 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly pod and video cast brought to you by the magazine of free minds and free markets and unfree lunches. That is foreshadowing. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nick Gillespie-Peter Suderman and Catherine Mangue-Ward. Hi, everyone. Howdy. Hey, Matt. Happy Monday. So it's not. This is going to be an extremely disillusioning week in American politics and not just because it's going to be a week, but rather consider this gruesome headline in The Hill, which is a newspaper. This is from yesterday. Trump-Biden rematch hits overdrive with Super Tuesday's State of the Union. I think that should be in newscaster employees. Trump-Biden rematch hits overdrive with Super Tuesday's State of the Union. Nick Gillespie, well, the good news is that Nikki Haley won Washington, D.C., so thumbs up, America. And also, No Labels is going to finally make its secret decision on Friday of what to do with itself this year. Thank God. Well, they're not going to label themselves. That's what we know. Not quite yet. It's lent, so that means at least we all don't have to drink kerosene so far. It's times like this, Nick, that the two-thirds of Americans who hate this tend to go looking for the Hail Mary passes and the magic bullets and the other metaphorical terms that Catherine loves so much. Just looking for any alternative to the system that's puked up these results. So today's episode, we are going to go into the weeds of those potential reforms, open primaries, ranked choice voting, ballot access laws, stuff like that. But first, I want to talk about a little magic bullet that was just swatted down Superman style by the Supreme Court. I wonder if you've got it. It is the Supreme Court, so that's Supreme. I think that's what we've got to do. It's the Supreme Court 9-0. That's unanimous for those who are scoring at home. It started this happened just an hour before we started taping. The High Court told the state of Colorado to take a long walk off a short pier with its attempt to disqualify Donald Trump from the ballot because he's an insurrectionist. Catherine, why don't you lead us in a quick round of Insta reaction here on the Reason Roundtable podcast. My Insta reaction is this was for the best. And I think that is not least because here on this podcast, we generally prefer for electoral outcomes to be decided by voters and not by a bunch of jerks with too much power on their hands. And in this case, the Supreme Court was not wrong to take this case quickly and rule definitively. If our ultimate goal is, as I think it should be, to get to a peaceful transfer of power rather than to get to a specific electoral outcome, this clearly maximized the chances of that. So good work, Supreme Court, I guess. Nick, I speak for you and me when I say our ultimate goal is to not stroke out between now and November. But how do you react to this news? I agree with Catherine that I'm glad the Supreme Court ruled that Trump can't be kicked off the ballot. But you know, the reality is over the weekend, I've rewatched the South Park episode giant douche versus turd sandwich. And I was like, wow, from 2004. And it's like, you know, God, those were better choices than we have. William Styron Sophie had a better choice than we have in 2024. Reporting for duty, Nicholas B. Peter, what's a I think this was basically the right decision by the Supreme Court. I was reasonably convinced by an op ed in the New York Times about two months ago by Kurt Lash, who just did a close reading of the relevant provision in the Constitution and argued that it is ambiguous. And so when you have a novel case of huge importance that would just radically change elections in the United States, and the provision is ambiguous and the history of how that provision has been read is ambiguous, you don't go and kick the likely presidential contender for the Republican Party off of a bunch of state ballots. Also doing that and allowing states to do that, I think this is one of the points that the Supreme Court makes that's interesting and relevant is that if you had, if you did this at the state level, it would cause chaos. If you had even 41 states where Trump was on the ballot nine where Trump was not or whatever the number would be, having different ballots across the different states would be incredibly chaotic. And therefore, just like from a process standpoint, it would be a bad process to allow some states to go ahead and do this. All right, let's proceed into our specific political. Matt, are you happy with it or are you livid with rage? I'm sorry, let's consult the moderator of this podcast. Moderator, what say you? Oh, I'm busy moderating the podcast. So I'm going to move the discussion along. No, I agree. You're just going to be a tragic happener. Really just increased here. And frankly, I'm maybe willing to accept the trade off of like one of you strokes out, but we get the peaceful transfer of power. Is that something I can have? I agree with all of you don't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion beyond the let's stop at some point doing the mini cannons, the mini toy cannons that were popular from like 2017. Like, oh, this one's going to finally boom it off. No, I really thought you were talking about Jim Wynn of the gas race, Matt. Well, the toy cannon toy cannon for the T shirt gun of democracy. Aren't we glad we asked Matt? OK, Catherine, let's get into our specific ideas. But before we do that, that's not an ad read, but let's get to a more like a general proposition as a pallet cleanser, throat cleaner. I hate it here. It's soon after Ayala's birthday. I don't know that it's too soon. Libertarians love to talk about faulty designs and incentives and such. To what extent do you reckon? Oh, perfectly haired editor-in-chief. Does our political and governance dysfunction derive from our kind of kind of architectural design flaws or bad rules? Yeah, I mean, I guess I want to start by being a little warm and fuzzy and saying that our political function to the extent that it is successful derives from our design. And so I want to like props to the founders for getting most of it right. So let's start there. But the partisan dysfunction that we are seeing now absolutely could be ameliorated. It could be at least it could be like less painful for all parties with some tweaks to the process. So yes, I do think the way that our election, the structures of our elections have evolved over time. They are not inevitable. We could be doing a lot of these things differently and that there are some places where we're doing it differently would produce outcomes that I mean, you could the trouble, of course, is that there are many different things you might be looking to maximize. So one might be like more democratic outcomes and one might be more orderly outcomes and one might be speedier results. And so the kind of part of the issue here is like no one even agrees what we're maximizing for, much less how to maximize it. That said, there are some of these proposals to kind of fix our elections as people often say that I do like. Nick, you surely fondly recall when we were touring around America, our book, The Declaration of Independence, How Libertarian. Well, it's a different country, Matt. It was, in fact, a different country, but a lot. That's the same John Kubermell in camp. Thank God. And Bob Seger. Yeah. But a lot of people at the question to answer, this was like the third most popular question was, don't you think that if we did fill in the blank, it would fix everything? What is your sense of that there is that that that X percentage of our problems are designed flaws? I am going to, I think, go against probably the consensus of the three of you and say very little it is this is not an architectural design. The house is built and it was standing for, you know, a couple of hundred years. The dysfunction and it may not be that, but the polarization and the issues we're seeing now isn't because we don't