 We want people still to go on about their lives. We want people to rest assured that a lot is being done to protect them. That last clip was from March 13th just about two weeks ago. In retrospect, is that message, at least in part, to blame for how rapidly the virus has spread across the city? Jake, we should not be focusing, in my view, on anything looking back on any level of government right now. This is just about how we save lives going forward. That was New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on CNN's State of the Union Sunday, swatting away his own words as presented to him by Jake Pepper. Hello creepy shut-ins and welcome to the Reason Roundtable. I'm Matt Welch, joined by my video-streamed colleagues, Peter Suderman, Nikolas B. and Katherine Mangu Ward. Hi. Howdy. Hey, Matt. Happy third week of the pandemic. Pandemic has lasted longer than that, so I hate to fact check you right out of the gate, although maybe it wasn't declared as such by the always correct World Health Organization. I should say at the top, to listeners and viewers alike, please bear with our metaphorical sawdust and duct tape and rubber bands and such, including but not limited to the sounds of five-year-olds throwing tantrums around my shoulders and also Matt, I'm not five. And I was going to say also, please do not judge harshly any visual information that you might see unless it's Gillespie's mustache, but he shaved it for this very podcast, which I really appreciate. I did that to help bring the nation together, Matt. It worked. As did Katherine's eyeliner. Let's start with a quick, every Monday grim body count on coronavirus. We're up to 35,000 deaths worldwide, including 2,500 in the United States, 1,000 of which are in New York, most of which are in New York City. Confirmed infections are at three-quarters of a million worldwide, 145,000 in the US, 60,000 in New York. We keep mentioning Gotham because Nick and I are here at the epicenter or near the epicenter, which I think is in Queens. A hospital capacity is being stretched right here right now. It will happen sooner rather than later in some other cities in America as well. There are rapidly expanded capacities in places like the Javits Center, the conference center. Central Park has tent city hospitals being erected right now. The White House over the weekend issued after some kerfuffelage and whatnot, a travel advisory for people leaving and coming to and fro the tri-state area. Trump administration also extended the general social distancing advisory guidance for the country to April 30th. And also various officials, including the president, have been sort of rhetorically preparing America to be ready for between 100,000 and 200,000 virus-related deaths. And oh yeah, Congress last week passed $2.3 trillion stimulus bailout rescue mission thingy. So there's been a bunch of journalism, including at-reason, about actions that governments and others have taken so far, leading us to this point, including actions that have not been particularly helpful and useful. So Catherine, as the editorics of the operation, maybe kick us off here on a round of government failures or inadequacies that have gotten us to this point and hopefully maybe some workarounds that we have learned in the process of getting out of said failures. Yeah. I mean, I think we should go back to the clip from the top of the show, which of course was the most perfect distillation of this attitude that we're getting, which is government is well-intentioned and everyone was doing the best they could do with the information they had. And anyway, let's not dwell on the past, but instead look forward to the bright future where government continues to be well-intentioned and do the best it can do. Meanwhile, government at every level has failed quite spectacularly in handling this. Now, everyone has failed. I personally am failing right now at handling this. Just to be clear, we are all failing together as a nation, as individuals. But I do think all of us have seen a lot and taken a lot of guff from this. There are no libertarians in a pandemic line. First of all, absurd and insulting. It's not as if libertarians are unique among political philosophies didn't think, hey, what if there's a public health crisis? We did. But the thing I want to talk about in particular is the messaging about mask wearing and mask purchasing, because I think this is a great example of the kind of government noble lie at its worst. I don't know yet what the new guidance will be. There has been rumors and counter rumors that the guidance is going to change and we should all be wearing masks 10 days from now. And in fact, maybe we all should have been wearing masks all along. Certainly, other nations have taken that route potentially to some success at the same time. Healthcare workers need them more. So in fact, no one needs masks. Don't listen. No one needs a mask. This kind of messaging is why people don't trust the government or why they shouldn't. I am a libertarian. I don't trust the government. And I still was like, yeah, they're probably right. I don't need a mask. And now I'm on Amazon trying to figure out how to buy masks. This is not a failure of libertarianism. This is not a failure of the private markets. It's a failure of government. And in fact, if anybody gets us out of this, it is largely going to be all of the people who tried to figure out a way to make a buck on making and selling different types of masks. I bought some on Amazon. We'll see if they come. That's a mistake, Catherine. I mean, yes, buy them on Amazon. And we did too. But you, of all people, should know that the place to go is Etsy for masks. No, I do not want some hippie, like that person probably like coughed on the beautiful hippie mask right before they shipped it to me. I like, no. But they have like a artisanal disease. You know, they have like, it's true, tuberculosis from the strain that killed John Keats or something like that. You know what I learned about the real point on the tour? Protect you from COVID-19, but it'll have a bird on it. That's true. Put a bird on it. You know, I do think that part of, you know, what we're talking about here, and it is interesting because like I'm willing to say, you know, there's no question that the government has failed and that the two major institutions of the government that are specifically designed to keep us from being in this situation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA, have royally fucked up and they continue to with almost daily new, you know, directives to get in the way of stuff. But I think the bigger problem here is actually that, the model in this, this is on a, I think on a deeper or higher level than we're normally used to thinking about this, this is more of a Hayekian knowledge problem where it's like various people within the government had good ideas or partial information and they were kind of trying to push through their understanding and their presumptions about what was best. And it turns out that like nobody had a single best answer for what to do and that part of the problem here is less like that the government knew, had bad information and made a wrong decision. And it's more that like you need a lot of different kind of ideas bubbling up in a marketplace of ideas during a pandemic as much as anything else and that we would have had more information if, if