 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable podcast, the Libertarian podcast brought to you by the magazine that's been always looking on the bright side of life for more than a half century now. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Catherine Mangue. Ward, happy eclipse day, everyone. Howdy. Hello, Matt. Happy Monday. Catherine, what kind of teaching moment are you going to do at today's solar blotting out of the sun? You know, we've talked about this before. I'm a rocket's girl, not a planet's girl, and you might argue that those are the same, but I would argue that they're importantly different. Like, I'm going to enjoy the eclipse, but, like, if people didn't make it, I'm just not that interested. And this is kind of the ultimate people didn't make it event. Peter, is there some kind of- But people are making it an event. True. By gathering and celebrating. There's a communal spirit. I think we'll be encouraging, uh, reasoned staffers to look directly at the sun. Yeah. Which ones? What could go wrong? You know, most mutations are positive, right? This is what we learn from the Marvel universe. Peter, did you organize a cocktail for the eclipse? Not even close. I think I'm actually just going to stay inside and watch apocalypto, which has a great eclipsing. At the same moment, I believe that the human sacrifice sequence is happening. It's great. Maybe it's at the end of the movie. Nick, are you going to unduck tape your windows finally? No, why would I? How can it get darker, Matt? How could it possibly get any darker? All right. Uh, we are going to actually do a podcast here and get into the fragile state of U.S.-Israeli relations here in a moment. But first, friends has global instability and market volatility got you looking for a more stable type of coin to diversify your investment portfolio with. Well, CSN Mint has got some shiny silver stuff for you. 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It started or kind of accelerated from where it was already kind of going with the Israeli Defense Forces firing three times at and killing seven aid workers from a convoy delivering food to besieged Gaza by the World Central Kitchen run by Jose Andres, President Joseph Robinette Biden II. A personal friend of Jose Andres said he was outraged and heartbroken over the killing and in a tense phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said kind of sort of for the first time that if future US military aid to Israel could be conditioned on the way that Israel behaves in the prosecution of the war, the allowance for deliveries of aid into Gaza and further civilian casualties, concrete steps to try to limit further civilian casualties as Israel continues to attempt to get its more than 100 hostages back and to drive Hamas from power in Gaza. Catherine, we just passed the six-month anniversary of the October 7 massacre and mass kidnapping event and it seems like Israel is the one that's now kind of isolated diplomatically on the world stage, including reportedly being in the crosshairs of a potential retaliatory, a retaliate, it's too early for words, attacked by Iran after Israel had sent some rockets into Syria. What, in your view, concretely should an American president be doing vis-a-vis our closest ally in the Middle East? Yeah, I mean, I think the problem here is that the right answer is a very unpalatable answer. So the right answer is not all that much one way or the other and I know that that is deeply infuriating to virtually everyone actually. There is a lot at stake and of course there are complicated pre-existing relationships and commitments, but I think it has actually been largely admirable that Biden has shown some restraint in terms of making these type of threats. I don't think what he did this time around was terribly inappropriate because it was relatively small scale. He kind of said the smallest small admonition that he could formally say and this was a really big screw up. By all accounts, this was a mistake and I think it's weird that people are getting super aggro about trying to prove that it was on purpose. It doesn't make any sense to me. I can't understand a world in which Israel was like, yeah, we're going to bomb Jose Andres. That would be flatly insane. So I do want to say I think it was a mistake and I think it was corrective Biden to treat it as a terrible mistake, but one that had process and structural roots that Israel could be addressing. Nick, your favorite senator and your senator, Chuck Schumer. Not my senator, Matt Welch, maybe yours. He gave a speech about three weeks ago on the Senate floor. He's always described himself as the best friend of Israel, even a protector of Israel, but he said that Benjamin Netanyahu was one of four major obstacles to peace in the Middle East and said that basically what Israel needs to do right now is to hold new elections to replace said obstacle. Is that the right approach for American policymakers to make? Are we focusing over much or the right amount on Netanyahu himself? I don't think it's generally appropriate for a US president, much less a senator or congressman, to start talking about who should be running what country, especially if they're an ally, which Israel is. We have treaties and things like that with them and they're in an act of war situation. It doesn't seem to me to be very helpful. It is telling. I think Biden is right to critique or to call out allies when they're doing something that needs to be either addressed or corrected or something like that. That's not the same thing as saying, you know what, you need to get some, you know, we need a different town council in Tel Aviv and you better get that streetlight working or anything like that. These are very different things. I think the most interesting thing coming out of recent events was the big Biden fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall recently that featured, you know, million or $100,000 photo opportunities with ex-presidents and all of that kind of stuff. Biden said going in that he is working to, you know, to get Saudi Arabia, among other countries in the region to recognize the right of Israel to exist. That gives me hope. That got washed over because he said he's working to get Egypt and Jordan to countries that have recognized the right of Israel to exist for decades now. You know, famously, people were saying that this is a sign of his cognitive decline, but in fact, if he is working to get Saudi Arabia and other key Arab countries in the Middle East to recognize Israel and produce a united front both against Israel but also Syria and Lebanon and other countries that border Israel that don't recognize its right to exist and to kind of block Iran from being a regional player in the Middle East, that strikes me as good. And that's the thing that gives me the most hope out of recent events is the idea that the U.S. may actually be working towards a diplomatic solution that will keep the United States out of the area, you know, which we should not be engaging militarily in any significant way, but also would bring the region some stability and a future where the countries who are actually there and are going to be there for the long haul are working together in some kind of peaceable