have representative government and elections that get us there. It's because we do have representative government and elections that get us there. There is no consensus on what the government should be doing and how we should be living as a country and our elections and our politics reflect that. There are tweaks that could make things better or worse. I for one, you know, I want to see more candidates from a broader range of, you know, positions, but they're going to be housed within the Republican Democratic parties or the whatever the two major parties happen to be. So I don't, you know, I think we're looking at a bug. You know, that's actually a feature. I don't even know why I said that. But, you know, we we disagree. We disagree, you know, what government should be doing? We have two parties that are as ossified and fossilized as the presidential candidates, running them and the former speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, who is like she will be mistaken if she ever goes to the Louvre. They will put her on a fucking pedestal as a mummy. Mitch McConnell has been, you know, he's the Karen and Quinlan of American politics. We have a leadership that absolutely reflects bad politics, bad parties, and we are to blame. So I think Nick is right there to a degree. But let me push back just a little bit. I don't think that we have a design flaw in sort of the the fundamentals of our Constitution, but I do think that there was a misapprehension and incorrect expectation on the part of the founders about how American government would operate at the federal level. And so they designed a system, as we know, with three independent branches. And what they thought was that the competition in government would be between those independent branches. And instead, over the years in particular in the last 50 years, we have seen the competition develop so that it is a partisan competition rather than a rather than the branches trying to sort of check each other. And that has created some distorted incentives. And then, in addition, in the 1980s, the Supreme Court made a somewhat less not very well known ruling that is now actually going to be back at the Supreme Court this year that I think was very consequential in exacerbating that. And that was in a case versus Chevron. And they developed a doctrine known as Chevron deference. And what Chevron deference does is it basically says that when courts are ruling on administrative on the government agency interpretations of of the law, courts have to accept the government agency's interpretation if that interpretation is reasonable and reasonable is a very that casts a very wide net, right? There's a lot of things that are sort of like that seems reasonable enough. That doesn't seem completely bunkers crazy. And so what that does is it incentivizes the administrative branch, the executive branch and the agencies to create all of these to sort of to go far beyond the the the the text of the statutes that govern them and to do a bunch of stuff and then to present to courts. Well, here is a reasonable interpretation and then the courts hands are tied. And then in addition, because the executive branch has an incentive to do more and to sort of take on more, Congress has less of an incentive to solve those problems and to do the business of democracy and to actually sort of say what here's what we're going to, you know, here is what the law says and here's what we're going to do. What does that have to do with elections? And I'm not being obtuse. I mean, the administrative state is an issue, but it's like, you know, in terms of elections, you know, is this the reason why Gavin Newsom is governor of California and Ron DeSantis is governor of Florida or why Joe Biden ended up becoming the Democratic nominee, etc. I'm not really. This is not the only issue. This is not like I said, I think the system was basically designed right. And and the thing that it has to do with elections is it places more power in the executive branch places more importance on the presidency because the executive branch is in effect making law by interpreting law that then the courts cannot buy because of Chevron deference. The courts cannot say that's a completely ridiculous interpretation or that's just the wrong one. We are going to we're not going to accept that. And so by placing more importance on the executive branch, it disempowers the legislative branch. And so at the margins that reduces the competition between the branches and means that people that Congress has less incentive to do legislative work and much more incentive for, for example, backbenchers to just try to make a name for themselves and sort of act out, right, and just sort of use Congress as a media platform rather than as a place to go and write legislation that is going to be different. And that changes elections. It changes how people think about who they are going to vote for and which votes matter and how they sort of think about their incentives as voters, because everything ends up getting kicked up to the presidency. And Congress is just sort of sits there and doesn't even pass budgets. It raises the stakes for the executive catastrophically and lowers the stakes for Congress catastrophically. Yeah, I think I think to answer Nick's question further is that Peter is talking about the federal government. And this also points to a feature of American politics that I think doesn't get enough consideration, which is that when we talk about politics, generally when we chatter and write about it, it's usually federal and it's usually the gap between the president doing his stuff and the backbenchers being clowns. And and there's a big difference between that and what happens in the state and local level. And there's a big difference in the in, I think, the consequences of what happens when you have a Democratic or Republican governor or legislature on the state level, the gap between policy is much more striking. And but because we're so fixated on the president and that we tend to think about that when we go vote for a state and local, even though the consequences are all kind of different and scrambled. I'm going to it has federalized politics and people are just voting down the ticket. But and also to Matt's point, it is not an accident that the best and that's not to say good, but the best governance, the best policy governance in the United States right now is almost entirely coming from governor's offices and state houses. I I will answer the question briefly by saying I mostly agree that I think we're getting the government we deserve good and hard on some level and its reflection of our choices. My interest, I guess, or suspicion or something is that it's the places precisely where the rules having to do with elections are written by the participants in the elections, the winners to do stuff like ballot access and, you know, the literal commission on presidential debates, districting its nose places where I think reform bits are most welcome and yet I don't have a magic answer besides appoint Walter Olson to everything. It's kind of hard to figure out how to do this without the political competition, but I think that's where a lot of the reform lies. All right, speaking of reform, let's get to it. Specific pluses and minuses of various tweaks. Katharine, I have increasingly heard and have been increasingly persuaded by kind of this year, maybe even more the notion that open primaries, allowing people who are not members of given political parties to nonetheless vote into that party's primary election to decide who is going to be then put forward to the general is a good idea. The idea being that if you allow some outside blood to get in there, it reduces the kind of in group, you know, contest of who can be the most sort of extreme or at least loudest inside the room. It's going to lead to overall moderation and so forth. We have open primaries more or less in about half the states. Now, what say you as that as an improvement