 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable podcast, your weekly libertarian product from the magazine of free minds and free markets. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nicholas B. Peder Suderman and Catherine Mangue Ward. Hi, friendos. Howdy. Hey, Matt. Happy Monday. We're going to get into the big Apple antitrust case here in a moment. But first, friends, did the price fluctuations of crypto make you seasick? Are you suspicious of the long-term reliability of the index funds and blue chip stocks dominating your 401k? Well, CSN Mint has got some shiny silver coins for you to consider adding to your investment mix. CSN Mint, one of the most trusted names in the numismatic arts, has been providing certified U.S. Mint collectible coins and precious metals for over 20 years. They're practically bullish right now on silver, which is trading far below its all-time high despite having plenty of modern industrial applications, electronics, solar panels, medical devices and so on. CSN Mint can get you your coins, your bullion bars, your collectibles all with certificates of authentication, graded by a third-party professional for purity and origin. If you're going to collect something, might as well be money. So go to CSNMint.com slash roundtable and use the promo code roundtable to get a free silver American Eagle. That's a $30 value with your purchase of $75 or more. That's CSNMint.com slash roundtable. Do it today. You'll be glad you did. All right, let's get right into it, shall we? The Attorney General of the United States of America, Merrick Garland, on Thursday announced that the Department of Justice, along with 15 other states, was suing Apple, not the Beatles record label, alas, but rather the people who make most of our smartphones, not Nicholaspies, for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Apple, Garland alleged, has maintained monopoly power in the smartphone market that it created by using exclusionary, anti-competitive conduct, resulting in fewer choices, higher prices and fees, lower quality smartphones, apps and accessories, and less innovation from Apple and its competitors. The company has, in short, consolidated its monopoly power not by making its own products better, but by making other products worse. Catherine, I see right here on CBS News, so it must be true that, quote, users have long been frustrated by discrepancies when sending messages between Apple and non-Apple products, including lower media quality, diminished editing capabilities, and even different colors for the messages themselves, end quote. I had not been aware of that frustration, though I am admittedly a little bit slow on understanding technology products. Is there indeed a consumer harm underlying all this stuff? And is antitrust law the way to address it? Right, so obviously referencing the green text bubbles as the justification for an antitrust action is flatly ridiculous. I associate myself just this once with a tweet by Ben Dreyfus who noted this weekend that he, this has made him a libertarian. This is the moment, the green text is an antitrust violation is the thing that made him a libertarian, and he correctly notes that what Apple owes to Android users is nothing because they are not its customers. And I think that that is a really a pretty legit point. Nick, first of all, Ben Dreyfus as you should associate more than just once and has been a secret libertarian for a long time, but you are an Android user. Unlike Catherine who is just an Android. Yes, good looking out on you. Can you, Nick, can you tell us, give us a brief commercial for Androids? I don't really understand what they are. Yeah, they are for the same money. They're cheaper and you get a much better phone with more capabilities. The one thing I want to point out to Merrick Garland who is an idiot is that Look in the camera and point. I'm trying to. I'm not sure where the camera is now. There are cameras all over my apartment. I'm never sure which one is on. No, but the, you know, on the Android system, I have a Samsung phone, you know, on the Verizon network. My text bubbles are green and I'm happy to have them as green. So the idea, I really don't know a single person who gives a flying fuck about what color text bubble is. And I don't care, you know, that I could pay more money to get an iPhone. I mean, it's just, it's an absurd case and it exemplifies everything that is wrong with Joe Biden's approach to the economy. I suspect we'll be talking about other minions in his administration later in the show. But this is the type of thing. Apple has a 60% market share in the United States for smartphones. And, you know, globally, Android phones are bigger and more used. This is such a nothing burger. And if your attorney general is focusing on stuff like this, they are just being anti-capitalist or they have some bone to pick. That is not quite visible or is the actual cause of action here. This is absurd and it should, it should cause a mass defection from everybody who's not an idiot when it comes to supporting somebody like Merrick Garland or for that matter, Joe Biden. Peter, just to counter Mr. Gillespie here. Dr. Gillespie. Dr. Gillespie here, there has been a lot of what have been called conservatives. This is literally a headlight I read this morning of people who like Lena Kahn because there's an increased national conservative interest in antitrust and using the big stick against Silicon Valley. Google has also come under some antitrust excitements under the Biden administration. If I'm not correct a little bit on the Trump administration as well, is laissez-faire America becoming more like deregiste Europe these days? Peter. Well, to start with, I just want to say that while I'm not a conservative, I do think the wrath of Kahn is the best Star Trek film. And I, I'm a conterite. No, I don't have that. I think another thing I think here. You're a real con. You're a contrarian. That's right there guys. That's it. I'm a con. Certainly. Trarian. Oh my goodness. Thank you, Catherine. As always, the best editor here. There is a real sense in which the United States is following Europe's lead here. Europe has passed a whole bunch of tech regulations. And what you see with a lot of them is that they fly under the banner of, we're going to help consumers. This is just about making the market more fair and more competitive. But what they're actually doing is just giving bureaucrats the power to play product designer. And that is exactly what is happening here with the Biden administration suit against Apple. They've decided that they don't like how Apple has designed their products. That is the core contention here. Oh, Apple, wait. You should, your iMessage should be, it should, it should work. It should have exactly the same capabilities when you're talking to Google users. It's just, it's incredibly petty, small ball stuff. I mean, like it seems to work from the presumption. This is a little bit of an exaggeration, but that like the green bubble is something like a human right, like DoorDash. It's not, I mean, don't be crazy here, right? It's just kind of nutty. There was an exchange and an NPR report on this that I thought was really telling. So you've got the, the host who's asking NPR tech correspondent Derek Kerr about, you know, what the, what the harms are here. He says, well, you know, so the Justice Department has given the example of, you know, you might not get that green bubble if you're not on the iPhone. So how else has Apple made the user experience worse for other people? And the tech correspondent for NPR responds, well, you know, iMessage in iPhone is a good example. If you're not an iPhone user, you're basically locked out of having a fun experience because you will not see those