Tim "The Lawyer" Sandefur talks to Armstrong & Getty

or they're from Atlanta when you're getting that's right. So anyway, this is our our our our long form podcast, and our our first guest is a good old friend personally and professionally. Tim sander for Vice president for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute. He also spent fifteen years at the Pacific Legal Foundation, an organization which were big, big fans of. He's the author of Cornerstone of Liberty, Property Rights in

twenty first Century America. Co authored with his fabulous wife Christina Sanderford, The Right to Earn a Living the Conscience of the Constitution, a wonderful new Ish book about Frederick Douglas called Frederick Douglas Self Made man um and in a great writer and thinker. Pay Tim, Hey, so you have you want to you want somebody who can just keep talking and talking and talking for a tremendous amount of time, and you invite me. I get it now,

I see what you're talking. Well, you've got the depth of knowledge. But were you aware maybe you were aware this this Some people call it the intellectual dark net that exists out there, and I like that name because it's it's kind of off the grid, but there are millions of people doing it listening to these podcasts and one of the from YouTube videos that sort of thing very big. Yeah, But one of the things that seems to be a theme is they're not clearly one thing

these conversations. It's not like it is at all of regular radio or TV where you tune in and you immediately say, is this a liberal show or a conservative show? These long form podcasts you can't really figure out with the guests are, which, by the way, is the way normal people are, you know. Yeah, that's the thing I think. I think the term dark net is ridiculous. I think gets an attempt to try and make it sound like

it's some shadowy conspiracy of evil capitalists. But the reality is that with the availability of all sorts of different kinds of media. Now we're seeing the the subdivision of of our conversations into a finer and finer degree, so that you have more intense audiences that might be smaller,

but their motive more devoted. And you saw that, for instance, when cable television first came out, the quality of television drama improved because you could have longer form stories with more in depth characters and complicated plots and things because you weren't going for a larger audience. We're going for a more loyal audience, and so you could explore things more deeply, like with HBO. And so I think that's

what you're seeing. That's pretty good. Maybe that maybe this is this podcast thing or whatever you want to call it, is like, um, it's like cable cable tv has been to network shows well, and of course a lot of it's going to be terrible just for the because of the base a rule, everything is crap and so most of the most hell yeah, everything starts from there. So you know, it's funny. It strikes me as a guy

who's raised raised a passle of kids. The more kids you have to appeal to it meal time, the more likely you're gonna get bland crap, and I think you know the same as true of virtually any sort of entertainment. You know, this is probably a super broad question on this topic, but what the hell, um, where do you think we are in terms of the exchange of ideas, particularly in the United States, because moronic cable news yelling

is at an all time high. On the other one, Oh yeah, and it's it's unforgivable, it's criminal in its stupidity, and it's it's dishonesty. At the same time, though, you have a phenomenon like the one we've been talking about. Yeah, I have no idea. I mean, see your next book. We have we have at our fingertips. We have these devices in our pockets that we can use to connect to Wikipedia and have the entire world's knowledge at our fingertips and all of the great music and art and literature.

And instead we mostly at our at our best, we're sending each other videos of kittens. So I think it's that it's a weird phenomenon where the curve is flattening out, so that instead of having a few people who have access to a tremendous amount of information and they're the

recognized intellectual leaders of the culture. Instead, everybody has a slightly more improved knowledge of the world, but it's only slightly and so it sort of tends towards the middle of the road, which may not be a good thing in some ways, but in other ways it's a great thing. I mean, there's a lot of people out there who would never have had exposure to the world's great art and literature who today can access it. It's just are they going to take advantage of it? Should we necessarily

want them to? I don't really know why. Why wouldn't we want them Because Western civilization is oppressive? Haven't you heard that? Do you know about in your sectionality? Well, there is that, But I was thinking more like mic Roofen says, not everybody needs to go to college, not everybody, you know, it's not necessarily a bad thing that somebody doesn't like to sit there and listen to Bach and handle.

I happen to, but a lot of people don't. And it doesn't mean that those people are stupid, and it doesn't mean that I am intellectually superior to them. Those are criteria established at in previous age. Nowadays, we have people who have intense knowledge of very tiny fractions of the world. It's an era of specialization. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's that's not necessarily a bad thing that

the age of the Renaissance man is over. The Age of the renaissance man came about because the number of people who are illiterate was tremendous back then, and so if you could read, you necessarily became a specialist in everything. But nowadays that's not the case. I like Barbara Back

and Bill Handel stop it. You know, I've been called renaissance man, tim, But it does occur to me that, like, if you're referred to as a renaissunts doctor, you'd be run out of town, or a Renaissance astronomer, you'd probably be pretty behind the curve. Um Well, that those people are calling a renaissance man, they were, they're referring to the Renaissance fair. But that that reminds me to walk around with a big turkey leg. It's my thing. It reminds me the idea that you know, we were always

against rocking the vote. We we don't want more people to vote unless they take the time to like read up on the issues, then then please do. But unless you're going to no, don't vote. I like voter turnout being relatively low since most people aren't paying attention, and you know, it kind of gets to here. All this information is out there, but are people going to take advantage of it? And do we want them to? Yeah? No,

that's a good point. I mean we the vote can be a dangerous weapon, and yeah, we handed out indiscriminately. If everybody voted, I mean, if we had something like turn out the vote politics, our our entire political system could be turned upside down. Today, there's not an issue that you couldn't stand on its head if everybody decided

to vote, and thank they don't. Yeah. Yeah, the qualifications, the requirement that people know what they're talking about before they go into the voting booth seems perfectly reasonable, and yet it's regarded that is regarded, it's always been pest. How do you feel about a poll test? I know it's it's history is not good. But what about if you had a test and you have to be able to name the president, vice president, and how many Supreme

Court justices there are? Something like that? I mean, pretty simple, you'd wed out of think that's liable to It's liable to so much abuse that I wouldn't favor that because if you could wave your magic wand to wave away the abuse, well, then it would be best just to do that instead of imposing attack. In fact, the best thing to do is to reduce the authority and white males is that where you're going. I'm sorry interrupted you.

