 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato, an editor of libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. On today's episode of Free Thoughts, Trevor and I are going to talk about a lecture that Trevor gives to the interns called the Primitivism of Politics. So when you say that, Trevor, when you say politics is primitive, I guess there's the two words that we have to figure out what they mean, politics and primitivism. And so let's start with politics. What do you mean by that? Well, generally speaking, we've talked about this before. It's good enough to talk about democratic politics, voting of some sort. There's a lot of ways that people have power over other people and that's one sort of theory of the state. Kings don't really experience politics in the way we're talking about. Like political intrigue on the court and things like that. But generally speaking, these are power structures that are devised because some sort of voluntary system is presumably not working. And the one that we've been using in a Western world has mostly been using as some sort of voting democratic system wherein groups of people get together. And this, of course, also includes running for office, political ads. I think everything about all the accoutrements of politics, I think, is also pretty primitive in that way. But just in terms of politics, everything around it, all the trappings of democratic voting and trying to obtain power over other people. And so this is primitive? Yeah, it is primitive, I think, in a very way that is not adequately realized. Oddly though, I think it is realized in a lot of just sort of colloquialisms where we talk about how Washington is so bad or we talk about how all is fair in politics. There's a lot of discussion about just, you know, late night host Jay Leno saying, you know, politics, we expect them to be charlatans. We expect people to stab other people in the back. So it's often there's this veneer that it's primitive. Please let a war language. Yeah, the war room of elections and there's a huge amount of this language around it, which is always fascinating to me because if you took the temperature of the way people think of Washington and late night hosts describe Washington and just people in a bar talk about Washington or their local state capital, they think that everyone's kind of a crook and that the whole system is kind of BS in a way. And it's very, very underhanded and primitive in its own way. I often describe it as a DC at least, as a Hobbesian world in suits. I mean, it's a war of all against all, just a little bit more dapper. By Hobbesian, you mean, so Thomas Hobbes had the idea of this social contract. So before we had government, before we got together and formed this state, we kind of were living all in this primitive state of nature and in his view, that was this war of all against all. It was just every man for himself, everyone kind of stabbing each other and stealing from each other and slaughtering each other and taking as much as they could. And then we, according to Hobbes, enact the state, give it power over us and that prevents this awful state of nature, this life that he called solitary, poor, nasty British and short. That is true. And I must, of course, concede that this doesn't come to blows or violence as much. And that is part of the virtues of politics in the sense of it's a system by which people can get together and resolve a dispute of some sort and not have to come to blows over it. I mean, it's often been remarked that when the first, when the Adams-Cheferson Aaron Burr election happened in the 1800 right at the beginning of the American experiment, it was a very new thing in the world for such a peaceful transfer of power to occur in such a divisive election where suddenly the loser of the election just goes away. He doesn't field an army. So it's less primitive than that, but it's more primitive than people would like to generally believe, I think. It's not necessarily the apotheosis of civilization to take everyone, put them into tribes, tell them to go to Washington, D.C. and then fight for their way of life against each other. And so does this primitivism then explain a lot of what we think is wrong with D.C. or the negative views so many people have of D.C.? Yeah. I think this is the critique, the libertarian explanation or at least my libertarian explanation for the problems in D.C. that we hear a lot about. We hear a lot about how it's never been this bad before. It's so partisan, you know, the do nothing Congress, it doesn't get anything that hasn't done less than any Congress ever. The enmity and hatred, the fact that we have some people who watch Fox News, listen to conservative talk radio, re-conservative blogs and never ever talk to people on the left and then we have people on the left who watch MSNBC. So these very, very divisive groups and they say, well, how can we ever get anything done together? And no one's asking the right question, which is why do we have to do all these things together? Is it not possibly a factor that as politics matters more, it becomes more primitive? This is an expected result of politicizing more and more core essential fundamental values that are more divided, we're more divided on such as healthcare, education, religious values to some extent. All these type of policies that are very, very tied to how we think of ourselves as people and that therefore every single time we're supposed to put it in Washington D.C. and expect everyone to behave nicely to each other, well, I don't expect anyone to really, I shouldn't expect anyone to behave nicely to me if I'm out there voting to try and change their healthcare plan according to my value system or change their child's education plan according to my value system. I don't know why people expect it to be civilized and I think that this is going to get worse unless we start to realize that this is baked into the system, this is baked into the entire expansion of government that we've been experiencing. But how is this different than, how do we distinguish this from, I guess, what we call the rule of law? So you say like, we shouldn't politicize things and kind of force our values upon other people, but there are values that we think are absolutely legitimate to force on other people like don't commit murder, don't steal, don't rape and of course most of us don't think that like the opposing values in these political questions are as bad as murder and rape, but we still think they're often bad. Like it's not, you know, it's not that this is, yeah, these other people may value, you know, not having, say, free government provided healthcare, but the person who's in favor of government provided healthcare says that's not, these aren't opposing values, these people are like flat out wrong, you know, and so I am, I don't need to like make my life worse and make the lives of everyone else worse simply so that we can kind of respect these wrong-headed views or, I mean, the same