 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Richard E. Wagner, the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University. His new book is Politics as a Peculiar Business, Insight from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Dr. Wider. Well, thank you for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here. I often start by asking authors the question about the title, but your title is very, very mixed up with the background within your writing, the background of Virginia political economy and just classical economics. So before we get to what a peculiar business is or even a theory of entangled political economy, maybe we can sort of set the scene with the prior literature as you do in the book and just start off talking about public choice in the Virginia school and what that is and how that's a background to what your book is adding to it. Well, this book is a continuation of lines of thought I've been developing probably for about 15 years where I came to realize that so much theory in economics and political economy has a government as an entity that is apart from and stands outside of what we call a market economy and intervenes into it and so it's like a mechanic. If an economy is like an engine or a machine, a government is like a mechanic and so it comes in and repairs and keeps the machine working. In contrast, I have been working with the idea that an economy is nothing like a machine. It's rather like a coral reef or a tropical rainforest, a rich and ecology of different kinds of entities or to use an image I've used in a number of cases, including in this book, is that the standard economic theory analogizes a society to a parade. The parade can have 5,000 members, but you can take that parade and reduce it to a little point on a map and watch it as it goes along. In contrast, I analogize a society to a crowd of pedestrians, maybe 100,000 people spilling out of a stadium after a game where you would not begin to think of that as like a parade. Now, someone might say it's an unruly parade and needs to be tamed and that's where policy might come in, but if you think about it, it's a social process that works well. People all get to their destinations pretty much as they plan, but what accounts for the order of the pedestrian crowd has nothing to do with what accounts for the order of the parade. For the parade, the order was based upon the marching abilities of the band members, the organizational abilities of the conductor and so forth, whereas for the pedestrian crowd it's based on such things as recognizing that we're not like bumper cars, we don't like to really collide into other people and we have ways of recognizing where people are heading and in turn how to increase or decrease our speed and so you can have people go in every which way and it all works and so that scheme of thought has been with me for a good 15 years and trying to lay this out in a variety of books and articles now. Well you have an interesting line because you put it in the context of the Virginia School as I mentioned and the Adam Smith Carl Minger line of thinking, but kind of going to the parade crowd analogy of the line where you say that the distinction between different types of economists is based on the accounts different economists give for the observed orderliness of society, which seems to be some economists seem to think it's more like a parade and that the government and then the entanglement part, the government can come in and just direct it and they're separate entities, but that's wrong, you would say, and like Samuel said in kind of situation. Well I do think it's a wrong-headed way of conceiving of economies and societies. And also governments though, please go next to him. Well as governments as part of that and that's, you know, I think of governments as existing within societies just as businesses do, that's the idea of government as a peculiar business is it is a business that people invest in politicians and political parties, people earn their livelihoods in political parties, candidates advertise over the place that it has many of the features of business, but it's a peculiar one because you really can't have any kind of market test for the claims that political candidates make. Just out of curiosity, why is that the origin of the term Virginia School? Why is the Virginia School called the Virginia School? That is a term that was first used in I think it was 1961, could have been 60 or 62, but I believe it was 61, where the University of Virginia had assembled an extraordinary bunch of economists of James Buchanan, Ronald Coase, Warren Nutter, Gordon Tulloch and so forth and had a very distinctive approach to economics and political economy, a much more of an integrated approach to political economy. In fact, what was later became called the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Political Economy was originally called the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Political Economy and Social Philosophy. There were people in the university administration who disliked the highly classical liberal thrust that those people had and they attained a consultants report on the Department of Economics. This started off said that like quoting basically from memory, not accurately, but basically that this department is composed of a large number of unusually gifted and creative people, but at the same time the program is way outside the mainstream of economics and it really should be brought back into the mainstream. That report had used that there is a distinctive Virginia School of Political Economy taking shape here. So in result of that report, we had things like the university wouldn't match and offer to Ronald Coase from the University of Chicago, it wouldn't promote Gordon Tulloch who left the university Buchanan left and the whole Virginia tradition that was taking shape there with a different approach to political economy kind of exploded. Some of it regrouped in Blacksburg has now moved to Fairfax and the tradition has kept alive and I think is growing. What's distinct about, because I think sometimes I hear people call, we just talk about public choice theory, they call it the Chicago theory about the different kind of public choice about arrows theorem and things like this. What's distinct about the Virginia School? What's distinctive is how you do economics and how you think of economics, a very shorthand expression or definition of public choice, is public choice is the application of economics to politics. Well and