local state and local health agencies had had more discretion to test and to do stuff on their own without having to run it all the way up to the federal government and get, and get denied, we would have been able to choke off certain parts of the infection earlier. When you look at countries like Germany, there's a piece in the New York Times, which has gone, you know, back and forth from, you know, the New York Times is, you know, as they report what they report changes, but Germany doesn't have the same kind of top down health authority that dictates everything for everybody and instead they, you know, they issue advisories and different departments or state level groups that make decisions like what we really need here is decentralized decision making because a lot of private actors have really bad information or bad ideas and a lot of public ones do. And so, you know, that to me as part of the takeaway here is that even in this kind of situation what we need is more discussion rather than less discussion. John Stossel has a pretty good video about Germany and other things that I recommend that he did from his, you know, his remote location apartment. Suderman, build on that a little bit. What, what missteps have you seen taken by the government so far that have contributed to where we are today? It starts with the CDC botching the testing rollout process and then really I think the bigger failure in many ways was with the FDA. So the way this process normally works is that the CDC develops the test kit and that's kind of the standard, right? It's not so much the test itself, although it is a test. It is the test that then private companies could be licensed to produce en masse. And so the way this works is the government develops the set of sort of here's what we expect from a test. So at the, at the time that the CDC was doing this, there were a bunch of state labs and a bunch of private companies that were also developing their own tests. They went to the FDA and said, hey, can we use these? And this was in the middle of February. They were asking at least as early as February 18th and saying, we've got tests that work. Meanwhile, the CDC's test, in addition to just being slow, generally, they botched the initial test and actually had to recall the test. And so they had to basically start over. And so what the CDC did was create a choke point. And then what the FDA did was say that none of these alternatives would be allowed to be used. And they didn't approve other tests until the end of February, despite the fact that the former head of the FDA, Scott Gottlieb, was tweeting in the first week of February that companies like Roche have platforms for this stuff. They're well suited. They are built to roll out testing in a large scale. And that didn't happen. And that didn't happen because the CDC was a choke point and because the FDA decided to ensure that the CDC would be a choke point. And because of that, we had very little visibility on the actual numbers for people who were infected in the United States until really this just this last week. And that has just absolutely hamstrung our response. It has been because we have been operating blind, governors, the federal government haven't known what to do. And it has been a huge, huge problem. That is the original sin in our failure in our sort of major failures to respond here is that we blew the testing process. And when I say we blew it, I mean the CDC and the FDA worked together to ensure that private companies that are really, really good at this sort of thing couldn't do their jobs and couldn't make life better for millions of Americans. Can I just say I am very uncomfortable with the number of times the word choke has been said already in this podcast. If we could we could just scale that back as a disease. We want to choke the life off. Okay, made it worse. I am going to take my choke pointers privilege. No, I'll talk a little bit about the person that we heard from at the top of the of the old pod, Bill de Blasio, a mayor of New York. Thankfully, there has been, I'm sure everyone has seen by now, various mostly democratic but also the bulwark kind of super clips of Donald Trump saying various things kind of minimizing the crisis. And while the curve goes up like this and and more and more deaths in cases and such like, well, they're finally starting to do that now with Bill de Blasio. Similar kind of super clips, even from comments that he made as recently as this month. I'm ultimately not going to talk about all of that and focus micro microscopically on the schools. But I just want to point out because this is amazing that on February 10. This is what the mayor of New York City, which is now the epicenter of the Coronavirus in the United States said if you're under 50 and you're healthy, which is most New Yorkers, there's very little threat here, the disease, even if you were to get it basically acts like a common cold or flu and transmission is not that easy. Thanks. Thanks, Bill de Blasio. So he's wrong about transmission, but he's not wrong about the effects of the disease. I mean, I want to throw in the idea that we are overreacting still. But like to say that we are overreacting is not the same to say as it's basically the flu and transmission is not easy. Right. That that is there's no there's nothing to support that. Well, at that point. But yeah, that's I just wanted to throw that as a as the palette, a moose bush. But talk more specifically, shouldn't it be the thing that puts a big dollop of phlegm in your throat rather than clears the mouth? Are you choking on a moose bush? So no. Yeah. No, the it was clear from this parents of New York City school kids, public school kids that the mayor and the Department of Education chair Richard Caranza were ideologically predisposed to not close the schools. There's plenty of arguments. Should you should you not close schools? I happen to believe one thing about that. But let's set that aside. They were so predisposed towards that that they would come up with different reasons for it. And as part of the process, New York Post has done some great reporting on this. They intentionally they sent directives to schools and to teachers to not report to not report to the Department of Health when they had a positive test. There was a teacher at a school pregnant, by the way, who tested positive, I believe it's like a March 15 or 14 and said, Hey, look, I'm positive. I've been at school all week. Maybe we should shut down the school. They're like, No, not only are we not shutting down, but everyone all the teachers have to come for mandatory like extra training here. And since then, half a dozen of those teachers have fallen sick as well. They have suppressed information on this is the problem, you can have differences of opinion about various things. But when your ideology not only points you in a direction, but also impels you or, you know, encourages you to suppress information from people. That's when you have all kinds of danger that comes up. What's out there? Have you seen, I mean, there's a there's a meme going around in the world and we're all kind of leaning into it, even by the framing up the top here, a meme saying, Oh, this crisis has confirmed that proves my priors. Yeah, all of my preexisting beliefs are true. So let's let's let's shake that up a little bit. And Catherine, since you're so enthusiastic