 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly refuge from the way people normally talk about politics brought to you by the magazine, Free Minds and Free Markets, and whose editor-in-chief definitely will not be featured in an upcoming chart-topping rap single. I am Matt Welch, joined hopefully on video as well by Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Katherine Mangue Ward. Sup y'all. Howdy. Hey Matt. Happy Monday. So if you thought that 2024 was going to be a relaxing year, I would like the name of your doctor, please. Just looking over the Drudge Report this morning, he went to the Blood Red headlines, which is always a good sign. And these were the big ones in all caps. Drone Wars, McConnell Calls for Striking Iran, and Nuke Warning. So welcome to this week. Three U.S. service members were killed and 34 were injured in an attack inside Jordan on Sunday. And we'll talk about that a little bit later in the program. But first, still more chaos and more chaotic politics down at the southern border with Mexico. I will try to bullet point as fast as I can in chronological order. The developments over the past week, beginning last Monday when the Supreme Court ordered the state of Texas by a five to four vote to allow federal border agents access to the border with Mexico, presumably to cut some of the razor wire that Governor Greg Abbott down there has installed both in the Rio Grande and near it, especially around the Eagle Pass area 10 days prior to that, the Texas National Guard had blocked Border Patrol agents from accessing the river when three migrants were dying, a mother and two kids, and there are two others who were in the river at that same time. On Wednesday, Governor Abbott issued a statement defying the Supreme Court's order, calling the large number of border crossings an invasion, thereby triggering a constitutional right to state self-defense. Also on Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly said in a GOP meeting that the Republican attempt to attach a bunch of border security items to a Ukraine aid bill was now in limbo because, quote, we don't want to do anything to undermine Donald Trump. On Thursday, the Republican Governors Association issued a statement signed by 25 GOP governors standing in solidarity with Abbott. Donald Trump then encouraged them to send their own National Guard units down to the border to help out. And the hashtag Civil War began trending on Twitter. On Friday, President Biden urged passage of the border Ukraine deal saying, quote, it would give me as presidents a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I signed the bill into law. And then on Saturday, the Oklahoma Republican Party condemned and censured the Republican senator from Oklahoma, James Langford, for working on that border Ukraine package, which they described as an open border deal. In a rally that day, Donald Trump said, quote, as the leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible open borders betrayal of America. Catherine, do we need a complete and total shutdown of immigration politics until we can figure out what's going on? Yes. And if given that power, I will use it on the first day that I have. First hour. Yeah. I want to start actually with the with the Senator Langford, Oklahoma GOP thing, because it was to me, it was just such a fantastic microcosm of the whole thing. In particular, okay, so again, remember this, this man's crime is just like talking with people about a bipartisan deal, like, like he was just like doing legislating, which is his job. And you know, it's we wouldn't want Congress to do that. It's not God forbid. God forbid Congress should do the stuff that Congress is supposed to do. So in the resolution condemning and censoring him. Sorry, censoring his open border deal. This language was in there and I just want to like have us sit with the language, whereas authorizing several thousand people to invade our borders before any action can be taken is contrary to the oath that Senator Lanford took to the Constitution. What does it mean authorizing people to invade our borders like that's a nonsensical concept like there's this attempt to draw a bright line between legal and illegal immigrants. This has always been kind of dubious, especially around asylum seekers and several other categories of immigrants who can come without prior authorization under our laws already. The idea that we are going to end up any sort of standoff between National Guard and and federal border officers is very, very, very troubling. And this Oklahoma thing just seems so silly and sort of so internally incoherent that I kind of want to use it like as a, I don't know, like a microcosm for this whole conversation. It's it's just people making up reasons for their side to have the backing of the Constitution and like this resolution isn't going to get us in or out of it. Let's steal man our Oklahoma friends for a second here, Catherine, which is to say that a thousands number is a thing that exists in the deal or at least is our understanding of it that if there are more than 5000 illegal border crossing then that will be the numerical trigger for doing some kind of total shutdown of the border. So, you know, it's a transitive property argument, but it's but it's certainly they're tethering something to a thousands language in the bill, right? But I think it's the idea of the authorization of an invasion, like it's the it's the use of the invasion language. It's, you know, we can, we can, you know, I don't authorize an invasion of my home when I invite you over for dinner. Like that's that's not the right way to think about it. And of course, we can let people in. Of course, we can choose to let people in. Of course, we can choose to not let people in. That's the legitimate business of Congress to figure that out. Nick, there are a lot of Republicans or Oklahoma friends and a lot of non Republicans as well, including people running for president or your Oklahoma friends. I'm very friendly with all people who are basically making the counter argument that it's ridiculous to like hinge border enforcement or Biden saying that, you know, I will do this enforcement on day one of this bill being signed when the president has broad latitude to enforce immigration policy already. Do they have a point? The point that they have, and I think that increasingly people in the country are bothered by is the idea that the border is chaotic and that we don't have an immigration policy that's working. I mean, you know, I mean, what we're turning the United States into is like a gigantic who concert, except people trying to, you know, people trying to get in and being stampeded because they're hearing good music here. What we need fundamentally is a better border situation where there is more control of where people come in and where they don't. The solution to that is not by criminalizing more and more people and laying more and more barbed wire. It's by expanding the number of places where