 Aaron Powell Welcome to Freethoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. Trevor Burrus Joining us today is Deirdre McCloskey. She's the Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communications at the University of Illinois, Chicago. And today we're talking about an essay she wrote for an upcoming volume edited by Ben Powell on prospects for libertarianism. The essay is called Manifesto for a New American Liberalism or How to be a Humane Libertarian. Welcome back to Freethoughts. Aaron Powell Yes. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. You begin the essay by talking about liberalism 1.0. What is that? Ben Powell Yes. Well, this is a coinage by Dan Klein, an economist friend of mine. And he's making the point and I'm making the point that we free countries were once liberal in my sense and in Dan's sense and Tuckville's sense and Adams's sense and so forth that we were free economies without much in the way of government intervention. And then in both England and the United States, especially the United States, the word liberal was so to speak taken over by what I call slow socialists. And they're my friends and I don't think they're evil people but for about 100 years the word is meant in the United States, larger and larger government. Aaron Powell What is slow socialism as opposed to fast? Ben Powell Well, fast socialism would be 1917 and communism or the horror of Venezuela these days. But I was once a Marxist and then I was a Keynesian and that's kind of slow socialism. One takes the view that the government is very nice and is very competent and so we need more of that and less economic freedom. Aaron Powell Is it slow socialism because it has no principled stopping point? Ben Powell It has no, that's a very good way to express it. I'm going to adopt that way of saying it. I'm going to steal it immediately because that's the point. There's no limit if the nanny state as it's often called thinks you should go to bed at eight o'clock then there's soon, well you know every day we get more news of this. In the state of Tennessee if you want to open a moving company, a furniture moving company, you have to get the permission of the existing moving companies, so you can imagine how that works out. Ben Powell Certificates of need. Aaron Powell Certificates if you want to braid hair you need a license from the government and this is crazy. Ben Powell What's wrong with, I mean fast socialism seems to have a bad track record, but what's wrong with slow socialism? I mean don't we need these kinds of rules if we're going to live together in a complex society where all of our actions impact each other. We've got to follow rules and we've got to have some way to use the government to make sure that that society works for everyone that it takes the shape that we want it to. Aaron Powell There you go. That's the standard argument and I used to use it when I was a kid and Bernie Sanders uses it and my friends on the left use it all the time that the more complicated the economy the more regulations we need and of course it's actually kind of the opposite. The more complicated the economy the more we need to rely on the immensely complicated plans of individuals and trust, not a blind trust but a certain trust in the market. If the market results in global warming and air pollution then there's a case for some intelligent piece of government intervention but in general we should let the market work. You know I came here in an Uber taxi and it's a cheaper and better service. It's being ferociously opposed by every taxi monopoly in the world. In Germany they've made it illegal but that's how the economy should work. People as the English say they have an expression having a go and allowing people to have a go is pretty, has worked out very well. Trevor Burrus I think that Aaron made up the way he said his counterargument was something he said society is shaped the way we want it or something like that. That seems to be an interesting, you know people say that, the government can make sure the society is shaped the way we want it and they kind of gloss over how kind of crazy part it is. Aaron Ross How hard it is to do. The key word here and I urge you all to watch it when it happens is the word designed. Designed to do such and such, it's a lawyer's word. It's not something that a person who actually understands society a little bit would use because design is very hard to undertake. Look, if you're engaged in a war for survival then design is really what you want. You want General Grant or General Lee for that matter to be focused on the one thing and then you kind of know what you need to do. For something as complicated and rich as a advancing economy, an economy in which the poor are getting much better off than they once were, design is so often doesn't work. Trevor Burrus The other one is we. Aaron Ross Well that's right, we because the only we we have is the government and this we-ness is a problem. We want to in turn the Japanese. We want to invade Iraq. We, we, we. Aaron Ross I think also in design in particular there's a loss of the sense of costs because I mean so design in design context like you're doing, you're designing a new product, you know every now and then they'll do these things like a new iPhone comes out and they'll tear it down, some tech site will tear it down and they'll add up the cost to the component. They'll be like this phone actually only cost X dollars to make but they're selling it for