about that particular mean, is there anything about this crisis and the response and whatever that has caused you to explore perhaps the limitations of your ideological priors? I'm about to give you like a really cop out answer, but here it comes anyway. So yeah, like I'm thinking a lot about this, like, behold, how the crisis confirms everything I already believed. You guys are not getting it probably quite as many submissions from outside writers who all would like to run in reason their essay about how coronavirus proves their priors. Like I'm seeing just a huge uptick in in that genre in my inbox alone, much less in the world. I will say, and this this hurts me. So it is at least somewhat of a of a real answer to this question. This does not make me change my underlying anarchist views. It does make me more sympathetic to the ways that anarchists annoy the be Jesus out of minarchists because we are muddling your messaging, which is to say a lot of the a lot of the libertarian responses to the there are no libertarians in a pandemic critique have been, hey, the thing libertarians think the state should do is respond to airborne infectious disease. Like that's the one freaking thing the state can do. But of course, me out here being an anarchist, I'm like, I'm actually I stand I stand by my actually because as we discussed at the top of the show, the state is doing a terrible job at that. It does a bad job at all the things we should have no state. However, I am sorry to my fellow libertarians for the fact that the existence of me and more over the existence of louder, more annoying variants of me are complicating your messaging. Just to be clear, as always, my anarchism is the most gradualist form. And so I would say, yeah, once we get rid of all the other things the government does, we can talk about getting rid of the part where we try to control airborne infectious disease from some kind of centrally managed power. But again, just one note, it's going badly. Is that state capacity anarchism, Catherine? Shut your mouth. That's a great idea. That's a very good idea. Just zip it. Suderman, talk about how Catherine's the problem. Oh, she's the greatest boss and editor ever. Oh, it's so much. No, it's because you can. And I say this with two other bosses and editors. I was going to say, ah, good point. But you know, look, she's my current boss and editor. So so she she gets the time. My definition is that's like calling someone your current wife. Ouch. Hopefully my my boss and editor for a long time here. So I will I will say for the rest of your life, really, I will say let's get out of this zone. Keep going. This is this has confirmed my priors in some ways. You know, I wrote that you should play video games. I believed that beforehand. But it also it has it has caused me to think more and about and perhaps a little differently about stimulus and and fiscal policy than than I did before. And so and even going into this, even if there's a video in which I interviewed Virenik Deruji right at the as this was sort of rolling out in which we talked about the insufficiency of economic policy responses. But when the government shuts down the economy and prevents people from working, when it is a when it is a government driven recession, and I assume that that's what we're in, I guess, technically, we haven't had the committee that calls this thing or calls things a recession, call this a recession, but we're in a recession right now. And we are in a recession because the government demanded that people close their businesses and stop going to work and stop interacting with the economy. And in that case, I find it harder to make the case broadly against any sort of large scale fiscal response that attempts to pay people back or sort of to cover for the the days and weeks and months in which people either can't work or are very limited in what they can do because the government has said your business is closed. You cannot get revenue the way that you planned. You cannot go to work. And that's not a ringing endorsement or anything close to the particular stimulus package that we passed. I suspect that if nothing else, it will be implemented badly. And there will be minimal insufficient oversight of it. I mean, the oversight issue, you know, we're going to is just going to be a mess as they spend all of this money and figure out who they're going to give it to, especially on the corporate side. At the same time, when the government says you can't you can't work. And that's the reason you can't work. That's the only reason it's not because you were bad at your job. It's not because there is a market failure. It's not because there was sort of an underlying condition in the economy. It's because the government said you're out of work, then a large fiscal response. I can see a case for it in a way that I maybe couldn't have a month or two months ago. Nick, do you want to confess how much of a Libertarian you no longer are based on the coronavirus? You know, I think I had gone through most of my death and dying stages years ago. So for me, the one thing that this drives on more than anything, you know, I've been working, I started working remotely from reason in 1996. And my day to day life is not substantially different than it has been for, you know, since then, for what's that 23 years, 24 years around that time. And I think what I'm actually kind of rethinking now it's less about government policy. And it's more about in the mid 90s, I was very much of a proselytizer for moving online and kind of escaping, not escaping, but building a world in the cloud, or it wasn't called the cloud then, but cyberspace and whatnot. And then on the information super highway. Yeah, you know, it's funny because nobody used that term, but cyberspace was then you guys missed an opportunity because I don't know highways and incredible. Well, you always, you always want to paint the future in terms from like the previous industrial era. So you know, we should have been calling it the celestial railroad or something. But it, it's, you know, it's, we've, we've been accomplishing that kind of vision of a migration into a more distributed decentralized, you know, both online as well as meet space reality and whatnot. And I think what we're looking at now is, you know, it's a force migration into a lot of that. And I think the there will be really good and interesting meaningful shifts that, you know, in a piece that I wrote, I likened it to, you know, cyberspace was kind of like that big home exercise piece of equipment that you bought and now you use to put dirty clothes on, never got around to using we're doing that more and in things like education in particular in medicine, we're finally seeing people getting their asses and gear to actually start doing stuff in a mix of online as well as, you know, kind of in what will eventually come back to being real space and things like that. But that it's actually, it's, we haven't theorized, you know, a kind of a post, you know, 20th century world very well. And I think this will hopefully, you know, what will come out of this is a better mix of really using all of the online stuff as well as kind of really sharpening the, you know, the case for meat space. It's weird when you go outside even in places like New York, you know, Matt, where you and I are, you know, most of the restaurants are kind of shitty and