people can come in legally and more importantly, and this is something that the Biden administration did pretty successfully. And it really needs and then cap their own success on it, but we need to be doing more parole in countries where people are coming en masse where people who want to come here legally, whether it's from Mexico or Honduras or Ukraine, excuse me, or wherever, go to the embassies of the consulates in their country and actually work to get pre approved where they have people who will bring them here and will sponsor them. Typically the parole are currently the parole term is for about two years. They come here. They are pre vetted and they are authorized to work. I'm doing that kind of stuff is going to alleviate all kinds of problems on the border, but we need to, I think fundamentally delink what's going on in the border with larger immigration policy, which we have not done because at least realistically, since George Bush got reelected and tried to do comprehensive immigration reform, we have stopped talking about that and all of the focus is on what's going on on the border. And as long as we're doing that, we're in trouble as a country. Biden, I think is rightly in trouble because he hasn't addressed this type of stuff, trying to do it now. The Republicans have made clear and this is disturbing even if it's politically astute. Everybody, like every poll shows more people are nervous about what's going on in the border because people seem to keep coming, not through points of entry, but wherever. That's going to cause a lot of chaos. And like CBS, you go poll shows 75% of people think there's a crisis or it's very serious on the border. That's up like 25 points from a couple months before that. Something needs to happen, but it's not going to happen through a political standoff like this, unfortunately. Peter, you're an astute watcher of Mitch McConnell. What do you make of his intervention, his leaking, I presume, last week? And what does that say about your sense of whether there's going to be a more likely or less likely chance that we will see that border security bill and or Ukraine funding come out of all of this? I think so much of what we are seeing is election year posturing. That's true of the Oklahoma letter that Catherine referenced. It's also true of what's going on in Congress right now, where Congress was at least making some steps towards a bipartisan immigration deal. Not one that libertarians would necessarily support, but they were at least trying to do some legislating. And what Donald Trump has signaled to the Republican Party is he does not want them to do that for fear that it might work. Because what Donald Trump wants is for there to be chaos at the border so that he can run against Joe Biden on Biden, you're not controlling the border. What McConnell basically said last week was, yeah, we're going to let Donald Trump do that. Now, he has walked that back since and said, actually, we're going to try to proceed with a deal. But I do think that the way that that news cycle played out makes it pretty clear that Republicans are very willing to let the border chaos continue because they view it as an electoral advantage. And it's really kind of telling, it's cynical and it's gross and it's awful that the party that is supposedly now in favor of border control actually seems to be at least in the short term, at least for the rest of 2024 basically uninterested in doing any sort of real legislating on this issue because they believe that it is that it will be politically advantageous to them in the presidential election coming up in November if things are bad at the border and people blame Joe Biden for it. But it is important to note that things are bad at the border and they have continued to get bad. There's no question the Republicans here are awful at the national level, probably at the state level, but there is something that needs to be changed and that's not happening at all. That's true and this is a bipartisan failure and both parties have played politics here. I mean the Democratic position seems to be, we want some sort of strict border laws to be in place and also not to do any real legislating or ever enforce those laws. That's not a tenable position, but the Republican position is chaos is good for Donald Trump and therefore we should probably let that chaos persist at least as long as Joe Biden is president so that we can pin it on him. Catherine speaking of untenability, Kato's Alex Narasta who is an immigration liberalizer had a pretty good Twitter thread over the weekend contextualizing all of this stuff and even in the middle of that he had this following thing that caught my eye. The immigration court backlog is currently about 3.3 million. Those migrants are going to be waiting, working and living in the United States for a long time and many won't leave even if the court orders them to go. That's just crazy untenable, isn't it? Not just as a practical thing, but certainly as a political thing. Yeah, I mean Alex is basically always right about everything with respect to immigration. I associate myself with him. I can't think of a time that he's been wrong. So I think that, you know, his persistent efforts to point out what the status quo really is are really important. Like they're here. They're already here. And that's again why I think this invasion language is so weird and so unhelpful. It's not like... This isn't a Mars attack situation. It's not a Mars attack situation. And, you know, the Martians are already among us, I guess, and it's fine. It's more like Alien Nation, which was itself an extended sci-fi parable about immigration assimilation. Great movie with Mandy Katinken. So as with actual aliens, when they come, we would be better off to welcome them, to talk with them, to have them, you know, to treat them with respect, to not have them risk their lives to come here. I can't speak to how the actual alien invasion is going to go, but we already know what happens when we let people in. And, you know, when we let people in, as Nick is correct to know that the border is a mess. But one solution, which I know is not on the table right now in our current political climate, but one solution, one way to prevent a messy, deadly, confusing, politically polarizing, playable disaster at the border, is to just let people come here, to just make the doors of legal entry, like to throw them open wider. And it doesn't mean we have to let every single person come here, although I think maybe that would still be the way, honestly. The vast majority of people who don't have communicable diseases and don't have criminal histories. Y'all with your asterisks, take your asterisks and leave. Like, I just think in the end, if we are looking for a solution to this truly horrible situation, both at the border and all these people who are living within the country who are being told at any time, you know, maybe your status will be revoked, maybe you will have to be thrown out, maybe you