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 europeans would recognize as a Political Party. You cant get thrown out of one of our parties. There is no card to carry around. It is too vague tendency. We have a lot of overlap. And sometimes they dont. Its one tendency that thinks government should solve our problems you can hold those two ideas in your mind. If theyve ever had to sit down in a government office. As simultaneously that government should fix this problem. And government is the problem. Im not a Libertarian Party member because i dont consider america to be a Political Party system. And also because i had been involved for all of these years with the covid institute. Our job is to be nonpartisan. It hopes that the analysis will make a big difference. In the way that legislators and bureaucrats and executives about things. And sometimes it does by golly. The libertarian sum to me. Individual liberty and dignity. The individual responsibility. If we say some interesting questions about history coming up. There were lynchings about this. The current culture war is being conducted. It is by historical standards rather moderate. America has never been this divided. That is right. I think it is gordon wood. Let me tell you about the 1790s. The battles between the federalists and the jeffersonians which was over American Attitudes towards the french revolution. We have gone through this before. Now other distinguished professor is the United States not more libertarian than it was 50 years ago. Taxes are much higher. America is a libertarian a much more Libertarian Society than it was 50 years ago let alone 60 or 70. I think it is hard for people to identify. Is the way of analyzing those things. Yes, there is a strong libertarian streak in the United States and we do act upon it maybe two steps forward one step back. It may have its pauses and not get the press that it deserves because a lot of the good is quiet good and that doesnt make news. Here is a sort of a related question from a young man once worked for the Cato Institute and then left. I believe it was little orphan annie who said the libertarian moment is always a day away. Was she right or wasnt more like julian simon wrote. Is a verys silicone valley executive that we wont burden him with we need to stay cheerful again. Here we are 30 years later. In the case of the quite more as the first gulf war. We have a dictatorship that just went in and stepped on a Little Country nonetheless it was not doing any harm to the rest of the world. And thats just not a lesson that we want the rest of the world to learn. There goes holland and denmark. It is the same sort of thing that set up world war ii. In the violation of the belgian neutrality. We went in. And with a great deal of force and exercise that force with very considerable wisdom and stopped when we were done. It was limited operation. Its a little bit of authority. They were hoping to get rid of saddam hussein. One might honestly say that we stopped too soon. Im not someone who would believe that force should never be used in international relations. There is times when nothing else will do. Cement here is an interesting question and that that comes from carlos. He says its common to hear as an argument this outrage would never happen in the usa and im not sure if he hears that in chile or we say that in the United States sometimes. This would never happen in the usa until you scratch the surface and discover there is plenty of bad government going on in the United States. It is comparative. To a certain extent. Just looking at ourselves and looking in the mirror. We see all of our faults just as i see my 72yearold self every morning and the mirror. One of the reasons i dont shave anymore. It is easy enough for us to see our faults. When we go around the world and is a great comparative experience. I cant speak for the situation right there. My experience in most of the world with corruption. Not that we dont have our problems. The kind of ethnic and racial hatred that we implore the poor here in the United States and rightly so is much worse in many parts of the world. I covered the bosnian war. Nobody on the face of the earth. Couldnt tell us anything about that. When i witnessed my first battle. They are playing that. And so many other rule of loss. Law. Better protection of free expression. A developed area of europe. We wouldnt have anything. We went be thinking about immigration if this worked a fantastically fantastic place. Comparatively speaking we are doing really well and things to be proud about. To get back to complaining about our own country. You were very critical of congress. They want to know if you think the term limits would move congress and less about their own. There was an argument for many years. They went back and forth. It was almost back in favor. I was dubious about that because i thought the likelihood would be in the seats of house of representatives. The likely nest. Instead of being one long time rather corrupt and ineffective forever holder of that seat the perpetual congressperson that they would belong to a certain Interest Group and we would always had even if it changed every two years they would always had that for michigan. That certain pharmacy. The social conservative seat. Do you want a dog thats can dig up the whole yard. And then one day over cocktails and said to me pj, let me make one last attempt. Of arguing with you about term limits. Everybody in washington is opposed to them. You just won your argument. I think thats a good point. If all of the special interests and politicians are against it and must be something they think it would do to their power. Is the u. S. In the middle of a new great awakening with the new religious waves culture seems to be the idea that we should be perpetually aware of injustice not be able to sleep or eat or drink because theres so much injustice off there. All of its hooked together in one great big injustice blob and you have to spend to spend all of your time being aware of it and being aware of it seems to consist of mainly talking other peoples ear off about it. In bothering other people this just doesnt seem to me like a kind of fun that will last for very long. I think its extremely boring. And even in the practitioners and proponents. I think we will get over this past experience with great awakening. There was a populist great awakening at the end of the 19th century. The past history of the things is that they have their 15 minutes and then we move on. Here is a question that relates to you professionally but also to the state of the country. It seemed to me in your book. 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 the United States . Reading is hard. Even if what you are reading is insubstantial as what i write. Reading is still hard work. If it translate those words from the page in your minds. Just watching junk on television or the computer is a much easier experience and i am worried that we are losing that a requires for Light Reading and that means our view of things is going to be increasingly superficial sensationalist and short. Very brief attention spans. Even if you are reading the worst sort of murder mysteries or geopolitical thrillers at the badly written ones. It requires a concentration span. In our concentration span is very useful from all the other endeavors in life. Open a book. You cant say writing has gone on a side but when was the last time someone actually wrote you a letter sealed up in an envelope. Speemac that is pretty rare. They know what they are talking about. And they they dont so i can answer it. As it wipes out the economic bowl or do you think of a comeback. Is it back. What we know historically about about the disease epidemics is that economically we tend to recover from them pretty quickly. Until this thing came along we had forgotten about the spanish flu epidemic even though it took an enormous number of lives. We tend to recover rather quickly from these. This one may be a little bit more difficult because instead of recovering from the disease itself we are getting all the suffering that went into it. And not remembering the dead people. We are in the middle of an epidemic while trying to limit and prevent epidemic. The method of prevention our themselves very disruptive. With the greater leadership in washington. It wasnt so good for them. It probably is an end to the surface system. Because the labor shortage in europe that resulted in the rise of the middle class. In the small proprietorship by the benefits of the black plague economically speaking were positive. Economics is one of those things like work. We count the victories but we dont really count death. I think we are about at a time i just want to ask you your new book is a cry from the farm middle. Is there a take away you want people to get after reading that book. Go back to just being mad at each other. You dont wear a family. You dont maintain that kind of crows close relationship with out having arguments. There is always a stage where the kitchen sink danger comes in. Instead of arguing about whether to buy a new car and gets down to you leave wet bath towels on the bed all the time. We seem to have reached that point in america. To keep the argument on the subject. Let us argue by all means. It is argued as much as we want. Even a bit yelling and shouting is fine. But let us confined the argument to the subject at hand and quit hating on each other. The book is called a cry from the farm middle. I want to thank everybody for joining us. We have a lot of questions come in and i apologize we were able to get to all of them. Feel free to go back and watch it again. Tell your friends about it