You're not going to landed white males. You know, if I'm saying, you get the government so that it's not doing anything. It doesn't matter who gets to vote. You know, lots of feminists like to quote the line from Virginia wolf Um where she referred to a room of my own. I want a room of my own. The actual line that she said was give me a room of my own,

and you can keep the vote. Because what matters is let leave me alone, give me private property, and don't bother me and take my stuff away to pay people not to work. And it doesn't really matter who gets elected. That's why you don't see all this this bruja, however, gets who gets elected dog catcher or something. But there's tons of money being poured into who gets elected president and elected to Congress because there's so much redistribution of

wealth involved. That's the real problem. Interesting, which brings us to really kind of the root of your career and your books, um, which we mentioned and we'll get into a little more specifically in a bit. But you know, in this great age of resurgent populism, uh, there's a lot of populism that's really unhealthy. For instance, and the Founding Fathers knew that most people want a king, don't they in a royal family, in a wise and benevolent pop out of rule from on high. Yeah, I think

there is a something to be said for that. I think most people don't think long enough to to say where does the money come from that the government is going to give to me. They think that many people think of the government as their parent, when the reality is that government is your child. It's the people who support the government. So as a matter of common sense,

the government can support the people. And I don't want to come off as contemptuous of the average human being, um, but but there's danger there, and the Founding Fathers understood that because it's really seductive idea that the government will take care of me. In fact, it's not only is it not, it's not a condescending thing to say. Most people don't understand or think about politics. It's not a condescend anything. It's that it's the focus of a lot

of scholarship. It's called rational ignorance. And my my friend Ilias Souman, who's a law professor at George Mason University, he focuses a lot of his scholarship on rational ignorance. It is not rational for a lot of people to spend their time studying politics because they have other things to do. They they spend their time studying, you know, how to make how to do gardening, or how to build buildings, or how how to put up a bridge

or something. That's what their time is spent on. And it's we would not be rational for me to spend my time studying engineering, because I'm not an engineer. For the same reason, the it's not rational for most people to spend their time on politics. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that we need to be very wary when they express political opinions or demand

a say in what the government does. You're a an expert on the founding, what do you think we we we regularly asked this, as you know, it's a common question if the Founding fathers were alive today, what would they think of their experiment? Do you think shocked that it lasted so long? Or horrified to where it's end hut up? There would be a lot of the ladder No, I I think I think Jefferson would be horrified that we hadn't torn up the Constitution long ago and rewritten

it several times. Jefferson had this idea that we should rewrite the Constitution every generation or so, and he would be horrified also, by the way, at the size of the states. He thought the states should be much smaller than they currently are and should be subdivided down into the two hundreds hundred citizens per town unit or something like that. Came up with these really great ideas to try and limit government power and keep power in hands

of local decision makers as much as possible. So he would have been horrified, and he would have said that we had sold out the American dream to the Hamiltonian notion of get rich quick. And by the way, that is really true. There really is. There's two American dreams.

There's the American dream of patient, careful hard work that provides a modest living for yourself and your family, and then there's the American dream of get rich quick, and those two have always been intention and it's when the latter starts to rise in society that you really need to be careful and worried about the government. I think

James Madison would have been more pleased than Jefferson. Madison had this idea, had a more conservative view about what government could accomplish and and how reasonable it was to expect people to be responsible citizens, and his answer was not very so I think he would have been a little bit more pleased, but he still would have been pretty shocked by the scope and size and power of government today. No, none of them, none of them, not even not even people like Hamilton's or John Adams, who

were more of your big government guys. Not even they would have had they all would have been horrifying. That's what I was gonna say. You could find things that they would disagree on, I'm sure, but I would think they would all be shocked at the royal government place in everybody's life in the modern world, which brings us

back to the rational ignorance you're talking about. As I've said many times, it is an impossibility for a voter or hell, even a legislator to have anything near a thorough enough knowledge of what the government is doing to be a responsible voter or responsible representative, which which is just that's a deal breaker. If you have a government too large and complex to comprehend much less control, then

you've done something terribly wrong. Yeah. I think The Atlantic ran an article some months ago about talking about how the presidency was just too big a job for for people across the board, And that's absolutely true, and it's not true just in the era of Trump. It was true of Obama, I was true of Clinton, industry, of Bush. No no individual could possibly understand even a fraction of what the president is required to do, so of course the president can't possibly get it right. No nobody could

possibly handle that kind of information. Is just too much work for any one person to do, or or a group of people like you said, Congress doesn't read a lot of the bills because nobody could read all those bills. So what happens is that the intellectual leadership kind of devolves into the hands of think tank people like me, or into the hands of staff members, especially in a state like California with the with term limits and things. You often find that the staffers stay around, they become

the permanent political class. And then it's a matter of of this, you know, these ideas that float around the capital for a decade or two, until all of a sudden there comes a need. Oh, hey, let's we need to do a bill on such and such. What what have we gotten a drawer? You know, Well, they've gotten a drawer what's been floating around for ten years? And that's what it gets past. That's exactly what happened with Obamacare,

when when a ballcare came about. All these notions have been floating around Washington, d c. For decades or so, and they all just stuffed it into a bill and there you go. And so you get this horrible, crazy quilt of a bill that nobody still understands what it does. You know. So let's circle back to something you said that we're talking about Hamilton's earlier and they get rich quick view of America, the American dream. How does that

intersect with the desire for big government. I don't get it, he says, feigning ignorance. Yeah, well, a lot of people expect to get rich quick off of the government um or at a minimum that they can use the government to keep other from other people from getting rich quick. And it's the government is a great tool for for ruining your competition and getting what you want right, stifling competition by both through licensing laws or other kinds of restrictions.