on the existing status quo? Yeah, so I think if the thing you're trying to do is minimize tribalism in is minimalized, she's is minimize tribalism in politics that open primaries would help, right? This is just if you let the people who most strongly, personally and viscerally identify with the party, choose the party's nominee, you're going to get a certain type of nominee. And if you let people who are kind of interested in voting and stuff choose the party's nominees, you're going to get a very different person in many cases, I think. And I personally am guessing that I would prefer the latter category of candidate, but, you know, that said, I don't think we have enough evidence within the United States in recent memory about the differences in open versus closed primaries to say for sure, I could also imagine a scenario in which we get both parties nominating sort of mushy middle technocrats in a truly open primary system. And that might suck, too. So I don't want to I don't want to get out of ourselves in terms of candidate quality, but the theory of minimalizing the minimalizing. What's wrong with my brain? Yeah. Minimizing. Maybe it's the hair doc. It's the tribe. It's the word tribal and minimize that are joining together. And if that's not what we want to say, I don't know what is. The 2024 news cycle has been minimalizing all of our brains. My brain is minimalized on this one. I think the party should have more control over who they nominate. You know, if anything, maybe the problem isn't, you know, is an open or closed prize. But yeah, OK. It's that, you know, the parties actually have in many, many ways lost control of who they get to nominate and things like that. There are a lot of people who blame Citizens United for that, actually. Yeah, I know. And, you know, I think Citizens United was was right. We have a great video about it. Three reasons not to sweat Citizens United, which includes a great bit from Rachel Maddow as well as Keith Olbermann. I mean, it is like looking at the past through a dark glass. But, you know, the parties exist in order to do this kind of work and to put candidates up who reflect their constituents, their special interest groups, and in many ways, anything that takes us away from that, I actually think might make their offerings less sharp. So that might be part of the problem. It certainly would have gotten us or probably would have gotten us Mitt Romney instead of John McCain in 2008. And I must say, do we want moderate candidate or centrist candidates? I mean, that's what people who push for open primaries. So he's talking about this, it eliminates the extremes. I don't know, you know, maybe that's good. If in particular instances, and then it's bad and others, I don't want to. I don't want to moderate candidate for freedom. I want to I want to full-threaded one. What say you, Nick, to the objection that, like, why should taxpayers be on the hook to throw a closed political primary election? They shouldn't be. They shouldn't be. Well, interesting. OK. Peter, what do you think? I don't think that there is any voting reform that is going to fix America's democracy. I think there are some things, some good things to say, for example, about ranked choice voting. But as Nick said, one of the effects of ranked choice voting is that it tends to sort of sand off the rough edges of politics, because what it does is it sort of is it finds a more centrist consensus candidate rather than just picking the person who has the most votes and is often, in some ways, the most radical or most extreme from particularly in a primary. And so that may be good in some circumstances, but certainly it would have it would have consequences that no one would on this podcast would like, at least as far as policy goes in other cases, because it would push things towards sort of the median policy preferences for voters. And the the median the median voters policy preferences are not very libertarian in a lot of ways. Yeah, but isn't it I mean, isn't it kind of silly to judge something a proposed reform based on whether this little narrow group of us? Yeah, it feels like it's the best result. I don't think it's silly. I think it is worth noting. And like I said, there are many things to like about ranked choice voting. That's how I started. And I I think there's there's a bunch of stuff to sort of a bunch of aspects of about ranked choice voting to recommend in many ways. The fact that we have a system that has that has selected for partisan extremness, right, for sort of the ex games of candidates, right, the just the most ridiculous, showy people, especially outside of leadership. That has that has brought on a lot of American politics as problems today. On the other hand, the policy outcomes that would that would result from more ranked choice voting would in many cases not to be to the liking of those of those of us on this podcast and many of our listeners. And we should understand that there are good things and there are bad things about all of these reforms and none of them are just going to fix democracy or solve America's governance problems. In part because of what Nick said earlier, there just isn't enough consensus right now about a whole lot of things. And until we find that consensus, until somebody sort of can say, here's how we're going to do it, whether that consensus is we're all going to do it the same way and we all more or less agree. Or actually, our consensus is going to be there's 50 different ways to do this. And we're just going to, you know, that's that's that's how it's going to be. Whatever that consensus is, we have not found it yet. As stipulated at the top, none of these are considered to be magic bullets. Want to consider them piece by piece, whether it's good or bad. And since Peter led us to our next one, let's talk about it, Catherine, a ranked choice or instant runoffs. The basic system is that if the four of us are running for presidents, voters will rank us in order of preference. I pledge to get the United States out of Rhode Island. And they're almost 200 over you over 200 years. And what have we accomplished? It's time to bring the boys home. And so whoever comes in fourth place will then after everyone, the voters rank. What's your name? Did you cover up with that cough? Nick comes in fourth place. I was I was I was so conflicted between Nick and Peter that it was that it was difficult. And that's purely a careerist move more than anything else. But wise, the you ranked voters rank them in order of their preference. And the person who comes in fourth place, all of the fourth place persons, voters, then their votes are redistributed to the second place person. You keep doing this until someone gets more than 50 percent. We have this in Maine and Alaska. Mostly it's also in New York City. Four dozen cities, including New York on Salt Lake City. Nick, as you know. Yeah. Well, it's kind of trending. It's growing. Sarah Palin is not in Congress because of it and other things. So, Catherine, how do you like ranked choice voting? I have grown to like it more over the years. I used to kind of just be like, listen, nerds, that sounds fine. And but not really give it a lot of thought. That is your modal response as an editor. Nerds, that sounds fine. I actually think the ranked choice bros of like 10 years ago really remind me of UBI people. Like it's the same energy of like they're maybe not wrong, but also there are so many different proposals and people really want to talk to you at great length about the details of the proposals. And it's not clear there's consensus or anything remotely approaching consensus around any of them, ironically. And so, OK, like, sounds fine, bro. It sounds fine. Nerds is sort of where I end up. But I have changed that view partially because I have seen it, actually, as you say, in action in the US to seemingly decent effect. And also because I actually think a little bit contrary to what Peter was saying, that the value for ranked choice