two or three X, you know where's all that extra cost and the cost is that the design process is so expensive and so wasteful, you know you try it, it doesn't work, you scrap it, you try it again. But we seem to think that design when government does it doesn't work that way. The design is just like this abstract idea and then you apply it and that's right. And the key sort of ideology behind the left and behind this slow socialism is that the economy is easy. You could come up with that all the time. People will say well, you know, we'll subsidize solar panels, that'll be easy. Everyone knows that solar panels made in the United States are the ones we want and then you lose half a billion dollars which is what the cylindra fiasco is all about. I'm not making out that the Obama administration was terrible at this but it is that they think and this is a very deep presumption especially by people who have never been on a farm or who have never been, weren't raised in a small grocery store where they worked. I find that my students who are raised in small businesses like small farms, they understand economics, they understand there's no free lunch, they understand the price system whereas if you grow up like I did as the child of an academic, actually a professor, you don't know what your father does, you know that your mother is a central planner in the household and you think gee, let's make this national. Why not central planning for 324 million people in the United States? It definitely seems that but that's a really good way of describing Paul Krugman for example that the economy is easy. Now, what about, we're talking about the socialists on the left, the so-called liberals. What about conservatives? Are they an issue? My, yeah, they're sure is. My view is that conservatives, we as free market advocates, as Catoites, we ought to be trying to occupy the middle. This thing that just happened in France with Macron, by the way, I was at a dinner party in Paris a couple of months ago before the election and I pointed out to the assembled group that Macron in ancient Greek means big deal. And it is a big deal that he's occupied the middle with real liberalism, that is, freedom for people so far as social matters are concerned, transgendered people or people from Morocco and so forth on the one hand and fiscal responsibility on the other. So taking the best of the Democrats and the Republicans, so to speak, in France, the conservatives and the socialists. So I think there's a middle ground that free market advocates should be assuming. We are, we should be taking it. We are the radicals, as we once were, of course. We are the ones who can stand between these two. But you know, look, you know someone's a conservative. If unlike me, they think that the 1960s was the beginning of the rut. If they say, oh, the women came out of the kitchen and started messing around with flying airplanes and so on and those damn blacks or darn blacks or everyone to express it, they started to get uppity and these queers, they got out of the closet and these colonial people, once they had it all well organized in the British and French and empires and now they've gotten a right, oh, I hate it, I hate it. And you know, a progressive in a deep sense is someone who believes the 1960s were the great, was the beginning of the modern era of freedom, of liberation. We have to get across somehow to our audience and beyond our audience that institutions like Cato and the Charles Koch Institute and others, their view of the 60s is precisely that it was the beginning of true freedom. But there's a view, the progressives, and they look back on the 60s and then they look at the great society laws. That's the other side, that's the slow socialist coming, you're right about that. So what do we say, so what they say is like, look, the two things go hand in hand, that we stopped oppressing people, we stopped marginalizing people and we brought them into society but that part of what that means is then taking care of each other, being part of the society. So what are we in that radical center? I'm an Abrahamic socialist. Jewish. You mean Abraham, like the Abraham. The Abraham, Abraham, the named Abram, Christian, Muslim, I'm actually an Anglican, an Episcopalian and I believe that we do have a responsibility to the poor. But our responsibility is to give them opportunity to make sure they're not serfs of the public schools that they're, you know, look, I come from Chicago and the south and west sides of Chicago are really in terrible shape. That doesn't mean there's not a vital and large black middle class but there's also not so vital and very poor black underclass. The south and west sides of Chicago ought to be hives of industrial activity. They were in the 19th and early 20th century. There was no problem getting a job in the 1920s in Chicago but we put obstacles in the way. We have interventions in the wage bargain, so-called protections of various kinds such as the minimum wage that make it impossible for a person who's not worth $12 an hour, 15 or 10 or whatever it is, to be hired by anyone. And then we have zoning, which makes it impossible to open a factory on the west side of Chicago as you said, and if you didn't think that was enough to stop enterprise, we have this war on drugs, which turns the south and west parts of the south and west side into free fire zones. And this is very bad for the poor. Unfortunately, lots of these things are outgrowths of this regulatory