 this one, which is my favorite in a while, not just for the brevity, but of the wit comes from Eugene and Rachel Spagnolo, who writes, what does the US government do well? And then they add no easy answers, you know, take money, spend money, keep the job all off limits. So hard answers, Catherine, you must answer my anarchist friend and boss, what does the US government do well? And I'm going to go to edit this out of context and spray it all over the internet. Go. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, the way I read this question and then the first 10 answers that I thought of were ruled out by the new easy answers proviso. Here's, here's what I'm going to say. It runs elections pretty well. I know, I know it's a surprising answer, but I am taking kind of a world historical perspective here. And I think that the US government has done in its long history, and even with a slightly messier recent variations, a good job of running elections and handing power off to the next guy each time. And that is maybe the most important thing. So yes, this last one, tough times, but we all make an occasional mistake. And I still think that this is in fact something, again, from a world historical perspective, the US government is doing far better than most, maybe even well. I've never pegged you before as a contrarian, Catherine. So congratulations. This question was so hard for me, Matt, great to be on a curve. You know, nothing is an acceptable answer, Catherine. It's not. I really wanted to answer the spirit of this question. And that is truly my best answer. Peter, you're a status. Certainly, you can think of something. Yeah. So actually, I want to give two answers that are basically the same answer. And the first one is Operation Warp Speed. It worked. It was good. It was pretty inexpensive for what we got out of it. I would absolutely take more Operation Warp Speeds as long as they had the same impact per dollar or even anywhere close. Operation Warp Speed gave us a good COVID vaccine more quickly than we would have gotten it and distributed it more quickly than we would have gotten it without Operation Warp Speed. There are a bunch of other things that the government did that made the vaccine roll out much slower than it needed to be. But the Warp Speed part of it was pretty good. Here's the other thing that comes to mind that is the most worthwhile Canadian-initiative Washington, D.C. Beltway answer. But for the longest time, if you were a policy wonk type adjacent person, you worked at a think tank or whatever in the aughts. And you were asked, well, what is the one good government program? Everyone had the same answer. And it was PEPFAR. PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This was a George W. Bush. George Washington Bush. Sorry, George Washington Bush. That is the hidden, the unknown president. This was a George W. Bush program that spent some billions of dollars, actually quite a bit of money, but spent it reasonably well to help fight AIDS globally. And it worked. Like there weren't a huge amount of, there weren't a, there were not a lot of administrative and managerial problems with it. And it actually seemed to accomplish the goal that it set out to do, which was to reduce AIDS in the world in ways that there wasn't an obvious private market that was going to sort of come in and fill this gap. And so Operation Warp Speed, PEPFAR. Those are government programs that I'm just like not going to spend a lot of time complaining about. Yeah, sure, you could probably find in $90 billion of PEPFAR spending. Almost certainly there's a couple of billion dollars that probably shouldn't have been spent on something dumb. But overall, it worked pretty well for a government program. Like I'm going to give it a passing grade. Nick, I feel like Peter might have taken one of your answers. Am I right? No, he did not. But what I'm going to say is that what the government, if we include the courts as part of the government, which I think we should, it does a very good job of protecting speech. The Supreme Court in particular against mob rule and against insanity has actually consistently for basically all of my lifetime, you know, has worked to expand the sphere and severity of speech, more power to commercial speech, as well as political speech, as well as expressive speech. That's great. And I will also throw in the federal government. You know, this is a law which it's no longer quite as heated as it was even a couple of years ago, but people still tend to hate it, especially people in government. The creation of Section 230 as part of the Communications Decency Act helped the internet become what it has become. And I realize now everybody is against the internet and everybody is against user-generated content on the internet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Without Section 230, you know, we would not have had virtually any of this. These are the, you know, it's the internet's first amendment, as Jeff Kossiff and other people have talked about it. I think that's, you know, really great and really important. And just to bring it back to the Supreme Court, it's basically the one part of all of the Communications Decency Act that withstood the Supreme Court, which struck down most of the other stuff which would have regulated the internet like, essentially like a broadcast TV or radio channel. So the state has done a very good job of protecting free speech. I'm going to give my answer and then talk about some Google searching I did about the answer afterwards. But my answer is whenever I've talked about this before and been more like Catherine in a public space, people have come out of me and said, well, actually the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration does some pretty good science. So I want to give a shout out. I don't know if that's true, but a lot of people who are smart tell me and swear that that's true. Feels like the U.S. Weather Service does pretty good job out there just as a consumer. I don't have any complaints. I'm sure Len Gilroy has briefed against it somewhere, but