 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly libertarian podcast from the magazine that's doing better this morning than Yankee fans. I am Matt Welch, joined by Nicholas B. Peter Suderman and Pinch Hitting for a gimpy Catherine Manki Award, none other than Fiona Harrigan. Good morning, pals. Hello. Hey, Matt. Happy Monday. There you go. Peter's been working on this pronunciation of Rushi Rishi Sunak, right? I've already... Either that or he is really on some kind of super-saturday. You know, it's not either or, never is. The UK has a new prime minister, as badly mentioned already. We'll talk about that a little later in the proceedings. But first, let's get to what everybody on this side of the pond is yammering about. And that's the upcoming midterm elections by everybody I do mean, actor-director Rob Reiner, who on Sunday tweeted, in the next 16 days, Americans will decide if we want to remain a constitutional democracy or live under fascism. I have voted for democracy. If you agree, vote blue. Meathead aside, there's just a ton of apocalyptic rhetoric going around in the media right now. Historian and MSNBC regular Jason Stanley this very morning, we do this on Monday, tweeted, what is your plan now that American democracy is likely a thing of history? Will you tell your kids about what it was like? Will you lie to them about what it is now? It's pretty easy to make fun of all the hysterics. It's a bit harder for everyone, whether they be doomsayers or skeptics, thereof, to spell out concretely what it would mean if the GOP does what the opposition party to the president so often does two years after he's elected and that is retake control of the House and maybe even the Senate. Peter, you live in DC in your weird little lair there with a 9,000 pound dog behind you. You always dress up as Mitch McConnell for Halloween. Can you give us a preliminary sense of whether Republicans indeed plan to tank the global economy in order to force social security cuts as I keep reading about in the pages of New York Magazine and The Washington Post? My God, they're animals. Yeah, probably. Yeah, yeah. Is that your sense? Look, so the articles you keep reading are articles written from a sort of left-wingish pro-democratic pro-democratic party perspective that they're looking for a hook that will help Democrats in the midterm and the hook they have settled on. And I actually think there's some reason to think that this is an effective political message is that if Republicans win back the House and the Senate, they will use the upcoming debt limit expiration to basically hold, they will hold the debt limit hostage and their demand will be what we have to cut Medicare and Social Security. Republicans have, there's some reason to think that some version of that is true because a bunch of Republicans have said, look, there's a debt limit expiration date coming up. And when that happens, probably what we're going to do is we're going to say, hey, look, Social Security and Medicare have kind of shaky finances. Maybe we should work on reforming them. And so they're not putting forward specific proposals right now, but there have been a couple of proposals from the past couple of years, and they include things like, hey, maybe we should means test entitlements. So let's not give entitlements to seniors who are really well off. Or maybe we should raise the age of retirement so that so that people don't get Medicare or Social Security immediately at 65, like 10 years from now. That's the kind of thing that they're talking about. And that's what that the sort of the left wing industrial political complex right now wants you to be afraid of. And look, there's, there's, you know, like I said, as a political message, this may well be somewhat effective, because Medicare and Social Security are in fact quite popular. And if you can portray a party as trying to cut them, as trying to cut those programs, then that's typically a winning political message. That's why Donald Trump spent four years saying, I'm absolutely not going to touch Medicare and Social Security, because he understands that they are popular programs. Which is the detail that seems to go absent in some of these analyses about what the Republicans are. Remember all of those other times when the Republicans controlled everything? I mean, they burned it to the ground. I mean, every time the Democrats managed to get back into office, they had to rebuild these programs. There are absolutely questions about how serious any of this is and what Republicans are going to do. The Republican Party is a total clown show at this at the moment. They do not, you know, it's not like they have like really rallied around a bunch of specific plans here. But it's I do think that it's at least possible that something like this will happen. But so on the policy merits, this is what's not getting talked about here is we could argue about whether the debt limit is the best vehicle for for negotiating reforms to Social Security and Medicare. But if nothing happens, if Congress doesn't do something, Social Security and Medicare are going to cut themselves. And they're going to do so in a radical and dramatic way, not a like a planned way, which is what the Republican plans to the extent that they exist have suggested. It's not talking. They're not, you know, the when Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund goes becomes insolvent in 2027 or so. What happens is that immediately Medicare cannot pay all of its bills overnight. When Social Security's trust fund becomes insolvent in the 2030s, what happens is that immediately Social Security cannot pay out all of its checks overnight. And so what if Republicans go ahead with this? Again, I'm not sure I think the debt limit is the best vehicle for for doing this kind of negotiation. But if Republicans go ahead with this, then why are we why are we why are we acting? There is no reason to believe that they're going to do this. I mean, this is a political strategy by the Democrats who Peter is right that the Republicans, you know, is a clown show that is literally headed by a guy who recently said he would throw, you know, various kinds of whistleblowers in jail so they would be raped. I mean, that's Donald Trump and his most recent public persona, you know, to the cheers of thousands in the audience. That's where the Republican party is and the running people like Herschel Walker, who is, you know, who who is still bringing down the NAEP scores for fourth grade reading, for God's sake. I mean, it's a terrible party that is about to win big in the house because the Democratic party is headed by a guy who is talking to people who died years ago and, you know, and has just pumped trillions of dollars into the economy and has led a disastrous two years. So, you know, I don't know if like if we want to talk about political, you know, strategies and stuff like that, but there's no reason to fear a midterm Republican win in the house and possibly the Senate which is looking more likely, but it's still kind of iffy. That is not the end of democracy. That is the next click in the wheel of democracy. And the real problem from a libertarian point of view is, you know, that neither of these parties is at all serious and there's a really deep question about whether or not the libertarian party is actually serious. Nick, to follow up, I mean, should we not be concerned that we're about to see restoration of power in a party where 147 members of Congress didn't vote to certify the presidential election and where you have, you know, gubernatorial candidates in Arizona and Michigan and Pennsylvania? Yeah, it's trouble. Is it possible that all the boys crying wolf out there are distracting us from an actual wolf and should we be concerned about big things with fangs at the door? I am not worried about anything, any emanations of or, you know, proclamations of looming fascism from Jason Stanley or Rob Ryder. That is ridiculous. It's hyperbolic and it is incendiary at a particular time when what we actually need to be doing is sifting through candidates who are not insane from either party and putting them in one camp. Because, you know, we also have people, she's going to lose big in Georgia, but, you know, Stacey Abrams who was talking about how like, you know, really the tight connection now is between inflation and having kids, you know, and that's why we need better abortion because, you know, kids are going to inflate the economy or something like that. The level of political rhetoric is so fucking stupid. You know, that's got to be the primary focus unless you are in the tank for the Republican or Democratic Party. I welcome for sure a House win or the Republicans taking over the House because it will act as a check on a Congress that has been terrible so far. And that doesn't say anything good about Donald Trump or anything and it's not nihilistic. It's like, right now we need a check on the way that the government has been, you know, has been spending money under Joe Biden. And I think that will happen. What happens next? Who knows? You know, because Bill Clinton, I think a lot back and Matt, I know to you and to me, this does not seem like ancient history. It doesn't even really seem like, you know, it's like a couple weeks ago. But Bill Clinton, who unlike Joe Biden got in with the lowest winning percentage since Richard Nixon, he won with like 43% of the vote in 1992, looked like he was going to be a one-termer who would not even, you know, get a parking lot concession in James Buchanan's presidential library. It was such a failure. The Republicans blew him out in 1994 and then he ended up being one of the most successful presidents of our lifetime because whatever mix of fluvium that was coming out of Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton and seeping out of every fabric in Washington D.C. in that period, you know, ended up concocting a brew that was pretty successful from an economic and political standpoint. So who knows? But no, democracy is not threatened if the Republicans win the House in the Senate. Nick, are you not at least a little bit worried, Jason Stanley aside, Rob Reiner aside, about someone like Kerry Lake winning the governor's race in, you know, in Arizona and installing people into positions of power over elections in like a potential swing state? Yeah. Yeah, sure. And is that the end of democracy? I don't think so. I mean, we heard those stories about Georgia and, you know, Brian Kemp was like a monster, right, who's about to become the governor of Georgia. So yeah, there's lots of things. Brian Kemp was the guy who was there's lots of resisted Trump's efforts. Yeah, I know. But he was by the by Democrats at the time. He was we were being told that he was