good, but that still raises the question of what kind of economics because there's different styles of doing economics, each of which will lead to a different way of trying to bring politics into the rubric of economic theory. The most common form of economic theory still and has been for a good century has been based upon notions of economic observations pertain to a system that's in a state of equilibrium. And that scheme of thought, if you think about it, I think leads almost automatically to thinking of some outside observer as a mechanic who can then shift an economy from one state to another whereas within the Virginia tradition and which goes back I think much more to classical economic modes of thinking like Adam Smith sees a society as a continual ongoing development process that really isn't adequately characterized by notions of equilibrium but rather is more fully concerned with how it is that a set of people who are occupying a relatively contained geographical space can develop institutional procedures, practices, traditions and so forth that allow each of them to have a good amount of liberty to govern themselves to determine their own affairs and yet recognize that we all do live in close geographical proximity and so there has to be these, there is a inherent collective or political element to the living together. So if you ask the man on the street what economics is or what it would mean to talk about the economics or something, a lot of them will tend to say it has something to do with money changing hands and goods and services being bought and sold and business companies, the stock market maybe. So for those people what would it, it might sound confusing to say we should apply economic thinking to government because government doesn't have those things. You know these people aren't, they're not earning money in the traditional sense by selling a product, their salaries are fixed by law and they're not, they're not buying and selling things and they're intervening in that sort of stuff but they look distinct from it. So when we talk about thinking about the state economically, is this a, do we have to think about economics differently than that kind of man on the street view or how do we apply this? Yes, there are two different ways in which economists have approached what economics is. One way is defined in terms of subject matter. So economics is the science that studies the practice of business. That's a very common, very conventional study. Another definition of economics is that economics isn't the study of a class of activity but is the study of the entire range of human activity that pertains to intentional action. And so you could say as a basic principle that people in whatever they undertake to do intentionally seek to do it better rather than poor, seek to be successful rather than seek to fail. And that kind of principle of economizing action, where all actions, we face choices where we accept and do some things, reject other things, that kind of economizing principle at work can be brought to bear on just practically everything. And the challenge then for economic thinking is to develop those schemes of thought in ways that prove interesting and useful to other people. And that's why you're kind of hostile to this aggregation element that you describe. There's a section called, I think it's called politics as a shell game, but you seem very hostile to an equilibrium like a number, whether it's an interest rate or some sort of average and how that's supposed to describe society where actually that emerges from the kind of behavior you were talking about every individual choice and you have it graphed in the book as nodes and people making decisions, but an average might emerge from that, but if you look at the average, you're missing something as sort of the way you put it. Sometimes you always kind of construct averages, take any set of numbers, you can find an average for that. That point in the book was an argument about the relation between what we call macroeconomics and microeconomics. But most macroeconomic economists reason in terms of one kind of aggregate variable acting on another and so you might say that an increase in education in a society increases economic growth perhaps might be one possibility. I don't object to that as a statistical observation, but what I would say is that takes attention away from where the action really is. That is if you really, like if you believe, go back to these, to change the example, go back to these macro stimulus kinds of notions. Suppose you say, well, it would be beneficial to spend $100 billion, the government to do that. They're making it a trillion. They're making it more interesting. That's a real money at some point, a trillion here, a trillion there, yeah. Beneficial to spend a trillion. Well, if you articulate that belief, if you believe the macro story, that would say, well, you don't care, you shouldn't care who spends it. You propose it and let someone else say how to spend it, because what that model says, what matters is getting the spending up, where I think no one, of course, would do that. The fact they wouldn't says that what's important is the underneath kinds of patterns of spending. You go back to this example I mentioned a moment ago about growth and education. Well, does it matter what kinds of programs, educational programs are supported? Does it matter what kinds of educational organizations receive the support? Does it matter who it is that makes those decisions, whether it be public school bureaucrats or our parents? If you think those things are important, those are ignored by the macro kinds of formulations, but yet I think it's those things that are important. What I mean by then a policy as a shell game is that that's to the extent that the debate takes place on the level of these aggregate kinds of variables. It loses sight of what it is that's really important in generating the kinds of things we really should be looking at. This idea of government as outside of the market and not bound by the messiness of the market is pretty pervasive. You've got this sophisticated academic version of that you mentioned of seeing the government as the mechanic working on the engine, but you also see it more at the folk level whenever something bad happens and there's a response, there ought to be a law. This idea that we've identified some problem, we can just say that government should fix it and then government will fix it. Can you give an example of how thinking about government economically, of