voting for people with heterodox views is that you can you can see some of that in the numbers, right? So if you if you can kind of run single issue candidates that people can express support for within a ranked choice, you can see that preference. You can kind of make yourself visible. And I know we're going to I don't want to cheat us ahead, but people are using the none of the above option in Michigan last week to do that. They were trying to trying to be seen in the numbers using the choices that were available. And I think that that actually is a valuable tool. And I would like to I would like it to be available to more people. So ranked choice, bros, you have won me over. Let's do it, I guess. I think the you know, the results in Alaska with Sarah Palin and another, you know, Republicanoid candidate and a Democratic candidate who ended up winning actually shows like there's something wrong with that. The the voters of Alaska seem to have by, you know, their massive votes preferred somebody from the Republicanoid side of things. And they did not get that. You know, and while many people delighted because it means that Sarah Palin is going to go back to, you know, running a social media website or something like that. You know, it strikes me like it doesn't it doesn't seem like Alaskan voters were, you know, the will of the people such as you can divine that from elections was well served by this. I'm not sure the will of the people is necessarily a partisan preference. I think that the virtue of ranked choice voting in that case might be that actually whatever the appeal or lack of appeal of Sarah Palin is, it transcends Republicanoid or not Republicanoid and that gave people a chance to express those differences. And just like the preponderance of negative feeling towards a particular candidate, right? Like if if people are feeling incredibly polarized against someone, if they excite those types of emotions, doesn't it make sense to have a way to express that rather than voting for their single preference? What I what I do like about or what is always combined with ranked choice voting is the instant runoff, especially if unlike the city of New York, you can actually do it because you're not run by incompetence. You know, doing something that precludes the need to run a second election at great taxpayer expense as we saw in Georgia might be, you know, might be a good thing. Let's just kind of grab bag the rest since we can't spend the entire podcast talking about this. Catherine, you clearly want none of the above and uncommitted and other ways of saying hell, no on these assholes. What what's your what's your favorite otherwise reform sitting out there on the table that people talk about? Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm none of the above or die. But I will say I was doing a little research for this for this topic. And I had forgotten and I fear our listeners may have forgotten that in the 2012 election, the sore loser provisions that that perhaps on perhaps which is so much hinged since Gary Johnson was three minutes late to withdraw from the 2012 Republican primary and therefore was denied access to the libertarian ballot. These are the sore loser rules or rules that prohibit you from from doing this cascade of cascading from major party to minor party. There are a bunch of different ways they work. Sometimes it is through this timed mechanism. Sometimes it's just a rule that you can't do it. And the LP tried to resolve this by finding another dude named Gary Johnson. That's true. Who is going to stand in for Gary Johnson? And it's I actually don't remember all the details of how the two Gary Johnson's were later going to be collapsed into a single Gary Johnson or something in like some kind of quantum mechanism. But I had forgotten that that glorious low key moment of procedural comedy and I wanted to remind everyone. This is like that guide from the state of Washington who changed his name to absolutely nobody and one seven percent of the vote for the Lieutenant Governor's Office in the early 1990s. This is my candidate. This is what I'm talking about. And might actually go to a ballot box to vote if she could vote for absolutely nobody. Nick, I do encourage people to write us all in on their ballots. That's a great joy of election season. Every year for me is like I get a couple of photos on my Twitter feed of people who wrote in one of us. And I love that. So loser laws are preventing the likely of preventing the long awaited marriage between no labels and Nikki Haley. She's of course ruled it out running on no labels, although she has said many times things like Americans really hate this rematch. And I'm going to fight for those Americans who hate the rematch, which sounds pretty no labels, but she's prohibited from running in eight states worth a combined one hundred and thirty one electoral college votes because she ran in this cycle as a Republican and you can't do it otherwise. And again, these are these are pretty recent. This is the exact thing where the Democrats and Republicans say, OK, I don't like that thing. So let's do a new rule that prevents that thing from happening for competition. Nick, I feel like you want to say something. Yeah, no, that's I think that's awful. It's I think what you wanted to say is that Gary BigHands Johnson from the San Diego Charters should be on everybody. So somewhere in a box, I have a sore loser man bumper sticker, which was the refrain that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were referred to in the two thousand election. Back when Catherine and Peter were. And it's amazing because Joe Lieberman was like eight hundred then, but he's still around like we have this ferato class of politics. I mean, they're like John Wooden, you know, where they look they always look like they were 80. And, you know, they get out of politics when they're 50 or so. He's still trying to ban Mortal Kombat, just mad that there's another one. I will add perhaps to top this off unless anyone else has a burning reform. I don't know how I wouldn't necessarily mandate any of these things. But I think when people talk about debate criteria, presidential or otherwise, but let's presidential specifically, if you get on enough ballots or your party gets on enough ballots where you could win a majority of electoral college votes, you get you get at least the first debate. That's that's that's Matt's reform here. I think I like that one. You know, 15 percent threshold is ridiculous. RFK Junior might get close to that this year. Maybe they'll change it. They'll change it. They'll change it. But I don't know if Trump or Biden, but especially Biden, want to even think about having debates given everything else. All right. Well, that, you know, is also just fascinating to think about, you know, do debates matter? I mean, I would love to see more rather than fewer or be able to read the transcripts. But, you know, whoever puts the debates together should be able to define the criteria and, you know, the candidate should be more willing to participate. But of course, you know, they're not going to be. And there were no presidential debates, televised presidential debates between after 1960 until 1976. We have some good articles on why that happened. And did it mean that those elections in between were less representative of America? I don't know. One thing we didn't talk about was was germanting. And and I do think that there the gerrymandering has been a problem. It is not great that the vast majority of house seats are not competitive. And the reason why is because whoever's in charge every decade or so redraws the lines and ensures that they are not competitive. And Eric Baim did a great feature for Reason Magazine a few years ago about how actually we should just have those lines, the district lines drawn by computer, and we should just let the robots do it for us. And that would produce fairer, better drawn electoral districts and more competitive house races. And