in the tank and that he was, you know, rounding up mailboxes and things like that. We could not have an old star game in Georgia. Come on. Kerry Lake is a disturbing apparition and, you know, it is, it is frightening. I mean, on some level, it's also Arizona, which is, you know, is now officially kind of a purple state. So we'll see, you know, from its inception. But in any case, I know, I don't, I think, yes, I don't think the the point is that these abnormalities aside, this is not a threat to the Republic and people who reach for that are not serious thinkers, including people at Catherine's Alma Mater. Fiona, you were negative five years old in 1994 or thereabouts. So let's let's get you in on on a subject that you've been talking and writing about a lot, which is Ukraine. There's been a bunch of contradictory reporting about what a Republican majority would mean for U.S. support for Ukraine versus Russia. What's your latest sense of where that stands? Yeah, you know, funding for Ukraine is a super hot button issue and a lot of Republican leaders and politicians seem to suggest that a Republican-led Congress would handle that more surely than the Democrats have. And they've definitely been the loudest voices calling for things like accountability, oversight, certain mechanisms for restraint and making sure that, you know, weapons and aid end up in the right hands, essentially. But it's kind of in the way that a lot of Democrats have faltered on immigration. There's been this convergence around, you know, sending these massive aid packages that some otherwise basically conservative Republicans would otherwise oppose, right? They've been very happy to be very spendy in some areas that are perhaps ill-advised and perhaps have been predicted by previous conflicts like Afghanistan. You know, we've seen very strong examples of aid and weapons ending up in the wrong hands if we flood them into quickly and if we don't think about these things up front. You know, and I think a lot of libertarians might disagree on the wisdom of funding for Ukraine. It's seen as a good alternative in some ways to boots on the ground and direct assistance through soldiers. But with the U.S. outspending basically all of Europe for a conflict much closer to their backyard, it's kind of hard to see those priorities as physically responsible. And a lot of Republicans have voted and sided with the Democrats in favor of aid to Ukraine. So absent oversight in a devoted inspector general, which has been floated by folks like Rand Paul, things like that. I expect there's going to be some incoming hesitance among Republicans. There's been a trend upward in the number of Republicans who have voted against aid now that the initial shock of the Russian invasion is wearing off. But it's hard to imagine that there would be transformative changes, especially as both parties seem overly willing to spend American money without much debate. Peter, you've mentioned in the past something along the lines that personnel as policy might even sort of amend that of saying the personality of people in positions of power sometimes matter pretty heavily as well. This is just a way of segwaying into Mitch McConnell who you've followed for a long time versus Kevin McCarthy. Mitch McConnell, if Republicans take the Senate, it's going to be a lot of McConnell, a lot of McCarthy. Everything I have seen and heard about Kevin McCarthy in the history of his entire life is that he is a stupid person, just like a dumb person. Mitch McConnell, whatever one says about his wisdom, his heart, his lizard brain, stupid is usually not what comes out. Mitch McConnell would run Washington or run Congress effectively if Republicans take both chambers. Am I correct in that? I think that's an open question. McCarthy would have more power than he's ever had before. I think there would be no escaping to some extent that he would be able to make calls in a way that he has not been able to make before. Yeah, I agree with your assessment there. I mean, Mitch McConnell, whatever else you think of him is just tactically very savvy. I think that's often to the detriment of American politics. Mitch McConnell has always had exactly one goal, which is to elect Republicans and then not really have them do anything in hopes of making sure that Republicans are elected as often as possible. Hence, the thing that he has cared about most that's outside that is the courts. He has really moved a lot of Republican appointees into the courts, but that's at least in part because he sees the courts as a better vehicle for making decisions than Congress. And he doesn't want Republicans to have to have their names on stuff because he just wants to elect Republicans in service of it's just never actually been clear what McCarthy is is not tactically or strategically savvy. And it's also not clear exactly what he stands for on policy, but it's totally plausible that he could end up adopting some sort of policy platform position of the moment. But my guess is that a McCarthy reign would end up not so much being about policy. Instead, it would be about really dumb political attacks on Joe Biden and just hearing after hearing on stuff like Hunter Biden and God knows what kind of dumb scandals. The Republican Party has already signaled that if they get power with Biden still in office, that's what they're going to use it for. And that