fun stickers like the heart or the thumbs up. And remember, this is the world that young people live in. Justice Department says when Apple designs its products this way, it's basically locking people into the iPhone family. The hearts and the stickers and the green bubble, they're, they're making a federal case out of that. It's just bonkers. I also love- They should make the federal case out of, you can't plug in your, your headphones anymore, right? I mean, whatever you say, grandpa. You in fact can, you just need the dongle. By a little adapter. So I mean, the thing that blows my mind about this is that there are people from the Justice Department, from the FCC, they're looking straight into the camera and just saying the Microsoft case was a huge success and we're gonna do it again. Right? So this is, this is a wild historical counterfactual. Like the idea that somehow anti-trust action gave us the competitive ecosystem that we have today in terms of technology is just flatly untrue. A mostly failed anti-trust action to be clear. Right. And you know, the idea that, that this is, you know, as Peter said, the idea that this is like worthy of the attention of, you know, at this level of details, worthy of the attention of kind of what will end up being, billions of dollars of the great legal minds of our government. I listen to the Motley Fool podcast sometimes because I'm attempting to be a little bit less stupid about the markets. And what they said about this this morning, I thought was pretty good, which was, they just said, hey, Apple's gonna make this go away with money and time. And Apple has a lot of money. They just have a ton of money laying around as a general matter. And that what the real cost will be is that they're going to be distracted by this extremely complex, extremely expensive, extremely lengthy, lengthy regulatory action. And they're not gonna, they're gonna be less innovative. And that that's a huge problem for this company, which, you know, customers expect a certain amount of whiz bang innovation, I guess. I would certainly like to see the next cool thing that Apple is doing and not have them be distracted by this. You know, this is, this is like a very, very, very direct illustration of the trade-offs that this type of antitrust action or other regulatory interference has, which is that a lot of smart people at this company spent this whole week and many months before and will spend many years after worrying about, you know, what Jonathan Cantor has to say instead of how to make the next cool thing that's gonna make our lives better. We should talk just a little bit more about that Microsoft comparison, because if you go back to the Microsoft case, the Justice Department's argument was that Microsoft had basically a monopoly on desktop soft OS software and had used that monopoly to push their own internet browser, Microsoft Explorer. At the time, they had about 80% of the market. Apple has in the United States about 60, 65% of the smartphone market. So that's a, that's a big share, but what the Justice Department has done is that they've made up a kind of a fake stat where Apple has 70% of the... It's like the fancy schmancy smartphone category. Yes, it's the elite phone or the business phone, but yes, that is exactly what it is. There is a further element of this, which is cultural, and I'll explain it to you, Apple users. People who use Apple products, and I have an iPad, and you know, my first, one of my first big jobs out of college was actually working on an early Mac system for the publisher of Mac user, et cetera. But Apple people think the whole world exists in Apple universe and that, you know, everybody is desperate to be an Apple user, et cetera. And nobody fucking cares. If you like Apple products, you buy Apple products. If you don't, you buy Android, you buy Google, you buy Windows, et cetera. And you buy things, you know, even Kindle, which is its own version of an Android operating system and things like that. This is such a high functioning market where winners and losers are pretty fluid. They go up and down. There's a lot of innovation. And to, you know, to kind of underscore Peter's point, if 60% of the US smartphone market for Apple is enough to trigger some kind of antitrust action, Windows still has a 55% market share of computers, of PC, you know, of desktop and notebook computers. So then this means the next action will be another case against Microsoft, which nobody is pretending is dominating and destroying markets, you know, through its monopoly power. I mean, these are functioning markets. And if, you know, if Merrick Garland is going after this kind of stuff, it's just like, it's a sign of just absolute stupidity. Nick, you and I are old enough to remember the Microsoft trial in real time and to have forgotten it now because of the decrepitude of age. Are there any other lessons from that, even just of the political economy of the thing or technology or anything else that you can recall from those bad old days when you were writing very presciently and incisively about that case? You know, I'll point people and we'll throw it in the show notes to a piece from the early 2000s called antitrust biggest hits or greatest hits. And it is that when you look back at the major antitrust cases, the Microsoft case was going on that, but things like Alcola and Standard Oil and whatnot, they were predicated on before Microsoft. They were predicated on some level on, you know, suggesting that consumers were being harmed. And when you go back and look at it in real time, that is never actually the case. What, what you ultimately see are textbook examples of regulatory capture and politically motivated actions because certain types of companies have at certain points bought enough influence with the government to kind of try and force an outcome that they want. And it almost never actually results in better consumer outcome, which, you know, is the standard of most antitrust actions. And that is the one that Lena Khan and Tim Wu and a bunch of other people are very influential in antitrust actions are working to delegitimize as the as the standard by which things go. Catherine, but, you know, wasn't it good to break up AT&T? So there are a couple differences between Apple and AT&T. I think our, our regular listeners probably already know many of them. Not least, Apple really has not benefited at all from any kind of government coddling. And AT&T did spectacularly. There's, you know, I know that there's, you know, there's always going to be a very complicated relationship between any large company and regulators. But Apple kind of is dominant in the marketplace mostly because it makes, it makes good, good products to the extent that that Nick disagrees, we can fight it out in that marketplace. No, what I'm saying is like people who love it, love it. Yeah, it's great. But, you know, I think the other thing that's at, you know, at question here is one of the accusations is like, okay, well, Apple is keeping people out of its ecosystem, right? Like there, there are various ways in which they are saying, hey, and their justification is, well, it's, it's for privacy. It's for security. It's to kind of ensure quality. We want to keep some people outside of our, and I swear to God, if I hear the phrase, walled garden again, I'm going to burn the whole thing down. But It went out of walled prison. You know, let's be, let's be honest. As long as drugs can come in and out, Nick, that's fine. The Shawshank redemption, but for Apple. But at the same time, we have this kind of big movement to, you know, to draw down from section 230 to, to kind of make it, what will functionally make it harder for companies to do this kind of gatekeeping to, you know, to figure out the correct