And you know we by the way, we often talk about this in economic terms, but it's also true in social terms. The government doesn't just prevent competition in economics, it also events competition in ideas. So religious groups will often try and use the government to restrict their opponents in exactly the same way that businesses try to use

the government to restrict their their competitors. Licensing laws, for for for starting a moving company, are a good example of how existing moving companies use the licensing requirements to prevent economic competition. A lot of the time, you see the same kind of competition between religious groups as as

opposed to economic groups. So, for instance, every few years, Texas goes through a meeting where they adopt textbooks, and because they're the single largest market for textbooks, that matters a lot, so a lot of religious groups will rally around that meeting to try and get the textbooks they like adopted because they know that that will set the trend nationwide. And it's exactly the same phenomenon. And James

Madison understood this when he wrote the Constitution. He used that example, used the competition among religious groups as his explanation for why you need limited government, because that kind of competition will cancel itself out if you have the right checks and balances in place so that no one church can take over the power of government and stifle religious freedom of religion and so forth. And the seam

is true of government, I mean of economics. If if you have these competing interest groups, as long as the government's power is limited, it doesn't really matter whether they hate each other or whatever, because they're not going to harm the rest of us by creating a monopoly. And so that's why I often say that my goal is the separation of economics and politics in exactly the same way as the separation of church and state. How far away are we from that goal? About a billion light years,

you know, probably worth mentioning. It's specifically one of my favorite books of yours, The Right to Earn a Living, which is just it's such an eye opener about how government is used in regulation is used not to keep us all safe and make things fair, but precisely the opposite. Yeah. Yeah.

The founding father is called the problem of faction. A faction is a group within society, which can even include an entire majority of the society, that wants to use the government for its own private purposes instead of for the public welfare. And the fact is that there really is only one thing in the world that is genuinely in the public welfare, and that is the protection of

individual rights. Everything else you can think of favors one group at the expense of another, whether it be public schools. Public schools favor those who have children against those who don't have children. I don't have kids, but I have to pay to support the public schools, And there's always some excuse given, Oh, well, you benefit from the fact that there's an educated populace. Ha ha ha. Yeah right.

It's the parents who benefit from the public schools because they don't have to provide for the education entirely by themselves, because they're subsidized out of my tax at my tax dollars. So everything else that you can think of is like that. It benefits some people at the expensive others except for the protection of individual rights. And so the more you get to a government that does nothing more than protect

individual rights, the better off. Society in general is as opposed to one faction over another using political power for their own best interests. A tangent since you brought up the idea of getting rich quick the recent Supreme Court ruling on gambling, so there are a lot of states that are either going to get into the lottery thing now or increase it or opening up more um gambling, to sports betting, to to to make money off of it, and only the governments will really be allowed to do

it large scale. So so you've got taxpayer money being spent to advertise to people to that they're gonna get rich quick, I guess, so that they can bring in more money to the state government and then wasted. How do you feel about that? Yeah, you know, it's it's funny because of course, as a libertarian, I believe that if you want to gamble, it's every bit, it's your right.

The government has no business getting involved. But you know, gambling is a is not exactly a healthy occupation, and it does encourage social morais and habits that are inimical to a good society, and it should be. I don't know, it is worrisome that the government is in the business of fostering these kinds of activities. If you think about it, though,

it's funny because government has always been doing that. Government has been subsidized by um taxes on liquor forever, and there are states where the government owns all of the liquor stores. Liquors is a monopoly run by the government, and government taxes on cigarettes and things. You know, these syntaxes have always been a very important part of government's income, precisely because it knows that. You know, they're kind of addictive and it's hard not to do them, so they're

a healthy stream. When prohibition went into place, prohibition was only made possible by the passage of the Income Tax Amendment, because the federal government was supported so much by alcohol taxes that the only way that you could prohibit alcohol was to come up with an alternative income stream for the government. And that was why the income tax was

such a an important part of the progressive platform. I was happy to hear you say that that you're troubled as a libertarian, you know, because I'm the same way. I'm libertarian most things, but on this one. The idea of the government with the billboards of happy, smiling people winning money, which is a lie. Almost nobody, nobody, You're not gonna win, you know, long term, your math, you're

gonna lose. But they're so they're lying to people to try to get them to spend money on something that's a bad habit, to try to fill state coffers, which then they will waste the money. Wow. I was gonna accuse you too, of of dabbling in paternalism. I was really looking forward to that. But now I get it. So would you, either one of you have a problem with just, you know, me running a sports book on

the up and up. I'm not stealing from anybody, as long as it's not like a state encouraging it and in misleading people as to how likely they are to win. That's that's a very libertarian point of view. I think, well, you know, government itself is a sin in some way, so it kind of makes sense. But it's also a very read of tax All of these taxes, cigarette taxes, alcohol taxes, and sports am betting taxes in the form

of gambling harm the poor more than the rich. That because the richer we are educated enough to know what a bad bet buying a lottery ticket is or and and they tend not to smoke or drink as much. Actually, I'd be I'd be more okay with it if I could count on the fact that if somebody gambles their whole life and ends up with no money when they're sixty five, sorry, you're just out of luck. But that's

not the way it works. They're gonna get some of my money to be able to live, you know, a dignity in their old age, as Barack Obama wants put it um. If that's the case, then I do have a stake in whether or not they gamble away their money. Yeah,

which is where that's why socialism so complicated. Daniel Alker, in his book on Prohibition, points out that one of the reasons why the DuPont family worked so hard to get the Prohibition Amendment repealed was because they thought that that was the first step in getting rid of the income tax. Well, instead, what you ended up with was both You've got government taxes on alcohol and income taxes.