seems like the kind of thing that McCarthy is really going to be motivated by. Freedom caucus for the win. Freedom means investigating Hunter Biden's laptop. I'm looking forward to a final wrap up of Benghazi. And if they can somehow get Hunter Biden tied to Benghazi, Matt, then it's not the end of democracy. It's the beginning of freedom. We finally got the McCarthy. Well, I was going to say McCarthy, if I'm not mistaken, is the last of the young guns who is still in office. Him and Emilio Estevez. Yeah. Now, even Emilio Estevez is like, no, I have nothing to do with that. Yeah. Kevin McCarthy is the Lou Diamond Phillips of Congress. Or the Casey Sejmako. He so typifies the mediocrity that people like H.L. Mencken struggle to find the words to put onto the page. He's terrible. And like Peter said, he will be awful. Mitch McConnell will be awful because he doesn't want to do anything other than shovel money to his pet interests and things like that, which is bad enough. And Mitch McConnell will be in some ring of hell that has not yet been discovered. But Kevin McCarthy is stupid and will do bad things that not only hurt the future Republican party, which I could give two shits about, but he will do things that will make the next two years even more miserable than it's already done. Fun fact about young guns, the Western in the late 80s with the new Brad Pack. When I was a child in Long Beach teenager, we used to drive up to Westwood and like to walk around. That was exciting thing to do in high school. And we stumbled upon the movie premiere of Young Guns, like a red carpet and all the various stars walking there. And it was the first time I were you bitten by a radioactive charge? The first time that I was made aware of the Hollywood cliche that all actors with like two exceptions are just horrifically short. All these guys are little hobbits walking through and they're like, wow, we could take those guys in basketball totally. All right. One of the major themes that Republicans have been hammering on during this election is immigration. I cannot tell you how many thousands of times I have seen this citizens for sanity TV commercial during the baseball playoffs about how like every single Democrat has voted to allow illegal immigrants to stab people in Las Vegas. I think that's the direct quote. Fiona, you follow this issue pretty closely, the politics and the issue of it. How much does now I thought we were going to talk about? No, I'm sure you will find a way to I thought we were going to talk about a million injected into it. I like how when I say Fiona, immediately the dude start talking. Can you give us a sense of how much the immigration is looming as an issue? What the comparative party messaging is on it and whether any of it bears any resemblance to reality of what immigration policy at the chaotic seeming border is right. Yeah, sure. I've been in Arizona for about a week now and it's really astonishing how many times one campaign ad can say the words fentanyl open borders and gang members. That's about the 10 or down here. It's a central plank for Republican candidates these days, people like Black Masters and Kerry Lake over here, but even in races that are very far away from the border. It's kind of a first cousin to law and order, the crime-focused messaging that a lot of candidates are pulling, but actual immigration reform is basically untouchable on Congress. I think there are a couple reasons for that. One is that in a way, a lot of Democrats have capitulated to Republican messaging. Here in Arizona, there are some senators, Kirsten Sinema and Mark Kelly, who have moved to delay the end of Title 42, which is a pandemic error policy that Biden has continued after the Trump administration imposed it, which allows border officials to expel asylum seekers. That sort of thing is kind of in this uncanny valley of Republicans meeting Democrats in Arizona. A lot of those politicians mentioned the same thing, that the policies that the Biden administration has kept in place are creating chaos at the US-Mexico border. Whether that's true or not really depends on who you ask and what data you parse. A lot of Republicans have said that they won't consider things visa reforms and measures to bring in PhDs and STEM workers until the border is secure. But what they don't mention is how destabilizing a lot of the Trump administration policies were at the border and how a lot of the buildup of that is now manifesting down here at the US-Mexico border. For example, Title 42, it's really reduced legal pathways, things like asylum. Trump also really drastically reduced refugee admissions and work visas, legal immigration, which has essentially forced migrants who are determined to migrate to migrate illegally. So with asylum no longer really a thing during the pandemic, a lot of people were crossing illegally because they had no other option. Really, there were pre-pandemic expulsions for migrants that would carry penalties. So people really didn't attempt to repeat crossings if they were caught for fear of punishment. But Title 42 doesn't penalize in the same way, which means that repeat crossings are super high down here, which means that there's really inflated data in terms of crossings and apprehensions. So that's something that a lot of Republicans miss out on and a lot of Democrats who are now siding with Republicans miss. But policy