impulse, longstanding. As you say, it starts with American progressivism 100 years ago and then ramped up in the 30s and then especially as you pointed out in the great society programs of the 60s. And we ought to step back. We ought to have, you could call them by various names. We ought to have enterprise zones, for example. There's a new word that is being used a lot and it makes me cringe whenever I see a use. And since it's liberalism and now we're neoliberalism, and I feel like anytime anyone uses that word, they're derogatory. They're saying the same thing. It's a term of contempt. I was at a small conference at my university at UIC with my colleagues. I'm a professor of English and history as well as economics. They were mainly from English and history and they had brought this markzoid from New York, a smart guy who talked about economic history in the United States since the war. Some of his points were good and some of them weren't so good. And I stood up and very politely said, you know, maybe you should change such in your argument and I'm an economic historian. I'm not an unknown figure in this and he said, here's what happened. He said, I see that you're a neoliberal and sat down. That was his reply. And what I found very distressing is my colleagues didn't say, well, you know, come on, Deirdre McCluskey might have a little standing to talk a tiny bit about economic history, maybe a better actually answer, but they didn't do it. You'd mentioned that you were at one time a Marxist and moved through this progression. I was kind of a Joan Baez Marxist. So you're just in it for the folk music. A tiny bit simple-minded. How did you change your mind? Well, very slowly. I mean, I was at Harvard College, you know, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and I in, say, 1960, we're about the same age. We all had the same opinion. Capitalism is the problem. Let's have a revolution. The problem is that those two guys haven't changed their opinion. I've changed my opinion on lots of things, including my gender. But I then became a Keynesian because that was what was an offer in the economics department. I wanted to help the poor, so I became an economist. And then I became a kind of social engineer. We were going to come down to Washington. We was at Harvard in graduate school and we were going to fine-tune the economy and own. And then I started to apply economics to economic history and I realized that these tools, these basic tools of economics, supply and demand curves and so on, make a lot of sense and are useful for history. Then I got a job at the University of Chicago in 1968, I taught there for 12 years. And then in 1974, a Robert Nozick's book, Anarchy, State and Utopia sort of solidified it for me. And then I continued to drift somewhat more slowly in the next couple, three, four decades. But now I describe myself, as I said, as a Christian real liberal and as a kind of Austrian economist much more than I was. And I speak in terms of humanomics. I'm trying to combine the humanities and the social sciences in a serious way. So my heroine is Mae West, who was brilliant. She was a comedian in the movies in the 30s. And she said, I was snow white, but I drifted. Come up and see me sometime. I am in favor of the institution of marriage, but I'm not ready for an institution. So do you think would you drift all the way to anarchism? No. In fact, my first politics was anarchism, oddly enough. At the Carnegie Library in Wakefield, Massachusetts, built by Andrew Carnegie, I found Prince Kropotkin's book Mutual Aid when I was about 15 years old. And it blew me away. He was a prince of the Russian Empire and an anarchist, unfortunately a left anarchist. So he believed the problem was the state. I still agree with him there. And then the other problem is ownership and capitalism. And that's where I parted slowly. So no, I have a nostalgic affection for anarchists. When we talk about taking away some of these controls that the government has put on us over the last century ... Yeah, so great protection. It seems to me that aside from people's objections, our food is going to be polluted, our air is going to be polluted, people are going to be ... Yeah. And that is really important now for the conversation is inequality. Keeps changing what is important. True, true. Now it's inequality. And now it's inequality in the corporations, the centers. The international corporations. Yeah. What do we say about inequality? Well, about the international corporations, we say, he's so dear to you as a slow socialist want to make a corporation called the federal government larger and stronger and completely monopolistic. That's one way to answer them. These are not knockdown arguments. The fact is that real inequality has fallen. In the first place worldwide, it's fallen with the economic growth in China and India and some other places. But even inside countries like the United States, in substance, it's declined. Now it's true that Lillian Baitankar, the heiress to the Loreal fortune, the richest woman in the world, has a bunch of stupid diamonds in her jewelry box that she never wears and chateau she doesn't ever visit and yachts. She doesn't go on because she gets seasick and so forth. She's got all these toys. But basic goods are much more equally spread than they were in say, 1800 or 1900 or 1960. Things have improved for poor people. When I was young, poor people, there were actually people starving in the United States. There were actually people