balance between, okay, we're going to let everyone on here, but we no longer have protections from liabilities because we're going to, you know, eliminate section 230. But also, if you do try to put walls up around, you're going to trigger an antitrust action, like it, we are making it impossible to function as a tech company in this country, which like one of the best things we've ever done is incubate and encourage the big tech companies that now dominate our economy. And in fact, if you look back at the history of antitrust cases, what you see is not that antitrust was successful, but in fact that tech is a super competitive marketplace, where new developments give companies an edge and you see competition happen even in places where people say it couldn't possibly happen. Again, the Microsoft case is such a good example here because that case sort of ultimately more or less went nowhere. And then Microsoft ended up becoming not the kind of giant monopoly company that could not possibly be dislodged from the marketplace that the DOJ said it was going to be. And why did that happen? It didn't happen because somebody else came in and built a slightly better desktop OS with a slightly different, you know, internet browser. It happened because of smartphones. It happened because Microsoft missed out on the next wave of technology. The biggest, the closest thing we probably have to a monopoly over the last 10 or 15 years in big tech is an Apple and its smartphones, but it's Google and its search market, which it really does control a lot of this search market, especially in America. But where is Google losing market share to? What is threatening Google's dominance right now? Open AI, which is in part owned or at least invested in. Microsoft has a bunch of money in this. Open AI, which is going to make traditional web crawling search along the lines that Google has done well with. It's going to make it less successful, less valuable to Google. And what we see every time is that the antitrust folks think, well, this is a static market. Nothing else will ever happen. And therefore, the big company, we have to take them down with the power of government and yet every time some new development that the regulators, the bureaucrats, the antitrust folks, they didn't think of that new technology comes along and dislodges the old player because competition actually works. Nick, I'm just having a quick flashbacks to the late 90s when Microsoft owned Slate. You guys forget, but MSNBC, what's the MS in MSNBC? I can't imagine. I don't know why they keep it, but they do. Matt, the mention of walled gardens, and I think you'll appreciate this, although I know that Peter and Catherine will not, but he's got to listen to... No, no, because you are wiser to have avoided this in your mental locked box upstairs. The song Mind Gardens by David Crosby on the Burge Younger Than Yesterday album, which is this droning piece of shit about a where David Crosby builds a walled garden and doesn't let the sun shine in. And it's like the nadir of all of hippie culture. It is so good and so bad. And what's funny about it, though, is the guitar sound shows up all over the velvet underground record as well. Let's all just try to take a moment and recover from all of those images. Let's move on to a philosophical question, which is to say, if Washington produces a $1.2 trillion spending package, and nobody really pays attention to it, except for a couple of backbenchers in the GOP in Congress, did it really happen? This is suggested because over the weekend, President Joseph Robinette Biden, the second, signed our latest last minute trillion dollar spending stop gap, which will get us through all the way to about six months from now, which is an excellent time to be re-addressing this thing two months before or a month before the presidential election. Bill passed 74 to 24 in the Senate, 286 to 134 in the House, where, of course, Speaker Mike Johnson is facing threats of being removed from the likes of Marjorie Taylor-Green. Isn't she just Marjorie Taylor now? This I don't know. Are you dead naming her, Matt Welch? I would hope so. That is my role in life. She dropped the green in solidarity with Android users who don't have the green bubble. They do. I think she got divorced. It's the blue bubble that people want. Anyways, Peter, can you tell us what the hell is and is not in this bill, if you have any idea and how many thousands of years we are from the good old days of 2011? I think we're so many millenniums. We're counting in dune time at the beginning of every time Princess Irulan or whatever the hell her name is comes on in dune too. She's like, the year is 10,472, and that is how I feel reading the news about the budget. So the quote from Chuck Schumer after he passed this thing was just incredible. It's been a long day, a long week, a very few long months, but tonight we have funded the government. That's more or less. I really was hoping it was going to say tonight, let it be low and brown. Yeah, that's basically how I feel every time we tape a podcast except it's only Monday morning. This is a $1.2 trillion bill and it is, you guys have heard of an omnibus and you've heard of a Cromnibus. This is a mini bus. It's like the short bus of budget bills. The people listening to this podcast remember the short bus used to be an insult. It's kind of can't say that now, but like, yeah, this is the short life of budget bills. And it has a half a dozen of the appropriations bills all rolled into it. And there's a bunch of stuff and it's basically exactly what we would have gotten had they not gone through the rigor moral of getting rid of Kevin McCarthy last year. It doesn't really cut spending in any meaningful way. The biggest wins for the Republicans that they're claiming are that they have slightly defunded some of the non-profit aid groups that work with immigrants. And then they also cut a little bit of the bonus IRS funding that the Biden administration gave to the IRS to do enforcement. However, the IRS says this will absolutely not change their enforcement in any way. All they're gonna do is spend the money faster and they will be out of the money and it'll be up for sort of another vote a little bit faster as a result. So the big wins for the Republican Party here. This was a great process, guys, all around. Nick, are we out of money yet? I guess we're not. You can always print more. You can always print more, Matt. We're in this bizarre experiment. That's coming true. So part of the issue here is that the government is gonna keep spending and the Republican, the part of the Republican Party that wants to shut down the process needs to actually come forward. I mean, I wish they would do this, come forward with a budget and insist on it and voting on it and things like that. You're never gonna win by just trying to say no and force another government shutdown. That will end up in more things being spent down the road. And part of the largest issue here is we are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic anyway when we're talking about this stuff because all the action or most of the action, a larger percentage of government spending than Apple has of the smart fund market, is in stuff that is never being discussed in the annual appropriations process and that needs to change. That's a tease for a soon-to-come segment on this very podcast. Catherine, the Congressional Budget Office is always sending out death porn that we talk about from time to time, talking about the just massive debt overhang and debt apocalypse that we face. And there's a long been economic literature suggesting that such huge amounts of debt service depress GDP. And yet, here we are. The United States is again kind of leading the industrialized world