changes that would actually help mitigate that. Restoring asylum at the ports is really, really important and the Biden administration restored asylum for Haitians and essentially completely shifted 90% of Haitian migrants crossing illegally to 90% over 90% crossing legally. Things like increasing work fees, a delegation, those things are very highly correlated to reductions in illegal migration. But all of that is essentially untouchable because everybody just goes apeshit over the border and nobody can actually talk reasonably about these reforms. To the point where there's only one major piece of legislation that I know of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act that Republicans are co-sponsoring in pretty large numbers comparatively, that is actually geared toward immigration reform. So this is essentially an untouchable issue now. Peter, I read Kevin McCarthy's commitment to America so that you didn't have to. It also takes about as long to finish as my pet goat. I think here is the complete... Did you read that on a menu tray at like a norm or something? It was on the back of my fortune at the Chinese restaurant. Here's the complete and total plan to regain control of the southern border. You ready? Peter? Is your body ready? Could I possibly be ready? Fully fund effective border enforcement strategies, infrastructure and advanced technology to prevent illegal crossings and trafficking by cartels. End catch and release loopholes, require proof of legal status to get a job and eliminate welfare incentives. So that ought to do it, right? I like that he's leaving open that space for artisanal traffickers. You know, not the cartels. Come on, they're big business. They don't care about the people. Fully fund effective strategies. I mean, who could be against that? He's a mad man. Crazy. I'm surprised he didn't want to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse. So the Straussian reading is they won't fund anything because none of the strategies are effective. Wouldn't it be great if there's a new season of surreal life coming out, but if Dr. Drew just expanded sober house to cover Congress and it was like 535 people, you know, living in a Dr. Drew Pinsky sober house, I don't know. I think that would be preferable to what is going to come. Just as long as John Boehner could wobble into the picture now and then again. He would be leading every other meeting. Come on. This ends with a bunch of Republican governors nationalizing like Greyhound, right? And then just busing every immigrant directly to New York, D.C. and Martha's Vineyard. But where Eric Adams can't be found because he's out at some kind of late night secret club that wearing really cool clothes. And then they're going to argue that this is actually fiscally conservative because Greyhound was operating at a loss or something, right? Like if you have the Amtrak guys take over Greyhound, it'll somehow or another will save money on the trips that the immigrants have to. Well, if every immigrant, if every illegal immigrant is carrying at least two Amazon packages, it all balances out. They're all going to end up rebalancing the city bikes. I don't know what happened this morning. Finally, all those city bikes that are downtown will be driven uptown. No, I mean, this is a good question because so far the Republican immigration policy has been to use immigrants as props and political stunts. There has not been any sort of serious effort to put forward something that is stable, functional, right? That can actually last and is going to work at the border because Republicans don't have that plan. What they have is a bunch of gripes that they're going to lob at Democrats because they think that it will help them win elections. But then if and when they end up in power with actually having responsibility over this, it's totally unclear what they will do because they don't know because their position is we should fully fund effective strategies. Good luck with that, guys. It's also true that the Democrats have failed at anything approaching immigration reform or even immigration control. To a certain degree, Trump was the beneficiary of part of his extremeness at the border did discourage people, but it's also that the conditions in the sending countries also have changed. That's one of the things I think from a specifically libertarian perspective that is it exceeds even the grasp of most libertarians, which is that the receiving country is not the dictator of flows in the way that we might think. And it's really governments don't control borders effectively anymore except in absolute authoritarian countries anymore that they control the economy and things like that. And they can hold the line for a little bit, but things come back. And what we desperately need in America, and Americans are ready for this, politicians are not, is to have that discussion about why more immigration is better than less immigration and more legal immigration is better than less legal immigration. We have a population problem in this country, which is that we don't have enough people to do the work that is already available plus the work that will grow if we have more people. It's really disastrous. And this, I don't know how much it will actually affect directly this election because everything is really hinging on the economy. And I think historically, immigration is kind of