will have to choose between staying where your life is and going into hiding or going back to a place that you left for a reason. I just think that we could just choose more openness. That is really an option and I think the only morally defensible one. But I also think a really pragmatic one. I genuinely think that this is doable. And Alex, as usual, has like some excellent concrete steps that we could take, including stuff like, you know, getting the simplifying and speeding up the paperwork backlog for people who are already here. One of the points that Alex makes in that post that is very good is that this is a demand issue and this is a demand side issue because the U.S. economy is in some ways, especially with regards to the job market, actually doing pretty well. And like there are a lot of job openings, especially for lower skilled labor. And so people want to come here. And so to me, the operating metaphor here is not movies from the 1990s about alien detectives or alien invasions. Instead, it's prohibition. And people resist this metaphor when it comes to immigration because they see it as something fundamentally different. But it's really this it's really very similar in so many ways because there is a demand for something with prohibition. It was alcohol with immigration. It is good jobs and a better life for your family. And that demand is not going to go away just because you try to put an artificial barrier in the way of it, right? Instead, people are going to try. They're going to try to get it through means that are more dangerous and more chaotic. And it's going to create a secondary market in violence and criminality. That is what happened in prohibition and it's what is happening with the border. And if you want to tamp down on crime and if you want to make it harder for gang members and violent people to come in to cross the border, then what we need to do is we need to say people who are obviously peaceful and just want to come here and work and contribute to the economy, they can come in and there's an easy and straightforward process for them to do that. And then we're going to focus our efforts on catching the actual bad guys who want to come over here and do bad stuff. It'd be nice to hear a president who has the bully pulpit really come out and say exactly that that we're a nation of immigrants and that everybody who wants to live and work peacefully is welcome here. It does cause disruption. We're going to meter it out so it's not like a billion people coming in the first year or anything like that, but we're going to expedite it. Right now, as much as anything, and this is true not just of immigration, but it's true of economics. It's true of foreign policy. We don't have a national metanarrative of like what is America about? And as a result, you start to see people knock off things. Forced Republicans to say that they don't want anybody new in the country because things are perfect the way they are. Forced left-wingers to admit that we cannot admit people. Not that this happens, but it's the fear. You can't just bring in a lot of people who are immediately going to go on welfare rolls. Which, by the way, if we continue with current asylum policy, if you bring people in and they can't work, that's like fucked up beyond belief. Let people come here and live and work openly and honestly. They don't get welfare. They don't necessarily get citizenship, but they do get legal status. We're going to move into the parts of the country where there are opportunity, and that will take care of all sorts of problems rather than cause any. We need to be talking about why immigration is important to the country, not just in economic terms, but also in kind of national and identity terms. And we also need to talk about the fears that people have. Part of this is a larger anxiety that's throughout the country in all different ways about the future, about how things are shifting radically out of the world that most of us grew up in and didn't like when we had it. We wanted it to change, but now we look back nostalgically as if the 1970s when immigration was very low is somehow a good thing. I mean, fashion? Yes, it was a great thing. And it's pretty good in music, underrepresented, yeah. Proc rock and bell bottoms. Bring them back. Matt likes the colors. Elephant, elephant bottoms, bell bottoms, elephant bottoms. Not enough. All right. As mentioned at the top, Iranian-backed militias killed three U.S. troops, wounded 34 others in a drone strike on a military outpost in Jordan. On Sunday, President Joe Biden tweeted firmly in response, have no doubt we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing. Republican hawks, who apparently still exist as long as Lindsey Graham draws breath on this earth, called for bombing Iran. Peter, you don't like World War 3. Excuse me, Matt. He said, hit Iran now, hit them hard. Yeah, that's a bomb. Lindsey Graham. I'm just saying he is signaling to grinder something deep in his subconscious. I don't know what you're doing, Mr. Gillespie, but I like it. Peter, you don't like- Joe Biden also finishes every policy pronounced by saying, oh, and I like ice cream. I like ice cream. Time and place of our own choosing. I like ice cream. Come on, man. Peter, you're scared about World War 3 all the time. How is a reluctant imperialist supposed to react when Iran keeps proxy warring us all the damn time? Yeah, it's a tough question. I think one of the things that is interesting or that is worth thinking about here is, according to reports this morning, the U.S. intelligence military apparatus still doesn't think that Iran actually wants to start a larger war. And that, I think, is pretty important because if Iran wants to start a larger war with us, then they're probably going to be able to do it. If they just want to go ahead and say, we're doing the big war, we're doing it now, it's happening whether or not you like it, then that's going to happen. And what we want to do is design some sort of response that is not going to trigger, that is not going to change that. It's not going to trigger a desire to start a larger war. That's not going to make them feel like, well, we're back into a corner and it's a big war no matter what. So that's what we want to do. And I think the Republican bellicosity on this issue is so telling and so frustrating because they're not thinking about the consequences. They're not thinking about the downside risk of attacking inside Iran, which is what a bunch of Republican sitting members of Congress and the Senate are saying right now. It's not just Lindsey Graham. It's John Cornyn. Target Tehran was his tweet. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to go back to him. Serious crippling costs to Iran, not only on frontline terrorist proxies, but on their Iranian sponsors, blah, blah, blah, blah, this sort of thing, right? And it is a posture of aggression without regard to the possibility that we could end up in a war that costs a lot more American lives. And I just think that people continue to underrate that. Yes, it's satisfying and even necessary to hit back when somebody kills some of your soldiers. You can't let that go completely unresponded to. At the same time, you have to consider what's the possibility that this could break out into something much larger with a regional power that has the capability of killing an awful lot of people even if we are probably stronger than them in the long run. Why are we in Syria? Why do we have troops in Syria? And what authorizes troops to be in Syria and Iraq at this point? That is a foundational question and it's weird. The Republicans aren't asking that question now, but they will when it becomes politically advantageous. But this is the problem with having troops scattered all over the place. The reason what Iran is doing in the region is trying to destabilize any kind of either actual accords or growing accords between places like Israel and UAE and Israel and Saudi Arabia. If they want regional stability, it would have been nice not to have spent a couple of decades destroying Iraq, which was the regional opponent and nemesis of Iran and held them in check. Obviously, all we did was destroy that country so that Iran can have a bigger hand. But we should be spending all of our diplomatic efforts right now trying to build up a regional coalition of countries that all fucking hate Iran, which they do. Because everything that's happening in Syria is because Iran wants it. I think that's a more foundational question. And Republicans need to be held accountable for being terrible when it comes to foreign policy. They almost always have the wrong instinct, except when occasional outliers in their parties say, hey, you know what? We should be involved in fewer places militarily than more. Much of the Republicans response here is, as with the border issue, just an attempt to capitalize on election year politics here. They're trying to make Joe Biden look weak. I think they're trying to play into, oh, he's old. He's doddering. He's, you know, one of these peace-loving, weak Democrats. It's... We can't have the hippies recharge. It's time of danger. I mean, like, you know, it's not the worst, but he's, you know, yeah. I mean, it's not all... It isn't all just that the Republican... You know, the Republicans keep taking advantage of how shitty Joe Biden is. It's like, we need to... I mean, this is the problem, right, from a libertarian perspective. You know, the Republicans and the Democrats aren't offering anything, but, you know, we should... Nobody should be, you know... When you're beating the drums for war in the Middle East, nobody should take you seriously. And especially if you are part of a government and an administration, and certainly people like Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn and Mitch McConnell, they have... They are absolutely central to 20 years of God-awful foreign policy, as is Joe Biden. So... Yeah, the question isn't whether we are weak or strong. It's whether we are prudent. Katherine, you're prudent. I heard you attempting to talk. What were we going to say? Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to throw one more quote in there, which is Tom Cotton, my personal favorite hate figure, calling Joe Biden a coward, unworthy of being commander in chief unless he brings devastating military retaliation against Iran's terrorist forces, both in Iran and across the Middle East. This is, you know, that piece of it is just largely the electioneering of it all, right? Like, hey, I'm trying to put an idea in the American people's minds of what Joe Biden is. He's a coward, and there it is. But I think the flip side of this, and, you know, Tom Cotton is certainly... He certainly partakes in this ideology, which is that courage and like, you know, danger and war are opportunities for virtue. I mean, this is, I do think if we're, I don't know if we're steelmanning, but like, there is this belief on the part of some of the less stupid Republicans that maybe war would be good for this country. Maybe war is what we need. Maybe we are being cowards and having our little groups of Americans here and there, you know, when Nick says, well, why are we there? Why are we in all these places? At least one answer to that question is like, we are looking for opportunities to bravely crusade for justice around the world, and we're going to take them when they come, and maybe this is it. Now, I think that's wrong. I think that's spectacularly wrong-headed. One clue that it's spectacularly wrong-headed is Tom Cotton believes it. But, you know, I think that there is, it's sort of the same thing that we're talking about at the border. Like, people are looking for an opportunity for a single, simple concept that we can use to make sense of a chaotic situation, and maybe a big war with a big enemy is what we need. I think that that idea is powerful. In fairness to Tom Cotton, he has been very consistent about wanting to overthrow the government in Iran even before he was in the Senate. 100%. He's not dumb. He's just super, super wrong. He's not inconsistent. He's not hypocritical. He's just wrong. All right. We're going to get to our listener email of the week here in a moment. But first, the world would be a better, freer, and happier place if constitutional protections for private property were taken more seriously. That's why our good friends over at the Institute for Justice have released a new season of their hit legal history podcast, Bound by Oath. Both tells the story of how the Supreme Court has cleared the way for government officials to abuse property rights, to trespass on private land without a warrant, to restrict peaceful and productive uses of property, to seize and keep property without sufficient justification, and many more outrages, featuring interviews not only with scholars and litigators, but also with the real-life people behind some of the Supreme Court's most momentous property rights please do look up Bound by Oath wherever you get your podcasts. That's Bound by Oath, Institute for Justice, I.J. Property Rights, do it all today. You'll be glad you did. All right. Reminder, email your snappy queries to roundtableatreason.com. This one comes from Christian, who writes in part. High Roundtable, Monday's discussion about Javier Malais got me thinking, are Libertarians too obsessed with economic growth? As we all know, growing in the economy means that there is in theory more prosperity to be shared with more people. This is great and everything, but shouldn't we also recognize that growing the economy sometimes comes at a cost? We know that biodiversity is increasingly under threat. A million animals and plants are threatened with extinction, some of them within decades, is the current trajectory sustainable? If not, shouldn't we temper our sustainability? After all, if economic growth is the one and only ultimate goal, what is stopping us from tearing down rainforests? What is the point of trying to