fashion. Peter and Nick just mentioned Egypt and Jordan and recognizing Israel's right to exist. Part of that recognition process and America's diplomacy process has been to give the Egypt and the Jordan's a ton of money, lots of weapons too. Libertarians tend to be like, hey, we should maybe stop arming all the people who are shooting each other and who suck like Saudi Arabia, although Nick loves the House of Saud apparently, but I don't and I understand the impulse and it's correct in almost every respect and yet that is our leverage, is it not? Is there something kind of incoherent of saying, hey, America, you need to pressure Israel more and hey, America, you need to stop arming people? I think foreign policy is never going to be fully coherent. It is the area of policy in which it is hard to develop and maintain a perfectly consistent, perfectly rigorous theory of the case and then actually act on it practically and just, you know, you look at the situation and there are no great options where at the very least there are trade-offs, quite clear trade-offs with every possible option. So with Israel or with any of the other countries who we have been arming or funding or sort of giving some sort of aid to, right, you know, if you pull your funding completely then you lose your influence, right, because there's only after it's gone then what do you have older over those countries, right? What can you say, well, I want you to do this because we've got billions of aid coming to you and if that billions isn't coming anymore then there's no more leverage. On the other hand, you keep your funding in place and you become complicit. You are participating in whatever awfulness, possibly even encouraging it or making it easier, you know, making it more likely because you're providing more money for more guns and more bombs and more atrocities. And then even if you condition your funding, even if you say, well, we're going to give you this money but we're going to put rules on this, then what do you have? Then you have a situation, then you have a situation in which you are, it looks an awful lot like you are meddling in the affairs of other countries, trying to basically run their governments and especially, you know, with a Schumer speech that you mentioned with Israel, right, like it just looks like the United States thinks these are sort of quasi-territories of the US and we're acting in a sort of imperial way, right? So there's just not a great way to go about this. I think there's, I think it would be great if there were philosophical consistency throughout the international relations. I just don't think that that's at all going to happen because it is inherently messy. It's ugly and it's messy and especially where there's a war involved. There's not going to be a clean, easy, smart solution that just works and produces the results that you want. I think it's important not to, you know, assume that there's equivalency between all foreign interventions that the United States makes, whether they're selling weapons or having a defense treaty or invading a country. You know, what we did in Iraq is categorically different than supporting Israel after it has been attacked by a group that is the governing authority in Gaza that has said we are not going to stop until Israel is wiped off the face of the earth and it's being abetted by a series of countries, Iran most obviously, which says Israel does not have a right to exist. We want to exterminate all Jews, not just from the Middle East, but from the planet. You know, unless we are going to be fully isolationist, which would also mean I assume that we would never give certain countries better trading terms than other countries and things like that, you know, them we're in a world of trade-offs. And when we start looking at that, you know, there are better and worse things to do. And I think supporting Israel not militarily, but supporting Israel as it tries to make sure that, you know, Hamas is not capable of, you know, killing what would be the equivalent of about 30,000 Americans in attack, attack, attack. I think that's a good thing. I think Iran is a bad actor. We are certainly complicit in the rise of the theocracy in Iran because we shouldn't have we shouldn't have deposed the government that was democratically elected in Iran in the 50s. But it does not mean that the only the only possible solution is to say, okay, we can't do anything. So we pull out. I think I think I'm just saying I think an attempt to try and bring diplomat diplomatic solutions and regional alliances that make sense for both the region and the larger world, including America. That's not a bad thing. You just said no military aid to Israel. Does that include the iron dome? No, I said intervention. Okay. I thought you said yeah, which is a little bit I mean, I don't think, you know, we can also make a difference. There's something different between Ukraine defending itself, you know, an internationally recognized country, which we don't have treaties with, but we do recognize that's right to exist. You know, Ukraine defending itself against Putin is different than Russia invading Ukraine, right? Morally. Yes. And I think our responses to that are going to be different based on those differences. Catherine, Peter was talking about how solutions are messy and filled with trade-offs. So let's have you trade off here on a solution that's always mentioned by Americans and not really by Israelis, which is the ever elusive two-state solution. We've seen President Biden, Chuck Schumer, everybody, every American president, for the most part, says this is necessary. And whenever things get even more tense and bloody in the Middle East, they say it even louder. Is it a bit of a non sequitur to talk about a two-state solution from an American point of view right now considering how Israelis own priorities and sense of things? Or is that precisely when we should be telling our friends that it's important to think about a two-state solution on their borders? I think the two-state solution talk sounded more practical and more reasonable in other moments in other times. And of course, it often is the way that conflicts between nations are resolved. I mean, this is a very standard operating procedure. It's like, okay, we're going to fight over a chunk of land for a while and eventually divvy it up in some way. This is not a crazy proposal. That said, I think what you're alluding to is right, Matt, which is that it is impossible for me to imagine that Joe Biden repeating the phrase two-state solution right now is doing one single thing to move that part of the world toward peace. It's just a thing to say because we have to have a thing to say because we established it as our preferred solution at some point, and we don't have a way to improve on it. I think we were talking about the difference in our moral evaluation and maybe also in our foreign policy stance with respect to defensive action. And I think it's been very interesting that in Israel, part of the fight is a fight over who is acting in defense of themselves. This has been a big ongoing part of the conversation as well. Is Israel waging defensive action here after having been attacked, or is the long history of this region a long history