in economic growth. Like, nothing can stop us. So maybe we're all wrong. Catherine? I mean, even if nothing can stop us, we could still be doing better. I think that this is one thing that people sort of, because we have so much political rhetoric about beating other countries in terms of economic terms, we have to beat China is something that both Biden and Trump say all the time. And when we see all those upward trending lines in the U.S. is at the top, we're like, great, we did it. No need to examine this any further. That's exactly wrong. We absolutely are making all kinds of trade-offs, including just basic functionality in Congress because of, among other things, the cost of debt service. This is not something that's like, well, this line's going up. So let's ignore it. It's all fine. Can I read a quote from, which is not quite as good as the Schumer quote, but a quote from like the victory press conferences on the Hill. So this is Patty Murray, who is the mother in tennis shoes. The Democratic chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. And she said, make no mistake, we had to work under very difficult top-line numbers and fight off literally hundreds of extreme Republican poison pills. Hypermaga. Like, the tightpods of legislation. The tightpot. Like she's just being pelted with a handfuls of poison pills by Margaret Taylor. But she won and it turned out she really was St. Patty's day. We can't do it anymore. The laughter really sells it, Peter. Yeah. But this, I mean, this is the kind of attitude that everyone's going in with, right? It's like any Republican priority is a poison pill. Any Democratic priority is a, you know, unfettering spending. A happy pill. A happy pill. And no wonder that we can't do anything at all with any seriousness with respect to the debt. It's almost like the government is bad at making things function well. And yet, here they are with both the budget and the iPhone. Yes. All right. We're going to get to it. I want to just register. I have a sense of dread now. Every time Peter starts talking, but it's going to end in a kind of cataclysmic dad joke that is like a high speed wreck. Your sense of dread was about like the fate of the United States as a polity or just like what was going to happen in the next sentence. That is, yeah, it's totally that. I aim to strike fear into the hearts of my enemies. Nick, my only question to your observation is what took you so long? All right. So we're going to get to our listener email of the week here in a moment. But first, a reminder that this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Friends, what's the first thing you would do if you had an extra hour each day? Maybe send out those thank you notes for Christmas. Ah, maybe exercise for the first time since Hector was a pup. Maybe spend a lot more time on Twitter making really, really bad puns. Well, therapy can actually help you prioritize things that are important to you so that time becomes less of an excuse for you to procrastinate instead of doing the work. That's where BetterHelp online therapy comes in. BetterHelp is an easy to use, super flexible, entirely online therapy service that has helped many listeners of this podcast clean up brain clutter in order to boldly face life's actually important challenges. All you have to do is fill out a quick questionnaire, get matched with a therapist. Don't like the first one, just swap them out for a second. Let therapy help you make your days longer in a good way with BetterHelp. Just visit betterhelp.com slash roundtable right now to get 10% off your first month. That's better H-E-L-P.com slash roundtable. Do it today. You'll be glad you did. All right, related question from the previous topic. It comes from Barney Benner, who definitely did not bring a Benz to the venery. Barney writes and reminded everybody to send your emails to roundtable at reason.com. Barney writes, I keep hearing y'all call social security an entitlement. But seems as though the definition of entitlement would be receiving something that you have done nothing to deserve. Nick and I, he's writing this, are the last the baby boomers born in 1964, and I have resented the theft from my paycheck for 45 years. I agree that we as a nation have been screwed by the Ponzi scheme of social security, but I also feel I deserve the money I paid in. I also know that my money was used to support those before me, but in a business perspective, I have the right to the money I paid in. Write me a check. I'll forgive what I could have received in interest by anyone with half a brain. Your thoughts, please, I will just cut in quickly. I hear this whenever I use the word entitlement, people get mad, and I always just use it as the, you are entitled to it legally. Although Nick might have a rejoinder to even that description. Nick, what say you as, besides just the Generation Jones erasure happening in this day? I feel his pain tremendously, but the fact of the matter is, you're not entitled legally to your social security. There was a 1960 case Fleming v. Nester, which involved a Bulgarian immigrant who was deported after it became clear that he had belonged to the Communist Party and had lied on his entry into the country, but he sued after he was deported to get his social security. And the court said nobody has an expectation. It's not a property right. Like you don't own it. Is it realistic that the government will like massive, you know, on a mass level, not pay out to security when they don't have to anymore or they don't want to? That's unlikely, but it's important. We don't have a right to it. And that should add to the anger over the ridiculousness of social security. And the fact that it does not make enough money to cover its payouts, and it needs to stop. And I would say to Barney, again, I feel the pain. I would be happy if this would provoke a political solution. I'm willing to walk away from it, you know, and just be like, okay, just stop taxing me for it. And I don't get anything. That's the trade that I'm willing to take, because otherwise I don't think there's a way to do that. The current benefit in 2024, the average payout, which is distinct from the median, obviously, but it's about $1,900, I would much rather see if we are going to have mass transfer programs, have that money go to people who are poor and who need temporary assistance or temporary help or even long-term help and get rid of old age requirements, old age entitlements, period. They were passed first with Social Security and the Depression when being old meant you were likely to die and you didn't have retirement. And then with Medicare, which was called the last act of the New Deal by LBJ and its other big proponents, times have changed. And well, old people are wealthy people and they should be funding their lifestyles accordingly. And it's going to be ugly, but we need to have an actual shift point where we say, okay, this system, whatever, however it might have functioned in the past, it no longer is relevant to what we are now and we need to change how we do this. Catherine, are you going to be marching on the National Mall with a get your status hands off my Social Security sign? Absolutely. I've already got it. I've already got some poster board and some Crayola markers I'm ready to go. Crayola, by the way, 80% of the non-toxic Crayon marker. Tell Lena Kahn. She's going to come for my box of 64 colors. That's the one with a little sharpener in the back, which is the kind of special perk that only Crayola users get, which is, if you think about it, basically a crime. I mean, in the Republican budget plan, the initial Republican budget plan, there was this idea, maybe they were going to just try again to raise the age of Social Security eligibility by a couple of