grossly malnourished. Now everyone, including me, are overnourished. There was no air conditioning. Take that as a simple case in point. There were horrible heat waves in Chicago and Washington and so forth that resulted in hundreds and hundreds of deaths. And then air conditioning first came to movie theaters and my parents got an air conditioner in their bedroom in 1956. And now it's commonplace. It's interesting there's also no rich man's air conditioning. There's no rich man's air conditioning. There's no rich man's air conditioning. There's also no rich man's iPhone, which I think is super interesting. Exactly. I don't want to say everyone because look, there are poor people. I supported two homeless people in my home for four and a half years, in my own home. I still give, I still ties to my Episcopal church and they're a very efficient charity and they do very good work. So I'm, as I told you, I'm a bleeding art libertarian. I want the poor to be better off. As far as this inequality thing is concerned, aside from envy about the diamonds, which is silly, envy is insatiable, what's the real problem here and there's not a problem. There's not a serious problem. The poor are much better off than they were 50 years ago or 30 years ago. I want that to continue and the main way for it to continue is to have economic growth. When people complain about inequality and systemic inequality and growing inequality, I really get the sense that it's not so much that there's rich people with baubles that poor people don't have, but that they almost adopt like a, take a line out of Michael Walter's spheres of justice and say that the issue is not that there's, within the sphere of money, some people have a lot more than others, but that having a lot more bleeds into other spheres and so what it turns into is disparities in power, that the rich can get their way and the poor can't or the rich can exploit the poor and the poor can't do anything about it and the wealth disparity is both a cause and a symptom of that, but it's not itself the real problem. Yeah, of all the communitarians, Mike is the most deep. Sandell, for example, at Harvard is not deep. He's an inch deep and yes, there is a danger there, but as Mike has said in print, he was asked, is capitalism corrupting? There is a book that asks that, or the market, is the market corrupting? And he said, yeah, it is. And then he said, and so are all the other alternatives, the socialist or the populist, let's say, who makes crazy promises. I was talking to the Uber driver about it this week as I came over this morning, that's corruption too, and then it ends up that his family is better off, as in the case of Trump. So, and I think that's a very wise remark. And from an Abrahamic and Christian perspective, I have no trouble with that. Original sin, dears. People, power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. So, we need to make sure that market economy, we need to help market economies to be competitive and to free entry, and you have to break apart monopolies like the doctors, the plumbers, I mean the AMA, American Medical Association. And so, and when have the rich not been the rulers? Gabriel Colco, a new left historian back in the 60s, wrote about the ICC, the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was to leash the railways and prevent them from exploiting the farmers, and in fact, they did the opposite. They got captured as Colco documented very quickly by the railways. Instead of reducing fares, they raised fares, and then they got to regulate trucking as well. So it was, and we at the University of Chicago, the Economics Department, were delighted at Colco. So here's a man of the left, we're supposed to be on the right, I don't think we really were, but supposed to be on the right, and he and we were agreeing, namely that, well, we called it the golden rule, those who have the gold rule. We hated it as much as Colco and the new left it. Does liberalism, if it's working well in the sense of growing betterment, as you know, trade-tested betterment, does it contain the seeds of its own demise in the sense by producing enough wealth that people start wanting to take it, because it seems, if everyone's toiling in the field, A, you're not taking things for granted, and I think people start to take wealth for granted in an affluent liberal society, and B, you understand that everyone else is also working in the field. But then when you start seeing, oh, there's a hedge fund manager who does an important field. He's working in the field, but he's behind the hedge. He's behind the hedge. Too shay. And you're just, well, I don't see what he's doing now. He's managing that hedge, and he's making a lot of money, and so now we can just take away. Yeah, that's right. But this, as you know, is an old theme in the study of modern society. Drake said that capitalism would raise its own grave diggers, and lots of people have made this point. They did. Schumpeter did, and what's his name, the sociologist did, and I just don't think it's inevitable. I think we can rage, rage against the dying of the light, but it is a problem. It's this problem that we grow up in socialist societies. They're called families. And so every generation has to be taught, especially now, as you said, we grow up in families that are very far from production. If you grow up in a farm or in a small business, you kind of understand there's no such thing as a free lunch. You got to work to get more medical