mediocre. They haven't really, they didn't really build up the physical space because they didn't have to yet. And so I'm not sure that this gets at your main question. But what I'm looking forward to coming out of this is a richer appreciation both for what cyberspace or, you know, cloud, whatever you want to call it, needs to be doing to really have people inhabit there, but also, you know, the rest of our lives so that you're not going to mediocre restaurants anymore. And whole cities are like that. I spent a good chunk of the past 20 years living outside of Cincinnati. It's a good example of a midsize city. You know, it's not smaller than New Orleans or, you know, or some place like Savannah or, you know, other cities and, you know, that have a real sense of place, but it never really developed it very much. And I think, you know, that's something that I'm looking forward to seeing take off, you know, post pandemic. I should, first of all, not scratch my face, but second of all, scratch your face as much as you want. Thank you. So still a free country. Say that one thing that this is underlined maybe in the opposite direction from Nick is I live in a very, you know, walkable restaurant community filled neighborhood. And the thing that keeps me sane in during this long cabin fever, you know, shining reenactments that we're all going through is taking a walk through the neighborhood. And it makes my heart go pangity pang to see how many places are closed. And it sort of makes me makes me realize anew how much the thing that makes me happy is to see bustle and to see humans interacting and to be part of it and to set out my front patio and wave and call the neighbors over to have a drink and all that kind of stuff. And that's all good. I'm talking about it's like, why are you having calling the neighbors over rather than going to a corner bar that is fully inhabiting what a corner bar should be, as opposed to just being like a half ass again. That's too much of that. I'm having the opposite experience, which is I have always been team Matt on this front that like the best land and most beautiful landscape is like an urban street where all the shops are open and some people are eating food. Like that's that's my optimal environment. However, this has forced me to do nature. I have been doing us some nature. Could you do that thing with your eyes again that you just did right before the word nature? I'm not sure. It was so spontaneous. I can't recreate it because that's how I feel about nature. I don't really like the outdoors very much. But my children are antsy. And we have Rock Creek Park here in Washington DC, which is beautiful. And so I found myself genuinely recreationally putting my hands on dirty rocks, like and kind of enjoying it. And I was like, I see interesting. So, you know, there is a flip side, which is like when the optimal bustling commercial street is not available, you know, nature's all right, I guess. Nature is the ultimate product of the Industrial Revolution. Rock Creek Park certainly is like the idea of like let's carve a chunk out of the middle of a city to do the nature in. And so that the grubby working class people can commune with nature and be less bestial at criminal crime. It's working right now. Suderman talked about the stimulus and his own weird fondness for it. So let's talk about that a little bit. You've already, Peter, talked about your own kind of confessionals. I'm very excited, Matt, that the Kennedy Center in, you know, got $25 million and immediately started laying off people in the stimulus, which goes to the large point. And Peter, I think you will, your point is taken that when the government shuts everything down, you know, they have a certain level of responsibility. But this bill is going to be the biggest landmark in the number of companies. And Justin Amash was tweeting about how United Airlines got freaking bailed out and immediately sent out letters like firing people. No, even better. The airlines, the airline, they got their money on the condition that they wouldn't fire anybody until, I believe it's September 30th. And they sent out notices then saying that everybody was furloughed or fired on October 1st. It's the perfect, it's the one time that they can really guarantee on time delivery, right? This, the stimulus is a bad or whatever we're calling it is a bad bill by design and conception. And it will lead to, you know, if not ruin, it is going to be as bad as the bailout after the financial collapse. And it's going to be as bad as all the money that was poured into a bunch of stuff that we can't even identify anymore after 9 11. There is no question, I think, from a libertarian perspective, you know, what do you do when you are faced with this kind of like system wide problem? What is the role of the government in maintaining, if not the economy, because who cares on some level about, you know, this indicator or that indicator of the stock market, and it's more how do you guarantee, you know, a minimal level of mass health and, you know, suitability for continuing to live and all of that kind of stuff. But there's no question that this bill is not designed to deliver that and it won't. That'll come by because of private sector activity and things like that. But this is a nightmare. And it's only get, it's going to take us decades to understand the full contours of that nightmare. Suderman, you are the resident process geek on this podcast. Talk about the process of this bill and what that says about the way that Congress has been devolving over the years. The process here was, well, we closed down the economy, better spend a lot of money real fast. And then they kind of came up with some ways to do that. And because they were trying to do it real fast, Democratic staffers who were writing the actual legislative text in particular just dropped in a whole bunch of junk, a bunch of Democratic priorities and tried to sneak those in because when you're trying to spend money really fast, there isn't time to actually go through and read the bill and read the bill text. And in fact, this had already happened just a couple of weeks prior where we had this relatively small, only $8 billion kind of initial recovery package. And they had to go through and do a bunch of corrections on it in the days after it initially passed because Republicans voted for the thing and then found out that Democrats had stuck a bunch of junk into the bill that they wanted to remove. And then it would there was an issue there because Democrats were like, well, we don't obviously want to take that out. And so there's a lot of kind of really grubby partisan politics as usual going into this. And you combine it with the fact that it's in fact very difficult to write good legislation even in the best of times, even when you're not trying to spend $2 trillion, two plus trillion dollars on an emergency basis. And so what we ended up with was a kind of a grab bag of money for middle class earners, money for corporations, expanded unemployment benefits that in some ways, look, if you want to talk about, we should probably talk about this provision specifically because I think it hasn't gotten enough attention amongst sort of libertarian types who have been focusing on the corporate bailout angle. The unemployment insurance expansion here provides an extra $600 a week for four months. $600 a week that's $2,400 