argument works in all sorts of things and the people who are opposed to socialized medicine make the same sort of arguments, but it's never like I want to force my values, it's the facts say this is what we need to do and these people simply just aren't paying attention to the facts. I mean, that's definitely one interpretation of it and I think the response to that situation is to have a realistic assessment of how much you can expect other people to agree with you on these things. This is sort of the unacknowledged, the unacknowledged lessons of tolerance that we started learning, especially after Protestantism came in and we had the Reformation and then things like the Thirty Years' War, which were a bunch of people realizing that they couldn't live together without violence or if they were trying to impose each other's views on each other. What you do when you realize that you're not going to be able to impose views on other people just realistically, not that you won't be able to convince them. They might be told they're wrong, but you're not going to be able to convince them is you step back. That's what I think civilized people do. If it's within the realm of acceptability, so religion's a very good example. That's what happened after the Thirty Years' War. That's why religious tolerance was so huge in the American founding and in the Enlightenment period was because a bunch of people started to understand that although they might be 100% positive that the Catholics were wrong or the Protestants were wrong or whoever was wrong, they were not going to convince them without violence. I think that the civilized thing is to sit around and say the problem is these people who have totally wrongheaded views about education, global warming, whatever, but I'm not going to be able to convince them without an incredible amount of force and incredible amount of control and even then probably not. We need to diminish the amount of control we try and take over their lives. We need to accept the plurality of people as pretty much a given and also revel in it. Also, enjoy it. Enjoy the fact that your neighbor doesn't have the same views as you, which means they'll bring different dishes to the potluck dinner on the Sunday football game. Those are good things too, but don't try and take over their lives and make them live the way you think they should be living. So you have several criteria you list for what makes a given set of behaviors primitive and then we can then see how those apply to the way that politics is conducted in this country. So the first one is violence, is a characteristic of primitive behavior. But like you said, we don't really go around. We don't go around clubbing each other on the heads. We don't go around murdering each other. Even our most staunch ideological opponents, we generally don't beat them up. So where's the violence in all of this? Well, libertarians often point out there is a violence at least at the back end of the state. You may not see it initially, but resist it long enough and you'll find it at some point. It'll either be someone putting handcuffs on you and putting you in a cage or other types of, that's the most common form of violence, but there's other types too. There's definitely violence at the end of this and that's what you have to do when it's not voluntary. And there's a few things, there are a few options available to you if you meet someone who you fail to convince about the correctness of your views through rational, peaceful discourse. So it's an implied violence present in the acts of politics, so if we use politics, you and I get together and use politics to impose view X upon everyone, then there's not an immediate violence in that, but there's this implied violence in the sense that now everyone better do X and anyone who doesn't, well then the violence is going to show up. Yeah, it's definitely there and it's absolutely essential to the system, otherwise it wouldn't be voluntary or it would be voluntary. I mean, it's essential for the system to work, which I'm putting in square quotes there. I mean, what really is happening more than violence though is of course a sense of legitimacy. I mean, when you have an election that's lost, we don't use violence to enforce this on the other people who lost the election. They go along with the results, which is one reason why it's more peaceful, but it starts to get a little bit more divided when those values become more core to our view of ourselves as human beings, but it is the reason why politics is a more civilized way, I think, at some basic level of deciding things than pure fisticuffs. If the two people can, if the loser agrees to abide by the result, I mean that's a lot of times the only thing we're doing in dispute resolution. So it's a more civilized way of engaging in primitive behavior. Yes, it's something we need to realize it for what it actually is, but as a general rule for dispute resolution, whether it's a trial, whether it's doing rock, paper, and scissors to figure out who needs to go get the trash cans, the reason you use that is you say, is you use some sort of system that's seen as fair and then whoever loses it abides by the result. Politics doesn't really have the right of exit though, which is very essential to having those systems work better, I think, which is to be able to leave in a realistic fashion and when you lose the election, be like, all right, well I don't want to have this power over me of the election I lost. So before we then move on to some of the other criteria of primitivism, let me ask just see if I can maybe clarify or see if I understand how you're using the word primitive. So it sounds like you're saying to some extent like primitive behavior is going to be necessary in some ways because we're always gonna need, if we're gonna live together in large groups, there's going to have to be, you know, we're gonna have to force our views on each other in at least some respects, like enforcing like just laws or whatever is going to demand some degree of violence, which is a primitive sort of behavior, but are you using then perimeter as kind of like to mean not as good as we could be, like not living up to how we ought to live or what we're capable of living up to, so in the sense of the example that I like to use when talking about this is, you know, when trying to assess whether behaviors are virtuous or vicious, the terms that can be used, is to think of Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers. And to imagine like, is this something that Mr. Rogers would do, you know? W-W-M-R-D, yeah. Yeah, and you know, and so once we, if we understand what politics is, the politics is using violence to force our will upon others, you know, is that something, is that the kind of behavior that a guy like Mr. Rogers would do? So I think this is a good way of looking at this from a different angle. There's another way of thinking about this, going back to a book written in the 19th century by a guy named Henry