a proxy for economic issues as well as issues about things like drugs or sinisterness. Immigrants and drugs have always been linked in the popular imagination for political outcomes. But also with the pandemic, immigrants and sickness and illness have always been linked. So this is lurking, but I think it is a secondary issue to the main driver of what's going on in this election, which is an economy that everybody knows is shitty and is almost certainly going to get worse because of the way the government has been acting over the past four, you know, eight, 16, 20 years. Incidentally, this was supposed to be one of Kamala Harris's jobs early on was fixing the root causes of migration in Central America. And she went on this awful media tour down there. And essentially, the conclusion was that we should just pay these countries to keep their people at home, which is total misread of government power and corruption down there. But also begs the question of fiscal responsibility when we have how many jobs open, 11 million jobs that God knows how many immigrants could fill and happily would. All right, we're going to get to our listener email of the week here in a moment. But first, is it from an immigrant man? No. Well, actually, I'm not sure. That's a good question. It might even be from a non resident. We'll see. I don't think we ask that question on the email submission. It's true. But we do ask if they're felons, right? Because we prioritize felons in the question. It has to be written with a prison return address. But first, I'm going to read an ad, people, if you stop talking. We're all except for Nicolás be responsible adults here. We do what it takes to ensure our families in case of a medical emergency. But what many of us don't realize is that health insurance won't always cover the full cost of an emergency medical flight. Even comprehensive coverage can leave you with high deductibles and copays. That is where air med care network comes in. When you sign up to become a member of air med care network, should any such emergency arise, you will not see a bill for air medical transport when flown by an AMCN provider. Air med care flying machines transport more than 100,000 patients each year. Best of all, this piece of mind for your whole family can be yours beginning at the low low price of $85 a year. Listeners to the round table can get gift cards with their new memberships for up to $50. To either Visa or Amazon, simply visit air med care network.com slash reason and use the offer code reason. Start protecting your family. Do it today. You'll be glad you did. All right. Reminder, email your succinct queries to roundtable at reason.com. This one comes from Larkin Hogle. Larkin Hogle is the name. It's a fantastic name. Do you think it's real, Nic? Larkin Hogle? Yeah, it's got to be real. It's got to be real. All right. No, nobody. It's like, remember when you're reading those little novels for kids, they would always have the most preposterous. Novels for kids? What are you talking crazy, Matt? They'd always have crazy names like Jack Rabbit. You know, anyways. Rupert McDowell Rimpel and stuff like that. Sorry, Larkin Hogle. This was said to us before the announcement of the new Tory Prime Minister. By the way, Hogle writes, please see the following comment from British Conservative Party MP, Robert Halfon. And now I'm quoting from that. The government has looked like libertarian jihadists and treated the whole country as kind of laboratory mice on which to carry out ultra, ultra free market experiments. He told Sky News. That's a Conservative Party MP. And here comes the question from Larkin Hogle. How can we prevent libertarians from being slandered as such if, as the UK markets suggested, meaning the financial markets free or economic policy require short term suffering to achieve longer term gains? Do Americans have the stomach required to approach such policies? Nick, I would invite you to answer that question. Looking through the American lens feels like we're miles and miles away from anything that might be branded austerity. How would those politics go down in 2022? Yeah, I don't know. Sorry. I was bedazzled by the vision of a libertarian jihadist who somehow asks for permission to come into your house and then sits down and says, like, can I talk to you about libertarianism? And then when you say get the fuck out, they just leave. That's a libertarian jihadist, right? Peter, you... Somebody who's very polite and respectful. Peter, you talked earlier in the podcast about how those entitlements are going to get cut sooner rather than later. Can you imagine, can you visualize the politics of that as we get closer to those dates? Do you want me to talk about entitlements in the United States in response to a question about whether or not Liz Truss was doing libertarian stuff in the UK? The question is, if you would have listened to it or read it when I put it on the Slack channel, is do Americans have the stomach required to approach such policies? Would you like me to read it again a third time? Would that make it work? Yeah. And wait, is this from Larkin Hogle? Hogle. Oh yeah. Put your Hogle straight. That guy is, you know, it's just hit after hit for Larkin Hogle. So let's start with the UK because I think that's instructive. The issue there was that she wasn't doing libertarian policy stuff. She was running up the