preserve the commons, such as wildlife habitats? Why bother building so many parks and recreational areas when we can build more of the profitable stuff? In my view, Libertarians should be better at recognizing that some things in life transcend the economic sphere. Catherine, how do you plead? Yes, guilty. I think I am obsessed with economic growth. I think there almost is no such thing as being too obsessed with economic growth. And I think it's because a complete understanding of growth contains all of these things that the letter writer wants us to think about and cherish and protect. That it turns out that when people are wealthier and have more choices that they choose to do all this stuff. They choose to protect biodiversity. They choose to make parks. They choose to make room for stuff beyond kind of straight-up conventional profitable activity. And conversely, that slightly slowing down. This is the sort of reasonable position. It's like, hey, GDP ain't everything. We could just let it go. Just maybe half a percent. We could just slow it down a little. And we could have all these other things in exchange. I think, first of all, that there's often a false one. And second, even slowing down growth a little has massive, massive consequences in the long term. This is just the kind of compounded interest theory of things. That a little less growth now is unconscionably less for future generations. And I also think that many of the problems that he's describing they are consequences of growth, but I think that more growth also holds the solutions. I don't think just because something was caused by a phase of economic development means the answer is less economic development. Sometimes it's still more. So more growth forever and ever, Amen. Nick, how do you plead? I would point the reader to various articles by Ron Bailey that, first off, talk about how the species extinction estimates are almost all wildly overstated. So if the origin of this question comes from an empirical fact, we should go back to that and be more cautious about what we're saying there. But beyond that, to agree with what Katherine is talking about, you know, economic growth does not mean environmental despoilation by any stretch. Just as wealthy countries start to preserve their heritage, the minute that they get to a point where they actually can have nostalgia for the past rather than running screaming from it, you know, in the environmental world this happens too. There's an environmental Cousinets curve. Once you reach a certain level of GDP, you start taking care of the planet in a much better way. Think about, you know, the example that always used to come up was East Germany and West Germany. West Germany was a productive country. West Germany took much better care of its natural resources than East Germany because they had a lot of economic growth, comes a higher interest in and demand for environmental preservation. These things are not mutually exclusive in any way, shape, or form. And really just to underscore Katherine's point, you know, economic growth isn't something that you can fine tune. It's not, you know, it's not some kind of little, you know, measure that you can change. You either have it or you don't. You're taking it down from 3% to 2%, which would be awful. And it's kind of what we've been doing or taking it down from 2% to 1%. You don't want to live in that world. It's going to end up being poorer and dirtier. Peter, you're from Florida. Hasn't the mania for growth ruined the Everglades or something? Surprise. It's an Everglades question. I don't know. I've heard there's still a bunch of cool alligators or things like that. No. Look, what Katherine and Nick said is right, that wealthier societies are on average much better for the environment. You see this throughout history when you compare, say, First World democracies versus communist countries or more authoritarian countries 100 years ago. But also you see this today where wealthier societies just have per capita much lower emissions than other societies. But let's table that for a second. Let's say that I'm a little bit convinced by this reader's point that maybe there are some trade offs that are worth making. We're right now making too many trade offs against growth. And I will take this point much better at the point that we have some sort of budget for those trade offs. Because right now what happens is everybody makes their case. You know, the three-footed Toucan from the whatever or something. So that means we can't build this thing here. Okay, fine. The three-footed Toucan. That's going to be our cause for here. But then over here we also got to save the 74-foot salamander that there's only 12 of these left and right. Okay, we're not going to build anything there. All right. At some point you have to make a decision about how much money you're going to spend on trade-off. If you're going to spend hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of pages of rules, the vast majority of those rules are growth trade-off rules. And no one has thought about them in a sort of holistic budgetary way in the context of all the other rules. They just say, well, this rule is worth it. It costs us $100 million a year. It costs us $1 billion a year saying, well, we're going to say, okay, every now and then we'll make some trade-offs that limit growth. We're not doing that. And so until we get there, then I'm going to be pro-growth all the way. I would only add that the, you know, if we postulate that the more or less elimination of extreme global poverty over the last 30 years is the single most important and underrated news story. One of the underrated news stories as well is that richer countries have been now for the past 10, 15 years doing less carbon emissions, getting cleaner, re-foresting, not de-foresting and et cetera. I can't speak specifically to biodiversity, but there is a cleanliness. The waters are cleaner. The air is cleaner with all of these rich countries. That's where the trend line is going. And if you get to a certain level of richness, it starts to go. If you're going from poor to industrializing, as China and India have been doing, while eliminating extreme poverty, yes, you are going to add a lot of net carbon and pollutants in the air. And then people will start to get rich enough to be able to demand like, hey, I don't want to breathe this shit. So some of the think about this is all a perfectly good transition into our next topic, which is this. On Friday, President Joseph Robin at Biden, the second, third, I forget, second, issued a temporary pause. He likes ice cream. I do air quotes now that people can see in theory if we release this video. Temporary pause on liquefied natural gas export terminal projects, at least until the Department of Energy can update the underlying analyses for authorizations. Biden says he's making this move because, and this is a real quote, while MAGA Republicans willfully deny the urgency of the climate crisis condemning the