of Israeli occupation? And it's the Palestinians who are in the defensive position because so many people share this moral intuition that whoever has been attacked is in the right. It becomes a battle to be perceived as the one who is attacked. And I don't think that that rubric is helpful here either. So we have this kind of hand wavy two-state thing. We have this no, no, it is me who has been attacked thing. And I think both of those debates felt like there could have been movement on them in the 90s, for example, and they don't now. They feel they feel totally locked in and locked down to me. So when you're judging what Joe Biden is saying, it's worth remembering that he's not just speaking to an audience that consists of players in the Middle East, of Israel and the countries around it. He's also speaking to a domestic political audience. And Democrats really do have a big incentive. Joe Biden in particular has a very large incentive to make this conflict go away and get it off of the front pages as soon as possible, preferably by the summer, because right now it is splitting the Democratic coalition here in the United States and proving at least a moderate size, if not a major headache for the Democratic party going into the election. And I think you can't discount that as a goal that Joe Biden has when he's speaking about this stuff. And so when he says he wants a two-state solution and when he's talking, when he makes stern phone calls to leaders in Israel, he's talking to Israel. Yes, that's what he's doing, but he's also talking to Democrats here and trying to make sure that he plays the part that he wants to be seen playing. That analysis, though, is the very reason why my initial answer to this question was, and is always, the US should just be less involved. Of course, there is a theoretical world where we could do the perfect diplomatic intervention. Many, many presidents, US presidents have labored under the delusion that they can do that correctly. But in the end, their priorities are not actual peace in the Middle East for its own sake. Their priorities are when an election. Their priorities are talk to the Democratic base. Their priorities are a million other things. And so if we are asking for the US to be a leader, a world leader in these matters, we have to recognize that this will always, always, always be true, that it's just us doing domestic electoral politics in a extremely high-stakes situation, a life-and-death situation for other people. Libertarians declare there are trade-offs to all solutions, to all policies, right? Yeah, breaking details at 11. Yeah. No, but it's also true that the courts that the US helped broker between Israel and Egypt and Jordan have been good things, I think, for the world and for the region. I agree with you. Foreign policy is almost always an extension of domestic policy. I said this at the time, and I still believe it, that the reason why the US invaded Iraq in 2003 was because Bush needed that from a domestic point of view. There was no connection to getting bin Laden or stopping another 9-11, which is what we were supposed to be doing with the global war on terror. Matt, I know you are fond of saying that the October 6th status quo in Israel was not tenable, and I think that's right. And that goes back to questions of whether it's a two-state solution or something else. When the war is over, and there are legitimate questions to be asking about Netanyahu's plan, which he's kind of laid out for when it will be over, or when Israel says, okay, hostilities are over, there will need to be something that is different than what existed before October 7th. And it may be that the US can help play a role in brokering a deal. That actually brings peace and some stability to the region for some level. It may be that we shouldn't have anything to do with that whatsoever. But that's a different question than saying whether or not the US can be more or less helpful right now. Couple of just follow-on points. One, about the sort of crass domestic politics of it all, you find in most of the news articles, just straight pieces about Biden, White House wrestling with the issue, there'll be a paragraph or two. And this is very important because Michigan is a swing state and there's a lot of Americans there. And so Biden wants to signal to them that he's on their team so that he can win the election. And it's like, one state, one group, one contested election affecting the decision-making process of a once great country is pretty interesting and strange. The other thing that I keep getting echoes of, Nick, you mentioned Radio City Music Hall, there is an every single Biden event basically now. There was at least one or a couple, I think, protesters inside. I'd pay a lot of money to protest apparently to get in there. And they're dogging him at every live event. And it reminds me a lot of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first term as governor, the California Nurses Association and other labor heavies there, went to every single event. If he was at his middle school daughter's graduation, and that might not be exactly right, but it's somewhere close, there was going to be like 15 or 30 agro nurses chanting Schwarzenegger sucks or whatever and waving banners because he had taken on the public sector unions in California, was that a huge part of public opinion? Much less so probably than upset at Israel right now is a live issue, especially for Democrats, although Americans are souring on Israel's prosecution of the war per Gallup. But Schwarzenegger saw it and felt it every day and it affected him. And I have a feeling that Biden, the staff, the White House, you know, 25-year-olds duck taping their mouths in front of Capitol Hill or whatever. Right from various ages. A couple resigning, yeah. So like it's in the social physical space of the president and it's probably getting to my guess, it's just a guess. All right, let's move on. Can we, before we move on, can we have like one second on Jose Andres? Because I think this has reminded me of how incredibly cool World Central Kitchen is and it's so libertarian. It's just like such a story. I mean, we've told this story many times, but he is just a dude that was like, hey, right after disasters, people are hungry. What if we just didn't do this the stupid way? And, you know, he's a direct competitor to FEMA. He's a direct competitor to major global aid organizations that are supported by and facilitated by world governments. And I was just listening to The Daily, which, you know, have your debates with it or whatever, but they did a really nice episode that the first half of it was just the story of this venture by Jose Andres. And one thing they noted is that in the disasters that he stepped up for in the US, the reason that he was so successful is because the FEMA regulations on food aid had become so burdensome, including you have to have a bottle of water of a certain size in every food aid box or else you are not allowed to distribute food aid. And he was just like, yeah, I'm not going to do that. Here, I made you some beans and everyone was like, yay, he's a hero. Like, and he is a hero. So I think this is just like a good moment, even though a dark one to remember that the efforts that they