a month plus whatever unemployment insurance you might be getting already in most states. It's about $350, $375 a week. And it also expands the number of the universe of people who qualify for these unemployment benefits. And so people are going to be getting $900 plus a week because of this for four months. Do the math there. That's something like $30,000 depending on exactly your family structure, especially if you include then the $1,200 that you're also going to get just for being someone who is a middle class earner. And so there is now an incentive, I think, that is real for people who were making, who were working minimum wage jobs to ask their bosses to either fire or furlough them and to end up getting more money from unemployment insurance. And so if you look at what the kind of the state of the art and neoliberal policy response to the coronavirus is, is to do what a bunch of the countries in Europe, namely the UK and Denmark are doing, which is for government to pay a large percentage of payrolls provided you keep people on the payroll, provided you don't fire your workers. The whole idea is this is a time in which we have shut down a lot of work and therefore employers are going to fire a lot of people. What you want is to keep people attached to the labor force, right? We're trying to put the economy in an induced coma and then you want to be able to bring it out of that coma as quickly as possible. And when it comes out of the coma, you want all the parts that were attached beforehand to be still attached. But if what if this metaphor got... Yeah, can we go back to talking about lung congestion? So what the government is doing here with this provision is on the one hand they are providing a big benefit to people who are losing their jobs as a result of the coronavirus. And I think again, like I said, I can see a case for at least some of that, but they're also providing an incentive for more people to lose their jobs and they're going to destroy labor market attachments in the process. There's just a ton of unintended consequences that are going to come out of a rush 2.2, 2.3 trillion dollar package. That's one of them. The corporate bailout stuff we should also talk about. Other people should come in there, but there's basically no oversight on it. We remember what happened with the stimulus oversight where CBO released these reports every quarter or so. And they were like, well, we spent X number of dollars. Our models tell us that spending X number of dollars creates X number of jobs. Therefore, we must have created X number of jobs. They did absolutely no on the ground checking as to whether any of those jobs had actually been created. That was left to private oversight outside the Mercatus Center. Probably did the best work on that specific question by actually asking people how they had spent the money. And so there's just going to be a huge number of these unintended consequences of just weird stuff happening, of probably some economic destruction happening as a result of a bill that is designed to keep the economy from falling apart. Can I put a happy spin on all of this? I think the pandemic, both in its government response from the public health sector as well as economically and the political realm, this is where the 20th century finally goes to dawn. Because all of this, first off, we have to recognize this is in some cases, literally a truly you know, yeah, it is, which it's not, you know, it has to happen, right? I mean, you know, we we conjured, you know, it's not if we're talking mythologically or symbolically, it's not an accident that this is happening in the twilight of the baby boom. This is an attempt to move the 20th century off the stage one way or another. But this is a unanimous bill that both Democrats and Republicans are fully behind more than any other piece of legislation, probably in the history of the United States, even, even, you know, the declaration of war in, you know, in World War II, there was one House member who voted against it. You know, this is like a completely unanimous bill. And Thomas Massey, you know, the libertarian, lean in Kentucky Republican, has done something spectacular by force, trying to force a vote where people were accountable. And the Patriots in Congress were, you know, in the House were so brave that they didn't want their names attached to this legislation. He got Donald Trump and John Kerry to get all smoochy with each other for making fun of Thomas Massey. This is a truly unanimous bill that shows that the Democrats and the Republicans ultimately are not different in their approach to government or their solutions to crisis, etc. They've been bringing us to this state for the entire 21st century, failing more and more, losing more and more people, doing more and more destruction to the economy. Donald Trump is the last act of the 20th century. This legislation is the last act of the 20th century. And there is going to be hell to pay, because there is going to be all kinds of unintended, you know, consequences. The intended effects are going to be fucked up beyond belief. I mean, we just double we, we increased the federal budget, you know, in a week, you know, by 50%. What, you know, how is that going to play out? This is going to be screwed up for a long time. But I do think this is the thing that ends it all. And now we're going to be looking for serious alternatives to the status quo. And I think there is a libertarian response to this, which is a smaller government that does fewer things well. And then there is the maximalist version, which is coming out of the, you know, the democratic socialist idea, everything should be universal. The government should either be directly in charge or indirectly in charge of everything. That is the, you know, these are the models going forward. And I, you know, it, you know, it's horrible to talk about this, but we need something to stand up and cheer for. And I do think this, you know, if we look at this all, and we push forward as libertarians, as well as people like with pre political or political affiliations, this is the end of the 20th century. And it's shown that what was, has been, we've been using since the end of World War II, doesn't make sense anymore. It does not address the world. It's a map. It's a model. It's a projection or whatever that has lost almost all connection to the territory that it's trying to describe. And this, so, you know, coming out of this, whether it's in October, when those United Airlines workers, you know, are free to like start living in the 21st century or something, that's when the 21st century will finally begin. I worry just a little bit that it's not over and that we're going to do a bill like that again in a month or six weeks. They're going to try, for sure. They're going to have to. They're going to have to. I just, I am always, always 100% always and everywhere a skeptic of the theory that it's going to get bad enough and then everyone becomes a libertarian. It just never does. It never gets bad enough that everyone becomes a libertarian. Think about it. We see this in the baby steps of suddenly cities are letting people walk around with booze in their hand. Suddenly, the FDA and the CDC are going to eventually have to give up a monopoly on making bad decisions and let us all make more bad decisions on our own. School choice is breaking out. It's never