Is there any he's setting this trend towards gigantic government high taxes, many many regulations, and and look, I realize you occasionally you get a Reagan or a Trump roll and back some regulations here and there. But you know, that's just nipping around the edges. That's just tiny little bobbles downward in a trend upward. What will it take the reset giant war, cataclysm flu that kills two seventy million.

You know somebody I was it, George Will, It was some prominent commentator just recently said that he thought that nothing short of a catastrophic war. Now maybe it was Charles Murray, nothing short of account I've been saying that for a decade. Yeah, that's gonna pay attention to one of those bastards. Spend one of the armstrong and getting principles forever. We need a war or fatal disease to

come along. Damn, I can't anything. I'm reminded of that at the Simpsons episode when Bart looks at the at the Generation X or millennial or whoever was and and he says, we need another Vietnam's been out their ranks a little wow wow. But Bart, no, I mean it's true that crises tend to motivate people, and there will inevitably be a crisis if we continue down the road

of ever expanding government and irresponsibility. But uh, nothing, there's absolutely none of this is written in the Book of Faith. There's no reason in the world why we couldn't give me an example. And I asked people all the time giving an example of a society that went back from this, that went backwards to two more, you know, lean responsible. I don't know of one. I mean, without without a cataclysm, you mean, or just disappearing. Yeah, well, I just don't

think it happens. Yeah, exactly, That's what I've asked historians. It just doesn't happen. I wish it would, but I don't think it's gonna happen. Well, I've got an example. Hong Kong when when the British um you know, they they had Hong Kong for quite a long time, and it was not the economic powerhouse that it became until sometime in the mid twentieth century when they decided to do it as an experiment and create as close to

a lazy affair society as they could. And between the two thousand, you know, Hong Kong became this incredible economic powerhouse because of sharply limited government. Now the price for that, The downside to that was a good degree of authoritarianism because it was imposed and the people there really didn't have a lot of democratic control over how that worked. But it was it was done, and it was done

from the top down. As an ideological thing. We are going to create a free market society, and that you need a wise and benevolent king then, because the people are never going to vote for that, you know, which which could bring us to uh. You know, when democracy comes to the Middle East, they vote for a theocracy. Um. But I was going to say for Japan, that's another You know that your Middle East example gives me a

good example, and that is McArthur occupying Japan. Japan in the nineteen thirties and forties was every bit the terrorist theocratic society that the Middle East is today. And after the Caphy, the catastrophe of the war, MacArthur takes over and he says, we're going to write you a constitution and it's going to have things like freedom of speech and so forth in there. And look at what has resulted. What has resulted, It has been prosperity and modernization of Japan.

We point it could have been a weird, weird porn good point. It takes a catastrophe as your it takes a village, I guess, but I agree, and it is absolutely necessary to point out we are writing our own catastrophe. It stands at twenty two trillion dollars of debt and and growing every day. What's it saying that the hard times that you've been repeating, Gosh, hard times make for strong people. Strong people make for good times. Good times make for soft people. Soft people make for bad times,

make bad times. And that's what we're going through. Yeah. Probably. And it's hard because the generation that went through World War Two and experienced not just World War Two, but the but the prosperity of the fifties that came when Truman and Eisenhower eliminated the government controls that had been imposed during World War Two. That generation is disappearing. And the what we're seeing is the rise of Heck, we're right seeing the rise of a generation that doesn't doesn't

remember the Cold War at all. And that's a scary thing. And what's interesting. Lincoln actually gave a speech on this topic, his first prominent address in the l where he said, you know, all of the revolutionary leaders, they're dying off and and they are no longer around to remind us of the tyranny that they experienced and of the importance of freedom. And if we don't remember those lessons were destined for a real disaster. And obviously he was right

about that. Does I think we're seeing the same thing. There's been a number of poles lately, uh, articles and all kinds of different things showing a a much brighter view of socialism by young people. Hillary Clinton said not long ago, she said coming out as a capitalist really hurt her in Iowa. I mean, that's that that would have been crazy a couple of decades ago. Yeah, No,

it's a that's a very frightening thing. I mean, I yeah, nothing shows me more than seeing these things about the positive view that young people have of socialism, the the deadliest and cruelest of all human ideologies. Yeah. You get stuff for free, you see. Yeah, everybody gets a free education and they don't have to worry about working, and

they can be a put if they want. Um. Yeah, it's it is scary, tim Although the one and it's an odd reassurance to find, but the one reassuring thing I've found is that those same polls, when they ask him, right, what is socialism? The kids don't have a clue what it is. It just sounds vaguely pleasant to them that they will get a free college education. And you know, honestly, as you said at the very beginning, these are the people who are going to be voting so god so

many things we could talk about. We could talk about the unholy state of higher education right now, the idea of coming out of school with you knows worth of debt for your undergrad degree, and and you know how that's changed so much in a few, uh, you know, a few generations. I kind of sympathize with the kids, thinking there's got to be a better alternative than this. Yeah, what happened is the biggest thing I think is the conservatives. Really,

the blame I think belongs primarily with the conservatives. The Conservatives claimed to be the voice of freedom, of the constitution, of limited government and free markets, and the Conservatives have never really understood free markets and never actually supported free markets. And they then tied themselves to social conservative attitudes such as hostility to same sex marriage that made them uh no,

longer a tendable position for the younger generation. And so the younger generation has thrown out the conservative his and that, and by doing that, they've also thrown out the good sides of conservatism, which were the few aspects of limited government and free markets that some conservatives sometimes understood. But

that's some good stuff. That's that's that's really good right there, because we we've been on stages before, and you know, you can talk about small government and all that sort of stuff and fiscal responsibility, and but if people think you're most of this has changed now. But if people thought you were anti gay marriage or you know, anti legalizing marijuana or whatever, that the conversation stopped there. You weren't gonna get anywhere with your small government clapp track.