are that they are putting in are in direct competition with governments that cannot get their shit together to help people who need to help the most. And he's just a guy who knows a bunch of other guys who have like a slight adrenaline addiction. And so he's like, what if all these stupid chefs could be put to use? And I love that. Also, great cocktails. If you ever go to one of his establishments, have a margarita with salt air, it's like this foamy salt air stuff that they put on top of their margaritas. That's what the Gaza's really need right now. They probably do, TBH. We need a lot of things, but that too. It's also worth remembering that this should, you know, this entire situation should be yet one more shit against the United Nations, which has actually been overseeing all sorts of stuff in Gaza, including relief. And it's just a completely incompetent agency, government, and particularly in Gaza, where something like 10% of its members were involved in Hamas. So it's, you know, there should it would be a better world where Jose Andres is, you know, intervention is not necessary. But it's a reminder of what's actually going on. Well, you also can compare him. People like him. I think there's also a sort of a funny but useful comparison to what Russia has in the Wagner group, which was started by Progozen. Can I ever say that name? I'm so nervous about the Jose Andres is secretly though. No, no, no, he's the good version, right? Because the Wagner group was started by a former restaurant entrepreneur, somebody who was who made his who made his his name and his wealth with a restaurant empire. And one guy put it to use with a private army. And the other one put it to use feeding people in in desperate need of food. That's a teaser for a reference to some oligarchs that we'll have later in the program. But for now, let's continue on the theme of how much we love the federal government because next Monday is tax day, everyone. Amen. Then pass the ammo. Peter, I'm old enough to remember when it was, I think, till 2022. Well, I think it was the summer of 2022, when Democrats in Congress gave the IRS billion with a B dollars to hire allegedly 87,000 new enforcement officers and swore up and down that for sure, none of that would go towards auditing anyone except for the rich people. I think Janet Yellen used the word misinformation to talk about those of us who were at the time saying, that's not how it's going to work. That's just a single lady who she works with, misinformation. No, no. No. Wow. Would you care, Mr. Suderman, to in between your just machine gun of puns, your machine puns, inform the class on how and why a new inspector general report from the Treasury Department has exposed the Janet Yellen's of the world and her handmaidens in the MSM as being a bunch of dirty dog liars. Yeah, so you can call me Mr. Information. And I want to start with the $80 billion number because $80 billion is so much money. Let's just go back to where this money comes from. This is part of the Inflation Reduction Act. And the idea was that no one even thinks, even Biden at this point, like he's going around saying, yeah, it's not really about inflation, right? There's a great quote from him about a year afterwards. It's like, you know, the biggest chunk of this money, actually what it's really about, it's not about inflation. It doesn't have anything to do with inflation. It's about investing in clean energy. Well, it's also about investing in IRS revenue agents. Now, some of this has gotten blown out of proportion. There was some rumor that they were going to hire like 87,000 armed agents. That is not correct. But this money was intended to hire a whole bunch of additional revenue agents who are supposed to focus on enforcement. And the pitch was, we're going to catch rich tax cheats, millionaires and billionaires who are not paying enough on their taxes. And there's all of this money that is not being paid, the tax gap. And so what the idea was, the reason that this made it into the Inflation Reduction Act is that this was going to be a deficit reducer because there's so much unpaid tax money out there from really, really rich people. Well, the problem with really, really rich people is, first of all, they already pay a lot in taxes. Two, they have lawyers and other resources. And three, there's not actually all that many of them. But you know who there are a lot of? People who aren't that rich, people who make less than a million or really people who make less than $200,000 a year. And so the latest tick to report shows that the about two thirds, the majority of new audits that have come in the aftermath of this new spending, have been targeting people who make less than $200,000 a year and 80% have been targeting people who make less than a million dollars a year. Now, if you make $200,000 or you make eight or $900,000 a year, you are not exactly poor. But this is not the, we're only going to target the super rich argument that the Biden administration consistently made. The other thing that you see in that report that's really kind of interesting is, they're not meeting their hiring goals. And this is one of the things, this is like a notable part of this, is they're not able to actually find the people to go and do the enforcement here. And so who do you end up targeting when you don't have a whole bunch of new professionals? You end up targeting the easy people to get to, which are the middle class folks who you can just harass, who you can just spend a lot of time trying to pick up more money from. And this is a pattern. This is not a one-off one-year thing. If you go back to the previous year, I will just read you a headline from Liz Wolfe that ran at Reason.com in January of 2023. In 2022, the IRS went after the very poorest taxpayers. And there's just a whole bunch of audits going after people, not even the $200,000 earners, but people who are making much less than that. And that is a consistent pattern here. Whenever you give the IRS more money and you promise that it's only going to result in audits of rich people, the middle class and the not even middle class end up getting hit pretty hard. You know, part of that is also the earned income tax credit. If you claim that, this is a payment or a program which goes to lower income people by design. And there's also an error rate of up to 30% in a given year where the, you know, where payments are going out to the wrong people. And they're among the top people. If you claim the EITC, that's one of the biggest flags for an audit, which also doesn't mean an agent showing up at your door, but it means you get a follow up question or set of questions. And in a weird way, that makes sense because that is one of the most misbegotten or misappropriated programs that's out there. And it's pretty popular. Catherine, as you hurdle towards middle age, what is your current biggest irritation at tax season? Oh, God. I mean, to be honest, it has nothing to do with middle age. It has nothing to do with the complexity of my taxes. It's just the baseline range, Matt. It's just the very, very simple taxation is theft range that blinds me whenever I try to sit down to do the taxes. But if I'm giving like a slightly less bonkers answer, I guess it's, you know, it's