea. I am the publicist here at basis books. Im here with david talk about the new book, morality, restoring the common good, is an International Religious leader, philosopher awardwinning autho author. He was a chief rabbi to the United Kingdom and the commonwealth of nations from 1991 until 2013 and the recipient of the 2016 templeton prize pretty is the