years. Everybody panic. I don't think that our letter writer has to worry because the spectacular unseriousness of the U.S. Congress in dealing with this question, payouts will be continuing to people next age, to people of the letter writer's age, unfortunately. The question I think is still a little bit more of a live one for younger folks. And of course, I would love to see a system where we could opt out of, as Nick says, opt out of paying in, maintain our own retirement accounts, whatever it is. There are so many better options. But the fact is, I pay taxes and everyone pays taxes for lots of things that we are entitled to in the conventional sense that we don't receive, like good public education. Many, many people pay, dutifully pay their taxes and don't have a functional school that they can feel comfortable sending their kids to. I don't know, roads, more roads, they exist. They're full of potholes that might, for example, take you out and break your knee. This is, these are basic expectations. These are entitlements, again, in the conventional sense that we are supposed to have because we are taxpayers. We're not going to get them. It doesn't matter whether you feel you deserve them. The government is bad at providing these services and they are going to be particularly bad, I think. At paying off anything that looks remotely like the promises that were made about social security to younger people. But honestly, the letter writer is probably fine. So, I guess, congratulations to him. She said bitterly. Peter, I was kind of surprised to read the news from, I think, last week that the Republican Study Committee, one of those things in the on Capitol Hill, did in fact come out and say, yeah, we should maybe extend by year or two the time people start getting their social security monies. What, I'm surprised just because the modern GOP, led by Donald Trump, has made running against any kind of tweaking to entitlements central to their worldview. What did that tell us, if anything, about where Republicans are in seriousness about even acknowledging the cruel, cruel math that used to be just a bipartisan no-brainer was a problem that needs to be fixed in the future? Well, do recall that the Republican Study Committee is one of the more conservative organizations, collections of Republicans on Capitol Hill. And so what they say isn't necessarily what the entire party believes. I think the thing that I would want to stress to the letter writer here is that if you got all the money that you paid into social security, if they just wrote you a check that is equal to the dollar value, that would be far less than the expected value of your social security entitlement payout, almost certainly, because that is true for the vast, vast majority of beneficiaries. So you see these polls, I think, reason he may even have done some at some point where you ask people, well, would you be okay with social security if you just got the money that you'd paid in back? And people say, yeah, but then you tell them that's going to be a lot less than the social security that you would have gotten under the current system. They're like, oh, wait, I'm not sure I support that. But that gap, the fact that the amount that you paid in doesn't equal the amount that social security owes you under its payment scheme, that is the problem. Is that there's not enough money in the system to pay for social security's obligations and social security and health care costs and in part because of the changing demographics with more people living longer and after retirement. Those are the biggest drivers of the long-term debt. And so if you want to take a pulse of the Republican party and where it's at on this stuff, I would actually point you to what Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said on CNBC last week, where he said he would support a fiscal commission to take a look at doing something about the debt. Just so long as that commission took off the table at the beginning raising taxes or doing anything to entitlements. I, too, support losing weight without, in any way, changing my diet or my exercise. That sounds great. But that's basically what he's proposing. The fact of the matter is social security benefits, they both keep going up and then they keep getting kind of dinged because you actually end up paying tax on a lot of social security income or more than you used to. Over the past three years, in 2022, the COLA, the Cost of Living Adjustment for Social Security, was 8.7 percent. It was 5.9 percent last year, and this year it's going to be a mere 3.2 percent. So it goes up, but then you get taxed on it and then it causes a bigger imbalance that Peter was talking about. And the real kicker is every couple of years, the amount of income that is subject to social security taxes goes up. It's currently around 160 grand, which is a lot of money. And it used to top out like $100,000. $110,000. And the retirement age goes up by a month or two for each year that you retire up to 69. So we're going to get squeezed. And the question is, do we want to try and keep maintaining a really leaking boat and a rickety ship or whatever metaphor you want to use that is really falling apart and is not doing its primary function anyway, which is providing for a retirement for old people? Or do we want to admit that, okay, we've learned from this experiment and it's a tear down and we need to build a different system to help people who need it going forward into the 21st century? Between this and the Titanic reference, I think what Nick is telling us is that he is ready to go on his retirement cruise. Like, he's out of here. He wants to be on the boat. As long as it's not a reason cruise, okay? RIP, the reason cruises. I never got to go on one. Oh, wow. I'm going to ask sort of this is a aid. That's part of us didn't come back from that. Going to ask sort of create a version of that. I'm on a boat music video, but with Nick instead. No, please don't do that. That could be our outro for this week's podcast. I cannot beg you sincerely enough to please not do that. The letter writer Barney's spirit of it, I think was sort of like a personal conception of all these kind of things. And the FWIW, my personal conception, being a Gen X from 55 now, has always been and has not changed. I don't expect to get $1. I'm living my life, planning my life as if I will never get any money. You believe in UFOs more than you believe in the security of self security, right, Matt? That was the big Gen X talking point. UFOs are not about belief. Are there unidentified flying objects? By definition, yes. By definition, yes. It's not belief. It's just fact. Looking forward to next week's question from UFO enthusiasts asking you to expand on that. What are we calling them now? Unexplained aerial phenomena. UAPs, yeah. UAP, unexplained aerial phenomenon. Sorry, anomalous, actually. It's anomalous, maybe? Anyway, I guess they could be in the ocean. Should the Loch Ness monster pay social security taxes? That's why you should watch Ancient Apocalypse to find out the answer to these and other important questions. Yeah. That's really like dog whistling that conspiracies so hard these days. Let's go to the drama that's actually getting attention in political headlines today. As we tape this, and yes, we do tape it, it. Former President Donald Trump is in a Manhattan courtroom, roughly halfway between me and Nick, trying one final Hail Mary to get his Stormy Daniels hush money criminal case thrown out of court. That case, which is brought by a Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, may well be the only one of the four criminal cases that Trump is facing that will make it a trial before the November election. Yet the real drama arguably is that today is also