that would be good. Maybe we can have Gemini AI. Absolutely right. You know, so we're getting a lot of black Nazis in the Central Valley of California. We don't need AI to do it. We can use old fashioned computer technologies to do that. Slide rules. Slide rules for redistricting chair. Yes. You know, I agree with you completely, Peter, but also because I know Matt will appreciate this. When you see what happened to California at the state level, which the Republican Party there imploded after having a really good run and it is because they repulsed most of the voters in the state at the at the local and state level in the nineties. So there's no question that gerrymandering and redistricting and all of that matters, but it's also you can overcome that. And, you know, for instance, in New York in the last election, there were a bunch of Republican wins that were kind of, you know, totally unpredictable, but you can overcome that. But I think we got to go back to the fact that the two parties suck at the local level of state level and the federal level. And like until they get their acts together, or we as voters kind of push them to come up with better coalitions that represent more of Americans, we're just going to be stuck in what Morris Fiorina calls unstable majorities for, you know, until that happens. More Walter Olson in charge of gerrymandering and everything else and more drag queen Republican volleyball players. All right, we're going to get to our listener email of the week here in a moment. But first reminder that this episode is sponsored by Better Health. Friends, what's the first thing you would do if you had an extra hour every day? Would you swap the nat that's flying in front of your face while you're doing a podcast? Would you sleep in? Would you study Mandarin? Would you work even harder on that overdue feature for Catherine Maggie Ward? Well, therapy can actually help you prioritize the things that are important to you. So time becomes less of an excuse for you to do the work. That's where Better Help Online Therapy comes in. Better Help is an easy to use, super flexible, entirely online therapy service that has helped many listeners of this podcast machete through the blah, blah and cut straight into life's big challenges. All you have to do is fill out a quick questionnaire, get matched with a therapist. If you don't like the first one, you can just swap them out for a second. Let therapy be your day organizer and your attention span declutterer with Better Help. Just visit betterhelp.com slash roundtable right now to get 10% off your first month. That's better help hlp.com slash roundtable. Do it today. You'll be glad you did. All right. Remember to please email your short queries to roundtable at reason.com. This one comes from Ricky Blackman, who writes, howdy, hey, Matt and happy Monday. It's good. What are your favorites? He writes with a you. So good, Ricky, short quotes from fiction that present libertarianism. Mine is from the end of Terry Pratchett's, which is a broad as follows. You can't go around making a better world for people. Only people can make a better world world for people. Otherwise, it's just a cage and quote. I'm still unsure. Ricky concludes whether that final sentence should be included or not. Catherine, you love this question too much. What's your answer to it? I do. Matt put this question in the chat to prepare for the podcast. And I was immediately like, oh, actually, it was a little embarrassing. Yeah, Terry Pratchett now and always is the source for excellent fictional you know, freedom quotes of various kinds, libertarian quotes of various kinds. But I will offer y'all some Octavia Butler, a newly somewhat trendy, but always beloved of a certain set of libertarian author. She there's an epigram at the beginning of the parable of the trickster where she says there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns. And I think about that a lot. It's the perfect mix of like people are going to be people and they're going to kind of just make the same mistakes over and over. And you have to really accept that and internalize that. But they're like the world does change. There can be radical, exciting moments of change and we can pursue those. So Octavia Butler, honestly, all of her writing has just really, really cool, subtle themes that libertarians can appreciate and should foist on their friends. This is not the same as handing somebody out with shrugged. You're you're going to get away with this. Peter, how do you answer the question? The year was 2081 and everybody was finally equal. That is the first line to Kurt Vonnegut's great, incredibly libertarian, incredibly relevant short story, Harrison Bergeron. And it's not a libertarian epigram in the sense that it sort of declares the inherent, you know, all men desire freedom in the heart. So I think that's actually a line from Optimus Prime in the first Transformers, right, like all sentient creatures desire freedom or something like that. But it's so obviously ridiculous and so obviously absurd, especially coming at the beginning of the story, that it draws attention to the silliness and to the ridiculousness, the absurdity of that premise, of that idea that somehow or another, everybody is going to be equal in the most equal way. And then, of course, the rest of the story is great, too. But it's it's a great it is it is a great libertarian story and a great libertarian line because of the ironic way that it underlines highlights the the nonsensical goal of true equality of what we would now call equity. That that line, that story, along with the everyone going out to bounce the rubber ball once a bit from a wrinkle in time, just absolutely were the most terrifying totalitarian images of my childhood. And probably turned me into a weirdo. Nick, speaking of weirdos, what is your favorite? Thank you, libertarian. You were a weirdo already. You got the causality reversed. I will confess that I don't have a good choice here. But I've always loved this passage from the great Gatsby, where Nick is driving into the city with Gatsby. And what is funny, Matt, and you'll enjoy this. They're they're going over the Queensborough Bridge, the 59th Street Bridge, which is now named after Ed Koch. But the city scene from the Queensborough Bridge is always the city scene for the first time in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world, blah, blah, blah. And then Nick Caraway, who is the villain of the piece and my reading of the great Gatsby says, anything can happen now that we slid over this bridge. I thought anything at all, even Gatsby could happen without any particular wonder. And what I like about it is just the idea, you know, and I obviously have written about the great Gatsby for a reason, but it is a book about people creating the world they want to live in. And then many of and and it's an account from the people who are incapable of living in that world of increasing laissez-faire across every dimension of human activity. So I like that because it foregrounds the idea that you slide into a place where anything can happen. Anything can come together and be done. And, you know, people get worried about that. My answer is. Tenstafel, which, of course, is the acronym for their eight, no such thing as a free lunch as coined, at least the acronym by Robert A. Heinlein, who is my gateway drug to libertarianism as a as a teen. This comes from the Moon is a harsh mistress is 1966 novel about a lunar revolt against the colonizers of the United States or wherever the world. There's another line in there, one where another you get what you pay for. I like this thing for a couple of reasons. One is that it has that kind of similar thing of like, huh, makes you think it also makes you think about kind of economics and government provision of services. It immediately throws you into kind of econometric type of thinking, even if you're trade offs, trade offs, even if you're 12 years old. And I also like it because of