also this sense that like, I'm pretty smart and I'm pretty good at paperwork and I should be able to do this. And the gap between things I personally could actually do on my taxes and what needs to be done is so substantial that I have to pay someone else to do it. That's the real tax gap? It's the real tax. So I mean, this is, you know, in the plan to hire all of these new agents and in particular to hire agents who can, who either have the seniority or the private sector experience to process audits for wealthy people. Like the reason that the IRS can't hire these people is because that's a really, really hard job. And the reason it's really, really hard is because our tax code is so complex and also because the IRS is so backwards technologically. And I think that's a piece of this that it's like really easy to underestimate. In a lot of other industries right now, we are replacing expensive labor with technology. And that is impossible to do at the IRS because they are still trying to, you know, modernize their computer systems that are like microfilm based. And so it's the rage is the problem, Matt, but also I don't like it that it makes me feel stupid. My rage is that, like Nicolespia, I pay New York City income taxes, city income taxes. And like if you live here, and you look around and ask yourself, what are the things that work well? And what are the things that don't? The things that are managed by the city is the answer to the second question. Like if you drive into town, as soon as you get in like welcome to the Bronx, ka-funk, ka-funk, ka-funk. And the roads are so terrible. You've got those safe, clean subways, though. And you've got the trash piles. Yes. Anyways, let's get to our listener email of the week in a moment here. But first, a reminder that this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Friends, what's the first thing you would do if you had an extra hour each day? Maybe mix in some sit-ups, memorize the Book of Job, reorganize your triplicate team baseball card set of the 1964 Los Angeles Angels. Well, therapy can actually help you prioritize things that are important to you so that time becomes less of an excuse for you to procrastinate instead of finishing your long overdue assignments. That's where BetterHelp online therapy comes in. BetterHelp is an easy to use, super flexible, entirely online therapy service that has helped many listeners of this podcast clean up brain clutter in order to boldly face life's actually important challenges. All you have to do is fill out a quick questionnaire, get matched with a therapist, and if you don't like the first one, just swap them out for a second. Let therapy help you extend the effectiveness of your days with BetterHelp. Just visit betterhelp.com-roundtable right now to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelphlp.com-roundtable. Do it today. You'll be glad you did. All right, reminder to email your short queries please to roundtable at reason.com. This one comes from Dakota B in Charleston, SC. Who writes greetings roundtable? The recent article in Reason by Lenore Scanesi, the pupil Panopticon, reminded me of the Panopticonism. I did it of Michel Foucault. I think many of Foucault's ideas are libertarian leaning, even if his overall politics were not libertarian. Are there any other thinkers not traditionally associated with libertarianism that the roundtable can identify as having some libertarian views? I first heard of Foucault because I am a sociology major. Hold your scoffs, especially you, Mr. English PhD Gillespie, and most of my cohorts do not seem open to libertarian ideas, but I think suggestions of thinkers that you consider left-leaning, but also hold libertarian ideas that could help expose non-libertarians to libertarianism. Unlike what many of my classmates would assume, the government is not always the answer to social problems, love, reason, and the roundtable. Thank you, Dakota B. Nick, you were named checked. How do you answer this question? One is that the letter writer is absolutely correct, and regarding Foucault himself, I recommend the book that came out a couple years ago called The Last Man Takes LSD, which is about Foucault and his political commitments in 1970s and early 80s France, where he teamed up with Gestard Distain's right-of-center government to do things like stop homosexuality from being illegal in France, changing divorce laws, and doing penal reform, actual prison work, and things like that. Foucault has many things to answer for. Arguably, the dumbest was his embrace of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the late 70s, which is almost exactly a word-for-word kind of transliteration of Murray Rothbard's terrible piece and reason called The Death of a State, where he was in full luxuriant foam at the end of South Vietnam, because he said, anytime a state ends anywhere, we should be celebrating, even if it means it's going to be overrun by kind of tyrannical Marxist nutjobs and things like that. And Foucault does something similar there. But I would recommend people, and particularly academics who want to try and start an engagement with the left. That's a good place to go. In terms of sociology proper, I'm a big fan of Irving Goffman, who is not anybody's idea of a libertarian in a precise way. But the writer will know who he is, but in books like Frame Analysis, as well as all of his work on what became known as Total Institutions, he talked a lot in a kind of Jane Jacobs type of thing about taking, looking at systems of power and control as top-down mechanisms and then finding places where individuals at lower levels can actually find a surprising degree of autonomy or freedom. That works for me. And then the other article that I would recommend to everybody is the 1978, I believe, cover story, France's Philosophical Superstars, which talks about people like Bernard-Henri Levy, as well as Foucault. But Jacques Lacan, who is a French psychoanalyst, comes in as one of the kind of people who helped inspire a bunch of anti-statist philosophers coming out of the 1968 student revolutions there. Lacan now is mostly known through his association with Slavo Gizek, who is nobody's idea of a libertarian. But that's a starting point. Catherine, who's your non-libertarian preferably left-leaning people? I will definitely second Nick's recommendation that you check out, reasons France's Philosophical Superstars cover not least because of the just catastrophic amount of Bernard-Henri Levy chest that appears just the unbuttoned shirt of it all alone is really worth the cost of admission, which is zero because you can read it for free on our website. He's like half Amish, right? Like they don't believe in using buttons or zippers? Yeah, that's the problem. Aprilou Chameix-Sémoir. I have talked about this on the podcast before, but I have a little weird soft spot for Henry George and I think that he's disarming in a way. I don't know that I would say it's very hard to find words to describe Henry George and the spicy little georgists that you get on the internet. There's this little community of people who clearly are not big on labels other than their own very personal narrow one and do subvert some people's strong biases on questions of private property and other