Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20240622

Charles its a privilege to be here with you today, lets jump right in telus what it is you would like us and your readers to take from your new book. Guest okay in the cliff notes version. The first run is that the american project as i decided is effectively dead. There are real limits to what can be done through the political process. The second process is the opportunity for opening for recreating some of the best policies in our nation. So let me just quickly say that american project i am referring to the idea that begun with the founders that individuals and families, communities can be left free to live their lives as they see fit. The role of the government is to provide a peaceful setting to that environment. Thats gone. Its not coming back, were not going to have a Constitutional Convention were not going to be looking at the data or any other things. The political process has essentially left that option of rolling back the federal governments power. Host let me jump right in there and you mentioned hovering, your book has Many Supreme Court cases and perhaps if you can cliff note them for you can for myself and the viewers were not all constitutional lawyers. But you play one on tv. When you say these things are set in stone, what happens with such that one might argue christ is characterized the landscape of these areas has somehow evaporated . Spee2. Guest let me distinguish between two things. Can we get that her policy for my pointed view or for that matter your point of view. Can we change education policy, can we change welfare policy . That kind of thing, yes we can still do that. Host you yourself i would you yourself i would argue have changed policy. Guest while you have two and also if you couldnt change those two then are two institutions would have no thing. If you talk about regulatory state which is the center of my concern here and by regulatory state the administrative state, were talking about a very large that in the way it is constructed cannot be brought back. For example Ronald Reagan did not go into the office to rollback regulatory state because he didnt have the authority to do so. Host can i ask you to be concrete about something within this revelatory state which means Different Things to different listeners. In your view is in place, could be rolled back, would would Social Security be an example . Guest no. Im referring to by the regulatory state like osha, eta, fda, 70 other agencies and all the cabinet offices have some element. Guest like the Education Department . Speak. Host is this sort of a variance on rick a lawyer he said lets close these departments and then im not saying youre referring to that im just saying is that kind of the same sentiment . Guest point number one is what is revelatory state just to complete the thought. The Education Department does lots of things that are not involved in regulation. It also does lots of things to help build cash classrooms across the country. This is what you have to do to get federal funding. So the regulatory state is intertwined with all of the executive branch. Point point number two and i want listeners to be clear on this, some regulation for a libertarian like me is perfectly okay because it advances public good, redefine. The edith the eta in my view is redoing functions like if you have a smokestack billowing smoke, im not against regulation, im not against regulations that prescribe safe tunnel thing in coal mines. Although my libertarian friends would argue with that. If there regulations for the regulatory state the really good things that needed to be done and have been done, i dont want to touch those. Now you also have a whole lot of ways in which Small Business people, homeowners, farmers, ranchers, going about, going about their daily lives, doctors, dentists, carpenters, going about their daily lives and using the regulatory state that do prevent them from running their lives as they see fit for pointless reason. Host ice up spec their viewers right now who are saying, okay where do you draw the line . And since youve described yourself as a libertarian, youre going to draw the line different then a different place and i will, and a different place and harder libertarians would draw the line. Certainly that that seems to be a challenge, where do you draw the line . Guest let me put it in the context of my solution, because unlike a book that ive written. Let me bruce lee described that because one of the first task of my solution is to answer your question. What i proposed is defense fund, i want a big defense defense fund that is philosophically funded one which comes to the aid of not corporations but the little guys. The little guy who is who osha has come after him and says you have to redo your workplace its gonna cost 30,000 dollars for some idiotic reason, and i want them to push back against that. I want want there to be legal representation. I also suggest occupation, so Real Estate Agents have a spatial defense fund area the phrase i use in the book is treat government as measurable hazard. Suppose you are starting up what i call the madison fund, one of its very first jobs is to say which regulations are we really to say its okay and which are there not . So i have have a chapter that lays out guidelines for that. Such as, regulations that prevent things that are bad in themselves, you dont go after them, you dont go after the irs because its really hard to diss english principle this disagreement. Spee1 i was thinking about that on the way over here, first of all you should described by what you mean by civil diss meaning because its particular to your thesis. On the way over i was thinking when i think civil disobedience i expect most americans think you think about the civil rights movement. Civil disobedience against what im sure we both agree is an absolutely pernicious episode in the american landscape, not to say its resolved but clearly racial robbins still exist today in a big way. Weve seen the africanamericans and the police, but that strikes