easy, but there is a moment where we come out of the wreckage and are something different. Catherine, Nick mentioned Thomas Massey. The libertarian moment is 538 bazookas pointed at Thomas Massey, basically. Yeah, but we support the right to own those bazookas. That's the most important thing. What does it tell you that he is the most hated person or was until everyone forgot about it already, but for a few beautiful hours last week, he was the uniting hate figure of all of American politics. Yeah, I do think this notion that in times of crisis, let's hand wave away all this pesky procedure is a more dangerous one than people give credit. Massey was right to say, hey, if we're going to follow the rules, I'm allowed to say, let's put this on the record. That's one of my rights and privileges of my office. I do think that the notion that this guy is the problem is so misbegotten, even if you don't agree with that tactic. You might just be like, hey, you know what? That didn't accomplish a lot and it was sort of annoying. That would be a fair critique, but it is not fair to say that his underlying point was wrong. His underlying point was absolutely right, that the time when you need to follow procedures and follow the rules and read the bill is more in times of crisis. I think we should have learned that from the Patriot Act. We should have learned that from the authorization of use of force. We should have learned that every time we hastily pass a giant bill in crisis, it lives with us forever and ever. I think Peter is right and Matt is right that pretty soon we're going to think about doing this again. I think the story that Nick is telling about people walking around with cocktails and the FDA letting private companies do their own tests is it's a nice story, but mostly I think a world with more free markets and more choices wins when things are going well, when government is basically status quo and meanwhile the private sector gets bigger and better and people learn to appreciate it. I don't think crisis yields libertarianism and I don't think it yields libertarianism even if we have to go through brokenness first. When we break things, our tendency as a nation, as humans maybe, is to just build the state bigger and stronger and more terrifying after the stuff is broken. I have a question for y'all about the Massey thing. Does anybody find any merit to the argument that the problem with Massey's call wasn't the underlying principle that people should go on the record with their names for voting for this thing, but instead that what you don't want is to put a whole bunch of old people in a room real close together for a long time in a time of virus. Then why did they not do it by names? So they did it by voice vote, which meant that you didn't have to have everybody around and which meant that you didn't have to have sort of everybody doing it. What I'm saying is they did not record the names. But no, that's my point is that the argument against what Massey wanted was a record of the names and the argument against Massey was if you do that you got to bring everybody, in some cases on airplanes, back into the building. To me this just sort of suggests that what they should have done is had a process in place for say emergency voting online. Which was something that had been talked about after September 11th where there were like emergency procedures that were discussed but never implemented. Again a failure of procedure here, a failure to think ahead to plan for this sort of thing. But this is also like all over in the private sector people scrambled and figured out how to do their thing online or how to not do it. And instead what Congress did because it's allowed to do whatever it wants is it both didn't do the thing online and then did it anyway. And that's I think it's fair to say like that was a worst case scenario. And Massey pointing that out I think was fair. Even if in the end you say you know what we're not going to put our geriatric representatives on a bunch of airplanes and bring them back in it's incumbent upon Massey's colleagues to convince him of that. It's not just wave it away and go on talk shows and talk smack about him. Well eventually they didn't need to convince him they just sort of decided to ignore him. Right which they didn't even do that. Like the correct thing to do would have been to in the world's most collegial deliberative body whatever we call it to convince each other and talk. They have Skype, they have Zoom even if they can't vote that way. But they don't know how to use it. And it's Massey pointed out in one of his tweet storms about this that there's Nancy Pelosi who delayed the vote for many, many, many days beforehand to try to tailor it according to her own needs. And so that's crucial time they could have been spent doing something else. I also just point out in agreement with Catherine that today I believe the Hungarian parliament has basically given Victor Orban authoritarian powers over the country like canceling elections. You can go to jail for five years for fake news. Having to do with the coronavirus is sort of the emergency procedures we're going to wipe away. He can issue laws by decree instead of passing them by the legislature. It's a country that I used to live in and cover and have a great deal of fondness for. And it's also a place that a lot of kind of paleo conservatives and the Trumpian conservatives and have held up as an example of a particularly good leader. It's a very sad day and it's a cautionary tale for what bad governments will do in this crisis. And we should take care not to make the same mistake. And one thing that I've noticed that's been distressing among the many other things that are distressing is people media in particular have been fixating on various things. There's a big mallet over here and Donald Trump isn't using the mallet. I'm thinking specifically about the Defense Production Act. Like why isn't the present what kind of monster is he for not using this law to conscript private companies to build stuff which will inevitably be bad probably the conscription in the building and everything associated with it. But this kind of trying to shame the president who you hate for not taking maximum power in this time is just a very weird move and we should all be conscious of the authoritarian moves by everybody in this moment and to sort of build in safeguards that begin between the ears before we go up forward. And doubly we're too insist on that at a time when every single private entity that can possibly reorient itself toward whatever efficient solution to this problem it feels like it can contribute to is doing that. I mean to the extent that any firm anywhere is not didn't have a meeting among their top executives and say what can we be doing to help with this problem? What can we be doing to provide that can like the people something people want to buy something that people need? Like I guarantee you like you know thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of companies around this country ask themselves that question. The idea that Donald Trump with his giant mallet can hit all of these CEOs on the head and say okay now do the do something that's going to solve this problem and that that will be better than what's already occurred. I think it's so misbegotten and if people aren't acting right now it's for a good reason and sometimes