Sumner, Maine, who called ancient law. And in that book, he wrote a line, which I'm gonna paraphrase generally, but it was the movement of societies from primitive to modern has been the movement of status to contract. And what he meant by that was that in a primitive society, it's a status-based society, meaning it really matters who you are, who you know, where you are in the caste system of the society. Do you know the chief? Are you able to talk to him personally? Are you one of the people who gets to talk to him personally? All those things to determine what you're able to get out of life. And a more advanced society is one wherein contract is used rather than status, which means that you're only concerned about whether or not the person is a person, a competent person, a person who's of age, but after that, that's all you need to be able to make your way in the world, and it evens the playing field. What I think is the case is that primitivism makes us less than we could be because we've forgotten some of the basic rules of governance in the Enlightenment tradition. We had a few episodes ago with Jason Kuznicki where we talked about historicism and the idea that history has a progress to it, a wig view of history, and I think often people think that that means that the progress occurs sort of concurrent with government. Government gets bigger, we get centralized more things, we have more of a Star Trek type of universe, and that's where the future should be. I disagree that that's the kind of progress we're looking at. I think that we forgot that in a pluralistic, highly diverse society, minimal government allows us to be diverse and to work on the things politically that we share together, and that the more you try to centralize government, the less you're able to hold together a diverse, open society, and then you start going downhill. You start becoming more primitive because your society is diverse and everyone has different aims and different values, and now you're putting it more and more into a centralized political framework, and it starts going downhill, so then what I would call it is from status to contract to status. So a minimal government has virtues, it has absolute virtues for the weight for a diverse, open society where trading is encouraged, where community is encouraged, we're having diverse people that you can be friends with that you can eat with, as long as they're not controlling your life. Your ability to have a diverse society is definitely limited when everyone is trying to control each other's lives, and so yes, we're not as good as we could be in terms of the possibilities of a minimal state, and we're becoming worse than we should be because we're forgetting the basic lessons of why minimal government is a good thing. This idea of the move back to status then would seem to possibly lead into the second of your criteria of primitivism, which is tribalism, because being a member of a tribe is a status, not a contract. What is tribalism and how is that involved in politics? Well, it's a group dependency aspect. There's very little you can get done in the politicized world, the more centralized world, the world where more living in Washington, D.C., there's very little you can get done without a group. Ayn Rand once said that something like the most important minority is the minority of one, and I think there's a lot of value in that statement that if you are someone who has no interest group around you or not a very effective one, or you are someone without the friends to get you contacts, you are someone without enough people around you to make a story about the fact, a news story about the fact that you're getting oppressed or beaten down by government, and sometimes even in another way, groups that you need like lawyers, that's another way, like individuals increasingly need lawyers, so you need groups more in this politicized world to fight the game against other groups. Is that quite the same as tribalism though? I mean, needing a group is not necessarily the same as identifying with a group, because part of tribalism is not just like I identify with this group and depend on it, but those other groups are bad, right? And does that shows up in politics as well? It does, and that sort of ties into the second criteria that I have of primitivism, which is mutually exclusive. Okay. And I think this is another part of the primitivism. There's first just becoming a member of a group because you need to in order to get things done in Washington, D.C. or in your state capital. The next step is starting to identify with that group and think of other groups as oppositional groups who are enemies, who are evil people and trying to take things from you. And the reason you do that is because you're both fighting over a mutually exclusive outcome. Usually, there are compromised outcomes in some ways, but in this way about basic issues, are we going to have abortion or birth control covered in our healthcare plans under Obamacare? Well, we either are or we aren't. And so you can be a member of the group fighting for wanting that to be covered or you can be a member of the group fighting for it to not have covered, and if you win, they lose. And so that makes, I think, a lot of psychology coming to play, the sort of inherent tribalism we have that you see at a Packers Bears game or you can see anywhere throughout the world wherein you start to view the other side is actually evil and just completely opposed to you and therefore becomes more tribal. And whether you get secret handshakes and other sort of things that come with being tribal, but you start thinking of yourself as a member of a tribe. And I think in this town, Democrat and Republican would of course be the classic example of that. And it's kind of funny, there are Democrat bars and there are Republican bars and it percolates out into our other social interactions that we become very tribal. And then that tribalism leads to the next of your criteria, the penultimate criteria, which is extremification because once we start seeing the other guys as enemies or evil, then their positions are evil. And so even if those positions are very close to ours, we have this incentive to act like they're not. Yes, yeah, it's continually fascinating to me to see two people argue who I think are relatively close. I'll use Obama and Romney as the most recent prominent example who in the in the panel play of political possibility, they're pretty close. I mean, we even have Romney creating basically Obamacare in Massachusetts. And when they argue against each other and when their supporters argue against each other, they act like it's the anarchist versus the socialist. And I mean, there's the Romney wants no government. He wants to leave old people out in the street and then Obama wants to fully centralize everything and he wants to he's a socialist and it doesn't line up with what the rhetoric is. And this is the tribalism too there. First of all, some of us just it's easier