To some degree, that's a good thing from a libertarian point of view. That's because that shows that the audience was attuned to the hypocrisy of those who claims to be in favor of private property rights and free markets, but at the same time thought that the stage should tell people whom they could marry. And that's a positive development.

The downside is that the left is going to take advantage of that and they're going to wed socialism to their own views, and I one hopes that the younger generation will also see the hypocrisy of that, to see that the left is wrong when it says, yes, you can choose whom to go to bed with, but we're going to tell you what property you can own and what businesses you can run. If if we can maintain the skepticism against both sides, then there's a hope for

a future. Where are politics believe in freedom across the board? Well, let's not gloss it over the downside of socialism and central planning. For you know, for those who haven't been obsessed with it for most of their adult lives, why not socialism? Tim It sounds great, equal fair, etcetera. I you really do want a long form podcast, don't you.

The central evil of socialism is in the idea that you exist to serve others, that moral good consists of you working to support other people and other people working to support you, when the reality is that I do not exist to make other people happy. I exist for my own sake, and I have a right to pursue my own happiness not having to to curtail my behavior

to satisfy the desires of other people. Every other evil that arises from socialism, from the shortages that are inevitable in it, to the political and social oppression that results from it, flow from that central evil premise. I'm not nearly as good at quoting folks as you are. It's it's a gift. It's it always amazed me, but us,

And who's going to challenge it? Perfect? Yeah, But I absolutely love what I've heard expressed in a couple of places lately that the amount of control or oppression it takes to make socialism work, it would be repugnant to any human being who who either remembers what it looks like or can imagine it. You either. I mean, the only two reason people reasons people work are for reward or to avoid punishment. And there must be so much

punishment to make socialism work. It ends the way it always ends, That's right, And the reason why is because a thriving economy is a living thing. A thriving economy is kind of like um, it's kind of like the environment. It's like an ecosystem, which means it's constantly in a

process of change. It's not a static, fixed state and socialism views it as a static fixed state or or or like some sort of a machine instead of a living organism, and so it tries to prescribe rules that will be enforced by the government, to say what you shall charge or how much you will produce and so forth.

And because that can't work, what you really do is you end up you get end up moving the competition to some other aspect of the economy, and then that has to be clamped down, and then it moves it to elsewhere, and then that has to be clamped down until the entire society has clamped down. So, for example, if you impose a price restriction on milk, and you say, no, no, we're all the only commodity that we're going to impose

a price restriction is on milk. Nothing else. You can charge whatever you want for everything else, just not milk. Milk has to be what cents a gallon. Well, if that, if you do that, the dairies aren't going to produce milk. They're gonna put that They're gonna put their products into making cheese or butter instead because they can make more money.

So if you're gonna enforce your milk restriction, now you have to restrict the production of cheese and butter also, and now the dairies are going to start making ice cream instead, So now you've got to restrict the production of ice cream. And then you're gonna have to restrict the cows, and you're gonna have to restrict the farmers.

They're gonna have to restrict the feed that goes to feed the cows, and then you're gonna have to restrict the transportation the trucks that carry the cows from one place to another, and then you have to restrict the fuel that the trucks use, and pretty soon you have to restrict the entire economy just in order to maintain your price restriction on milk. It limitably works that way. Can't we just put the dairy farmers in a re

education camp and beat them until they comply. That's that's what ends up happening, exactly, because they don't work for profits, so the so the only thing they can do is to work out of fear, and so you have to impose more and more fear in order to get people to work. Now, the answer that socialists always give is, oh, no, new socialist man won't be selfish and greedy. He's going to care for his fellowman the way he cares for himself.

Now we know that that's nonsense, that that is has never been the case and will never be the case. But and the only way to accomplish that is through forcible re education. And so you create these labor camps in order to teach them to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the hive, because we're running people as if they were ants and so, and of course who's going

to do that. There has to be somebody who's in charge of the hive, and so inevitably you have a dictator class that gets fat and and the and while the people are starving. Yeah, it's like, remind me of that the Lenin letter that came to light a couple of years back. Uh, the letter actually exists, um where he says, better to hang a thousand farmers than to have, you know, the overall good not succeed or something. Just I mean, just amazing that anybody could actually think that way.

They were going to village the village hanging farmers to show you this is why you need to comply, and he thought, well, you know, you hang a thousand farmers but overall people are gonna be happier. And that's a hell of a mindset. It's like the old like the old trick of getting the donkey to move forward by holding the carrot in front of him, or you can whip him with a stick from behind, and so there you have the old carrot or the strict stick approach.

The socialists say that the carrot is oppressive, so they eliminate it. So then they're left with making bigger and bigger and bigger sticks. Wow. Wow, that is well said. So uh, having solved socialism for the next few generations. I want to talk a little bit about your book, The Permission Society, which is terrific and and we is

that the one we partially inspired? Yes, that was because you You are very fond of saying that whenever the government talks about permits, you need to remember that the root word of permit is permission. And I haven't and never use it as a noun without using it as a verb. The government is going to permit me to reap my patio. How kind of them? That's right? And I was having I was thinking of that when I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who

does Second Amendment law. And he was trying to argue in some cases that the same rules that apply when the government requires you to get a permit for a parade or a protest ought to also apply when the government requires you to get a permit for a gun, and that is that they're they're prison. It's very rare that the government is allowed to impose restrictions on you for free speech, and so it should be the same

thing for gun permits. And I thought you could apply that logic across the board to all the different things government requires us to get permission to do. And you start to think about all the things government requires you to get permission for, it's amazing. I mean everything from from the permit to build a house or run a business to a prescription to to have a medicine. A prescription is just a government permission slip allowing you to