that reason is a regulatory barrier so maybe let's look at those but to sort of demand production particularly from factories or companies where the government happens to have more leverage when in fact the most useful production might come from somewhere else entirely is exactly wrong. And part of this is that things like masks just to focus on that specifically are regulated as medical devices and therefore there are limits on how many masks per day can be sterilized or produced. The FDA has to approve all of this stuff and instead of asking for the president to sort of step up and take more power what we should be doing is saying hey you should be releasing you should be ending or you know or at least suspending temporarily these regulations probably putting them up for serious review for after the fact and saying look private companies that are ready and capable to solve all of these problems let them do it and there are there are I mean we just we know the for example Battelle says that they could process something like 80,000 masks a day and there are there's a limit put in place by the FDA of 10,000 why is that limit there I have no idea perhaps there was some sort of coherent reason at some point in history that somebody could supply there is not one right now and the FDA in particular is will come in for a harsh reckoning because they're making a lot of dictatorial decisions that are completely unexplained maybe they have a good reason but they're not giving them Matt I want to go back to though this you know this one question though of like when do we when do we gain in freedom and you know there's no question first and I'm not not trying to put you on the spot but no nobody's expecting the libertarian moment to to you know rise out of Hungary you know not since the middle ages right probably or something but when in in the Declaration of Independence we talked about how the 70s was a moment where simultaneously you had the most grotesque kind of beef up of government at the end of the Great Society under LBJ and then under under Nixon wage and price controls all sorts of things happening where the government was flexing like it hadn't since World War two really since a wartime economy and exactly at that moment all kinds of stuff started to get more free because people were like fuck it we're not we don't believe the government the government is exercising more and more control over more and more parts of our lives and we are going to go elsewhere and we're we're going to do it you know in in economic terms and in terms of business development and innovation as well as lifestyle and things like that and this is where I do think there is an analogy I mean I'm not just going to carp on this until either I die or or it turns out to be right but there is a moment no but there you know there there is a moment where people people have have lost confidence and trust have lost confidence and trust in the government and many aspects of private you know of private life in the private sector nonprofit sector you know and and we will continue to do stuff for ourselves and I think this is the moment like where we have to recognize there is a beginning to a consensus in American politics you know for different periods and there is an end to them and this is the moment where we need to be wallpapering the world with alternative ideas that have not gotten as full a hearing as they need to because we are at the end of this all of the great institutions you know both cultural and economic political you know you name it of the post war era including the post cold war era they have been you know they've been shown not to be up to the task and it's a question for us how do we map a world and how do we how do we kind of cajole people into saying why not give this a shot I think this is this is the beginning of that moment it's going to be a lot uglier before we get more breathing space literally just very briefly I would would say that we would need in that in that example or let's say I'm rooting for it in that example there to be a someone showing that that approach worked in this crisis or in this context as a country or a city state or something like that there needs to be an example and right now as I look around the world and one of the reasons I'm more pessimistic than I was in 2008 is that the context of 2020 2020 and I'm not talking about the Beach Boys record for once is worse than the context for 2008 there's a it's the the competition for policy the laboratories of whatever are are in kind of trending in a bad direction I you know certainly in terms of economic controls in terms of public health I think when you look at countries like Singapore Taiwan South Korea Germany these are countries that all have strong authoritarian tendencies or abilities and whatnot the way that they have acted is having a public health kind of administration or regimen regime that actually came in and made a few quick decisions early that then allowed for a normalization that's already starting to take place and I think that's on one level and I think we'll see you know the the question here is coming out is China is China the model of the future uh you know probably not both in terms of economics and in terms of public health and I think that's going to become more clear as we gain more information about their response like you know that is the epicenter of all of this and it's you know authoritarian regimes do not do well in public health crises over the long run and as part of that a lot of areas the world which have yet to really see a large number of reported tests are going to see them later and then that'll change the way that we look at all this right let's go to our end of podcast just before we move on completely I do want to add one one notable fact about China is that they have been claiming oh look we're getting better our response has you know we are locking everything down worked and what did they do last week after starting to reopen a bunch of their businesses and things like movie theaters that closed down a bunch of their movie theaters again and now they're saying that it's not really it has nothing to do with this our numbers are still getting better but it really it's just the movies are not good no but in fact but in fact like what that shows is like don't listen to what they say watch what they do and they are worried about reinfection they don't think that they have actually stopped this thing and also watch what they do is the kicking out journalists to make sure that no one can watch what they do all right end of podcast what have you been consuming during the quarantine era Catherine I will start with you I'm continuing my Jane Austen reading festival I know it's ridiculous but I have to say like I finished Mansfield Park and in particular the scenes of the amateur theatricals that they are putting on at home which end up being a sort of a moral contagion to the neighborhood so good so on point I have moved on to Emma which is a little bit lighter and perhaps more relevant for the careening of our society the people sort of monitoring each other's behavior and and it's good and honestly guys like I know everyone's like that's ridiculous but you're wrong and everyone should read Jane Austen continuing their way through her great works as the pandemic progresses speaking of Jane Austen Nick you listen to a song that