American people to a dangerous future, my administration will not be complacent. End quote. We live in a stupid country. Sorry, did I say that out loud? This election year move comes as American oil production led by fracking and natural gas extraction has reached all-time highs, helping drive down the price of gas, which the White House has claimed total credit for, citing its environmental policies. Peter, I just want to ask the process question on this. Doesn't this seem like a real bad process? Yeah, it's a bad process. And like typical bad process. It's the same bad process that we do for all major climate-related projects and energy projects. It's also the same bad process that got us where we are at the border. If you just temporarily say, this seems bad I'll get back to you about everything then it's going to be a mess. Of course it's going to be a mess. Of course we're not going to invest in the right things. Of course we're not going to have peace and order at the border. Like this is it's the worst process and it's the process we're using for everything. Also it's an election year political stunt designed to appease a key Biden constituency in particular the funded climate activists. And so when I say climate activists here, I don't mean people who actually like managed woods. I don't mean people who are quite involved with the land and with animals. I mean the people who work for foundations that do stuff in Washington DC. I mean groups like climate defiance and I named climate defiance because the White House named climate defiance in their brag sheet that they published on the White House dot com under the what they are saying leaders praise Biden Harris administration pause on pending decision of liquefied natural gas exports. And so they published the good job note from this group climate defiance which tweeted this out. They were very proud of themselves and they were like who are we you don't know who we are but we're climate defiance and they defined themselves. We are a radical collective of young people working to topple the fossil fuel industry. We've blockaded the White House correspondence dinner stopped play at the congressional softball game and sent top presidential advisors fleeing follow along right. So they're not even bragging about having any real impact they're bragging about being obnoxious and annoying. Yeah that's the people that the Biden administration has set out to appease here. I really wish they had tried to glue themselves to congress at the softball game. It's easier to spray that would have been nice. There's also the role of the tiktoker Alex Harris of Colorado who yeah it's like if we're doing government by tiktok we deserve what happens. You know China wins this round Matt Welch part of the problem here is that the Biden administration goes back to something Peter was talking about. At almost every level of economic activity and this is one of the reasons why Biden is a terrible president and why he has terrible disapproval or he has high disapproval ratings and terrible approval ratings that rank up there with Trump. At this stage in Trump's presidency even before covid hit. At every level Biden is trying to squeeze down economic activity. If you talk to people you know in business they talk about how mergers and acquisitions every opportunity that Biden has to say no or to slow things down or to make you shimmy through a tighter and tighter hole to get out of you know out into freedom or something like that. Biden is doing this. It's it is a bad way to run a country. You need economic freedom and you know when we're talking about like liquefied natural gas. This is such a great thing to be happening. It's great for the environment. It's better than you know it's better than old dirtier fuels. It helps geopolitically because by having multiple sources in different parts of the world that are able to offer up energy it means that places like China and especially Russia in the current moment or the Middle East can't dictate geopolitics as easily. This is such a bad policy and to the extent that it rests on the you know the stooped and limpid shoulders of Gen Z they've got a lot to answer for. The swap out of dirty coal even clean coal clean coal that would be in every like state of the Union address. We need more clean coal. The swap out via fracking of liquefied natural gas has been the single biggest factor in reducing carbon emissions in this country. So when the brag sheet from the White House when the statements from the president lead with that's why we're serious about no that's why you're unserious about any of it. We've known this stuff for 15 years and you're still pulling this in election years as a cave to these groups who actually they also need editors in this group Peter with a long list of things that they've done they could have just shortened it like we are assholes get straight to the point hear people. They're your favorite type of people right? The bridge blockers. Yeah, Matt loves a bridge blocker. I mean it's also though like why are we soliciting blurbs on our policies? Like that's another question is like this is not like a new novel and we're like oh let's get some other like say a nice thing about it let's get the Peter Travers quote. This is not the way they're just they're just saying the quiet part loud we're doing this to appeal to young people in an election year. Thank you, goodbye. We're gonna do a lightning round quick can't let it pass that last week there was a New Hampshire primary, very exciting in the Republican side Donald Trump won 54% to 43% for Nikki Haley despite of a whole lot of independence voting for that and more Democrats than usual and the Democratic primary is open and the Democratic side Joe Biden got 64% who was not on the ballot Dean Phillips who was got 20 Marianne Williamson got 4 I think vermin supreme came in like 5th not quite 4th that I was hoping for on the Democratic side at any rates or maybe he was in the Republican side I don't remember anymore let's go quickly one takeaway each beginning with Catherine Nikki Haley is out there raising a ton of money right now and I'm just trying to figure out what she's going to do with it right I mean I know I know that she thinks she's still running but as far as I can tell nobody else does except for the people who are giving her millions of dollars so it's confusing to me I will say the folks that are on the Axios had a report of her kind of fundraising sweep the folks that are on the list of you know Republicans were giving Nikki Haley money they tend to be on the saner side of the Republican donor class and I get that they're just still hoping this is a fallback plan a safety options you know something will happen and she will be viable doesn't look like that to me so that's a total endorsement of all policies backed by Nikki Haley's donors just to be clear that analysis that I just offered is no get ready y'all get ready for me on this podcast for the next several months like I'm holding