me i bet most listeners have a clear example of not only legitimate but essential civil disobedience. In your case youre talking about some pretty refined things, here is a Workplace Safety standard that you think is a bad idea and a waste of time, i could easily find someone on the other side of that argument, im sure you would agree. That doesnt pull the heartstrings or the mind strings the way Racial Discrimination does. Guest not your heartstrings, to me lets talk about vocational issues. One of the deep sources of satisfaction in life isnt practicing a vocation you love and love to do well, take pride in. Thats a big deal. To the extent you have lots of people in some locations, including positions, and smallbusiness Business People of all kinds where they say i cant do what i want to do in terms of providing a good or service, if its done in a way and impeding freedom and an important way. Host let me jump and presumably they can do what they will want to do not because some arbitrary being although it may look that way, but because someone along the way thought what you want to do is going to hurt someone else. So again you are kind of a bit of a judge and jury here. Guest well know i have a very different view of what the governments role is. For me the meaning of the American Experience is a presumption of freedom. If you are practicing your craft, the presumption is you do that the very best you can, if you make mistake and hurt someone you need to go to the court system, that goes back to the founders, you are vulnerable if you are negligent or screwup. Otherwise you have a presumption of freedom, i dont want to characterize your opinion, i, i would say that the progressive movement, im defining that in its early 20th century terms with its dramatic origins and would draw wilsons progressivism. It was one of the first time that is assumed the state was better. That experts can say no actually you should not live under presumption of freedom we will decide whats okay and what is not. We will decide if this is not safe or not ethical or not fair, and we will make these rules and we now live under that presumption. So when you say someone along the lines said this is going to cause problems somebody did, but the presumption. Okay heres where we really get ideological. If im minding my own business and have not hurt anybody, or someone would use the power of the state to say you havent heard anybody you havent anything wrong but im going to lay constraints on you because you might. Thats wrong. Host i dont think people would disagree with that, i do think that, i think there so many nitpicky regulations that we could agree that should be disregarded, but i do think there is two important things to do. The first one was in the book, the second was missing from the book so im going to ask you defend what i thought was a hole in the argument. The first is i think you have to get down to cases. I think you have to get down and say jared said charles here is an example of a safety standard that we should just get rid of, if we dont get rid of it then citizens ought to engage in civil disobedience to get rid of it because i think the ideological argument is pretty abstract and perhaps not as helpful as we would like. Okay thats the first point. The second second point, here is where i thought something was missing, im going to put this in economic terms, it would seem to me that before you want to engage in fairly potentially, dramatic endeavor of civil disobedience funded by hundreds of millions of dollars at least as per your hypothesis, you you would want to make a pretty strong case that what you call the regulatory state has actually hurt, not just individuals but hurt the broader economy. Here i think you have a uphill climb and you havent even tried to climb it in the book so im going to ask you to try to climate here. Prior to what your calling the regulatory state a lot of things were a lot worse, actually Growth Growth was a lot slower, recessions came more frequently and where will deeper. Many more people were made ill, by the kind of things we were talking about a while ago. People of very young ages were exploited, et cetera et cetera, the ink click patients of the regulatory state to use your term does not correlate with economic outcomes in fact they have improved since then, society has imbalanced in many ways, so i felt reading the book one think that was missing was an argument as to why you really would want to go after what you go after, other than a fairly abstract libertarian discussion about personal freedom. Guest point number one is that i am not interested in so much the economic area. The value of freedom to live you life as you see fit seems to transcend. I have what i call the trendlines test and it goes like this take some outcome that is recently well measured, and outcome you want to achieve, mortality or property reduction, the number of industrial accidents, i will use one that is a classic is highway deaths per 100 million miles. Heres the thing, plop that trend line as far back as you can and you should be at it. That covers before and after a written major regulatory intervention and show me, look at where the intervention occurred and try to tell me did the good thing that was happening before get better at a steeper rate . Heres my proposition, i can produce dozens of trendlines in which things were Getting Better on highway fatality is a classic case, and regulation came in, first you cant see an improvement but then the 55mile per hour speed limit was a huge regulatory in the 1970s and it flattened out. So my first statement is empirically you can take some things like certain contaminants in the air and you can show me a trendline in the air and say after the epa came and it got a lot better. I would would say thats in actually fairly small subset. It would be a good and important debate to have. Im sitting here thinking of my own examples which go on a different direction than yours. I think theyre important, i was was just thinking about Social Security. Social security again you dont object Social Security. Guest the reason i introduce that in the book is that because Congress Talk about the general welfare. Host so Social Security is introduced and the poverty of elderly falls and that shouldnt surprise any of us because its a fairly generous, particularly Progressive Program for cash benefits for folks were beyond their working years. So that was. 2,. 