the absurd acronymization of it is kind of what sticks to some people and definitely predates all of the baseball stat nerd, overly long acronyms that came out a lot of it from people who had read similar things when they were kids. And then that all of course became what we live with now with texting and social media, just ridiculous acronyms. Is that acronym, that's not even the right word. No, abbreviations, abbreviations, whatever. You know, Matt, you mentioned the 1966 book. I would love to see you do a treatment of so that's the same year revolver came out. Right, like do a kind of glimpse of what were the major transformative things that came out in a given year. You've done that with songs for particular years. But what's the connection between the moon is the harsh mistress and revolver and maybe a couple of movies that came out that same. The moon is a harsh revolver. Yeah, two things I will remind everyone that that was my high school thesis paper is a stranger in a strange land in the summer of love and how it was a direct influence up till you drop. Never stop grokking. Never learn not to grok. But also also, I think that the song to do that, Nick, and I've been been cogitating on this for a while is painted black. That should really your nihilist soul. But that sure is such a incredibly galvanizing song with really, really interesting versions in various languages. And it just like touched off an entire future. And fun fact, by far the most downloaded or most number of whatever on Spotify. Yep. Wow. Can I just recommend very quickly that people check out the Eric Bird and the animals version of painted black, which has a scat stanza or five that goes on for what seems to be about 30 minutes, where a burden is like, hey, baby, I mean, he sounds like telecevolos. You know, like, baby, I'm not seeing any colors. Not yellow, not red, not orange, not green. And, you know, it's like, yeah, we get it. We get it. So Robert Heinlein had a voting drive. Would that be grok the vote? That would be great. I hate it here. I like that. I understand grok in the original Martian. Yes, yes, indeed. If you're going to be talking about Eric Bird and you have to say point out that House of the Rising Sun was part of the lead up to painted black. It's very his version of that kind of introduced a new type of sound that Brian Jones thought interesting. Okay, Catherine, we're going to wake you up now. But first, let's wake up Peter Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader. Already mentioned on this podcast negatively by Nikolas B. Earlier announced last week that he is not going to be seeking re-election after November. Did he announce that, Matt? I don't know. It was the people around him. It was announced. It's something that's happened. We'll let TV's Andy Levy decided half time exactly how that came out. But Peter, you followed Mitch McConnell's career pretty closely. He is pretty much derided by everybody in American politics at this point. But with a lot of grudging and sometimes not so grudging respect among Republicans, especially those who are interested in things like judicial appointments. Can you give us a sense of what the post McConnell world looks like? What are we going to miss when he's gone? That's a good question. So I think to answer that, you have to go back and understand what Mitch McConnell was. And what Mitch McConnell was was a master of procedural politics for better and for worse. And that's in great contrast to the newer MAGA-E style of politics or even the squad style of politics, which is very media-centric, which is about grandstanding, which is about getting attention on social media or getting on cable news, but is not so much about using the internal levers of power to actually move legislation or block legislation to do stuff from inside the legislature. And I think there were things that were good about it, things that were bad about it and things that were quite mixed. And so one good thing is that is that McConnell recognized that a thing that he could do to advance his causes was to move the judicial appointments. And so he moved to judicial appointments, many of which folks listening to this podcast would approve of. And that has really changed American politics. And and Mitch McConnell is in many ways the architect of the Republican judicial strategy. A bad thing about Mitch McConnell was that I think that aside from the judges and maybe even maybe even you could fold the judges into this in some ways, in so many ways, his priority, his priorities were almost entirely partisan. He put the Republican Party and the fortunes of the Republican Party specifically the electoral fortunes. How many elections are you going to win? That was the thing that he that motivated him most was he was just going to try and put GOP butts in seats in Congress, right? And that was and if the number was was higher than that was better regardless of the policy outcomes. And and then there's a sort of a mixed view of him that is, you know, Justin Amash has often critiqued Republican leadership and yes, Amash was in the House and McConnell's in the Senate, but McConnell is part of this. Justin Amash has often critiqued Republican leadership correctly for over the past couple of decades, centralizing power where bills to the extent that they are passed are drawn up behind closed doors by just a small group of people without a huge amount of input from the backbenchers in the rank and file. And Mitch McConnell was definitely part of that. But I was at one of these sort of dinners you go to in D.C. where you meet people who are staffers on the hill or used to be leadership staffers. And this was a person who made the argument to me that in the absence of McConnell. We would have had a much less Reaganite, much more populist Republican Party much earlier and that Mitch McConnell, his centralization had the effect of holding the line on old style Republican Party politics, especially with regards to defense spending and tax cuts, but also to some extent with social spending that he tried to reject. And again, this was not like he was a champion for Medicare reform or Social Security reform or anything like that. But I do think that you can you can make a plausible. I'm not sure it's exactly the best case, but a plausible case that Mitch McConnell's efforts to centralize the legislative mechanics inside the Senate, what they did was they kept the Republican Party in that sort of Nikki Haley Reagan zone for a lot longer than the party would have stayed there naturally. And that probably had at least some positive policy effects from a libertarian perspective. I can see that Nick doesn't like this. So again, I'm trying to present a mixed a mixed portrait here. He did judges. That was good. I think his partisanship was quite bad. And I think his centralization had a bunch of effects, some of which were bad, some of which were good, but kept the Republican Party from going full MAGA and full Trump in policy terms as quickly as it might have in the absence of somebody like McConnell in the absence of centralization. Go Nick. I think that Mitch McConnell will go down as being one of the most powerful and negative influences on the Senate. He's in a John C. Calhoun class. He absolutely put partisanship and a single minded purpose of controlling things and controlling power, you know, front and center. And he was able to exert that over many parts of the federal government from a libertarian, a small L libertarian perspective. I would argue even counting the judge stuff, he did virtually nothing to increase and expand individual liberty and and and, you know, a libertarian world in his term in office. I am glad to see him go and I hope only that he's replaced by people like Rand Paul, who at least can make a gesture towards a more libertarian world where power is decentralized, not only at the local level and the state level and the individual level, but at the federal level. He was a plague on American politics. And