 Libertarians love to talk about faulty designs and incentives and such. To what extent do you reckon, oh, perfectly-haired editor-in-chief, does our political and governance dysfunction derive from our kind of architectural design flaws or bad rules? Yeah, I mean, I guess I want to start by being a little warm and fuzzy in saying that our political function, to the extent that it is successful, derives from our design. And so I want to props to the founders for getting most of it right. Let's start there. But the partisan dysfunction that we are seeing now absolutely could be ameliorated. It could be at least less painful for all parties with some tweaks to the process. So yes, I do think the way that our election, the structures of our elections have evolved over time. They are not inevitable. We could be doing a lot of these things differently and that there are some places where we're doing it differently would produce outcomes that I mean, the trouble of course is that there are many different things you might be looking to maximize. So one might be like more democratic outcomes and one might be more orderly outcomes and one might be speedier results. And so the kind of part of the issue here is like no one even agrees what we're maximizing for, much less how to maximize it. That said, there are some of these proposals to kind of fix our elections, as people often say, that I do like. Nick, you surely fondly recall when we were touring around America, our book, The Declaration of Independence, How Libertarian. I know. That was a different country, Matt. It was, in fact, a different country, but a lot. It's the same John Kubermellon camp. Thank God, and Bob Seeger. But a lot of people at the question to answer, this was like the third most popular question, was don't you think that if we did fill in the blank, it would fix everything? What is your sense of that X percentage of our problems are design flaws? I am going to, I think go against probably the consensus of the three of you and say very little. This is not an architectural design. The house is built and it was standing for a couple hundred years. The dysfunction, and it may not be that, but the polarization and the issues we're seeing now isn't because we don't have representative government and elections that get us there. It's because we do have representative government and elections that get us there. There is no consensus on what the government should be doing and how we should be living as a country. And our elections and our politics reflect that. There are tweaks that could make things better or worse. I, for one, I want to see more candidates from a broader range of positions, but they're going to be housed within the Republican Democratic parties or whatever the two major parties happen to be. So I don't, I think we're looking at a bug. That's actually a feature. I don't even know why I said that, but we disagree on what government should be doing. We have two parties that are as ossified and fossilized as the presidential candidates running them and the former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who is like, she will be mistaken. If she ever goes to the Louvre, they will put her on a fucking pedestal as a mummy. Mitch McConnell has been, he's the Karen Ann Quinlan of American Politics. We have a leadership that absolutely reflects bad politics, bad parties, and we are to blame. So I think Nick is right there to a degree, but let me push back just a little bit. I don't think that we have a design flaw in sort of the fundamentals of our constitution, but I do think that there was a misapprehension, an incorrect expectation on the part of the founders about how American government would operate at the federal level. And so they designed a system, as we know, with three independent branches. And what they thought was that the competition in government would be between those independent branches. And instead, over the years in particular, in the last 50 years, we have seen the competition develop so that it is a partisan competition rather than the branches trying to sort of check each other. And that has created some distorted incentives. And then, in addition, in the 1980s, the Supreme Court made a somewhat less, not very well known ruling that is now actually gonna be back at the Supreme Court this year that I think was very consequential in exacerbating that. And that was, in a case, versus Chevron, and they developed a doctrine known as Chevron deference. And what Chevron deference does is it basically says that when courts are ruling on administrative, on the government agency interpretations of the law, courts have to accept the government agency's interpretation if that interpretation is reasonable. And reasonable is a very, that casts a very wide net, right? There's a lot of things that are sort of like, eh, that seems reasonable enough. That doesn't seem completely bonkers crazy. And so what that does is it incentivizes the administrative branch, the executive branch, and the agencies to create all of these, to sort of to go far beyond the text of the statutes that govern them. And to do a bunch of stuff and then to present to courts, well, here is a reasonable interpretation. And then the court's hands are tied. And then in addition, because the executive branch has an incentive to do more and to sort of take on more, Congress has less of an incentive to solve those problems and to do the business of democracy and to actually sort of say, here's what we're gonna, here is what the law says and here's what we're gonna do. What does that have to do with elections? And I'm not being obtuse. I mean, the administrative state is an issue, but it's like, in terms of elections, is this the reason why Gavin Newsom is governor of California and Ron DeSantis is governor of Florida or why Joe Biden ended up becoming the Democratic nominee, et cetera. I'm not really seeing the connection. This is not the only issue. This is not, like I said, I think the system was basically designed right. And the thing that it has to do with elections is it places more power in the executive branch, places more importance on the presidency because the executive branch is in effect making law by interpreting law that then the courts cannot, by the because of Chevron deference, the courts cannot say, that's a completely ridiculous interpretation or that's just the wrong one. We're not going to accept that. And so by placing more importance on the executive branch, it disempowers the legislative branch. And so at the margins that reduces the competition between the branches and means that Congress has less incentive to do legislative work and much more incentive for, for example, backbenchers to just try to make a name for themselves and sort of act out, right? And just sort of use Congress as a media platform rather than as a place to go and write legislation that is going to be different. And that changes elections. That changes how people think about who they're going to vote for and which votes matter and how they sort of think about their incentives as voters because everything ends up getting kicked up to the presidency and Congress is just sort of sits there and doesn't even pass budgets. It raises the stakes for the executive catastrophically and lowers the stakes for Congress catastrophically. Yeah, I think to answer Nick's question further is that Peter's talking about the federal government and this also points to a feature of American politics that I think doesn't get enough consideration which is that when we talk about politics, generally when we chatter and write about it, it's usually federal and it's usually the gap between the president doing his stuff and the backbenchers being clowns. And there's a big difference between that and what happens in the state and local level. And there's a big difference in I think the consequences of what happens when you have a Democratic or Republican governor or legislature on the state level, the gap between policy is much more striking. But because we're so fixated on the president and that we tend to think about that when we go vote for our state and local even though the consequences are all kind of different and scrambled. I'm going to answer that. It has federalized politics and people are just voting down the ticket. But and also to Matt's point, it is not an accident that the best, and that's not to say good but the best governance, the best policy governance in the United States right now is almost entirely coming from governor's offices and state houses. That was a clip from the latest reason round table. If you want to see more clips, go here. If you want to see the whole episode, go here. Make sure to subscribe at Reason's YouTube channel or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening, watching or both.