care. You can't just say, you can't just raise the minimum wage to $100 an hour and we'll all be better off. And you know what prices do. You kind of understand the economy. I find my students who come from farms and small businesses catch on to economics much faster than I did. And there are a lot more eyes in the economy now than there were when I graduated from college in 64 and a ton more than there were in 1900. One-third of the American population was on farms in 1900. So people who just sort of don't understand their academics or their lawyer fathers or things like that. That's right. And it's not just the pointy-head intellectuals. If your dad and mom goes off to the office and you have no idea what it means or even if you go visit the office. It's nice that you take your daughter to work day. You still don't understand what mom is doing. She's talking on the phone a lot and you don't know what that's all about and what it has to do with the meat that comes to you in a nice cellophane package in the store and you think that's where meat comes from. Where does meat come from? It comes from the supermarket. On the question of poor and the role of government in their lives. So on the left they say we need to effectively financially help the poor because- Yeah. And I'm actually in favor of that in some circumstances, a hand up, a handout in the right of circumstance. You write in the essay that what we really need to do is kind of get out of their way. Yeah. Just trust them to much more know what's right for them. Yeah. So on the... I mean, this is an argument that just traditionally made more on the right is that do the poor know what's best for them? I mean, don't they... They're people, classes of people, individuals who really do need their lives guided by someone who knows better. And I'm thinking, I mean, in part, like so we saw the 2016 election to some extent was a whole bunch of people who were not the elites fed up with the elites telling them what to do or telling them what they couldn't do. And so lashing out and saying, no, we know what's best, but then there are things that they picked as the we know what's best would be catastrophic not just for the elites but for themselves. And so is there... I mean, do we have... Can we kind of trust them to run their own lives? Well, you know, that's the con... As you said, that's the conservative line. It's also the left wing line. And we people from Cato and so forth, we think that there's a third possibility that they are not... We don't believe in compulsion. We don't believe in violence. We're in favor of persuasion, of sweet talk, as I call it. And we believe that people should be left alone on the whole. You know, so it was said that these people can't take care of themselves about women, about blacks, about colonial people. In Holland, where I've lived for a number of years, they used to say at the height of the Dutch empire, mainly what's now Indonesia, they said this would be around 1900. The standard line was, well, we're no longer extracting tremendous amounts from Indonesia, although in some ways they still were. We're their guardians. And then you'd say, well, how long is that going to go on? Oh, about 200 years, said the Dutch. The well-meaning Dutch, the left, at least of the kind of imperialists. You'd pollute it this way. I just think this business of people not taking care of themselves is not good. The Protestant Reformation was mainly significant for the making of the modern world, not the way Max Weber said it was by changing people's psychology and making them more afraid they weren't going to get into heaven or something. But it's mainly church governance. Instead of the priests saying, we'll take care of this, you don't need to bother. It was the priesthood of all believers, especially on the radical side of the Reformation. You write about some, you say it a little obliquely, sometimes directly, but you say sometimes libertarians are taking bad rhetorical tactics. And I think you kind of say that sometimes they actually champion selfishness and sort that is not the Iran problem. The Iran problem. That's how I think of it. So what sort of libertarians are you finding out there and what are the kind of mistakes are they making out of that? They got to stop saying, screw you, I'm rich. That's what the country club says. And that's just not an intelligent way of talking because we don't, at least I, and I think it's true of both of you. We don't want to disdain the poor. We want them to do well and we want them to flourish in a free society. The kind of society that can be, as Langston used the great African-American poet said, in America, that can be and should be. And it's a good, sensible, practical vision. It can be done. And if we keep sneering at the poor this way, that's not a good move. And what we should be saying, what Cato should have emblazoned on its front or the front of the building is we want to help the poor. Every speech we give, every article we write, we think that this regulation or that and the federal government is a bad thing because it hurts the poor. And that should be our focus. And then we can take the middle. As Emmanuel Macron, we hope, we pray in, of all places, France. Henry Kissinger once joked, France is the only successful communist country because it's been centralized for four centuries. They've been working on it. You also write that you think that in our rules for rhetoric, do you think that we else, we need to make sure that we