own a medicine, right right. And And I actually just watched a speech you did at the Cato Institute about your book a few years ago, and you let off with a great quote, was it from Madison about how the the American the Constitution and the Revolution flopped the idea of um of rights and permission on its head. Yeah. So Madison wrote this in two. It's an essay called Charters, and he says that in in Europe, charters of liberty were granted by power, but America has set the example

of charters of power granted by liberty. And what he meant was that in Europe you had things like the Magna Carta. And if you actually read the Magna Carta, what it says is I the keing in giving the following freedoms to the people. Well, where did he get those freedoms to begin with? Right? Did he just invent them? Did he just grow them in his backyard? What the American Constitution says is no, No, the people are free

to begin with, and they give the government power. And Madison says in that essay that that change from the idea that government gives us freedom to the idea that we give the government power because we are already free. That change is the most important change that the American Revolution accomplished. You know, if we could go crisper, you know,

gene gene stitching whatever they call it, gene editing, gene editing. Yeah, with one briefly stated idea and in fact, like the next four generations With that, I think it would be what you just said, when what Madison just said, the idea that alright, alright, okay, I guess we need a government, but we're going to tell you what you can do, and you're gonna do no more than that. Yep, that's right.

And actually I there's a book that I really recommend called The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane, where this is the basic thesis. Now, the book's got some some problems, some of its historical claims aren't accurate, but the essence of it is exactly right. You're right. That is the key, that the idea that human beings are fundamentally free, that freedom isn't given to us by anything.

Once you have that idea in your mind, and if you apply it consistently across the board, it's really amazing. What a different world you would have, a world where where you can accomplish, you can pursue your own happiness without having to ask the government. Mother, May I first go ahead? I was gonna say, you know, I was thinking we ought to ask before before we wrap this up, what does it even mean to say you're a libertarian at this point in our nation's history, because there's so

many different definitions. Is it just escaped mental patient Gary Johnson, as we often call him on the radio show. Does it just mean that you embrace the idea that that the people should establish a limited government and keep it limited. The the simple answer to what a libertarian is as a person who believes the government has no right to dictate my economic choices, just like it has no right to dictate my personal choices about who my date, or

who my UH read, or whom I speak to. It also should have no authority to tell me what I do with my property, or whether I run a business, or or any of those sorts of things. Government is strictly limited to defending individual rights and nothing more. That's the simple answer. The more complicated answer is that libertarianism is a species of liberalism. It's and a lot of people get this confused because they think that libertarians are

kind of conservative, and actually where the opposite of that. Conservatives. The primary concern for a conservative is creating and maintaining a society. Libertarians aren't concerned with creating and maintaining a society. They're concerned with individual flourishing. They want the individual to be free to pursue happiness. I'm ever flourished in my life.

That's a good goal. Well, then you need to get out mortal friends, um and and liberals, today's modern liberals, they also want the individual to to flourish, but they think the way to a published that is for government to take money from people who earn it and give it to them, or to give them an education, or give them housing and everything that flourishing is assured to

protect them and stuff. Yeah, exactly, Whereas the libertarian says, no, no, you have the right to God to lead your own life, but don't expect me to come pay in your bills for you where and so those are two branches of the same treat Conservatism is the idea that our primary concern is creating and maintaining society, and that means curtailing individual rights sometimes in order to maintain healthy society. It's just by historical accident that libertarians and conservatives joined forces

during the Cold War because they're both anti communist. And what we're seeing in today's world is the breakup of that of that connection. We're seeing libertarians no longer joining forces with conservatives, which incidentally, is why you see the Trump phenomenon because the libertarian wing of the of the Republican Party, they weren't interested in participating in that kind of of a choice, and some of them voted for Hillary.

Even some of them may even voted for Gary Johnson, some of them voted for Trump's and so it fractured the Republican vote, which is why you saw that phenomenon occur. What do you do about people that make bad decisions in life? If you're going to look at it from a libertarian standpoint and you believe in free markets and try to stay away from socialism, because we talk about this a lot um. The person that's made bad choices throughout their life and they end up with no money.

The person that does the dumb things and ends up in the hospital but doesn't have insurance when they could have had it. How do you handle that? Well, I have a couple of friends who often say stupid should hurt, right, Yeah, And and there's a and the good thing about that, of course, is if you if you witness in your life as you're growing up, people who have had some really bad results from their actions, you might be careful, more careful with your own actions. Yeah, that's not theoretical.

I saw things. But so are you gonna end up in your in your cold hearted libertarian were old tim sender? Are you gonna have a homeless people starving, or people going to the hospital and they can't get their broken ankle fixed, or what I suppose that might happen. I don't think that it's going to be nearly as common as the nightmares that the left likes to throw out and say everybody's gonna be starving the streets. I always thought it was funny when people say, uh, oh yeah,

what it free to do? What free to starve? As if you won't starve if your hands are tied rights, has less chance starved to death than the person who's who's who's being dictated to by the state. Um no, a free society, if you want to help people who are unfortunate, you will not be stopped. Well, yeah, exactly right. And I think you know, private charity will become a much more significant part of every community. Um, you know when government charity. But Joe, the thing is, it's not

it's not about that to me. The thing about private charity, it's you're absolutely right a private charity. Not only as a theoretical matter would it occurred, but historically we know that's the case because the most charitable time in American history was the late nineteenth cent three, which was also the freest economically speaking, as everything from the Red Cross to the A s p c. A dates from the time where we got closest to Las Affair. So absolutely

that will happen. But the most important point here is that the what about the poor argument he's always whipped out in an effort to get you to say that you exist to make other people happy, that your life is deter the goodness of you as a person is dependent upon the degree to which you serve poor and unfortunate people, and that is something I absolutely refused to accept. I exist to provide for myself, to pursue my own happiness,

and to accomplish my own goals. If I happen to be charitable to other people, which I do, then that is because I derive personal benefit from that, because I think that person deserves some help, because it makes me feel better as a person to help that person, or or because I just am not willing to live with myself while watching this p and suffered well, and your your motivation doesn't really matter to me. If you're free to do whatever the hell you want, including given all

your money to the poor, it's your business, right. Uh. I had one more topic I wanted to get onto. I've got a big one, but I'm saving it for the end unless we come up with more topics to get onto. Oh god, it flitted right out of my mind. A capable of talking in our right. Yeah, God, bless you. And it finally it popped back into my mind. Um, what do you make of the culture of ready offense, the culture of the microaggression, the culture of um celebrating victimhood.