debt. There was a huge, huge energy subsidy there. And the tax cuts that she proposed were entirely debt financed. That is not the libertarian way of doing things. And it is sometimes described as libertarian, but that's not correct. I understand libertarians do sometimes have differing opinions about this, but I don't think that it is in any way fair to characterize debt financed tax cuts. So tax cuts without any offsetting spending cuts, and in fact with effectively an offsetting spending increase in the form of a giant energy subsidy, that's not libertarian policy. We can't stop people from saying that it is libertarian policy. And in the United States, we're going to face the same thing, which is that people are going to say that any effort to reform programs that are on track to fall apart on their own because of the design that they already have. People will say, oh, that's a crazy libertarian idea to reform those programs and try to make them more fiscally stable. It's not crazy. Either those programs are going to not be able to pay their bills or they're going to be reformed one way or the other. Now, my suspicion is that Republicans will not actually introduce and pass and successfully pass sensible reforms here. Like, if you ask me to bet on how this is going to go in the United States, what's going to happen is Republicans are going to propose something that maybe has some good elements and some dumb elements if we're lucky. And then it won't pass. And then a couple of years from now, we will end up with Medicare being months or weeks away from not being able to pay all of its bills. And there will just be some sort of temporary or ongoing temporary set of measures that fund the gap there. And Congress will not come to a resolution. The programs won't be reformed. And they will sort of hang in the balance of like, well, every six months or so, we have to reauthorize our temporary solution that we had passed initially saying, well, we need six more months to come up with a compromise. That's what's going to happen. It's going to be dumb. It's not going to be productive. But the idea that reforming Social Security and Medicare programs that are half century old or older that were designed badly, that were designed for a completely different world, and that we're going to do so in a way that actually plans a couple of years out rather than waits until the very last minute, if that's your idea of like, oh, that's some very scary libertarian public, doesn't that actually sound like a better plan than just waiting until those programs stop being able to pay all their bills on their own? Fiona, you've been writing about this and following this. Today, Rishi Sunak, the former Treasury Secretary. How can we get that fentanyl that you're always writing about? How can we get Nick to stop answering questions addressed to a person named Fiona? Hey, Fiona. Hey, not Nick. Welcome her. So Rishi Sunak was appointed Prime Minister today, former Treasury Secretary. He's, I think he's richer than Midas. I think he's richer than the Royals, says the Dodger reports. It must be true. I think the first Prime Minister of South Asian heritage, first Hindu, and maybe, or I'm not sure, first a Goldman Sachs alumnus. I'm going to read to you an Associated Press. You're starting to sound like Kanye West. Hey, Fiona. I'm going to read you a paragraph from the Associated Press. This is a news report and this is similar to the email question. His challenge is enormous as he tries to unite a demoralized and divided party that trails far behind the opposition in opinion polls and seeks to shore up an economy reeling after trust's brief disastrous experiment in libertarian economics. Is that inaccurate, as far as you can tell? He's been pretty vocal, well, at least previously. I think he walked this back since, but previously he said that the tax cuts were a fairytale and he was quoted as saying that borrowing your way out of inflation isn't a plan, which seems to cut to Peter's point that there's a lot of not libertarian-ness to this. I think it's important to mention people are going to call things libertarian as long as things are happening, but one independent analysis projected that those tax cuts were going to cost about $207 billion in the fiscal year. My understanding is that trust kind of skated this normal budget analysis that's kind of customary for these policies and I guess there was this kind of inclination to act quickly and decisively that very severely backfired. Whether Sunak is going to try something similar, it's hard to say. Liz Truss had something like a 10% approval rating by the time she ended up getting booted. I guess everybody was keeping an eye on that thing from the Daily Mail, whether she would outlive the lettuce that was slowly rotting in a corner. Is there a final verdict on that one, by the way? The lettuce won. The lettuce was doing well. It's not quite a big mac, right? That would be something else, but it's hard to say that he would do anything similar. I'm not a super close watcher of British politics, but he would have to be insane to kind of replicate that so quickly. Nick, is there, go ahead. I do think if we're talking about, you know, and the Larkin's question, and I feel like we're on a personal basis with him by this point, but is about the libertarian being slandered in America for many, many years. Libertarians, and