the deadline for Trump to post a mind boggling $454 million bond imposed upon him by New York State Attorney General Latish James as part of the civil asset valuation case that he lost a few weeks ago. He's already posted a $91.6 million bond to appeal his penalties to the defamation case that he lost suit, that he lost to Eugene Carroll over alleged sexual assault. Latish James has said she's ready to start seizing his assets, including maybe starting first with Trump Tower. She's starting with Barron, that's what I understand. Six foot seven worth of assets. Trump's other son, Eric, I believe, the smart one, has said that the whole law fair effort amounts to election interference. Catherine, certainly this does look like some pretty disproportionate dollar amounts that could put a pretty huge crimp on the fundraising of a major party presidential candidate, no? Yeah, I mean this is like the numbers with respect to various Trump bonds and like legal obligations are now, they're starting to like cause that same humming sound in my head that like the national debt causes, like that when the numbers get big enough, it's just like, oh God, I can't hear these anymore. One million is big, one billion is bigger. I now long for the humming sound. But yeah, I mean I think, you know, it's been interesting to me because I have, I think many people at Reason have like a quite strong view that campaign finance regulations, as a general matter, both are ineffective and probably unconstitutional. But we are really like, this is testing some of my intuitions on that since Trump is pretty explicitly just fundraising for his presidential campaign by saying, I have to pay, I have a lot of legal expenses that I have to pay. And also vice versa that he's saying, you know, I was planning to use the cash that is, of course, what the courts would seize first, right? Like the very first thing that they go after is not Trump Tower, it's just whatever sitting around in your bank accounts that's very easy to do because of course banks have already long since worked out procedures where they just take all the money in your bank account and transfer it to the attorney general or whoever. He's saying, you know, I need to use that cash for my presidential campaign. And so the sort of total bleed between those two piles of money on the one hand, I think it should be legal. I think it's crazy to tell someone, for instance, that they, if they're straight with their fundraising, if he says, I'm going to use this for my legal expenses, he should be allowed to do that. If people want to give him their money for his legal expenses, they should be allowed to do that. But yeah, you know, I think at the heart of it, it is still legitimate to ask like, did the court make this number so big? Did the judge make this number so big in an explicit effort to handicap a presidential campaign? That's a fair question to ask. I think the answer I would guess is a complicated one. But we talked, I think, on a previous podcast about like the way at which the way in which that number was arrived at, it was like fairly unorthodox. It was, you know, somewhat unusual for the way that courts typically process these types of claims. So I think it's fair to ask. Peter, with both Letitia James and Alvin Bragg, we're talking about elected officials, Democratic elected officials, who ran explicitly, at least in the case of Letitia James, and I presume Bragg, explicitly, they're going to go after Trump. And they've acted like, you know, end zone spiking clowns on social media as part of this whole process. Given those numbers, given the behavior, given the partisan nature of it all, is this election interference? What an incredible shit show. Like seriously, this whole thing, it just makes me like want to quit everything. So is it election interference? I don't think that it is election interference as classically defined. I think it is boorish and stupid behavior on the part of just about everyone involved. I hate them all. This is an aliens versus predator situation. Whoever wins, we lose. That's an uncommonly brief. Nick, is there an element to this where Republicans are getting what they deserve? Trump is a known quantity. He's going to be in the legal system, regardless, even if he wasn't president, there'd be a thousand lawsuits going in and out. He's always done that. He's always stiffed his contractors. He's always made himself look 12 times larger than he actually is. Is there a part of this where Republicans have it coming? Yes, but Matt, you buried the lead, as you were wanting to do on Monday mornings, because over the weekend, the real Trump news was that he won at the award nights, the club championship and trophy, and the senior club championship trophy. I won both. He wrote on Truth Social. He won at the Trump International Golf Club at West Palm Beach. He won the big awards, Matt. I don't know why you're trying to cover that up with this. I don't see you winning the Nick Gillespie Invitational Awards. In fact, I noted this morning that I continue to... I am the only voter in the Nick Gillespie Awards that are held almost daily at the Nick Gillespie apartment, and yet I never... I'm not even in the top five. I'm concerned that you have a monopoly on those awards, Nick. Yeah, and I'm still... I don't know what goes wrong. I put... I stuffed the ballot box. Lina Khan should probably look into the golfing awards at the Trump International. Yeah, this is... The Republican Party is getting what they deserve. I think the Democratic Party is getting what it deserves, and Matt, then where does that leave the four of us and many other people like us who are neither Republicans nor Democrats? Why are we getting what they deserve? That's the question, right? We're not just spoiling the next segment. They're getting court decisions and they're getting more money and they're getting... One of... Either a Republican or a Democrat is going to be the president. What do we get? We get the bill. This is the four-body problem. Yes. I would just point out that in studies of populist moments... I love studies. ...internationally shush, that one of the things that you see, it's a common feature of populist governments, is that a shockingly high percentage of former leaders end up in prison. And this is in Democratic countries as well. And I think it's an increasing thing that we're seeing worldwide. Sarkozy, might Nicholas Sarkozy, former French prime minister or president, is I think a head of two or in prison right now. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's all kinds of court cases. I mean, that's pretty common also in French politics. Once you bounce out of office, you're the subject of either fantastical, mistress claims or legal proceedings. I do like the... I mean, this is what keeps me on the internet. Regardless of how I access it, whether it's an Apple or an Android product, is the argument that Macron's wife was actually a man? Yes, that's right. This led to the unpleasantness between Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens. I appreciate you trying to throw that stink bomb near the podcast. Speaking of end of podcast stink bombs, let's go to what all of us were consuming in the cultural sphere. Peter, I'm kind of excited about what I think is yours. Why don't you lead us off? So I saw they live on the big screen for the first time. I've obviously seen this movie many, many, many times before, mostly just for the wrestling sequence in the middle of the movie that lasts so long. It's basically like the Joe Biden, Donald Trump matchup. It is just these two old guys kind of slowly beating the crap out of each other in an alley for no good reason for forever, and it just keeps going. And by the end, you can't help but laugh. The whole