matters. Maybe sneak a little Henry George into your friend's diets and see how it goes. If you want something a little more pop, I think the kind of Stuart brand cluster of humans is a good other place to start. These are people who do not by and large trigger any kind of anti-libertarian sentiment and yet the kind of whole earth catalog guys, especially brand, have a ton to say about what it means to be free and self-sufficient self-actualized in ways that are appealing to too many. Scottish science fiction author Ian M. Banks. Ian M. Banks was a leftist who endorsed the Scottish Socialist Party and really disliked libertarians. I'll just give you a quote here from a wired interview in 2012 where he ranted about greedism and marketology that was being advocated by the intellectually facile. It really gets my hackles up the right wing cover of libertarianism and he had that idea spread all over his books where he was just sort of having characters that were basically espousing his own view of the world, criticized libertarianism as for example a simple-minded right wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own self-regard. So it's really, really funny that Ian M. Banks also probably portrayed, gave us the best single, the single best portrayal of a fully anarchist libertarian world. His culture series of science fiction novels takes place in the far future in a post-singularity, post-scarcity universe in which the main society, the culture, has effectively no laws. The only real rule is consent and the whole goal of the society is for individuals to self-actualize as much as they want which means kind of anything and it's just fascinating how far he takes this. You can live as long as you want, you can die when you want, you can copy yourself and become multiple, you can sort of, you can take the information that is yourself and put it in a little box and then come out a thousand years later you can live life as a whale. You can switch genders at will and in fact he outlines all of these kind of fascinating ideas about like well you know maybe people will couple up for just a little while for 50 or 100 years of their thousand year life and they will both they'll fall in love and it doesn't matter what gender they started they will both become female to have the other's child and then they'll switch back to whichever one they want right it's just fascinatingly sort of clear about what it means to be to be an individualist and to to have a world in which people can simply pursue whatever they want and whatever they desire in the moment so long as they are not really hurting another person without that person's consent and that of course is also part of this is that you can give consent to be hurt and if you enjoy it you know what that's good for you and so banks banks is portrayal of this deeply libertarian kind of anarchist world to the extent there is a government it's entirely super intelligent AI and actually they usually kind of muck it up because governments always muck things up it's really whenever Catherine talks about being an anarchist I think about the culture and enim banks's world because enim banks was the one who I think gave us gave us the deepest and funniest and most alive portrayal of what that society what what a society that truly does not have laws or governments as we know them might look like and how that might you know sort of how people might choose to act in that world my answer to the question is visible behind my shoulder for those who are watching this on YouTube Vatslav Havel the former playwright turned president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic when that country broke in half is pronounced influence on my life and plenty of others besides there's a lot of people that you can describe on the individualistic and anti-communist left he's ultimately classified left later in life he developed an outsized fondness for Hillary Clinton and would take it to say such bad phrases as you know market fundamentalism but for the most of his career he articulated a vision of of individualism and the potency untapped usually of what happens when an individual decides to no longer just sit around and roll with the lies of government that if that basically most governments and certainly all totalitarian governments are based on enforcing what everyone knows to be lies and forcing people to mouth them and support them the classic case in his great essay the power of the powerless is about people putting up a sign the the grocer in a shop saying workers of the world unite and he breaks down what are the possible motivations for putting out that sign and what do they mean by that phrase and it's kind of hilarious but it's also really interesting wrote this in the depths of really really deeply totalitarian communism the 1970s in his country and in order to do that you faced abysmal consequences spent a lot of time in jail a lot of his cohorts did as well but he accurately predicted in this thing at a time when there was nobody making predictions like that that there will be enough people who do this and it'll expose the state as being built in this tissue of lies and it'll collapse so quickly you won't even believe it um and that kind of is what happened and he was part of that process um but it's definitely located in the same kind of tradition including the sort of showing your math showing your your mental processes as George Orwell uh George Orwell Vatsov Hovel even Martin Luther King too were always concentrated and they're they're focused on this notion of truth and even sort of self-purification and and responsibility towards truth and how you have to fight that against all the powers of warping ideology and power around you and it's very galvanizing to to read all of that and it's a fun history lesson for those who don't know that particular history at the end um all right uh as uh as mentioned uh earlier it is solar eclipse day it's going to be over by the time most of you listen to this i would guess um let's do a quick lighting round though i know kathan doesn't like the planets um but let's each of us talk about one cool thing related to consuming astronomy peter so if you want to go watch the very first eclipse that was ever recorded on any sort of film or video you can and it was recorded in 1900 by a british filmmaker and magician of course yes the magic guys have always been like uh i was a magic guy as a kid right like how many of us have worn the the black shirt with the the red tie you know um no the magic guys are great and he viewed photography as a way to help scientists um and uh and he was you know he had actually tried in 1898 to catch one um on film and then the footage was lost but he managed to catch it in 1900 and now you can watch that online and in fact if you go back through the history of the worldwide web eclipses kind of play a weird like little uh sort of recurring character they're like a recurring character in the history of online stuff in this um so back in 1998 one of the first big popular viral live streams long before youtube existed or watching anything live online any kind of live video uh was common at all um there was a there was a live stream of the 1998 aruba eclipse that got something like four million