applying economic thinking and analysis to government might lead us to conclusions and understanding that runs against what we might expect from this government as external and as a kind of perfect actor. What applying this might look like in practice? First of all, one of the concerns I've had and interest I had in not just writing this book, but some of the preceding ones is a recognition that we all operate with certain kinds of thought patterns in our head and those thought patterns go a long way towards framing the way we think about things and that influences the conclusions we reach. I think the image of politics as a source of mechanics who fix what goes wrong in the private market is an image that has been cultivated for a long time. It's an image that's supported by the predominance of economic theory. The theory of economic equilibrium very much supports that image. What I've been trying to do and will be doing for quite some time is to try to set forth and develop some of the intellectual tools that carries forward this alternative ecological kind of image where there are many people, for instance, on this point. You know, Adam Smith long ago made this famous image about a chessboard and how so many politicians look upon the chessboard and think they can rearrange it. And that again, that fits with the image of equilibrium theory. You look at a chessboard and you look over at it and you say, oh, black's position is hopeless. So let's move three of the paces around and make it an even game again. But what happens if those pieces have minds of their own? And so they can talk back, like if the chessboard image was accurate, I think the use of so-called illegal drugs would have vanished ages ago because people have minds of their own and just because some political officials say that they're going to harass and arrest people if they kept using them, isn't going to stop it. It's going to change the channels of commerce that they pursue and it's that kind of idea that I'm trying to incorporate into this ecological motif and saying then that good societies aren't simple matters of a set of politically designated officials keeping a machine repaired, but it's a much more of a self-governing kind of interactive process that we have to tend to and think about. And you know, I think there's much, much work that really remains to be done truly in understanding how these self-governing social processes work. Well, maybe that's a really good example on Aaron's question about illegal drugs. I mean, this seems to be an entanglement that the way of thinking about how to look at markets for illegal drugs is not to think about that the government comes along and makes drugs illegal by just waving a magic wand and therefore, I mean, or makes them disappear. I mean, they're made illegal, but it makes them disappear by making them illegal. All they do is change the interaction between certain entities under certain conditions and prefer some people over other people. I mean, that's something you do really good in the book is you do a good job of being like if you're in a legal regime, you might be a good businessman because you are good at promoting your product, but if it becomes illegal, then different people are better at selling it. That's the entanglement, the enforcement mechanism of the government with the market mechanism of the drugs. It just changes it. It doesn't make anything happen. That's the honest way to do political economy. Is that accurate, would you say? Yes, I would. I think it's—you go back to square one. What we observe are people. People have connections or relationships with other people. Some of those people go into political activities, some into commercial activities. They all occupy the same kind of society and the—I think questions become one of what principles might govern their relationships among the members of society. If you go back, it was in the late 19th century, there was a British jurist named Henry Main, confusing him with Henry Manny, goes back to Henry Main. Ancient law. Ancient law. 1861. 1861. And one of the formulations he had in there was the claim that the—to date, the character of what do you call progressive societies was a movement from relationships based on status to relationships based on contract. Now, towards the end of his life, even he was musing a bit about whether that was reversing. But if you look now, that I think what we found increasingly throughout the progressivist period actually has been a resurgence of relationships based on status or feudal type of relationships. I think that we're finding an assertion perhaps of a new kind of feudalism growing as against a society grounded fundamentally in liberty. And I think if you want to try to fight or counteract that one of the challenges to understand the sources by which a free society might end up refutalizing, which I think has been happening, if you look at the kinds of relationships where status based on age, race, gender, whatever, creates certain patterns of rights and obligations and duties outside of what do people do through private ordering? Where there with freedom of association and private ordering, you would again find a rich variety of kinds of social formations, but they would be generated through people's uses of their freedom to find associations that they regard as beneficial. And I happen to think the normative side of me happens to think that's a desirable quality of a society rather than, I don't know, you saw Downton Abbey or those related things. But sure, it was far better to be born upstairs than to be in a downstairs occupation. But on the whole, I think that's a scheme of life that we should be thankful to have left behind. If the lesson from applying economic thinking and recognizing the economics in government action is that either it's going to, the government intervening is going to not have a desired effect because people are simply going to route around it. They're going to figure out alternate ways to do what they were already doing that might be slightly more expensive or less efficient, but they're still going to do it just like so like drugs. People are still taking them and still buying and selling them. Or it's going to and or it's going to screw things up because it's going to create these different sets of rights and obligations that are incompatible with liberty or going to make us worse off or whatever else then. Does that mean that they're, what does that say about the role of the state? Should there be no government intervention then? Is that the