talk about criticized conservatives just as much as we do the last? Yeah. What liberals, real liberals or bleeding heart liberals or whatever wanted should be doing is getting away from being placed on this one spectrum on the right. Because when I announced that I'm a libertarian, people say, oh, you're a conservative. I say, no, I'm not. I say, Friedrich Hayek's essay at the end of the Constitution of Liberty is a nice, quite good essay. Why I am not a conservative. And we ought to keep on, as he points out, it's quite interesting. He's got a good way of formulating it. He says that conservatives have great faith in evolution up to the present. That all the things that evolved, all the English constitution, everything else, it evolved, that's a good thing. But they're terrified of future evolution. And that's where Hayek disagrees with them. What seems to me sometimes conservatives are socially planning, they're socially planning where the left is economically planning and if they're trying to, for example... That's right. Free on the social side, free on the economic side, we're the party of freedom. We're the real radicals and we can harness the imagination of the young in a way that these old farts, if you'll pardon the expression, can't. I once did a debate on marriage for gay marriage against a conservative and I just started talking about divorce law, which conservatives have been playing with forever, resisting no-fault divorce and things like this. And really that's just, if you're fixing the rules of divorce, you're just price fixing the exit cost of marriage in a social planning problem that's just as a version of Hayekian principles and other sort of price fixing. I express it that the conservatives want to get into our bedrooms and the slow socialists want to get into our businesses and I think they should lay off both of them. Are we, I guess so far as direction goes, headed in the right way? I was struck, I think yesterday that I saw a survey of voters in 2016 came out that put them on the standard economic social liberty quadrant chart and then had dots for where they voted, who they voted Trump or Hillary and then yellow for other and there weren't a lot of yellows. And what was really striking was first the unsurprising thing that in the maximal freedom on both there were almost no voters but that the kind of standard line that the conservatives are for economic freedom but not for social freedom and then the progressives are for social freedom but not for economic freedom was not borne out by this data at all that in fact what you saw was that the conservatives were, so the Trump voters or the red dots were clustered yes, very low on social freedom but also were very much like they were basically in the middle on economic freedom like they've been, they leaned against economic freedom then the liberals were in a similar, sorry the progressives were in a similar boat that they didn't care about economic freedom but their social freedom wasn't terribly high either and that seems to be anecdotally with the rise of the waves of protests on campus and the economic populism on the right are we drifting because it used to be like well at least each group was kind of half good but now it feels like the groups are, there's no good. That's an interesting observation and it sounds kind of a chords with what I can see. Well Brian Capic calls it the median voter is a national socialist. Yeah, yeah the median voter is a national socialist. There were three ideas that the intellectuals or I call them the clericy have had in the last three centuries. One was very good it was the 18th century idea from Voltaire to Mary Wollstonecraft of liberalism of freedom. The other two were nationalism and socialism. They were invented in the 19th century and they were terrible ideas and then if you like them you ought to try national socialism which as Brian says is- Double your pleasure double your fun yeah. That's right double your pleasure double your fun or quadruple your fun. So well I don't know I think that the demonstration effect of successful liberalism say in India or China so far as economic freedom is concerned is pretty powerful. You know we can screw it up. We did in August of 1914 and the European Civil War began which ended kind of in 1989. So that's why we need to have programs like this. We need to talk up economic freedom and social freedom and try to get people to move off of this I agree this kind of fascist consensus that they have. So let's you know I'm optimistic about how fast culture can change how fast political culture can change. The United States in the First World War was an isolationist power didn't think it was a good idea to intervene and then within months with a very skillful guy in charge of propaganda for the government it switched and we were forbidding people to give sermons in German. Or to teach their kids German or to speak German in public and so these things move very fast and gay rights for example didn't move at all and then whoof changed. And so if we keep at it I mean we the kind of elite clericy can only do a little bit. As they say in country music the rubber meets the road with the popular culture with the movies with country music indeed with rock music and you know it's not so much the New York Times which foretells the future but the New York Post and we've got to get those people going in the right direction. And I've seen a couple of movies in the last couple of years which courage me Joy about