off today because like we got we had like foreign wars to talk about my none of the above animal spirits could have never been at a higher mark like none of the above none of these people never just say no I'm going to be the Nancy Reagan of politicians from now on well I don't know what RFK Junior did to you Catherine he's out there fighting for freedom Nick one quick take away take away on the New Hampshire primary you know Trump is the Republican nominee Biden is the Democratic nominee and the country at large hates both of them the country at large and me specifically but in polls I mean this is like you know we thought 2016 was going to be the worst and it's like it can always get worse Peter you know after the ship crashes in aliens and Bill Paxton is just having like a lot of feelings and he's just like that's it man game over game over man that's my take away from New Hampshire since we do visual now I can just what does that say man that said when hell was in session it's the memoir of Jeremiah Denton Junior a POW V-DOM POW haven't seen that movie Stockdale among other people let's get to our end of podcast what we have been consuming in the cultural arena I'll let Nick continue trying to invent something so Catherine why don't you go first so I rolled up here ready to say that I this is what I consumed and now I'm feeling embarrassed but I'm just gonna say it anyway I re-read Plato's symposium this weekend guys that's what I did and I think that's probably afterward did you take the Play-Doh and you make it like a little like a stick figure out of it so it was pretty too Plato's symposium Barbershop yeah so it was for a variety of reasons but I re-read it in part because like the cable was out the cable was out yeah as if I've had cable for years like who has cable anyway I re-read it in part because I heard a song from Hedwig and the Angry Inch which is a whole song about the idea of love as presented in one of the speeches in the symposium and I was like that sounds bananas because it's this whole theory but how like people were two halves and they were torn asunder and before that they were like spherical monsters that rolled around challenging the gods anyway I wanted to check if I remembered that that was actually true and I'm here to just tell you that Plato's symposium is pretty funny and you should consider re-reading it it's also very very short but I think in retrospect my answer about like Republicans seeking virtue in war is probably because I just spent a little too much time with the Greeks this weekend and so I apologize to everyone. Plato's symposium it's pretty good also Hedwig and the Angry Inch it's pretty good I just that's what I read that's what I'm consuming okay if you can be like I looked at a baseball then I can say this Peter what did you consume? So I've been watching clips from Stephen Soderbergh Stephen Soderbergh's really fascinating 2014 experimental recut of Raiders of the Lost Ark the great movie that launched the Indiana Jones franchise back in the early 1980s and Soderbergh just made two changes to this movie the first was that he removed all of the sound and replaced it with Trent Resner's social network soundtrack so it's now got this kind of like creepy electronic dark vibe to it and then he also took all the color out of the movie and transformed it into a black and white film and he did this he says in a little essay that he wrote on his website as an experiment so that you could just focus on the staging of the movie and this is something that really struck me when I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen last year for the first time was how expertly this movie is staged and I mean every one of the shots is composed almost like almost like a sort of perfect little bit from a stage musical or a stage production where you've got a whole bunch of people and they're all lined up perfectly and everything is kind of surrounding the central character you have all of these fantastic silhouettes throughout the movie I mean it starts with one of the most iconic silhouettes ever put on film that shot of Indiana you know sort of in where you just see the outlines of him with his jacket and his hat and you think about that silhouette and all of the elements all of the sort of creative decisions that went into getting that shot it's not just oh Steven Spielberg sort of wakes up on the morning they're going to shoot the opening of the movie and it's like yeah I guess we'll shoot it like this it's also the costuming department it's the states with which Harrison Ford is moving through the shot right and sort of holding himself in his body it's the whip it's the hat it's also Douglas Slocum and his absolutely incredible photography I mean just so artful and so cinematic and what this Sotterberg cut does is it puts all of the all of the staging decisions all of the editing decisions all of the visual language of the movie into sharp relief allows you to focus on it better without thinking so much about the story and you see just how beautiful the film is how how iconic all of these shots are but also you also see how easy it is to just follow every all of the action it is just amazing especially in the sort of the late years of shaky cam here where that that is that's kind of dying in cinema I mean I think John Wick has helped kill off that tendency but where you can where you can just follow no matter how fast the cuts are moving you can follow every single bit of the action and you always know exactly where every character and object is in relationship to every other character and object and it's such a great little lesson in the craft of cinema and how good Steven Spielberg was at it 40 years ago in one of the great popular movies ever made Nick I know that the late years of shaky cam is going to be your next erotic memoir what if you know I'm also looking forward to the era of shaky viewers so like you know as long as we're shaking the camera can be still that's right what did you consume Nick well you know over the weekend like Peter I consumed some cinema I was in a hotel and I ended up watching a couple of hallmark movies which I highly highly recommend are we okay did you watch them entirely in black and white with a nine inch nail soundtrack of course I only see them black and white anyway you know I don't know what happened but and paging Mr. Darcy things like that what I highly recommend checking out the hallmark channel whenever you get the chance just stay for five minutes what I read this past week is a new book by a UC Santa Cruz historian named Benjamin Breen it's called tripping on utopia Margaret Mead the Cold War and the troubled birth of psychedelic science and it's an attempt to recast how psychedelics kind of entered into the American mainstream or it's somewhere between the mainstream and the avant-garde in the 50s and instead of focusing on people like Timothy Leary and Richard Albert slash Ram Dass and whatnot it starts the clock a little bit earlier and talks