movie is just so great in so many ways. But what really struck me about it, since I hadn't seen it all the way through in a few years, was that it is a great political time capsule. This movie is so populist, so pro-labor, anti-globalization, anti-mass media, anti-commercialism, just kind of anti-capitalism in general in a very explicit way, where you've got an explicit description of the bad guys coming from one of the kind of lefty organizer types. Okay, he's an anti-aliens organizer, but he's really, he's just a lefty activist. And he's like, well, the bad guys, you know, they're free enterprises, right? And it's this wink-wink joke about how the bad guys, you know, call the good guys commies. But that's not true, obviously, right? And there's even like a black-tie banquet scene that I'd forgotten about, where in the third act, you know, where our hero, Rowdy Rowdy Piper, wanders through the television station and like the bowels of the alien, you know, sort of operation and they get to this black-tie dinner and they refer to everybody there as the elites, right? And this was such an incredibly explicitly, proudly left-leaning film in its day. There's a shot in this movie. So the premise is that a kind of a drifter worker who's doing some construction work finds some glasses that allows him to see that the world is actually run by sort of alien overlords who are invisible to normal human eyes and there's propaganda everywhere, right? Like all of the signs for, you know, the magazines and just billboards, everything. It all just says like, obey and procreate and like, you know, sort of listen to authority, don't think your own thoughts, that sort of thing. And so, and then of course he goes and takes them down. And you know, so it's just interesting to see this as like, oh, this idea of the elites screwing the little guy, right, kind of the populist types. That was there in the 1980s, except it was quite left-coded. In fact, like I said, there's a scene where our hero sees the television. He sees a politician who is almost certainly the president. We never see that it's Ronald Reagan, but it's pretty clearly implied that it's Ronald Reagan. He's just like, yeah, should have figured, you know. And what's weird is watching this now, despite how left-coded this movie was at the time, watching this now, it actually feels like a kind of populist new right MAGA movie in so many ways with maybe the exception of the way it treats sex and marriage and fertility. But the movie is basically horseshoe theory in conspiratorial alien genre film form. And it's freaking great. I love John Carpenter, especially his run of movies in the 1980s. This is one of the best, if you can see it on the big screen, you should. But as you do, just remember, this is a movie that sort of shows us the shifting nature of populist politics and how it has changed over the last 30-something years. Who, can I ask, Peter? Because, you know, that's kind of one of the last big anti-Ragan pop culture manifestations. Who is Reagan in the current moment? Like, who are, are there, like neither party kind of admits to being globalist, right, at this point, or laissez-faire, which just, I mean, it's curious. I think that's right, though. You know, if you want a sort of a globalist Reagan-type villain that folks rally against, it's the sort of the idea of the Paul Ryan Republican Party, which still lingers on both the left and the right. Oh, they're gonna cut your entitlements. They're gonna do free trade, right? It's that maybe even the George W. Bush Republican Party and a huge amount of the mega new right worldview and to the extent that they have a policy agenda is about not doing the stuff that Paul Ryan and George W. Bush said they wanted to do in terms of trade and entitlements. I think your answer is George Soros. Thank you, obviously. Katherine, what did you consume? Speaking of views about fertility, I guess. I read Tim Carney's new book, Family Unfriendly, How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs To Be. I read it for a couple reasons. One, I'm a big Tim Carney fan, as you should be as well. Two, because I love that sweet, sweet confirmation bias and almost everything in this book comports with my preexisting views, so take my review with that grain of salt. I should also disclose that I appear in this book. I am one of the characters in the book. I'm a parent that Tim interviewed while he was working on the book. And the part that quotes me is it's a pandemic era. You know, he did the reporting of this book during the pandemic. It's a pandemic era kind of celebration of the fact that the pod that my family was in meant that the adults got to hang out and drink together a lot, which was super nice and is an undervalued part of kind of parenting as a part of a community. And fertility, too. Well, it depends on how clear you need the lineages to be. So the, but the book is very good, not least because it really is mostly about the culture. It really is not a book about how, you know, Josh Hawley is gonna fix our problems. It's like maybe how we can fix our problems. And he is anti-overparenting. He is anti-overscheduling. He is pro, having maybe one extra kid beyond what you thought you wanted. And all of these things just make for a good read. My final endorsement of this book is there is a, the cover has a picture of a playground slide on it, but I can only assume that this was a conscious choice. It's one of those old-fashioned ones that are the silver ones. And when you look at it, you can just feel the backs of your thighs just burning as you slide down it. Like the sun is glinting off it. And this is exactly the spirit of this book. It's like, you know what? Sometimes you just gotta go to the park and slide down the slide that hurts you a little bit over and over because that's the best activity that's available. That's true. And that's a valuable parenting insight. So Tim Carney's family unfriendly, I recommend it if you want to somewhat counterbalance the utterly insane push on both left and right to have Congress fix our parenting problems. My, one of my cousins, when he had his third kid, I was asking him about what it was like. And he's like, well, we have to switch from playing man-to-man defense to zone. And I often, he's a sports doctor. I often think about that as like what are the ramifications of society and policy when it comes to that? We grew up, Nick and I, 1,000 years ago where that was, it was all zone defense and they were not interested in playing it. They just didn't parent was their solution. And it was kind of rad. So yeah, I think I'm curious to see whether Carney's subhead is like, I don't know, maybe six kids is a little bit too many. I will go ahead and tell you, Matt, that is not his conclusion. He does not come to that conclusion. It's too few, right? But he gives you the tools to make your own decisions about how many is too many. Appreciate me some, Tim Carney. Nick, what did you consume? I watched the Netflix version of, Peter, help me with this. Liu Shijin's three body problem. She's in Liu or Liu Shijin? It's depending on how you, I'm probably mispronouncing that too, but it depends on where you put the first last name situation. I'm gonna call him Liu from here on out, but I watched Netflix's three body problem, which is a mini series and the first season ostensibly to a multi-season effort about the three body problem, which is a very highly regarded novel that came out of China in 2007, I think, and then it was translated about a decade later, eight years later. It's fantastic, really good series, and it opens with, it's about a Chinese scientist along with some shadowy people in Ohio State who are never sadly or never shown, but who have actual contact with an alien race that is