1 was getting back to this issue of particular line drawing endeavors, and what belongs in your civil disability category and what doesnt. So you take take taxes out of the mix, it strikes me as extremely plausible that appeared to go down the road we you would suggest some of your colleagues would argue that paying taxes is just paying taxes is something they should not do. Are they wrong . Spee2 yes, i would say thats wrong and particularly when it comes to the income. I think the income taxes idiotic, the way the income taxes currently administered i you think is idiotic in many ways. It was approved by constitutional amendment so someone like me who is very much in love with the concept of the original founding document, i have to look at the limits. Let me give you an example of how the other guidelines i use. Im going to use the phrase scrutiny. We will subject to rights in the constitution under strict scrutiny than others. I would say say there is no whole category of regulation you say you can disobey all of these but regulations that try to prescribe best practice in a vocation, they are subject to strict scrutiny. Regulations that prevent an owner of a property from doing what he or she would do at that property is like they dont interfere with neighboring property, those sick should be subject to strict scrutiny. I go through and i take a chapter and give other categories and say this is where you look for targets for civil disobedience. Host thank you for getting down to a more granular level. I read many of your books and you and i have argued about some of them in the past, i actually found this to be your most pessimistic book. It seems like you have given up on the system in your and where you go with that i found to be beyond pessimistic and into an area that is less than democratic. The idea was as i poured through the pages the system is broken the death to which your system is a broker and leaves it to be irreparable, it cant be fixed. So democracy wont work and we we will have to try Something Else which is in fact breaking the law and a civil disobedience contacts. You not talking about felonies, that struck me as both deeply pessimistic and somewhat undemocratic. Defend yourself and those. Those. You tell me how my attitude toward democracy is any different than James Madison. James madison and the other founders were deeply nervous about democracy. Host i guess to answer your question James Madison would say, and i think his actions you know more about this than me, i think his actions show that if you cant fix whats broken through the system then you either have to lift it or you have to try to use the system to change it. Guest now medicine didnt write the declaration of independence but it certainly is a founding dr. On authority that when government becomes abusive of its proper powers it is not only the right but the duty of the people to rebel. Host so they had the king of england in mind, youre talking about. Guest come on they were talking about the role of government and when governments, because anglin when governments do this its the right of the people to establish to do that. Host i dont disagree with you with your quotation of texture. My thing is i dont think they were thinking of the workplace regulations. Guest they were thinking about faction so when madison discussions factions at the terrible danger and that pose, if you substitute faction for the word special interest which is a 21st century word what they were describing was what we have. Here i will appeal to an economist who is not an ideologue on either side, wilson came up with a theory of sclerosis in government which is epidemic and inherent in advance democracy. Host and certainly one that you can say blocks from where he speaks. Guest exactly, its going to happen in any advance democracy, theres no way of stopping it because of the asymmetry of the power of a small group to organize versus organize a large group. Its a part for my libertarian views on things, he had a hold of the truth about the current state of the youth, the United States, states, the current state of japan, it will be soon the true of china if it isnt already whereby sclerosis sets in and you have government of the special interests by the specialinterest. I spent five chapters in the first part of the book justifying civil disobedience on grounds that a lot of these dynamics do not lend themselves to solutions. Host a couple of things, i still havent given you a chance to say what you mean by civil disobedience, and you should because our audience needs what i do that right now. Spee2 let me get to a story that prompted this book. Without many details because i dont want my friend to be identified, its a true story. My wife and i have a friend who has a Small Business that employs latinos as are kinds of businesses do, the difference between him and everybody else in his part of the country as he documents it. He spends 2030 grand 30 grand a year to do this. What happened is by doing the right thing and documenting them he sorta made himself an easy target and he has been relentlessly harassed by regulatory agencies not because because he doesnt pay good wages or living conditions, he does but there are things that you can obey. You can have enough nativeborn americans working for you to apply with certain regulations because its hard to get nativeborn americans to take those jobs in a bunch of other things. So one time he had a stupid allegation and that he was going to fight it in court and they said if you try that will put you out of business and he knew that is exactly right. Thats not an uncommon story, i had this image, i was furious when my wife told me. I could barely stand to listen