I think it's a horrifying development and it has to be ended now. It should have been ended yesterday. It's a terrible thing to see, and I think we see it particularly in There's three aspects to it. There's the ideas of approp creation, the idea of social constructivism, which is the idea that everything, all the differences between people are really just the result of social construction, that that

society can change. And there's the idea that of racial identity, constituting your your mind, that you are only who you are because of your race and there and that's what leads to the idea of privilege, that that any advantage

you have is just because of privilege. Disregarding that perhaps you or your or your ancestors made wise, wise choices and governed their resources prudently, we disregard all of that and say, the only reason you are in your status is because of privilege, and therefore the only reason other people are in a lower status is because they lack privilege.

Those three things appropriation. The appropriation is a horrible idea that that people shouldn't learn from each other or adopt each other's cultural practices because they somehow belong to some racial group. The appropriation, social constructivism, and privilege are the three things that lead to the culture of grievance that at its worst, most most intense state you see in

the Middle East today. If you'd explained some of those concepts to me twenty years ago and told me they were going to catch on, I thought that's not possible. And references to the Nazis are so tired. But as I've said many times, I am unfamiliar with any society that was so enthusiastic about pinning labels on people perhaps on their jumpsuits. Since Nazi Germany, it's astonishing to me to see the United States of America in a position where everybody must know you know what you are, before

they can even listen to your opinion. There are two aspects of today's social grievance culture that are very similar to Nazism or to proto Nazism. One of them is the idea of group grievance. People forget that the Germans saw themselves as victims of the Jews. They thought they were being victimized and depressed and kept down by Jewish privilege, and they thought of themselves as reacting against the aggressions

of the Jews. We forget that fact. The second thing is that this idea that cultural items belong to different groups. What what I said about appropriation, they came up with, For example, Deutsch physics versus Youdon physic. Youd In physic was Jewish physics, like Albert Einstein, the physics of Jewish scientists, and that was different from good German physics, Deutsche physic,

which was culturally belonging to the Jews. And that is exactly what we're seeing in social studies departments and even in some science departments and universities today that are saying that certain kinds of thinking, certain ways of thinking, belonged to certain ethnic categories, and you shouldn't cross this category.

That's a terribly dangerous development. Wow, that is a shocking parallel, because I've heard of that the rejection of traditional mathematics is being you know, paternalistic and white and western and that sort of thing, which is just a horrifying notion because it always leads you. You see this in particularly in the work of Tanahsse Coats, who writes for The Atlantic. Now, I could spend a good two hours talking about how much I despise Coats his work, and he's won the

National Book already, want a Genius grant. He is not a fringe figure. He got a genius grant. I didn't realize that he's brilliant and completely deluded in my mind, but gone. Tannahessey Coats is a white supremacist who happens to be black. He believes that the United States is a society based on racial class that exists for the purpose of oppressing black people, and that white people have no place in it. And I mean the black people have no place in it, and that they and he

his entire book, Between the World and Me. The thesis of that book is that black people should abandon the American Dream, in fact, should abandoned dreaming altogether, because the American Dream is a myth concocted by white people to a press black people. It's a disgrace. And when he gets to the end of the book and applause the September eleventh hijackers, you see the degree to which that nihilism leads to a system that that that degrades and

denigrates Black American citizens. And it's it's really offensive to me as an American to see anyone council Black Americans to abandon the American dream, that that Black Americans have suffered so much for. I mean, when you when you hear the term American dream today, very few people think of James trust Low Adams, the writer who invented that phrase.

In almost everyone thinks of Martin Luther King, who articulated the American Dream better than most white Americans are capable of doing, because he was laying claim to that dream as a fellow American. And Tana hasse Coat says, no, his writing is organized around the principle that that is white privilege and that America is a white supremacist nation in which black people have no place. I don't know how the ku Klux Klan should not applaud every word

that is uttered by Tanahs Coats. And that's the culture that you lead to out of this social grievance notion. Well that should put this podcast on the map. That a little screed right there. Well, yeah, yeah, I tell you what. Let's get together again and go further down that line, because I think it's an important one. So I got after I read his book, I got so incensed I started writing a response to it, which is now ninety pages long. And I have no idea what

to do with this. Give it to me. I'll set it to music. I'll make it a rock. You'll do it like a Hamilton's sort of thing. Yeah, exactly, exactly awesome. Come up with some dances, send off for send up for ideas of rolling out Already, you can't just use the same melody. So I got a question for you, and if you don't want to answer it, you can,

or we can even edit it of the podcast. But um, I've wondered about this for a while from a libertarian survival of Western civilization sort of thing, with demographics being so important. Well, first of all, are you mostly an optimist are mostly a pessimist on the future? Do you think for the good of the world. I'm an optimist in the long run and the pessimist in the short run. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better,

and then I think it's gonna go off better. One of the reasons I think it's gonna get worse and stay bad we're headed toward in another dark ages is the idea that, um, well, it's not an idea, it's just a fact. Developed affluent countries stop having kids. They just do for some reason. And it's happening all across the Western society. You as a committed and developed Eastern society. And I would never tell anybody who doesn't have kids that they ought to have kids, or that it's a

good idea. Trust me, you don't want to have kids unless you really really want to have kids, because it is your you mean, it's just you know, I'm glad I have kids, but it is not something you get into lightly. You know, I think I'll get a parakeet. It's not like that. But you're committed done not having kids.