to argue against someone, if you straw man their position and pretend that they're saying something that they're not actually saying, but it also is more self gratifying to you in this war where that person is trying to take away your right to abortion, if that's the way you're thinking about it, that they have to be turned into some sort of subhuman thing. And this is sort of a well-known trade like at war time, for example, they weren't Vietnamese, they were gooks, like you have to dehumanize them. And I think you start to see that in politics too. They aren't people who have a slightly, Republicans aren't people who have a slightly smaller view of government. They're anarchists who think that the entire government should be dismantled and thrown away, even though almost no Republicans actually believe that. It's also, I mean, rather frustrating for people with genuinely extreme views, like I would characterize myself especially, I mean, the spectrum of American politics to be told that someone as milk toast or, you know, middle of the road or mainstream as the major party candidates are extremists. Yeah, yeah, and I have said that before on media appearances, as an actual extremist, I am offended by the fact that you're calling Mitt Romney an extremist. But again, it's a function of tribalism. Do you think that two tribes sitting in 3000 BC or more like 30,000 BC had any room to think that, if someone would come in and say, you guys are a lot more similar than you might realize, no, they're gonna say that those people are on the other side of this hill and they're completely opposite from we are, how we are. What, it makes me think of the medieval Christian sex slaughtering each other over these vanishing, tiny doctrinal differences that are like, I mean, almost laughable in retrospect in terms of how similar these people were, but their tribalism had turned them into, these white heretics. There's like, there's no middle ground whatsoever for us to be on, yeah. So your final criteria of primitivism is exemptions from the chief, what do you mean by that? Well, if you have a very hierarchical tribe as we tend to think, anthropologists tend to think most tribes that we would call primitive, and I'll put that in scare quotes, tribes that exist now, they have a very hierarchical structure wherein a chief, I'll just use the term chief, most of the stuff I understand is not 100% accurate, but a chief gives out, controls a ton of the gifts of the resources and is able to give out or take away or give an exemption to general power if you know the chief. So it's this sort of way, you can get out of the general fight if someone there can give you an exemption, someone with power can say, well, we're not gonna apply this law to you or we're not gonna do this to you. So yeah, the chief gives out his own largesse to the people of the tribe. And so maybe now we can give, now that we've gotten these criteria of primitivism, which were violence, tribalism and group dependency, mutually exclusive setup, extremification, and then these exemptions from the chief, maybe you can give some examples of how these play out. I think people will have a pretty good idea you see them all over the place, but definitely examples are helpful. So I have one of my favorite examples, not favorite, it's absolutely tragic, but I think it's very illustrative, is of a girl named Abigail Burroughs. Abigail Burroughs was a 21 year old girl who had a relatively rare form of neck and spine cancer, neck and head cancer that she got when she was about 18. And at the time she was trying to take an FDA, non-approved drug, she wanted to take a drug that had shown in certain trials to have possibilities for helping her type of cancer. And the FDA said, no, you can't do that. And the FDA does this a lot when they say, we don't think this drug is effective enough for you, which by itself is incredibly perverse, but telling people who are very, very sick that this drug has not been deemed effective enough for them to take when they have no other options left. And so she took the case to court. She went to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, trying to say, I have a right to take this drug. And she lost that case. And actually by the time it went to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, she was dead for a while. It was Abigail Lyons is the name of the case, and they kept the case going for her. On the other side is AIDS drugs in the 1980s. In the 1980s, AIDS sprung up and terrified everyone, particularly in the gay community, and it was killing with an astounding rate of speed without a lot of understanding of what was going on. Now they had identified HIV and they identified AIDS, and the FDA was doing the same thing with AIDS drugs that they were doing with Abigail Burroughs. They were saying that we need to test this drug to make sure that it's effective enough for us to give it to you, that your risk level, our risk level is enough for you. And so they were running double-blind tests where they were giving placevos to some and giving real drugs to other. And it seemed really, really perverse that you have two dying people and you're giving one a fake drug and one a real drug. So the homosexual community got together and they formed an organization called ACT UP that had a specific goal to try and get the FDA to sort of stop doing this to them on AIDS drugs. And they had a bunch of protests, including a very big one where they pretty much shut down the FDA through a sit-in where they kind of surrounded it by sitting around it, shut it down for a day, and eventually they got an exemption pushed through for their specific type. The claim that what they were asking for was written in the law by Congress. The question I'm asking is why did they, why did the homosexual community get this active? And of course it wasn't just homosexual, they had people on their side, but why did this group, why did ACT UP win this battle when Abigail Burroughs lost? And I think the answer to that is really disturbing. I think the answer is that Abigail Burroughs' cancer was not that common. And that seems to me disturbing on a level that people haven't adequately realized, that we talk, people talk to libertarians and they say, well, you're gonna let people die in the streets through your healthcare system because they aren't able to get lifesaving drugs. And the best response to that is, yeah, well you're gonna let people like Abigail Burroughs die because she didn't have a big enough interest group to make her voice heard. And that's primitivism in a very, very, very basic sense. They needed a tribe to get done what they need to get done and they actually got an exemption so they got kind of a gift from the chief as I was saying, and of course in the background all the stuff is enforced by violence in the ultimate sense. That's a disturbing story and it happens all the time. And if you start thinking about politics that way, you'll see it a lot. That example, I mean, is