people to watch it it was a really big deal it was covered by local news um there's also like a live in person event by the organization that put this on that got a couple of hundred people and really kind of showed people the power of the web and and what it could do to sort of to to bring people to experiences that they might not other otherwise be able to have um and and to bring be able to to bring people together so it's just a sort of a cool um history of the web interact excuse me of um eclipses interacting with new technologies and showing people what those technologies can do nick what is your one cool thing and why is it uh elos discovery double oh that would be so nice uh and i actually i was just listening to a backward masking um uh kind of analysis of vlo songs uh which came up to my feeds yeah um yeah so elo is obviously one of the most satanic bands ever i you know there's no question of that but i i am just going to i said that i really enjoyed the last eclipse uh the one in 2017 and i really like the super duper glasses that you could buy so that you could watch them because i grew up in the 70s when the only other thing that was more terrifying uh than quicksand appearing everywhere and killing us all was the idea that if you stared directly into an eclipse you would burn your eyes out um and or otherwise mess them up and i can still remember an eclipse from sometime in the early 70s where i did look directly into it and then i became convinced that i needed eyeglasses a couple years after that despite coming from a family of genetic losers almost all of whom have uh nearsightedness i did you have to build one of those eclipse boxes yeah which never worked we had to do that yeah i don't know what what the teachers were doing while they were making us be busy with that and putting our heads in it and stuff like that so and i'm a big uh fan of eclipso the one of the shittiest comic book villains of all time which dates back to the early 60s gathen you're not a planet girl but is there anything about consuming astronomy that you find cool if you want to uh here's the best i could do um i there is a brave rad very short story that i read in school maybe around the time that i was making one of those dumb cardboard boxes that were supposed to show me the eclipse without looking at the sun and i've always associated this story with eclipses no one else seems to remember this story this is one of those things where in the absence of the internet i would assume that i had hallucinated it but um all summer in a day which is a beautiful story about um uh kind of the opposite a a mo a brief moment uh in a uh in a parallel civilization where the sun only comes out uh for a very short time very rarely and how people experience that and um it's also a little bit about uh so it's like a reverse version of isa gas mom's nightfall uh yeah uh but but also not at all answer song um so all summer in a day by ray bradbury for the eclipse vibes but in reverse i wish you had hallucinated it and then it could be like ray bradbury's shack genie movie it's the shazam of ray brad yeah no it's yeah it could have been but it's real and it's spectacular uh my uh lightning round uh recommendation is the sky guide app point your phone at the stars tells you what you're looking at it's awesome uh camille foster recommended it to me it's fun for kids of all ages those who are engaged in micro learning all right let's go to our end of podcast what we have been consuming besides astronomy in the cultural uh strata uh nick once you leave us off uh i watched the series finale of curb your enthusiasm no which is you know uh which started in 2000 or 1999 or 2000 and uh finally gave up the ghost after 12 seasons uh larry david was obviously one of the co-creators of seinfeld and he famously really shit the bed on the finale the two-part finale of seinfeld so this had that fascinating kind of thing was he going to get it right in many ways it's a rewrite curb your enthusiasm in a profound sense um is a rewrite of seinfeld um and in general i think it's great but it's also not as good as seinfeld uh in many ways it can be it's darker and deeper and certainly dirtier but as a series it's it's the stepchild of of seinfeld and the finale was semi satisfying but mostly in this sense in a way that i hope larry david will rep will understand and come to appreciate um it is another bad finale so larry david has been involved in two of the great tv shows of the past 50 years and each time the finale has been kind of like a bunch single something like that um but i watched that and the other thing that's great about curb your enthusiasm and this goes back to seinfeld is that at the end of the 21st at the end of the 20th century you know there was a kind of face-off between are you going to be seinfeldian are you going to be a friends watcher this is a a meaningful way to think about how you interpret the world and how you live in the world and with the demise of curb your enthusiasm uh that kind of ends a uh a genre or a worldview at least in public uh you know in weekly public kind of articulation and i think we'll be um you know thinking about what it means to be in a post larry david post seinfeld world i think my version of that is are you um bosom buddies uh when they're wearing the dresses or when they got out of the dresses and i think the answer is obviously dresses it's not even not even close yeah i mean you're either in the bed or you're not but yeah uh catherine what did you consider uh my selection this week is designed exclusively to anger you matt thank you and it is called ninth house by lee bardugo it is uh set uh on the Yale campus it is a it is a fantasy novel an adult fantasy novel the first adult novel by someone who had previously written a very successful young adult fantasy it is uh set in not just at Yale but in the secret societies of Yale and it has some kind of um like occult's magic-y stuff in there um i feel like you would hate this book everything about this book would trigger you the first page has a specific street address of the building where um our gal the protagonist whose name is uh alex stern but alex is short for galaxy yep yep that's what's happening in this book um i loved it i thought it was fantastic it was very readable it was very delightful um and uh what happens uh i i can't no spoilers but um there's a secret society within the secret societies nick there's uh there's um you know there's always another layer of the onion um there's also like some vivisection right at the beginning uh so not for people um who are squeamish but um ninth house by lee bardugo if you are looking for something that's beach reading while also being goth as hell i recommend it to you peter what did you consider i have been rereading uh verner vingy's novel rainbow's end this is the 2007 novel that won the hugo award so vingy died recently but he was such a visionary and such a great writer just a really enjoyable and thoughtful and rigorously structured his books are all like such so carefully structured and plotted um and he was specifically a libertarian visionary right so he popularized the idea of the singularity he was one of the first science fiction writers to write about brain computer implants and think