was as long as a Jane Austen novel if I'm not mistaken it is Bob Dylan's longest recorded song murder most foul which was recorded sometime in the past decade it's not exactly clear when and that he dropped towards the end of last week and it starts out talking about that dread day in November of 1963 or the Kennedy assassination and then it ends being this kind of you know brilliantly Dylan-esque rumination about all sorts of things that have happened historical events songs individuals movements and things like that it's to me you know one of the things that is great about Dylan is that he is I think the the ultimate American artist of the post-war era of the past 70 years and he is dying he's you know 800 years old and hit the world that he has been chronicling he hasn't released a new album in an album of new material in years he's been going through the American songbook he is kind of creating this wonderful network of connections and meaning where everything is connected to everything and it's you know and I read this piece as like it is a nice send-off again to a kind of baby boom America which is the last emanation of that post-war consensus I highly recommend Murder Most Foul and like all great art now it's available for free on YouTube there are already a million commentaries most of which are kind of uninteresting but you know it's to each his own and then when you get bored with that watch Tiger King on Netflix. I listen to the song I think I had a pretty similar reaction to Jesse Walker one of our three or four Dylanologists on staff which is that you started the first ago like I might really gonna listen to a 17-minute song about the JFK. That's like why is it so short? Why is it so short? He's just sort of noodling on his piano and yeah it's wonderful and then by the end you get a little choked up as he's kind of name calling half of American culture and including some there's a nice little obscure Warren Zevon reference which made me maybe I'll choke up. I want to go next because I think that Catherine probably has recommended this before and it's a quarantine thing and I watched with kids the homeschooling and also have a question that's why I wanted to bring it so it's our planet the incredible yeah nature slash global warming documentary with nature. Sir nature is a human construct this the context in which I have mentioned this in the past is that that's my kind of nature the kind of nature that David Attenborough is telling me about on my TV screen. It is it is totally propaganda and it is gorgeous I recommend for any of the listeners out there or whatever I just suppressed a very good joke and you'll thank me later. Was it suppression or mitigation? Suppression. Anybody who likes to just smoke a bowl and trip out on a nice big beautiful thing don't listen to the words as much as just sort of seed as incredible visual it's I mean just like ice shelves in slow motion falling down and and and orcas playing with with penguins trading them back and forth for fun and and this very horrible like wall with a step um anyways it's total adjutant prop of the global warming is killing everybody and whatever um take that for what is but I it's been a while since I've like tucked into some nature documentaries and I got a question and maybe this is gonna sound naive they're bullshit right like yeah they tell the whole shot they're shot on the same soundstage that the Apollo 11 thank you they're they're written by the same guys who write professional wrestling Peter probably has like a whole it's like Vanderpump rules they follow a baby chick through you know an entire lifespan you didn't have a camera there the whole time they're it's exactly the same as reality tv right so they capture 50 000 hours of footage and then they cobble together a story which does not reflect like a real thing that happened in real time but it doesn't matter and it doesn't matter even more than it doesn't matter in reality tv because like the baby chicks not a person like it's not it's like there's no reputation to like ruin or live with it's just what about what about the wow you really hate animals don't you it totally does what about the sound because I think the sound editing also might you think it's like someone with a pair of shoes like oh I think it's Mickey Rooney in our studio using his water wow it's all made up man it's all man-made thank god I'm not smoking the aforementioned bowls of whatever I like it that it was family movie night and also Matt's just like yeah so were you totally high Matt are you like are you like that's not a bad way to parent drinking cocktails I'm a I'm a quitter I can't I can't uh like Ringo star I don't smoke it no more uh Peter what have you been consuming besides everything on the shelf behind you uh and well you can see most of those bottles are full um for now you know I just I replace them every couple of days well it's what it's like 12 o'clock in the morning here right or 12 noon Peter I'm drinking coffee uh no I've been watching Killing Eve the first season of Killing Eve on which is a BBC show uh produced and written co-produced and co-written by none other than Catherine's fleabag fave Phoebe Waller bridge it is a post-cold war spy thriller about a yeah do the dance this is this is dance worthy dance it for Phoebe it's a it's a contemporary spy thriller about a sort of secret Russia desk in MI6 in which a an agent played by Sandra Oh is tracking a a mercenary who is a female killer it's a kind of you know like a reductive way to describe it would be as a feminist twist on the Jean Le Carré spy thriller but it's so so much better than even that and I would like that sort of thing to be clear but it's so much better than that it's just humane and witty and and like surprisingly light and deaf and funny at times while also managing to capture some of the real horror of being uh of tracking somebody who is a completely emotionless murderer perhaps like Catherine um and uh and it's just it's so well done it's so enjoyable and it is a break from our world with the exception of the fact that you see all these people walking around London and other cities and they're all just like walking around and having a normal one except with the you know all the like all the the spy shit aside right but like they're just walking around and they go to restaurants and they have coffee meetings with each other and you're like oh that's what the world is supposed to be like and I kind of yeah it makes me like a little bit sad but also it's really well written and engaging and I highly recommend it to just anybody who is ever like to spy thriller I'm just bummed that a thing called Killing Eve wasn't written by Bill O'Reilly um I think that's his next thing very good afterwards all right that's all the time that we have here for our first ever attempted video thing hopefully it'll be released on video we'll see um uh it's an experiment uh and uh keep listening to all our podcasts reason.com podcast the Wednesday interview the the reason to view on Wednesday with Nikolas B and uh Soho Forum might might see some backlogs it's gonna be uh we're gonna be going into deep cuts on uh yeah classics on the Soho Forum and uh yeah B sides just to have those like same super cuts from VH1 of like uh you know John Fugel saying talking about it. Yeah introducing a haul of oats. Okay goodbye everyone and we'll see you next week.