I hope that his example is seen as the exact thing that we do not need from elected officials, particularly people controlling either the House or the Senate. Catherine, would you care to triangulate between your two colleagues? You know, I'm mostly with Nick on the so long sucker don't let the door hit you on the way out kind of approach. But I will in maybe the only time I will ever do this associate myself with Elizabeth Warren's remarks about Mitch McConnell, in which she said, I've disagreed with Mitch McConnell a whole lot more than I've agreed with him, but he mostly fought to keep the government functioning. And that I do think is true. And I think that that is the thing that we are not necessarily going to be able to take for granted going forward. And you know, I'm all for the government ceasing to function, of course, but I would like it to cease to function in an orderly and principled way and not in a chaotic and stupid way, which I fear instead of getting someone with more libertarian impulses in place of McConnell, we will get someone with more chaos monkey kind of energy and that that will be the thing we miss about him. It certainly will be the thing that Senator Elizabeth Warren misses about him, but maybe me too. The I'll just add without making grand proclamations that the about the only productive little season of national politics in recent memory for my point of view was between 2009 to 2014. Maybe 2011 is better to 2000 and late 13. Some were in there when the Tea Party kind of Yop barbaric Yop came to being and Republicans even when they didn't have a lot of power, but had at least some in the House of Representatives particularly were able to post the great bailout and and the stimulus afterwards were able to hold the line on spending, including defense spending, military spending for a couple of years there and all throughout that process up until it ended and it ended in November of 2014. The biggest Republican like object or to any of that type of behavior that led to those positive results was Mitch McConnell and as soon as the 2014 election came and Republicans now controlled the Senate and the House, Mitch McConnell first out of the gate saying no more shutdowns no more debt ceiling negotiations no more any of this kind of stuff and that's when spending started going through the roof. It predated Trump, but Trump boosted didn't care about it didn't run against it, but it croaked that politics, which I thought was a productive and interesting politics and once that politics was done that its champions in adherence including an especially Rand Paul who was running for president back then was now no longer the center of attention and in the middle of the most crucial debates in Congress it's a bad moment, Mitch McConnell was on the wrong side of that and the other thing I would say about him and this is plenty I can find plenty of self-described libertarians who vociferously disagreed what I'm going to say which is that his blocking of the Democrats Barack Obama's attempt to nominate Merrick Garland to Supreme Court and just rejecting it out of hand I think was on a process level regardless of the result, terrible for American politics. I think it says that we are going to put presidential elections as a functioning legislative branch body. We're going to put presidential political considerations first and just have a kind of will to power idea about how we go about our business and that was a bad precedent and it will be continued in the future forever, at least until there's a new politics in this country. The end to bring this back to what I said about Chevron Mitch McConnell played into that and in many ways made the made the made Congress sort of a body that is less competitive with the other branches and one that is less willing to do its do the basics of its job and legislative. All right, let's get into our end of podcast. What we have all been consuming in the cultural arena. Peter, I understand that you stood in a long line to the bathroom. Do you want to talk about it? No, I didn't. I don't want to talk about that at all. Okay, but you did go to the movie theater in which there were long lines of the bathroom from what I know. That's true. I saw Dune Part 2 twice actually once in IMAX and once not in IMAX and I'm going to see it again tomorrow with Catherine Meggy Ward because it's awesome. It is sounds like he's perfectly willing to consider that option. I took my wife and she enjoyed it and that was good enough. So I was really thinking about this movie in the context of its sci-fi lineage in a lot of ways. Dune the novel Frank Herbert's 1960s novel is a response and retort to Isaac Asimov's foundation series and then of course Star Wars borrows a lot of elements from Frank Herbert's Dune novel right the sandy planet of Tatooine the giant worm and the Empire Strikes Back right and George Lucas was absolutely using that as part of his kind of collage material along with like World War II fighter footage and Akira Kurosawa and all of that stuff. And then of course Star Wars gave way right has sort of become the like 50% 51% of pop culture over the last 40 years. I'm exaggerating a little bit for effect here but it's become this huge force and now the Dune movies that are out are kind of recommenting back on Star Wars. But if you go back to where all of this started with Foundation and Isaac Asimov what was foundation foundation was Isaac Asimov's science fiction retelling of Gibbons decline and fall of the Roman Empire and you think about how much mind space has been devoted to these science fiction stories over the past decades and it really turns out that the meme is true. Men cannot stop thinking about the Roman Empire. And so that's what I came away from Dune to with. All right. So you liked it. Yeah, it's really good. You know, from and freedom. I think we're going to need like a holiday to celebrate it. Dune teeth. Oh, Nick, what did you consume that you would like to talk about without getting into Gibbons? Well, I also want to point out that George Lucas stole from Dune the original or the 1984 David Lynch version, which featured Sting wearing a diaper at the end. Some of that shows up in Star Wars as well. And I will I'm forever Dune the David Lynch Dune, which is that but that's because I dislike the novel and everything that emanates from it, although I think Peter is absolutely right in his categorization and characterization of it. So I will talk. I had two things, but I'll limit it to one mat. Thank you. Yes. And that is Andrew Hickey's podcast, a history of rock music in 500 songs. He is up to almost up to episode 200. These are multi hour long kind of disquisitions about music going back to the late thirties up through, you know, he's up to various points in the early seventies with things. He just finished a four part arc that involves the birds and particularly Grand Parsons, which is probably a total of about eight hours. And this is like rock history if Dan Carlin of Hardcore History was doing it. These are phenomenal, weird, you know, meditations on how rock music, which is really pop music in the post war era came into being. Hickey is a strange British guy. He sounds like Alan Rickman on a tranquilizer. He is it is just a if you care at all about popular music and about how that intersects with all sorts of different creative, commercial, political and cultural happenings over the past 70 years. A history of rock music in 500 songs is unbeatable. It is truly amazing. And you know, I am the most the asset test of it is that I listen to episodes about songs and artists that I actively dislike and I come out seeing the world anew for the first time. It's really a triumph of the podcast form and I cannot recommend it enough. I think that the birds and Grand Parsons tell a story about the possibility, the technological, the cultural, the aesthetic possibilities of the late 60s that was going to fail in its inception. And so that particular for episode series is