to it and i had an image of a lawyer tapping him on the shoulder and know that he is technically a violation of this revelation and we dont care, we are going to litigate this to the max and our sclerotic legal system is such that we can do that and make life miserable for you and when you finally level out were going to reimburse them for it. Then i said to myself, you could write a book so thats what happened. What im trying to convey is what i want is civil disobedience is i want certain categories of regulations to become de facto and on a forcible. Host but youre talking about, and i dont mean this in a negative way, youre talking about legal harassment and basically tying the regulator up in court. Yes. Host time the regulator up in court, i want to get back to that but i just want our listeners to understand what youre talking about. By the way one of the ways i think about this is a full employment for lawyers. Guest the regulatory state is with the government. Let me just finish up on thought though, what i want to do and this is very similar to what Philip Howard wants to do he want he has a book out that makes the same point. I want to for some common sense back into the regulatory state and the analogy i use is that behavior takes the purse on the interstate highways. Slower slower traffic on the interstate highways if theres not a traffic jam is several miles above the speed limit. Technically we could all be stop. Stopped. Because im one of those people who goes above. They stop people who are going crazy faster who are driving erratically, its not perfect the perfect thing would be to have some kind of speed limit which no reasonable person could go above but we dont have that. So lets have some common sense and enforcing the regulation. So what i want is this is an example not in the book, ive heard about it since, i encountered a bartender who had been fined 3000 for not carting a place where he was in a place where he is supposed to card everybody. So theres a reasonable reason for people to want to card the reason the person he did not card is his father. The idea that a euro crack could hear that and not laugh and say okay forget it, dont worry about it. It was a 3000 fine, thats fine, thats stupid. I want no harm, no foul. Host i want to come back to my accusation that theres something on dammit on democratic. Guest know you are correct to say that. Host i would like to ask you to defend that a bit further now that we have established the meaning of civil disobedience in your world, i want to get back to that because when i look out at the worlds i certainly see a lot of problems you have identified and very articulately these told. The anecdote you just told is one of them. Problems exist, overzealous regulation exists, you wont find either myself or anyone else living in the world realworld questioning that. However in my view we have mishmash together a system that is representative of what the majority wants, with all of its blemishes. What makes me nervous about, by the people, your book, is that it sounds like a relatively small group of elites funded by billionaires, as you suggest are going to be taking things into their own hands that purports to fight this mash up of what we currently called democracy. Its very messy, its happening in the wrong way. Through tying up the courts with legal harassment versus versus through the court . To the congress . Thats the thing that i think youre confusing, i could be wrong, i dont want to, i am not saying youre wrong, this this is not an attack, i think youre confusing the swinging of the pendulum and its swung too far in the direction of the lack, with a fundamental fissure in the system that youre trying to fix by extralegal methods funded by elite billionaires that sounds scary to me. Guest first let me go to the issue of the legal state. To me one of the most pretentious decisions in a five or six year period, when my point of view with the constitution was dry was 1943 when nbc tried to fight the federal Communications Commission because the legislation had asked for a fair negative old rules on licensee. Always before, the legislative power was vested in the congress of the United States there had to be an intelligible principle and regulation, whereby administration there others need to know their limits. They wanted to accomplish this and they were pretty specific about it. In nbc versus the United States the Supreme Court dispense the requirement of an intelligent principles. Heres heres my argument i would say what we have in the regulatory state there is no resemblance to what a majority of americans want. I would say that if you took some huge proportion of regulations and ask Congress Pass them on an upanddown boat, hardly any would get through, but congress does in its usual preening, self indulgent, undisciplined way, im betraying an animist year. But what they do is they pass legislation with highminded goals and some pretty vague instructions and after that the regulatory state makes up in its view, what it is inappropriate regulations for implementing that. I guarantee its your kind of gays who are in the regulatory state and their point of view about whats appropriate is way different from people like me. Host first of all i guarantee youre right that if you said to that average person on the street that how do you like the regulatory state and they would probably say not much. Then if you started saying how do you start feeling about minimum wage . And they would say i actually like minimum wage, i how do you feel about the laws about college labor . How do . How do you feel about blocking polluters . Guest talk about piling on, i ready said that their large categories of low hanging fruit in the regulatory state. So the ones you mentioned following those categories and i have no problem with it. So we have now gone out asked the man on the street and you say oh he kinda doesnt like regulatory state because in some vague way doesnt sound good. Thats not whats going to happen. If you go out and asked the man in the street and that the person