Joy Mangano the inventor of the self squeezing mop which was a pro capitalism movie and the other one was this one about about McDonald's with the founder. Yeah the founder is an excellent movie. I didn't quite see the end of it so I'm not sure if it was entirely pro-capitalist but it was a lot better than the Wall Street movies so we've got to keep at it. It seems that we also can be optimistic about things like Uber, Airbnb which are because I always say that there's a big gap between our physician papers, our op-eds, listening to free thoughts and because a lot of people just don't consume any of that but if they ride Uber and they suddenly demand they say don't take away my Uber don't do a taxi cab cartel there's a taxi cab cartel they just learned you know they didn't even know before and they want an Uber now. And it's by the way it's spreading all these lies about Uber it's clear that that's the source speaking of the sort of the deep state of the taxi monopolies but I heard a very interesting talk by an entrepreneur in the computer industry in fact I have a friend in the computer industry too and he says the same thing that computer stuff is ahead of the regulators. Now power generation medicine is not ahead of the regulators it's the the regulators have been sitting on that like some giant toad for a century but the computer people are so creative and are making up stuff every day new apps new this new that and Washington hasn't quite figured out or Springfield for that matter hasn't figured out how to stop it and and so maybe there's some optimism on that side of the economy the problem is in these traditional industries the the regulation is so heavy that's my only positive hope for the for the Trump administration if it lasts very long is that it will deregulate now we'll see if he can actually do anything at all. Yeah it sounds like you're making our colleague Jason Kuznicki published a book about the history of the concept of the state and he makes what I think he refers to in the gaps argument riffing off of the God in the gaps argument that you know the state is basically when we don't know how to solve something we just kind of fill that in with that was dangerous in theology sure I have something he so it sounds like dangerous in politics to yes so he agrees yes so but but so what we're saying with the the technology I think then is that the one of the values that it has is it kind of shrinks those gaps yeah those those areas that we didn't think like you can't do this thing without the government because the technology moves so fast because you can deploy an app so quickly whereas you can't deploy like a new power system or a new cancer drug you can people can latch on and can see it in their own lives I just wrote an essay available on my website that about economics I'm going to be presenting it to the history of economic society in a couple of days in Toronto and I point out that since 1848 the way the economists academic economists have made their reputation is by pointing out imperfections one after another ignorant consumers who don't know that they shouldn't consume alcohol say or monopolies in the 1890s that was the big talk externalities and economies of scale in the 1920s the tendency to endless unemployment in the 30s bad investment in the 40s informationally symmetries my friend my friend George Akerlof got a Nobel Prize for that and Joe Joe Joe Stiglitz is also a nice guy but he's a fool in so many ways and I point out in this essay that none of these have been shown to be important yet at the same time that economists have been listening I found I chronicled hear this a hundred and five imperfections just go to Samuelson's book for every year I was educated in Samuelson's book by the way he was my mother's longtime mixed doubles partner in case you care that is the best piece of random trivia I've ever heard and and that's right appalling the book spends you know five minutes on supply and demand and they spends the rest of the book talking about how it doesn't work monopolistic competition I was a student of Edward Chamberlain at Harvard in the in the 60s and he knows his thing and on and on and now inequality the alleged inequality which I don't think is correct I did a long review of Piketty's book not but meanwhile this terribly imperfect capitalism exchange tested betterment increased the real income of the average worker by a factor of thirty three that's three thousand percent since eighteen hundred in most countries a little since the United States in eighteen hundred was already one of the richest countries in the world a little less for us but say factor of twenty two thousand percent what with this imperfection and that's the problem that's the scientific problem they haven't when they propose when when a physicist proposes an amendment of Newton's laws he namely Einstein tells how big it's gonna be says look for things moving at close to the speed of light such and such will be true and light itself will bend around the sun to this extent an economist never do it they say oh what was me there's monopoly we've got to bring the government in what was me there's informational asymmetry you got to bring the government in what was me people don't have enough education we've got to bring the government and that's funny always the solution is to bring the government and to fill the gaps thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and Evan banks to learn more visit us at www.libertarianism.org