just an incredibly deep rendering of stuff. I know very well and I learned a ton on this and I think everybody would you know it regardless of whether you like the subject matter, you will be amazed that somebody pieced all of this together in a way that is a beautiful multi dimensional work of art. I highly, highly recommend a history of rock music in 500 songs by Andrew Hickey. I have had more people come up to me in the last two weeks and recommend that podcast that have probably recommended all podcasts in the history of the world up until that moment. Friends in LA who play music and have been in the industry one way or the other for 30 years will say the exact same thing that Nick just said of like, I know everything about X and I learned a whole bunch about X and I can't believe how right they got it and how interesting it was. So I can't wait to listen to it myself. Catherine and there is tons of it. So, you know, Catherine, what did you consider? I am going to re recommend something that Nick has recommended on this podcast in the past, maybe twice even. I'm doing this because I just read it and so it is fresh for me but also because maybe you like me blackout while Nick is talking at the end of the podcast and so you might have missed it and it would be a shame back of the line Catherine. You did. You did also blackout. You woke you woke me back up with the phrase Alan Rickman on tranquilizers. So I actually did. I did catch some of that this week. Julia. It is the retelling of George Orwell's 1984 by Sandra Newman. Oh, you guys, it's so good. It's just so good. Like speaking of like doing too good. It's doing too good, Peter. I haven't seen doing too yet. I'm sure I will enjoy it. But I love a retelling. I am I this is already a genre that I'm in for. I will, you know, retell me a Greek myth, retell me a fairy tale, retell me whatever. But because 1984 has attained this kind of mythological status, right, like all of us have it engraved in our brains at an early age. And so this is subject to that same that same power of the kind of like retelling of a myth, the retelling of a foundational story and and there is a twist, which I will not reveal. But it's it's fantastic. And if you, like me, are a lady, you might particularly enjoy it because one of the most powerful things about this about this retelling is that it it really captured for me the experience that I had, but wasn't able to articulate reading 1984, which is like, I'm not Winston Smith. I'm not I wouldn't be like this in this world. He is he is sort of too credulous and too uncynical in what I see as typically male ways. And Julia immediately busts through that and then does interesting things with it. So it's short. It's it felt short. Actually, I have no idea how long it was because I read it on Kindle, but it's it's really, really wonderful. Julia, a retelling of George Orwell's 1984. We get a retelling of this podcast from Catherine's perspective. Y'all just know I'm trying to do every day. I am going to be the odd man out in that my pick here is not something that I'm going to very enthusiastically recommend, but it has been recommended to me so many times over the years that I finally decided to watch it. The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonsai across the 8th dimension cult cult sci-fi movie from 1984 starring Peter Weller as a neurosurgeon slash like cold fusion scientist or something slash the musician slash jazz musician jazz is strong word and a bunch of other things besides and he gets involved in there's aliens and John Lithgow as a mad vindictive scientist and and so this is a cult movie long standing the nerds loved it the kind of people who would recommend Robert Heinlein books to a teenage Matt Welch love love love love love this movie and I'm here to tell you that if you watch it in 2024 good luck because it's crap. It's just not good. Wow. I went in there wanting to love it like I give me some Jeff Goldblum in his early phase and I'm you know you had me at John Lithgow Ellen Barkin who's totally sexiness fine. Wow. This is just like who's filmed for a dollar 75 in San Fernando and Southgate somewhere. It doesn't make any sense as a bunch of good one liners in the middle of a bunch of just stuff that it wow so bad. It just reminded me of how many things like if you were a part of alternative culture in the 1980s you had to put up with some really really crappy production values and I think a lot of people want to hold on to those things those those totems of it and and say that they're better than they actually were like Nick with David Lynch's Dune. Now I like David Lynch's Dune because it is terrible. Yes. It's it's the oral boros of nihilism or the Mobius strip of something or other. But anyways wait if the sandworm eats its own tail. Yes does it get high on its own supply of spice. Anyways it's it watches a cultural artifact maybe or if you're like me and they've all been telling you for 40 years that this one's really great and it's a damn shame they didn't make 75 of them Peter Weller is totally great in it and Peter Weller in general is always great as far as I'm concerned but I can only name two movies that he's been in but it's it's no good. He was in three Robocop films. Sorry what are three Robocop movies and he's in all of them though you only need to watch the first one. Watch the Rapture with him in Mimi Rogers the first Mrs. Tom Cruise. He's great. He's great as the voice of Batman in the Dark Night Returns adaptation the two parter that came out a couple years ago. Okay. See Matt if you want something that predates Buckaroo Banzai but is very funny in that same way watch George George Papard's Damn Nation Alley. Oh watch it. It's like the A team in a post apocalyptic world 10 years before the A team. I watched it three times in the same movie theater on the same day. It was playing in a double feature at the Paradise Theater two movies for 99 cents. I watched it with the no mobile here folks. Yeah the no mobile. So I was like Disney. I would peace out during the no mobile. I don't know what I would go do go punch a clown or something. But then I would come back and watch Damn Nation Alley Damn Nation Alley was so good. So good. Just cockroaches giant giant cockroaches have never been the same for me. God it's fantastic Damn Nation Alley. Watch that on a double feature with Death Race 2000 and you don't need anything else in life. You've already you've already won. All right. That's enough winning thinking of Catherine being mystified by people being wrong and stereotypically male ways. I think it would be good to do it as the second Damn Nation Alley is the second film in a short movie that starts festival that starts with breakfast at Tiffany's. Well that's interesting journey that George Park travels for breakfast at Tiffany's to Damn Nation Alley is like the voyage that the post apocalyptic world takes from a kind of fun and hip late 50s early 60s New York to a place where giant cockroaches are run in the show. That's all the murderer cockroaches that we have time for here on the Reason Roundtable podcast. Thank you for listening watching you know pelotonning people still peloton. I don't think so. But in case you were doing that thank you for your service listen to all our podcasts at reason dot com slash podcasts. If you like what we do as an organization please consider a tax deductible donation at reason dot com slash donate and Nick do you have anything to add about stuff that's happening in your world. Yeah and it should be up by the time this airs and if not shortly after go to reason dot com slash events on April 15th we're going to be doing a reason speak easy in New York City with Jonathan height. Talking about his new book the anxious generation so that's April 15. Are you going to place Robby Suave in the audience saying to say I dissent that critical it is just you know what bring your cell phone. That's all I'll say to the lady. Okay. Thanks again for listening. Catch you next week.