coming towards the earth. But it opens with a scene from the Cultural Revolution, which is fantastic and highly worth watching. Just watch the first 10 minutes of the show. The way that it figures what was going on in China during the Cultural Revolution is fantastic, and it sets a tone which is bizarre and wonderful throughout the whole thing of like, what do you do if you know that there is an alien race that is coming to conquer you in about 400 years? And how does that play out in various kinds of ways? There are market departures from the novel and things like that, but it's a really interesting and fascinating series. And one of the things that I was doing a little background on, Lou, the author, was pilloried for not speaking out against the way that the Chinese government deals with the Uyghurs and other populations at various points. And he has kind of claimed to be apolitical. He did go along with moving that scene from the Cultural Revolution from the middle of the novel to the beginning for the English translation and for the American market, which is kind of interesting. But he is on the record of saying, if you were to loosen up the country, China a little bit, the consequences would be terrifying. He's said that democracy is not good for modern China for a variety of reasons. And what's interesting beyond the fact that he's talking, he's coming out of a Chinese connection. When Netflix talked about this deal in 2020 for Republican senators, wrote a letter to Netflix demanding that Netflix say that they are against the Uyghur imprisonment and what are they doing? Like, they were supposed to answer why they were pursuing a deal with a text like this by a person like that, which is kind of interesting. And the four senators, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, Tom Tillis of North Carolina, Matt, and then I wanna ask you especially, Matt, the fourth senator was Kevin Kramer. Do you have any idea what state he is from? Sounds like a Dakota. That is actually perfect. Yeah, he's North Dakota. I, when I saw Kevin Kramer, I was like, I think I went to grammar school with like six Kevin Kramer's. Am I having deja vu? Or is this the second time we've speculated about whether Kevin Kramer is real on this podcast? I don't know. It may be we're in some kind of time loop from a different Netflix series. Are we bringing to sunglasses or not? Yeah, no, but it's, you know, it's a really good series. It would have been so beautiful during the pandemic, actually, because it has that kind of vibe to it. But it's a really incredibly well done in many ways. The characters are frustrating. The large scenario is really kind of mesmerizing and things like that. So the three body problem, and it's like eight hours long or something, and I watched it in like a day and a half because it's that good. So I'm only a couple of episodes into the show, but I wrote about the books for Reason Magazine several years ago when they came out. And one of the interesting things about that book is the way that it uses that opening sequence with the, in the cultural revolution. It is a sequence about a physics professor who is being told that he's teaching basically a capitalist physics, right? Physics that doesn't support the will of the people and the, you know, the Chinese. And he's being told to recant what he knows to be fundamentally true about the physical world. And this is in many ways, in some ways this sets up the plot of, oh, physics is just broken. It suddenly doesn't work the same way it does anymore. When I think of you read a little bit more deeply into the books, what you see is that the books are about, they are about this idea that sometimes like governments and movements and politics force you to say things that you know are not true and that that is a survival mechanism and that it's terrible. But the way that you survive is by holding in your head the truth that is real, the thing that is objectively actually true and that even if you're not gonna say it, that like you have to hold that in your head and that is how you survive. And it's really kind of interesting seeing that coming from somebody who is in, you know, CCP China. And I think the book is more secretly subversive than a lot of people have given it credit for. One hopes it's, Matt, your interest in, you know, in kind of the Eastern block politics under communism you'll find a lot, it's a very rich text for that. And the opening scene is the father is the professor who has asked to recant because he believes in the big bang which implies there was something before time began. And then the young interlocutor who beats him to death, I'm not giving anything away here saying that you are opening up a space where God exists and God cannot exist. I mean, it's just wonderfully done but his wife is the one who denounces him on stage. And then the daughter who becomes the main kind of catalyst in the plot is in the audience watching this. It's really, really well done because like Peter, like you're saying it's trying to hold multiple beliefs at the same time but then what is the effect on people who live under that system especially when then they have some space for autonomy or freedom, what kind of decisions do they make? And so it's very good. So my consumption is what if I told you that last year there was a movie about the Philip Marlowe character, Raymond Chandler's classic LA noir detective character that was played by Liam Neeson and that the movie was directed by Neil Jordan and that other people involved included Jessica Lange. All of this happened last year. It's a movie called Marlowe and no one watched it at all. It's got like, they made $12 and got an abysmal Rotten Tomatoes ranking. I didn't know any of that when I mashed the please play this button because it was Philip Marlowe and it's LA. And of course I enjoyed it and I'm interested in that fact. For those who like LA noir, I don't know if you like this but for those who absolutely need to keep some Philip Marlowe into their veins at periodic times as a basic survival instinct even more than holding in some truth that you're afraid to blurt out, it's just there for you. It's like inscrutable plot involving shady Mexicans and Hollywood starlets and power structures that don't make sense and corrupt cops and the whiskey and all that. It's not even based on a Chandler book. It's based on a novel that came out recently I guess called the Black Eyed Blonde. But it's all just familiar totally like an unfollowable Raymond Chandler plot and a lot of literary references. Neeson is a bit older than you usually get as a Philip Marlowe is a little bit more kind of frail and sad, a bit of a more emphasis on the Irishness, which is kind of interesting and kind of the wartime service and the memories and hauntings of that. It's not great and it's also super awesome and I loved all of it. And so if you're that kind of person you might like it too, you'll be outnumbered by everybody else but it's called Marlowe. That's with an E everybody and check it out if you like that kind of stuff. I saw it on Amazon, it's probably elsewhere. All right, that's all the elsewhere we have time for here on the Reason Roundtable podcast. Nick, are there any tickets left for the Jonathan Hyatt event that you are having The Reason Speak Easy on April 15th in New York City? Yes. That's good news. Go out there and get- Go to www.reason.com slash events and buy the last ticket. And if you like our podcasts and you should, there's lots of them now go to www.reason.com slash podcast to get the full view. If you like what we do please go to www.reason.com slash donate, consider giving us a tax deductible donation to encourage us to do more. All right, that's all the time we have. We will see you next week and goodbye.