was a Small Business, who have tried to put a deck on the back of his house the last three years, if its people who try to let me finish, that if it is a case of neighbors wanting to get together to solve a problem, you are going to get some big o, youre going to get a very specific. Host that is a very fair point, i put a deck on the back my house and i remember having the work delayed a couple of days because somebody had to sign up on something and they did show up. So i got up very easy and i have a lovely deck and im not complaining dont get me wrong. I have a question in a point. Every regulation you can think of, including the 1i just jokingly complained of having to wait for someone to sign a paper on my deck, every regulation and many of them eat you and i will agree on, the bouncer who got dinged for not carting her father, there is someone on the other side of that regulation that has been well served by its , i would wager. When someone doesnt car their father, thats absurd and that shouldnt happen , the question is can you fix that without hurting the person who is on the other side of that regulation for good reason . As you said if we dont card folks we will up hurting some very vulnerable people. Thats my point. My question i dont know that reagan, or the bushes were heroes of yours but i argue with conservatives and your one, my question is why cant the Ronald Reagans of the world, or the rubio, or the cruise whoever were talking about here why cant they be counted on to solve this problem . Why havent they been able to . Guest the answer is simple if its ronald ragan, he had the power to appoint the head of osha and the epa and i guess technically he could have demanded somebody reside unless he did the regulation the way he wanted. If you go deeper than that president s have very little authority over the regulatory state. Theres a very good book but it is it is extra legal in the sense that it has its own court system, administrative Administrative Court system, it has announced judges, it is as if jared, and i dont it is if the police could make up the laws, enforce the laws, and also choose the judges and prosecutors that it wanted and then serve as the court of appeals. This is a vast body of laws in effect that affect the daily life of millions of americans that lies completely outside, largely outside the normal political process. Host so as we move towards the latter part of our discussion here, thats the very system you want to go into and argue with. Guest its selectively to civilly disobey. Host and here im concerned your solution is potentially ineffective, i won red review of your book, i think the author and your idea wont work because the government has simply prohibit insuring against damages. It doesnt strike me as all that farfetched. The government put regulations in place to protect vulnerable parties, now we can argue, i happen to believe thats very port, you happen to believe its overdone, im sure you can find examples where it is over done. If you if an individual wasnt able to insure against those damages then there regulations are for not. So what would stop the federal government or the court system from saying im sorry, we simply cant insure against regulatory damages because that would be completely officiating the spirit of the regulation. Guest but here you are exposing my heart, the worse the better. That was the same back in those days. What they meant by that was in the process of the revolution, you want the empire to overreact and so what im hoping actually, is that it will provoke overreactions. Heres my reading of the situation, youre familiar with the famous to what extent you trust the government to do the right thing, all of the time, most of the time, or none of the time. That was a have gone about 13 in the most recent, throughout the entire class period. That is not a partisan distrust of government, i think there is a large, widespread, widespread sense among the american people, the federal government has become a thing apart. Its not a thing thing that we do together, the definition nipping definition of the government is an entity that is largely concerned with the law health of the sent selfinterest and of itself. I dont think my sentence in the book where i said my i dont think i shouldve put some statements in there. The reason is as follows. My sense is this this thing is going to get funded, with lots of small contributions and the reaction is not a billionaire saying yes i want to help out the Little People. Its the Little People saying its about time that we have this and its time to push back. Host i think thats a great notion and we will find out. Lets argue about government. I dont question your read on the pole, i i know the pull youre talking about. I think theres something more pernicious going on, heres where i should should write a by the people book of my own because what i think is going on is something different, i think when you ask people about government and trust government you get the results you get for the reasons you said. If you drill down and you ask people about the most important thing government said asked them about the troops, asked them how they feel about Social Security . How do they feel about medicare, how do they feel about minimum wage for example . These are Core Functions of government but by far the what we spend the vast majority of our budget on, i think Something Like 30 of the of the budget at this point is discretionary. The rest of this large social Insurance Programs and so on. Im remembering the old adage, get the government out of my medicare right. I think there is an interest during this juncture between government and the way you talk about it and government the way people experience. Also there are lots of people and i suspect we both object to that, i may object more who say washington is broken, vote for me and i will go to washington and make sure it stays that way. These are people who are using government dysfunction as a tool to discredit the institutions so they can protect their friends in ways that you and