awful. But it also seems like it's not necessarily representative of most of our politics. I mean, most of our politics isn't that true. It's not about these life and death. People like fighting the government in order to possibly live longer than the government. In this case, the FDA arguably killing people. So does primitivism play out in the kind of less high stakes politics too? One of the problems that libertarians have, but it's not just libertarians. Liberty, if you wanna live in some way, have a liberty loving area of your life, there's probably someone out there trying to keep you from doing that. Unfortunately, liberty doesn't have an interest group. Like that's often sometimes our problem. The whole point of this idea of primitive as a politics is that it's the interest groups that started eroding liberty. But to use a better, a different example, a more mundane example, there is a tribe out there called the Parents' Television Council. And you might maybe never heard of them, but they are very well organized. They are winning the tribalism game in many ways and the people who are liberty loving in this area are losing or often lose and they don't even know it because they don't have an interest group. The Parents' Television Council is a group of very, very conservative parents who are frankly quite offended at most the television shows that are on TV. They're really, really offended by the family guy, especially 10 years ago or so when the family guy first was kicked off the air and then returned, but it was kicked off the air at one point. They don't like what you're watching, assuming anyone is watching the family. They don't like what a lot of people are watching and they have a theory about how they should be able to control your television. And what they don't like is sex and violence. Sex and violence and all that stuff, yeah. So they've created this system, a very effective system based on a change in the FCC rules wherein they changed how they measure complaints. It was just a statutory change. It used to be the case that if they got 300 complaints that were exactly the same, the form complaint, they would call it one complaint. They changed it to call them 300 complaints. So the Parents Television Council realizing this was a tribalistic opportunity for them created a form on their website and in their network of people they can send out an email that's an action alert and they can say, hey, we saw the worst episode of the family guy or the good wife or whatever last night. It had sex and it had bare bottoms and whatever. We need to call you guys to action to send your complaints to the FCC. And when they do that, the FCC's complaints will go from 300 in a month to 150,000. And this is another tribe that is working to try and regulate your life in a way that a lot of people aren't aware and the reason they can do this is, again, they're fighting over it tribally. The government gives them the ability to do this. The FCC regulations give them the ability to do this. If they win, you lose, meaning that if they win in getting this off the air then you're not gonna be able to see it at least on broadcast television. So it's very mutually exclusive and it all is ultimately backed up by violence but it's their tribalism. It's their group organization that lets them win this game. And again, this is similar, not nearly as heartfelt, but it's similar to the cancer example and the AIDS examples. I don't think that those should be the traits. Your ability to put together a team, I don't think should be the trade that determines whether what I watch on television. There's a, that's sort of the thing about this. That's the kicker in the end is that we talk about a lot of different ways things can be distributed through a lot of criteria. And so to use an example, you could distribute tickets for a concert via paying money and using stub hub and things like that or you could distribute them via a line. And each of those distribution mechanisms prefers a trade in some way. The stub hub thing will prefer people with money but the line will prefer people with time. And so you're not actually, you're just choosing how the distribution will work and what traits it will prefer. In the primitivism example in the Parents Television Council, this is preferring the ability to organize. It's preferring the ability to create a tribe. And again, if you look at the Abigail Burroughs example for, it's a really poignant one, that seems to be really unjust. They often say, people attack libertarians and say, well, you let this happen to people because they don't have enough money. And I say, well, you let this happen to people because they don't have enough political power. A little bit of this, a little bit of that but stop pretending that this is a more just and more progressive world because you think that you should get organized. I mean, I'm the kind of person when someone comes to me and says, you're mad about something, you need to get together, you need to get a group, you need to make your voice heard. I'm the kind of person who says, why do I have to do that? I mean, like, why is that what I have to do to be able to live my life the way that I wanna live it? That seems really, really strange. Well, let me push back, I guess, on behalf of the Parents' Television Council and the FDA, potentially, and see if I can frame it how they may see it. So imagine people, there's some really bad pathogen out there called anthrax. People are buying and selling it, right? And so we decide, someone groups decides, this is enormously dangerous to buy and sell anthrax. Even if you mishandle it, you can kill lots and lots of people or you can intentionally kill lots and lots of people, it's just dangerous stuff. And so the government should prohibit the buying and selling of anthrax. Okay, now the family guy is not anthrax. And these drugs, these cancer drugs aren't like that, but there's still the argument goes, look, this is not about you wanting to enjoy the anthrax you bought or you wanting to enjoy family guy or you wanting to take this drug that might save your life. It's that if we allow it, then there's all of these dangers that result, that it's not that people are going to get sick and die, but that children might see this stuff and be harmed. Or that if we allow these drugs, then lots of people who don't need them or the drugs may be more harmful than they think will be taking them and will be hurt much, much more than if we just didn't allow the drugs. And so is it that, I guess, it seems like the argument could be made that what you're objecting to is not so much this broader just the kind of stuff that people are engaging in, but that these people are using politics to do things that you don't happen to like. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that's a valid objection. And so how do you then distinguish between the stuff that you don't like that is still really dangerous? So like we, there may be people out there who want to buy and sell anthrax in the open market. Or own a nuclear weapon. Or own a nuclear weapon, but we probably, it's probably okay to not allow them to exercise their preferences versus the family guy or cancer drug. Well, I think the way you distinguish it is you go back to the first principles of governance. When I was talking about, you know, how the minimal government has a virtue to it that is not some sort of antiquated backward way of looking at the world because we're denying and centralization, it has virtues to it. We look at the actual role of government and we say it has a place to act. There's a better argument for act in a situation of a nuclear bomb versus a handgun. And there are people, and I do gun policy here at Kato, and there are people who treat those as the same thing. I mean, they're just like, if I'm arguing for a handgun, they say, oh, well, everyone should just have tanks. I mean, no, they're very different. But it gives us a rubric. If we think about politics this way as a fundamentally alienating force or a possibly alienating force, if you let it control too many core values, too many essential values, then you leave it to the things that we have broad agreement on and you keep it more out of the places where we don't have broad agreement on it. That's a general theory. Another theory of saying is it's a question of when does someone, sorry, when does the government, which of course are a bunch of people, but when does the government have power, have justified power over someone's sort of private sphere? And I think that's a question that's not asked enough. There are two general theories, I think, that make this, that there's a theory of jurisdiction. So there are two of them, I'll call them the effects-based theory and the ethics-based theory. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, we recently had this incandescent light bulb that they no longer exist anymore. We have to buy compact fluorescence now. So that means they took jurisdiction over the lights in our houses. What was the theory by which they took jurisdiction over the lights in our houses? The theory was that the effects of having incandescent light bulbs in your house are not contained within your house. This is, and there are things that you do in your house and the effects are not contained in your, or your property or your body and they're not contained within your sphere. So that's a huge theory of how you govern people. So when music is too loud and it spills onto your neighbor's land, when pollution occurs and spills over, that's when you can start regulating, arguably regulating inside the sphere of property. This is why property is such the cornerstone of liberty because it keeps us from having a lot of discussions about what color our walls should be because unless the government can come in and say the color of your walls has an effect that bleeds outside of your house, there's some reason that we will be able to regulate the color of your walls, then we get to decide what colors our walls are and we don't have other people coming in and trying to paint our walls and having mutually exclusive possibilities of what color the walls are gonna be. But unless they can tell that story about effects, they don't have jurisdiction. There's another way that they try and get jurisdiction over your private sphere and that's through ethics, which is the, it's just a bad thing to do. So again, drugs is a really good example. I'm a libertarian, I think that all drugs should be legal, they should be, at the very least decriminalized, we should be putting no one in cages for putting something in their body. Why do I think that? I think it because I do not think there's a good effects theory that says if you put something in your body, you're gonna affect everyone else to the point that we can make this illegal and I do not think there's a good ethics theory, which is that it's just evil to the point that we can regulate it. Now, if someone takes a drug and gets into a car, they suddenly are affecting people outside of their sphere more. So there's a very big difference between smoking marijuana in your basement and playing halo and then getting into a car. So I'm a libertarian and I can believe that getting in the car and smoking should be illegal because now you're endangering other people. But if we don't start drawing really good lines between the private sphere and the public sphere and we start saying this is where you're not allowed to have political fights because you don't have any reason to think that the effects bleed out and that would include things like your walls, that would include things like what you watch on your television, I think, but as the rubric through in which we should have this conversation. In the nuclear bomb example, I mean, that's far more like getting into a car after smoking marijuana than just smoking it in your basement. I think it's a categorical difference. The effects of having a nuclear weapon are clearly going to bleed outside of your property or property sphere, even if you have a large farm, it's gonna affect other people. It seems to me though that most policies that people advocate that are of the sort that you're criticizing are they don't justify them on the grounds that this behavior we want to ban or the substance we wanna ban or whatever else, whatever we're trying to restrict has no negative effects. We just want to restrict it because we think it's evil or because we think you shouldn't do it. They instead tell stories of these negative effects. And so the incandescent light bulbs are worse for the environment. The handgun kills people and the smut on television has these negative effects on usually children who aren't in a position to choose rationally whether they want to internalize these negative effects or not. And so again, it seems like we're back to this, you say we have to draw these lines, but then the lines are just, I don't think the effects are as big as you do, so therefore we shouldn't legislate. Those can be, and that's some of the reason we have policy debates, I agree. But I mean, if you think about it, we've done this a lot recently. The gay marriage debate was a really interesting one because we recently had a very big court decision, at least striking down the federal prohibition on recognizing gay marriage. But all the arguments for that, it used to be the case that you could prohibit gay marriage just by saying, I think that's wrong, that's a bad thing. And that was good enough. Now the arguments have to be that this affects society in some way, right? It affects children in some way. And all the proponents of gay marriage and all of the opponents of gay marriage have both decided this is where the debate is gonna have. The debate is gonna be had on like the harm principle, basically like the million harm principle, that if it doesn't harm anyone, then the government can't prohibit it. There's still room to have a social science debate about that and have it about global