like, oh, it seems like it seems like that's okay. You love those hurricane trajectory gifts, right? It's like that little it's like the dotted line, right? This is a big dad in socks and sandals energy in this answer here. Did you see my footwear? I think he's sitting on a lawn chair. No, the fun part of this was, okay, I did Google this morning. What does the federal government do well? And that was an interesting exercise for two reasons. One is that many of the first results of my search and it could be tied to my horrible, dirty, the searching history or something like that. But all the answers came from 2011. It's as if a lot of people in 2011 were saying, you know what? Government sucks. And people are like, no, the government does good things too. So maybe that's where people started talking about the National Oceanographic, whatever the hell, administration. Man, I think it's also a time that you update your operating system. Maybe. Matt's whole internet is from 2011 and it's glorious there, honestly. You know what? The search worked a lot better in 2011. Google rot is a real thing. Live it, learn it, hate it. The other thing that I found quickly is this horrible site by the SEC, the security and exchange commission.gov, in honor of Public Service Recognition Week, which is totally a thing that exists in the world. And it is 50 ways government works for us. And I'm going to go ahead and say that I want to see this list with like Andrew Heaton do a repost after every single one of these. I'll just read a couple of, and this is ranked in order. Number one, social security payments help 51 million Americans. Peter. I'm not even sure you need Andrew Heaton to say anything. I actually think he could just read these and make faces. Oh my God, and brag. Okay, I'm just doing like a recent TV assignments here. Number two, college loan programs help millions who might otherwise not be able to afford higher education. Oh my God. Catherine. Three, the U.S. Postal Service. I swear to God. This is the ranks. Inspection programs help prevent mail fraud. By the way, those inspection programs, this is a completely under reported story, are routinely used almost as if they are section 702 because they can hold up your mail to this history store. You hold up the mail to light and look at it as long as they don't open it. And if they see anything suspicious, they'll share that with law enforcement without ever telling you without a warrant. That's what they do. That's number three. Everyone reading this list. Used to park in a park because he could do his route in like an hour and then we would always catch him either sleeping or reading playboys in the neighborhood park in his jeep. Yeah. Everyone reading this list. He's 106, but he's still working. Everyone reading this list should go back and read Christian Britschke's excellent feature on the absolute shit show that the post office is. And it has one of the great reason headlines at least of my time here, post apocalypse. Oh, gosh, that's like. That is not a good headline. That's old school. That's a great headline. It's a 1990s. It's a 1990s headline. It's a 1990s headline. Like. Ott's pun headlines, which Nick and I did none of. Zero. That was 90s here. That was 90s. Number four. Peter, this is for you. Social security. You're not reading all 50. I am. No, I'm going to tap out at five. I'm going to go run around the block a couple of hundred times. Social security disability provides benefits if you become too disabled for work. Peter, that's exciting for at least the next five years. I'm very obviously eligible. Why is the SEC doing this? That's exactly it. They in their own top five? Like I have so many questions. I guess that's just honesty. I will throw a link up in the show notes. It's filled with those. Insert your own. I thought you were going to say it should be to the tune of the Paul Simon song, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. I'm not that obvious. The one I got to number 13 is where I'm like, okay, I'm glad this exists, anyways, which is, and that's the first one, bank regulations limit your loss to $50 if someone steals money from your account with your ATM card. They're probably odd and be a law for that, but whatever. I'm not unhappy that that exists, but that's number 13 on your list. Boy, I have so many questions. It's the greatest list in the world. Have these people ever heard of reinsurance markets? No, not the people reading this list probably. Fred, CEI Smith did not evangelize enough for the beauties of reinsurance. All right. So we should absolutely make fun of stupid government programs a lot on this podcast. I really want to start by emphasizing the most fun we can make of them we should. At the same time, good leadership in government is something that we need, that there is a vacuum of. And if we treat it entirely as a joke as something that is just, that cannot possibly be good, then I think we are going to end up with terrible people who do not respect the office. We're going to end up in a situation like we have now where there is a real, a vacuum of leadership and seriousness in government. And it's a real problem. I mean, again, I'm not against making fun of this stuff. And I will continue to do it on this episode and every episode going forward. At the same time, this is just something that has really been sort of gnawing at me is looking at our leaders in America right now, especially at the federal level. Far too many of them are just posing preposterous idiots. And both sides, right? Yes, yes. I mean, because. To be totally clear, this is not a partisan distinction. There is somebody like Alina Khan who thinks or an Elizabeth Warren, maybe who thinks the government should be doing everything. Yes. The government should be doing nothing, but both of them kind of come down on the side that government should be doing things badly. That was a clip from the latest episode of The Reason Roundtable. To watch another clip, click here. To watch the whole episode, click here. And make sure to subscribe to The Reason Roundtable. You'll be glad you did.