i would both find very wrong. What about those contentions. Guest the first part about how people experience government. Let me me turn it on its head a little bit. Where does the government actually do a good job . Where do you you have a workforce that is highly motivated, and quite confident . Armed forces is a good example of that. James James T Wilson in his book bureaucracy talks about this where people feel, air other people government Government Employees are not as hard working or anything is in the private sector. The Social Security agency had a reputation as a high morale agency because people there who are distributing Social Security checks had a strong sense of mission. Thats what they are doing. If you look at the things you mentioned, go back to i guess my point about sub regulations are okay. Im. Im not an anarchist, their functions of government that perform very well, i would argue that where it has done the best job is in its morose Core Functions and what is happened as it has acquired, incrementally over time, this, this vast additional number of functions which are not core and where the government screws up pretty badly. Guest this. Host the second point was this idea of government dysfunction and strategist. Host. Guest there is a really good article where he had and i debacle Education Plan and you say that its a democratic plan or republican pan and in both cases they are identical plans of both campuses. Dammit kratz and republicans by huge majorities were opposed to it if the other party had done it. So are there there people who trade on that . Yes absolutely. Let me Say Something loud and clear. If you want to know who is complicit in the regulatory state, big business is hugely complicit. The regulatory state is a wonderful from wonderful from your point of view because they have the clout and craft at the regulations the way they want them. Big corporations can deal with Regulatory Burden that potential competitors cannot. So all of those things, i think probably were on different parts of the same page. Host getting back to some of your earlier work, tie this book in with at least two of your past books that i know pretty well. Losing ground and coming apart. So losing ground had a lot to do with antipoverty policy, and coming apart, which i found there was a lot in there i found to agree with who works with any qualities and the extent to which income, wealth, class dispersions are just re down dean against equal opportunities that both of us think are very important. I think it is a serious problem. Can you tie some of the themes of this book it into themes of those book both in terms of antipoverty policy which i would argue pulls under the part of the government that i think is okay, and any quality where i think we should be doing more to help us to banish people. On my list of things that government does well i would say the tax credit which is very robust, wage subsidy the, strongly anti poverty, and were spending 60000 plus per year and that. Can you tie this together question mark. Guest as far as antipoverty as concert, losing ground im now walking away from at all. I do think that income transfers in terms of guaranteed income as a replacement of the welfare state as a way to go. Im happy to have this it would be over the age of 21 ive a book called called in our hands where we propose that. So in that sense i think in a society as rich as ours everybody should have access for the means of existence. They should have access to it. That is not a big issue but coming apart, that was a deeply pessimistic book. In this book i have what i call a solution to a problem, that had no Real Solutions at all. So what i am doing in this book is different from coming apart, and coming apart im saying the civic culture that i cherish in this country has come apart and i dont really see any way back and im really sad about that. In this book, im saying you still have a lot of americans who are doing everything right, they are trying to raise families, make an honest living, minding their own business and increasingly government is making it hard for them. I want to help them out. So i am talking about a more recent trick did set of the population and frankly its a population that doesnt interfere with us, a lot of us dont live in neighborhoods in which they get together to help solve problems. In many ways we are buffered from these revelatory states, there are is a whole set of americans who are deeply impacted by this. Host let me take a stand for someone who is missing in both the book and in that analysis, which is the people on the other side of those regulations. For every regulation you can disparage and you and i can can find examples that are worth disparaging, there is someone who is being protected and to at least potentially in a useful way. I want to try to draw you since over the course of our conversation you have said may be more positive things than i would have expected of certain aspects of government activities that you dont judge to be harmful and your regulatory state. I want you to think of more about the opportunity agenda that would help the kinds of people that were left behind and coming apart or for that matter bob putnams book our kids. The one of the things we know, for example, i saw statistic the other day where it showed really smart low income kids where they score high on a math test, are just as likely to complete college as not very smart rich kid. Right so we dont have the level that we want but is that not just a critical market failure if you call it, would that be a great space for the government to try to intervene in a way to boost College Access and completion for smart kids and say barriers to achieving that goal. Guest well i guess its an empirical question, my two younger children went to a public school, so we would go to the final ceremony for all of the kids to say where theyre going to what scholarships they got. I have to say im familiar with kids who dont go to college even though they test well, a more common phenomenon is they go to college but not