warming and the effects of it and is it really true that kids are better off or worse off or things like that? But if we're going to live in a world of minimal government, we have to understand that the more that we start trying to regulate people's internal, important internal decisions, the more we're gonna have a primitive political world. So it's one of the reasons to not politicize something. I can't give you an actual line of what shouldn't shouldn't be politicized. What I'm trying to do is return us to an old style enlightenment philosophy hook where you need a good hook. You need a good lawyer, we call it jurisdictional hook. You need a good reason to politicize someone's light bulbs or someone's drug use or someone's alcohol use or how they raise their kids or how they educate their kids or what health do they have. You need a better reason, a better jurisdictional hook than we've been getting from the government for a long time now. The other problem with this is the cost that come with it is the primitivism that I'm talking about. So we get a less communal society, a more adversarial society, and that is something we should be thinking about when we start talking about having a national health care plan, which is what we're talking about right now. There is no way that everyone in America can agree on what the national health care plan will look like. And the ones who are going to win in that are the ones who have the interest groups and the ones who are gonna lose are the ones who don't. And that means that there are people out there who practice Eastern medicine, who practice other types of new age healing, things I don't agree with or many things I do agree with, but it doesn't matter for their freedom to live their life the way they want to. It is one of the reasons you don't politicize health care is because you cannot make a rational determination of what our health care plan should look like when our is 300 million people. I guess the question I still have, again, trying to act as the skeptic towards your thesis, is that if it comes down to, okay, again, if there's really, really large bad effects, then that is good enough to overcome the cost to liberty. So there's a cost benefit analysis going on here. And you've objected to interest groups being the ones who determine whether effects are bigger than that. The ones who win, yeah. But how else are we gonna determine whether the effects are of the kind that it's legitimate to legislate? Because the effects that the science can't speak for itself. There's no kind of third party objective person who can just make these pronouncements and tell us what's right, although the technocrats think that they can. But outside of groups fighting it out and saying, no, the empiricals that I believe are the correct ones. No, the empiricals that I believe are the correct ones. I mean, there's maybe outright majority rule, right? But I'm just trying to figure out what the alternatives are. Like is this, are you saying we should fall back and have a rule by experts? Or are we joining the rule? You're asking the right question because nothing I'm saying about politics and the functioning of politics or the misfunctioning of politics exists in a vacuum where there are no alternatives. I mean, that's one of the big mistakes that is made by I think the, what I often call democratic fetishists, but people who don't really see the problems with this, who think that the best way to rationalize the world is to get interest groups together and have them fight it out. But when there are other alternatives, that politics does not have to do this. And so there's a two parts to my argument. It's not just criticizing politics, although that's my argument for this one, but also saying that you can deal with these problems if they are in fact problems through less political means. So what you get out of this is a good example. You get more of a preference for bottom-up regulation and less for a preference for top-down regulation. And because people have been living together for a very long time and when they live together, they have a tendency to affect their neighbors. That's just how the world works. Now the common law has been dealing with that for thousands of years and they have entire rules about nuisance and if you're polluting your neighbor's land next to him like how you solve that problem, there's a huge body law about all those issues and it doesn't have to become an issue where you send it to an agency on the top who decides all the rules about this, but you can do it more from the bottom because when you send it to the top, then it is politicized by interest groups. Then it is politicized by all the things I'm talking about. So living with people is difficult and people have effects on other people, but the thing is that you can do many things in a community-centered way. You can say, I'm gonna go over there and ask my friend to turn his music down as opposed to calling the cops. So I think things like that, I think are better than bringing in politics. So generally speaking, like healthcare can be solved. Like when I bring up healthcare, is it something that we don't need to politicize? It's not in a vacuum. Again, it exists, I bring that up because I think the market can provide healthcare. In terms of figuring out what the limits are, where the lines are, I can't give you those exactly. I can give you the costs of politics and the problems that are gonna come from this and then we can use that now when we analyze the situation and we ask whether we should politicize it. Say, well, this is just gonna become an interest group battle and when it becomes an interest group battle, it's gonna become primitive and the winner of that is not necessarily gonna be the one who deserves it the most, they're gonna be the one who played the Thunderdome game the best. And I think that that's a good reason to not want to say that politics rationalizes the world in some way. It just makes it into more primitive type of fight. And I think one of the interesting things about your thesis is that the distribution of goods in this politically primitive or primitive politics system oftentimes doesn't even pretend to align with who won the battle over the facts. It's often that the goods, whether that's freedoms to live in the way we want to or cash or favors flow to groups or people who have characteristics that have absolutely nothing to do with how good their arguments are. Exactly. And I think that that's an important point. When we talk about healthcare and we talk about a lot of things, I think what a lot of people want out of the world and when it comes to healthcare, for example, is they want healthcare to be distributed based on need if that means anything. But I mean, it has some resonance. And then they think that the political mechanism does that. And I say that no, the political mechanism doesn't suddenly turn the distribution of healthcare based on a market into a distribution based on need. It