about what what that would bring to our lives and to our world and you know he sort of helped us think about the ai revolution that we are now on the brink of but in rainbow's end he portrays the world of augmented reality so for those of you who don't know what that is it's kind of virtual reality that interacts with the real world so think of uh having glasses or goggles that you know that show stuff in front of you while you're also seeing the physical world so an overlay on top of the the the ordinary world and so that is also a world that we are entering into now with gadgets like the vision pro but also just with your iphone where you can point your iphone at a sign that is written in another language and just instantly get a translation that is an augmented reality world um and this book is just incredible it is so sharp and so smart in the ways that it lays out how a r is going to change our world and it's it's amazing this thing came out in 2007 before the iphone really existed certainly he was writing it before the iphone was widely available and he just gets so much right he was just such a great thinker but it's also it's just it's funny and it's exciting and it's thrilling i mean he's just a really good kind of page turning novelist and he really primed me i mean that novel in particular is probably the novel that did the most to shape how i think about what i expect from the near future the next 10 or 20 years of technology and even you know not quite two decades later going back and reading it it is just incredibly prescient and still is giving me ideas for for how i think the world is going to turn out so that is verner vinges 2007 novel rainbows end rip to a great thinker and a great writer and a great libertarian visionary he's a really nice guy too i had the opportunity to meet him once and he did a reason interview with mike godwin for us that i'm sure we'll put in the show notes very very funny and unassuming and just incredible person so i watched the not opening night the opening preview night i don't really understand these terms broadway play terms but the first performance let's say of a new play on broadway called patriots about boros barazovsky russian oligarch is sort of rise in the 1990s from a former math geek to like a huckster salesman wheeler dealer semi-mafia guy and specifically about how he started boosting the career of an unlikely kgb technocrat called vladimir putin and at some moment when boros yeltsin is waddling off of off of the stage uh barazovsky helps promote putin as what he thought was going to be a malleable uh person that we could then do what we want um in russia which for him at least according to the play was to open up to the west and maybe join nato and do other things like that it doesn't work out that way as you can well imagine um the first debut on in london uh it's written by peter morgan uh it's terrific it stars uh michael stuhlbarg who was a great actor of the theater and uh and a big character actor in various movies he was the lead of the serious man by comb brothers and arnold rothstein and boardwalk empire and other kinds of of of performances he's a guy i went to junior high school in high school with his friend of mine i haven't seen him on stage since 1986 so it was awesome to watch a friend but he's also really really good i swear um it's not just the friend discount um it's really interesting and fast-paced and uh and literate and funny the dude who plays putin wilkin brings over from london and he's really good um and uh just a terrific um uh performance and it's was written a couple years ago and definitely has extra bits of resonance with all the various things that have happened in the world and in russia since then who knew that you would be interested in the character of boros boroszowski and yet uh you you are um and kind of the rise and fall and missed opportunities of of modern russia but you don't need to be a super russo file to enjoy it it's just a very quick paste and and funny and energetic uh play it's called patreons stuhlbarg is one of those guys who's good in just about everything uh and kind of stands out even in small roles his uh his monologue at the end of call me by your name the dad monologue you can just look it up is so good and so smart and so sort of tender in a way that you don't expect even even from the movie before it um it's really pretty remarkable also fantastic beard uh he's uh he grew a great beard for fiddler on the roof when he was 17 years old i can i can testify uh which is all of us were like wow it's pretty i wish i could do that to his day uh and fun fact is the day before or like uh like 36 hours before his uh the performance that i saw on april first got hit in the head of the rock central park by a crazy bum uh and who he then chased down the street to the russian embassy no less uh and got him arrested um and so uh and then like shout out the next day for work that sounds like a viral marketing campaign kind of does frankly i'm a little i'm a little sus as the 15 year old say uh anyways it closes uh it opens officially on april 22nd in case you want to be there on opening night and closes in uh in late june um that's it um okay i can just hear him singing if i were a rich man in my head right now uh it's uh it's remarkable i mean like uh i don't don't get me started by how fantastic of a performance that was um let us now finish this podcast thank you for listening listen all monday's even the non-solar eclipse ones uh kathryn thank you ward if you're still with us um i understand that there's going to be an annual reason weekend event that's happening pretty soon in boston massachusetts uh do you care to tell the kids at home what a reason weekend is and why maybe it's possible and uh and preferable for them to think about attending yes i would love to do that thank you matt um reason weekend is the gathering that we host for our torchbearer society you have to uh be a generous donor to reason at a certain threshold and um you get an invite and it's a pretty cool gathering we tend to bring in some speakers we do some little outings and uh the next one is uh the weekend of may 16th it is in boston and it will feature a live recent round table so if you like this year podcast so much that you made it all the way to the end bits you would probably enjoy being in boston on may 16th to come see us do this in person we hardly ever see each other all four in person so it is uh extra fun for us and we think that that makes it extra fun for you um you can find out information about this at reason dot org slash events uh nick can you give a lightning round of events happening in new york city that you find particularly enthralling yeah on uh a week from today april 15th we're doing a live reason interview a podcast statement with jonathan height it's currently sold out but you can get on a wait list on may 8th i'm doing a live reason interview podcast with uh cat murdy who's the head of students for sensible drug policy and on may 21st i'll be doing an interview with glenn greenwald speaking of russia mad well yeah in midtown go to reason dot com slash events and you can get information on all of this all right those for done you y'all and catch you next week goodbye if i were a rich man