about Margaret Mead and her one-time husband the sociologist and kind of gadfly intellectual Gregory Bates and the way that they actually helped bring a certain strain of thinking related to psychedelics and particularly LSD and therapy in the 1950s and early 60s and also how they were deeply implicated in cold war attempts through the CIA as well as the Department of Defense to use these drugs in ways that were kind of nefarious in a broader sense excuse me if you're interested in the history of post-war intellectual and commercial developments this ties into a number of critiques and analysis that point point to the way that defense spending really underwrote a massive amount of Silicon Valley development in California's economy certainly a lot of the things that made America the country of the future but also culturally in terms of things like encounter magazine and a wide variety of different cultural activities that places like the CIA underwrote so it's very interesting in that way if you're interested in psychedelic history this is an absolute must read the other thing as I was reading this and if you're a reason for who remembers the 90 one thing that I've noticed because the author comes back to or he sides on the question of these things need to be kind of gatekeepered and regulated in various ways and we would probably disagree exactly what that means if I was talking to him but I've noticed many of the arguments that we thought were kind of absolutely one in the 90s and this includes things like immigration, more immigration it's better immigration, more free trade is better than less free trade more individual choice in the technologies of living and technologies of the self that we use are better those are being attacked or rethought and reformulated and so Hayek somewhere in Al-Mangalit said that every generation needs to recast the arguments for freedom in new and urgent terms and fascinating to me to see how many things that seem to have been one many intellectual and cultural arguments in the 90s are actually coming back where people are saying you know what maybe individuals can't handle the range of choice and the depth of choice they have whether we're talking about social media or literature and culture or drugs so I recommend reading Tripping on Utopia, Margaret Reed Cold War and The Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science but also reading it critically while the Hallmark Channel is blaring in your hotel room. Oh yeah, that uncritically the Hallmark Channel, you know what when you see genre kind of work it helps you understand why artistic forms are better or worse pursuant to that last point about individual freedom and stuff I just saw that referenced on Twitter a new poll showing that comparing people who graduated like Catherine Wenge award from Ivy League schools answer to the question of do you think America has too much freedom compared to non Ivy League school grads and it's amazing it's like 54% yep too much freedom here at old Ron DeSantis. Please share the link for that. I'm sure it's top quality public policy research. My what you have been consuming last week, Melanie the singer songwriter Shantus Anjanu from the late 60s and early 70s who performed at Woodstock you might remember her for the semi-novelty hit single Brand New Key. She had a pair of brand new roller skates and you had the brand new key. There was no suggestive material or subtext there. Anyway she died after leading a rich and interesting life. I went down as one does the rabbit holes of Wikipedia and of Spotify and listened to a bunch of stuff. I was fortunate enough to have a friend who covered idiosyncratic melody songs over the years including Is She As Pretty As Me which is one of the weirdest songs you'll ever hear but this all led me to re-led me let's say to Miley Cyrus' Backyard Sessions which she did I think most of it was during COVID because you could still go backyard back then and it was the lockdowns. She had really nice big microphone and some good musicians and they did a lot of really great mostly covers of things and she does a cover duet with Melanie who was still alive back then and was still in fantastic voice just gravelly but elastic and big and strong and weird and Miley Cyrus who's a phenomenal singer I think and a very generous artist like honoring those who went before she's very much like Dave Grohl in that respect. It's a really terrific cover of Look What They've Done to My Song Ma which is a great weird little song from Melanie so if you're starting down a journey I would begin with the Miley Cyrus Backyard Sessions mash up with Melanie and then go forth after that and fun fact about Melanie she described herself as Libertarian as Jesse Walker was pointing out that she was one of those people who would show up on those kind of sea list celebrities who said that they're Libertarian. Very interesting background interesting person to go and learn things about and that's the end of that tune. We are now wrapping up this podcast The Reason Roundtable. Thank you for listening to it we have a lot of events over time but I understand Catherine that this coming weekend reason is taking a pretty active role at Liberty Con in Washington DC. Do you wish to speak to that? We sure are. There are going to be quite a few reason staffers participating in Students for Liberties Annual Conference, Liberty Con and full disclosure I am on the board of Students for Liberty because I think it's a really cool organization that helps bring the freedom to the youths and help the youths bring the freedom to the world I guess not the Ivy League youths who think that everyone has too much freedom but more like the youths in Argentina let's say. The conference is pretty fun and I think it will feature Nick interviewing Justin Amash I've got a panel Stephanie Slade is going to be talking about the Game of Thrones there's just like a whole bunch of stuff going on so if you are in DC or if you can be in DC and you want to come I think there are still tickets and it's a good time. Other events that we are having in the future can be found at reason.com slash events are there podcasts at reason.com podcast Catherine do our newsletters now get catched at reason.com newsletters I hope. We do have if you go to reason.com newsletters you can sign up for quite a few newsletters we've got some new ones we've got an Elizabeth Nolan Brown newsletter on sex and tech we've got a Robbie Suave newsletter on the media and censorship and stuff and stuff we of course have Christian Bridgke's newsletter on housing zoning urban policy and the like plus our OG's the reason roundup and daily reason alerts all kinds of good stuff we can be very much up in your inbox should you desire it so reason.com slash newsletters sign up for what you want literally an invasion of your inbox yeah like if you sign up for a newsletter is that an invasion of your inbox I guess so alright well be careful out there and we will catch you next week goodbye