lesson of thinking economically about the state or is there still a role for it in intervening in the economy we just need to do a smarter job of it? About that I'd say two things. One is I would say is there's probably nothing that can't be handled through private ordering. So I think in that respect I would qualify myself as in principle a philosophical anarchist in that respect and that take any kind of allegation about public goods, externality and so forth. Every such allegation implies a situation where there are gains from trade from working out a way of avoiding that situation. Now how do you work that out? It might be difficult. It might be costly but still as a starting point that kind of situation implies gains in trade and if so that would suggest that for instance this goes back to a long ago article that Ronald Coase wrote about lighthouses that the standard public goods claim is you can't get lighthouses provided and Coase went and looked and there were all kinds of instances of lighthouses provided through private contracting and similar claims once upon a time made about well bees buzz around and pollinate crops and you can't you won't get enough bee pollination but Stephen Chung wrote a beautiful piece explaining that exactly how beekeepers formed contracts with both apple growers, clover field owners and so forth and developed a nice set of contracts that led to honey being produced, apples being pollinated and human ingenuity is wonderfully creative but there's another side to I think human nature as well which is the ability to convince oneself if someone in the losing end of the deal can easily convince himself that he shouldn't have lost and so if you have five people in undertaking different commercial investments, two are successful, three are not and so those three liquidate they may just okay well I've liquidated my business now either go work for someone else or I develop a new business that's one strategy. Another kind of strategy is to sign up with some regulatory agency, some politician to get a grant program for new enterprises by people whose previous enterprise is one other or alternatively is often the case of many of the actions filed whether it be for a federal trade commission, a justice department and so forth or actions that are filed by people claiming unfair they have lost unfairly by actions of successful competitors and so that is also a natural kind of feature of human action and so when you think about what government might be needed for you should be thinking about that people will gain the system like that is that well if you're going to want to develop an explanation to give an explanatory account of what we observe going on the world around us that means we have to read social life not through some kind of rose colored glasses about liberalism private property and so forth but try to read them through what I would call realistic glasses that and if so I think one of the challenges I cite this in the book that at the time of the American Constitutional Convention the story goes that a woman asked Benjamin Franklin on leaving what kind of a government the convention have established and Franklin is reported to have responded a republic if you can keep it now that's that shows a couple of things about Franklin's thinking I believe one is he thought an evolutionary developmental terms it says you have it today it doesn't mean you're going to keep it that's to be worked out and in many respects we have moved in more in a feudal like direction compared to what we had then it doesn't mean that feudal life is nasty brutish and short it can be decently well you people down stairs and down to the abbey all got to sit down and have supper and so on and so forth but it's not a life where you're free to aspire to something beyond your status and I think that ability to aspire to something to live to look forward to something to live for something I think is an important feature that liberal types of orders bring out more fully than other types of orders but there still brings you back to the explanatory issue of what are the problems that liberal kinds of orders then face internally that might operate to to undermine them or at least to move them in non-liberal directions well if we're going to if we're going to get away from equilibrium would it be accurate to say you're against equilibrium I mean it's a weird thing to be against but you're against it in misuse of equilibrium would that be a better way of putting it misuse not against yeah I think equilibrium is a perfectly good notion to apply to individual action it means because every one of us in any of our actions here we are right now we think of something we want to do over the coming year that means that we have some belief or some notion about how our actions are going to play out and so that you might say is kind of an equilibrium notion that what I object to is that equilibrium notion being extended to an entire society because that gets you from a moves you away from a pedestrian crowd into a marching band and I think in the pedestrian crowd each individual has groups of individuals have particular destinations they're heading to leaving the stadium and but there is no common destination and the important thing there is the ability of people to work that all out for themselves and so I want to say I want to have a scheme of thought that allows the generation from inside a society of new products new ideas continual change and so to have that I think means that one person's plans two years from now might be challenged because someone else has developed a new product that's going to take away business and you know I think it that means that the picture of a free society you're going to have is going to be one of of commotion of fluidity which in turn means that people need to develop various kinds of measures for on the one hand taking advantage of that fluidity but also to some extent protecting themselves like insurance but that doesn't mean it has to be public provided social insurance and so forth and so it seems that in that sense of equilibrium that I see your book is sort of doing three three things the steps are to take the aggregation element and blow it up understand it's detailed it's open it up and get inside understand it's a bunch of people together for government and for the market they're actually kind of thinking like CSI and you know enhance enhance enhance and you figure out that the the equilibrium point is actually or the interest rate is just a bunch of individual decisions but