turns it into a distribution based on politics. And that is not the same as need. That is a totally different thing. And we can tell by the Abigail Burroughs act up example that it's not the same as needed. It happens time and time again in the healthcare arena of who's gonna win this or not. So yes, it's very important to compare these against their alternative. So when you say distributed based on politics, what sort of characteristics then become the determining factors of say who gets healthcare? Yeah, so the characteristics that we've talked about group membership, so unfortunately, sometimes it will be, do you have a popular cancer? That that will be sometimes the characteristic. We have breast cancer versus prostate cancer, which apparently for some reason have to fight each other, although breast cancer often wins. So if you have breast cancer, then you might have a better chance of surviving because we give more money to that. That's not at all based on any sort of rational distribution. It's based on politics. So that's one of them. Relationships would be another one. Do you know people in the government? Do you know your senator? Do you know regulators? That would get you an exemption in a law or a little bit of a tweak maybe for you specifically in your dairy farm or your, that happens a lot, like a specific tweak for a specific dairy farm where they don't have to comply with this law. So now they're winning that game and they only want it because they happen to know the right people. That doesn't seem very just to me. Another one is ability. This is like a really important one. And when the world is fully politicized and it's full of laws and full of regulations, the company or person who can keep up with the regulations will do better than the one who can't. And that doesn't seem like a very thing that I want to make the world better. So when you say ability, you mean ability to keep up with laws and regulations. Yeah, the ability to keep up with these, the code of federal regulations, the only question now is, what planet does it reach to? Does it go to Saturn yet? I don't even know. If we stacked it all up, line them up in by end and you need an entire team of lawyers to just make sure that you're complying with those all the time. And so that's one of the reasons why mom, post-stores have a disadvantage competitive to Walmart. I mean, there's other ones too, but that's one of them. And I don't think that's a very good reason to have someone lose their business because they didn't have enough lawyers to keep track of the regulations. That doesn't seem to be a just world if that's the one. And again, the other one that you get is the exemptions, which you often get by regulation. Relationships, having those exemptions to be able to compete better. That's how you win politics. People say, well, if you didn't go to Harvard, you didn't go to Yale, you didn't become a Harvard business school, then the market will fail you. You won't have healthcare, everyone will lose, you didn't go to the right schools. I won't concede that, but as a rebuttal, I'll say, well, if you don't know the right people, if you don't have the right interest group, if you don't have the ability to keep up with the laws, that's how you win in politics. So those are the losers. Neither one, that seems very unjust to me. I wanna close by asking a question that we've touched on throughout our discussion, but maybe let's just end things by addressing it explicitly, which is the what can we do about all this? Do we have to, is there a way to make politics non-primitive or do we have to accept that politics is gonna be primitive but somehow limit the damage that primitivism does or is there some other solution? So the first way to make politics non-less primitive is to make it matter less. That is the most important thing to do to make politics less primitive. Make it matter less in terms of healthcare and in the things that really matter. Make it matter less in terms of education, all these things that we care so much about. Make it matter less in those areas and it will become less primitive. There will still be fights over things that we have more broad agreement on like police protection and military protection, but that's one reason why it's easier to politicize those than it is to politicize education because there's a far broader agreement on basic protections of life, liberty and property. So that's the first way to make it more primitive. Another thing to do is to take seriously the charge of limited government and take seriously the charge that if someone's gonna assert power over you as you were asking based on effects or ethics, they need to have a very good reason to do that and they need to compare it against the alternatives such as the market or common law alternatives to not assert power over you with an agency but try and deal with these problems that happen between people on a more bottom up level than a top down level, which is gonna be a more politicized level. And a third thing we can do, and this is sort of a general thing for America, but we can look to the rules of the Constitution, which is my specialty here, but the Constitution, one of the things about it that is pretty wise, I have a lot of problems with the Constitution, but one of the things pretty wise about it is it limited government because it had an understanding about this. So the actual Constitution is originally conceived at very few powers to the federal government. And one of the reasons they did that is they knew that people wouldn't agree about this stuff. They didn't give the federal government power over education because Massachusetts and South Carolina could never ever have agreed about education. And nothing has changed about that in the last 200 years. Massachusetts and South Carolina still have very different views on education. Nevertheless, we propose more and more federal programs, common core, no child left behind, thinking that somehow we can square that circle and it's not gonna happen. So understand that there's a wisdom in the Constitution which is the same wisdom I was talking about with the theory of limited government. A diverse open society that has trading possibilities, that has friends and possibilities of cultural enrichment because of the diversity of that society is also one that cannot be easily centralized and easily controlled from the top and should not be centralized and controlled from the top because unless you wanna sacrifice the diversity and the openness of the society in trying to do that, those are actually contrary aims. And so understanding those basic lessons of the enlightenment of limited government and understanding the flourishing humanity we can get out of it will lead us to a brighter future. If you have any questions or comments about today's episode, you can find me on Twitter at A-R-O-S-P. That's A-R-O-S-S-P. Then you can find me on Twitter at TC Burris, T-C-B-U-R-R-U-S. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.