the elite colleges for reasons that we mention and when you do have those that dont go to college its not because either there is no way to afford it, it is because family, cultural characteristics that discourage them for it. And here we opened up a topic of conversation that is very complicated bulimic cut to the chase. I dont think government does that very well, i think what they do effectively is write checks. I think if you had a basic guaranteed income that would be far more, it would open up College Program you would have. Host i only pulled the college example out because i think its. Guest let me say a more general statement i think one of Ronald Reagans jokes that i believe in most deeply is that the most terrifying words are are i am from the government and im here to help. The government has an invisible hand in the economy has an invisible. It tends to screw things up all the time. Host i very much agree one to that assertion in the following way. Its one of those things that sounds good and in the spirit of some of these examples you can pull out of your book its not wholly without merit. There is a strain of work recently and i like social science and to delve into these things, i would push you into the direction of this im not sure how much of this you have seen, there is now work we have now been doing this stuff long enough and collecting data long enough. There is work that tracks these kids over time, kids who receive nutritional benefits, food stamp that the time kids who got medicaid are compared to kids who didnt. Kids who went to headstart work compared to kids who didnt. Kids who. Guest thats not a good. Host well with headstart its the quality of the program. Theres a local what these studies have consistently found, zero housing is another one. What they have found is that in fact not only do we reduce poverty when we provide resources to folks just in a mechanical way, these programs work like laugh lasting investments and these kids, when they grow up to be adults, let me finish have higher levels. We have four minutes ample time. These kids have higher earnings than those in the control group, theyre more likely to complete college, theyre more likely to form a Family Structure that is more conducive to the type youre talking about it before. Less likely to have out of wedlock births especially as teenagers. When you get right down to it the gray area its not. Guest categorically reject your betrayal of this data. There is no way that i can document why i categorically refute it, i will say i will go to the mat with you on these numbers in another setting, another time. Ive read this stuff believe me. Host some of these are designed which are very highquality. Guest im very familiar with it. Host i think it would be a good debate for us to have at the end of the day there is a level, i keep keep pushing you towards granularity because when youre flying along and meeting up on the regulatory state and the congress, youre going going to get a lot of people on your side. Guest my argument is this book is at ground level. If its at 30,000 p that these things look good and the closer you get to the ground and how people actually live their lives, the more you see ways in which government is not an ally but an enemy. Host in our last few minutes, and i think that was a good thesis, tell me what you will do or say if in fact this doesnt pan out the way you would like it to. If there are not billionaires who say okay go forth then and civil obedience or bunch of it individual donors who think this is a good idea. What will you conclude, what will you do if we meet each other a year from year from now and it hasnt amounted to zip . Guest i will be completely unsurprised. I am deeply pessimistic in many ways, i think there are some Natural Forces that will augment the kind of thing that motivated me to write this book that are actually in the right direction. I think some of the Cultural Diversity is working in the direction of subsidiarity in terms of control of daily life. Im not opmistic. I do want to say i would like people in the audience to realize you have two guys here who deeply disagree politically. And we have had what i consider to be a lovely conversation, which is an ot or civility. Host well right back at you and always a pleasure to interact with you. Guest thank you. That was afterwards, book to be Signature Program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, Public Policy makers and others familiar with their material. Afterwards airs every week and a book tv at ten pm on saturday, 12 and nine pm on sunday and 12 am on monday. You can watch afterwards on mine go to book tv. Org and click on afterwords in the book tv series and topics listed on the upper right side of the page. Heres a look at the book pres. Obama is reading this summer. The list include three nonfiction titles president obama is also reading three novels this summer. Heres a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. On saturday, august 22 book tv will be live in jackson, mississippi. The first mississippi book festival held at the State Capitol building. Two weeks later on saturday, september 5, where live from the 15th annual National Book festival in washington d. C. Where you will have a chance to talk with others such as tom brokaw and buzz aldrin. Later that month is the tenth annual brooklyn book festival in new york city. And the southern festival of books will be held in nashville, tennessee october 9 through the 11th. Let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area and we will add them to our list. Email us at book tv at cspan. Org. Now joining us on book tv is philip kotler, prof. At northwestern university. Prof. What you teach and how long a few been at the university. Believe it or not ive been here 50 years and i and i have taught all of the mba students. More recently i am confining my teaching here at northwestern to the executive programs where we get Business People who come for a week to learn about pricing or advertising or finance and so on. What is your background, how did