also within government the government is not not a single thing and the market is not a single thing and then also to realize that they're not totally separate so there's a bunch of integrated parts behaving in a creative systems kind of way that when the way in government and in the market and they're not totally separate they're actually intermixed or they're entangled and if it's sort of you kind of plead to the end like if you're going to do honest political economy you need to realize these basic points would that be an accurate characterization of no it's certainly in a characterization that I would accept and would embrace I think it's I would also though speaking of these separate systems or subsystems I would say there's one system it's the society in which we live and that society if you're looking at it then is composed of various kinds of subsystems of businesses governments that there are many points of commonality between political enterprises and market enterprises one of the things I wanted to get across in that book is that so much thinking runs in terms of government construed as a unitary enterprise a the state a state a single all embodied in a head person who makes choices and moves things around and what I have been working trying to work out is the idea that well government is use the plural governments we have a system of governments which are kinds of orders in fact Gordon Tullock in the politics of bureaucracy once coined the term bureaucratic free enterprise and what he meant by bureaucratic free enterprise is that no one really controlled big modern bureaus there are all kinds of fiefdoms within a bureau of different kinds of agents and sub agencies pursuing their desires their interests and so it was a you know Tullock didn't use the term but I think Tullock would have agreed that it was bureaucracy was a very peculiar set of firms or enterprises and that's what I'm trying to get across is that it's peculiar but being peculiar I think means that within some of these ideas about networks is these things can morph you might say if you have a relatively small number of these peculiar enterprises within a large sea of private enterprises that's going to be that kind of a system is going to have different properties than one if you have a large number of politically based enterprises perhaps more or less on par with the market based enterprises that's why for instance you take things like the recession or so-called of 2008 well you know you don't have any such thing as privately ordered credit markets anymore in a privately ordered credit market someone wants to get a loan someone has the capital make a loan they can work out a deal if the lender doesn't want to lend the the borrower can come back with a promise of higher interest better collateral but the total credit market is simply the product of the various efforts of people to make deals but now with various kinds of regulations and so forth that we have various kinds of rules that the lenders have to have that display portfolios that show the right kinds of distributions in terms of age gender geography race and so on and so forth and which if you think through that means that there are going to be some loans made in particular cases that knowingly and under private ordering wouldn't have been made and would have been thought to be bad business and other loans that might have been thought to be good business under private ordering won't be made under public order because they're squeezed out and so what that suggests to me is you're going to end up with a system that's going to have built in a greater amount of built in volatility than it otherwise would have had but that and that's an entangled that's an entangled kind of an in the idea of entanglement I mean I I don't believe in really borrowing directly from the natural sciences but there is this notion of of quantum entanglement that you can't locate position in one particle without making reference to some other particle and that's as close as I come to an analogy but what I mean by entanglement is you look at textbooks on economics theory the firm it says well a firm looks at its adjust its inputs and its prices to form a production strategy to maximize its profit or its wealth but if you look at it the substantive matter that firms especially large ones are going part of their doing business is going to involve political grants political exceptions and so forth and that's why the the big location for trade association is now a shift from New York to Washington and why so many chief executives now travel here on business on a regular basis it's not because there's any or not because of inputs as we understand them normally are produced here but yet important inputs are and that's what I mean by entanglement the same time that politicians also crave support from businesses in various ways that can provide things and so that's what I mean by entanglement has always been with us I cite a book by he's deceased now but a wonderful economic historian Jonathan Hughes called the governmental habit and Hughes looked at economic controls in colonial America and they were still there just at a much smaller scale than the way what they are now and so that's why I think entanglement will always be with it I think it's part of human nature so to speak but I think and what I want to try to explain here is that entanglement can't be eliminated it's part of human nature that at the same time it can become so densely entangled where the values of the political infuse themselves into the values of the market the values of the market infuse themselves into the political there's a wonderful book and I've been suggesting too many books I guess in this interview but that's what an academic does it's a wonderful book by a woman Jane Jacobs she too is deceased now but she had a book called systems of survival and what she laid out and I think it's wonderful is that a well-working society requires an interaction between two types of moral syndromes which she called a commercial syndrome and a guardian syndrome she also coined the term monstrous moral hybrids to refer to what happens when commercial people get involved in politics and guardian people get involved in markets and you know I think in a way what this book tries to do is to lay out in in an economic uh theoretic manner a kind of a logic that those two things it starts with Ben Franklin's intuition about a republic if you can keep it with the observation that well we haven't done all that well in keeping it and Jane Jacobs