What do we do? What does society do to try to get people for that believe in capitalism and freedom and education to start having more kids, because currently in America were below the two point one live birds per couple to to keep society going. And they're doing it all over Europe. That a lot of your European countries have started these government programs to convince people to have kids. It's not working and it shouldn't work. What what do you do about that? Well, I'll begin that with you

know you like my quoting so much. I've got a quote from you for you from Francis Bacon, who who writes he that has a wife and children has given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either a virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of the greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, who both in affection and means, have married and endowed the public. So you see, I'm married,

and I've married and endowed the public. Wells the only Bacon I'm interested in sizzling in a pen you childless pastor, and you and you have and and that's fine. But in general, it's just a fact that that capitalist democracies are being replaced by people coming in from other countries that don't believe in that sort of thing, and they're and they're just not having children. I don't know, since you know, I'm I'm reminded of another quote from Walter Williams,

who says, what do I care for future generations? What have they ever done for me? I'm I'm not going to be around to worry about that, so I'm fine with that. I I just think that my resources are better best put in this direction rather than another direction. And other people have other choices, and that's fine. And my children are are the ideas, and I hope that other people's biological children will take up those ideas and make the world a better place and always there for

them to do it. And and if they're not going to do it, then it doesn't matter, you know, one way or the other, whether whether there are more of

these kids or more of those kids. Well, to paraphrase the great English philosopher Graham Nash, who's you know, if you're not having children, don't teach your children, well, teach your immigrants, well, teach your you know, third worlder's, your your Africans, your Central Americans, your Mexican folks, whatever, we need to aggressively and enthusiastically express the things that we've

been chatting about. I think that's what's happening in Britain and France, and no, I think they're they're they've they've fallen into the cult of self loathing and multiculturalism to the point that they're afraid to defend that which is clearly not only good but great about Western civilization, which

is a bizarre sort of neurosis to me. But there's a route, there's a there's a basis for optimism in that, and that is that the immigrants who are fleeing those oppressive societies, they already understand freedom a heck of a lot better than a good deal of natural born Americans, no doubt about that. And the societies that that have the self loathing and xenophilia, as like to put it,

those societies they're the ones. They're the wealthy, upper class folks who aren't having kids, so they won't pass on those that mental infection to the next generation. So you know, there's I think it's impossible to predict. This is one of those things that falls into the realm of you know, the butterfly flaps its wings in Central Park and you have a hurricane next year. I it's impossible to predict what's going to result from these connections of people from

different civilizations and cultures. And I honestly don't know, And I don't think that it's necessarily the case that a free society will go to being an unfree society for

those demographic reasons. Well, and I hope yeah. And you know, probably a week after recording this podcast, there will be a nuclear holocaust or some sort of you know, microbe that wipes out three quarters of the planet, and this discussion will be rendered ridiculous because, as a tim points out, you just never which way these things are going to go.

But I'm still enthused about trying to teach folks what what counts and what yields a happy society, and that is ironically, you know, stimulating happy individuals and on that. You know, that's that puts us in a in a good point though, and that is that one of the things that we advocates of freedom find to be a handicap when we talk to the public is that we

can't point to any specific outcome of freedom. We can't say freedom will lead you to X. All we can say is that freedom gives you the ability to make a future a better future, if you choose to put yourself to it, and so that whereas the welfare state is or the communists or the socialists, he'll say, if you'd go my way, we will lead to X, and it's always a lie, but he can always point to something, even if it is just a lie, whereas we don't lie like that, And so we can't say no, freedom

is not going to solve your problems for you. It's not gonna necessarily feed the hungry or in clothe the naked, although freedom tends to do that better than any other society, but we can't tell you for certain what the result of them is going to be. Instead, it's the open

ended opportunity. It's the ability to build your own life, which a lot of people have a hard time picturing in their minds, and so they go for the lie instead, they go for X that's offered to them because it looks real, and yet it turns out to be a lot. It's interesting that that idea of you can be what you want to be, you know, with your your efforts and talents, is so exciting for some people and so frightening for others, depending on who you are, how you're built,

or what you've learned. I guess well, it's frightening for me too. It's all right for anybody who thinks about it at all. It really is, and it and it ought to be. That's what stimulates you to make the right decisions as best you can, and to avoid the wrong decisions. It's when making wrong decisions is no longer a fearful prospect, then you really should be afraid, because then you're gonna make wrong decisions more so. Yeah, it's

a fearful prospect, the idea of free society. But we know from the blasted civilizations of the past, of the of the desolate killing fields of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and the horrible stillness of oppression in Iran and China, we know what the lack of freedom leads to. So that freedom scary. A couple of bad sports bets and I could be eating dog food. Is an old person. There's no doubt about it. Now you get used to it.

Tim Sander for Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute. Tim big fun, great to talk to you. Let's do it again. Yeah, it'd be great. Thanks, guys. Ever tell you about the time I ate kibbles and bits at a party? Yes? I made people laugh. Yes, you have anything for the bid? Anything for the bit? Anyway? Did I did I ever tell you about the time I

ate spaghettios? I would, I thought to myself. When I was a kid, I loved spaghettios and I was at the grocery store, so I bought a ken of it and I and I took it home and oh god, that stuff is disgusting. Oh it's horrifying. It is you can't choke it down. And so that that's the big Vidio's phenomenon. So that now, when I watched shows from the eighties, like I watched night Rider and and I love this show as a kid, and I tried to watch it, I've had that happen. I've had that happen. Yeah,

you watch it and think this is embarrassing. Yeah, Well, if you had kids, don't feed them spahettios. Thank you, Tim, Thank you jug Lar