and the monstrous moral hybrids through the commingling of the commercial and guardian syndromes has much of value and what I'm trying to do in this book is to lay out how starting from a basically strongly liberal free market anti-futile orientation you can involve in more of a new kind of feudalism it's really curious how what you said just now seems like it might be response to one of the more common criticisms of markets that we hear from our friends on the political left or a way that they're maybe mistaken in how they approach thinking about government and markets and so going back to the when you said that if if we had a purely private system of providing loans like there are some loans that are being made under the current intermingled system that wouldn't have been made if we had purely private actors and there are other loans that would have been made if we had private actors and a lot of people on the left would say well yeah that's the whole point right is that the the interests of the private actors sometimes the things that private actors do in a market help people sometimes they don't but that their goal is not to help people their goal is their bottom line is to compete better with other firms and so if it happens that providing the loans providing good loans that help people align with that then that's what happens and if not and so what we need is the state to come in and say look there are people who are deserving of loans or there are loans that shouldn't happen regardless of profit motives and so we're going to step in and fix things because we are the difference between according to people on the left the market is that the market is individual pursuing their private interest and the state is this more unified thing that's pursuing the public good and so you need to counterbalance the one with the other but as you had mentioned like that we don't we're not talking about the government we're talking about governments and that you said bureaucracies are these peculiar firms and so my question is does that mean then that this critique of markets which is namely that competition there's too much competition and the competition can be a bad thing also can apply to the state in that there's competition between bureaucracies do they compete in ways similar to or at least analogous to the way that firms compete in the market there certainly isn't an analogy in competition I think the analogy goes back to individuals all people form their various kinds of plans and scheme some on a small scale some people just want to be a good husband good parent and do their job well through their days others have dreams of big industrial or enterprises or political careers but I would say that there's a problem that is deeply woven into our language that makes an opposition between state and market so either you're involved in enterprise commercial buying and selling or you're involved in political activity and that kind of dichotomy is a scheme of thought that takes all kinds of normal human sentiments and values out of commercial activity and sweeps them into the political whereas if you ask how do societies really operate that yeah there are profit-seeking enterprises also we find is a whole history of very successful entrepreneurs and enterprises doing things like endowing foundations establishing various kinds of illy-moserary enterprises and activities that I think in large to large extent represents I don't want to give motivational accounts that's not my business but there are many kinds of motives that might lead someone some of them might want to just endow monuments to their own perpetuation but I think many of them also feel a kind of a gratitude especially perhaps people who came up on their own bootstraps so to speak who who after they've had some success in business often like to try to help others that the state is by no means the place where you find concerns for people who seem to be misfortunate unfortunate and so forth that this is also a quality that you find a a lot of people sharing those beliefs and that's historically has been one of the uses of wealth has has been you know sure it's easy enough to find these instances of I don't know hate to cast dispersions but like the Paris hiltons of the world who just seem to just dissipate their wealth but you also find a huge many others who are involved in in trying to press beliefs causes their visions of good societies and so forth and so I think we've underestimated the social value of the creation of wealth and the work that wealthy people can do and I would also when I'm on this topic register the objection not to you I mean but the objection out there that says well people who want to keep their wealth to for their purposes are somehow what's the word stingy selfish selfish yeah that kind of thing but what could be more selfish than a politician political candidates saying I want your wealth to do with it as I choose when I haven't made it and and to use that to achieve political power use the because that's the other part of your but like not only have we underestimated the social value and charity and elements of the market we seem to have overestimated the people in government that they're just they're people who have their competitive advantages speaking to people and promising to give someone else's money to someone else and getting power because of that so that so they're not great people either but this is where they want to be so we were comparing the two we're just talking about two flawed systems that we need to just compare honestly yeah we should never forget that politics is fundamentally about the acquisition of power now all politicians say I want power because I want to do good but how many politicians have you heard say I want power to do bad I mean even Hadoff Hitler said he was going to make the world a better place Joseph Stalin Mao say too and all these butchers all said they were going to do good with their power that's again what we should expect but I think our historical experiences show us that sometimes yeah sometimes power will will be used for benefit but mostly not I just happen to think that power won't ever go away it's it's inherent in the human drama and what we're should be engaged in is trying to work out what kinds of arrangements which power can do less less harm than other arrangements thanks for listening if you enjoy free thoughts please take a moment to rate us on itunes free thoughts is produced by mark mcdaniel and evan banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org