I'm thinking of people who either were libertarian explicitly or traveled in adjacent circles like Grover Norquist, always talked about how any tax cut is good, any tax cut is a win, and they never talked about cutting spending in concert with tax cuts. Grover Norquist, for most of his career, he's changed tunes. I like him a lot. He's great. He's fantastic on immigration in particular, but for most of his career, he was not saying, we need to cut taxes and offset those with spending cuts. He actually believed like a lot of deranged supply side people that like, you just cut taxes and the economy will take care of itself and government spending will be covered, or they would talk about cutting government programs in totally separate ways. But that's part of the problem here is that libertarians went along for a long, long time with just saying, oh, just cut taxes, just cut taxes, starve the beast, which is actually something that William Nascan and the late head of the Cato Institute talked about for a long time. We bear some responsibility for an association between libertarians and tax cuts that are not paid for. It's really only in the past decade, and I would point to particularly worked on by Veronique Derougi, who was at Cato, at AEI, and is now at Mercatus, who really focused in on the idea that debt finance tax cuts are disastrous in all sorts of ways. And we have a slightly different rhetoric about that. We also take it on the chin for questions about austerity, about cutting spending, particularly in difficult times. It's a good idea. The real problem is not that it has been tried and shown wanting, is that it's never been tried. Back in the financial crisis, people were always talking about how England was going through this austerity period. They never cut government spending, even at the time where everybody was saying, oh, you know, you're killing people because of that something similar happened in the US. So libertarians do, I think, unless you're a libertarian nihilist or an anarchist nihilist, and you just say, just cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes, maximize the contradictions, amenitize the eschaton and all of that, you've got to talk like the way Peter started this out with, which is that if you're cutting taxes, you need to cut spending otherwise really, really bad stuff. I would point, and we'll link it in the post for this piece, but we've done a few interviews with Grover Norquist over the years just basically arguing this, in which he has said things like, my biggest worry is that people are going to worry too much about the size of the deficit because in his reading, when people worry about the deficit, that means taxes are going to go up. And those of us on the other side of it have been arguing that you've got to actually cut government or else what the hell are you even doing. Peter, is there any other besides the tax cut and spend takeaway from what's happening in the UK? Is there any other takeaway from the tumultuous events over there? England's becoming Italy, just new government every week and a half there. Is there anything else that you find of particular interest over there? Yeah. So the parliamentary system has some good things and some bad things about it, but they have the capacity in the parliamentary system to do something that doesn't happen in the United States, which is when the Prime Minister goes off the rails, instead of the rest of the party rallying around that Prime Minister and deciding to support them, the rest of the party says, hey, wait, you're bad for us. We're going to get rid of you. And that doesn't happen in the United States, where if you have a President who is clearly taking the party and the country in a bad direction, what happens in the United States is, and this is for true for Democrats and for Republicans, the rest of the party just sort of lines up to defend whatever dumb stuff the President is doing or wants to do. And that goes to policy decisions. It goes to personnel decisions. And it goes to personality stuff, in particular with Joe Biden and President Trump. We've just seen that the Democratic Party, it's not quite that no one in the Democratic Party will ever criticize Joe Biden. That's not true. And it's not that no one in the Republican Party would ever criticize Donald Trump in any way. But for the most part, the party formally backs the President even to its own detriment. And the parliamentary system allows a major political party who has a prime minister in place who has clearly lost the faith and trust of the people and has gone to somewhere that is taking the party and the country in a bad place. The parliamentary system allows them to say, nope, you're fired very quickly in a way that just doesn't happen in the United States. I will make a prediction not about the political outcome, but pursuant to this precise point that Peter is making, that if Republicans indeed clobber the Democrats, we will see the exception to Peter's rule beginning November 9th. We will hear a lot about how old and sleepy and meandering and ineffective Joe Biden is from Democrats and from the media if indeed they get their hats handed to them and Rob Reiner's dreams of fascism come true because... Do you think Joe Biden will run for president in 2024? Do I think he will run in 24? Yeah. I think if... Do you think that the criticism will be effective at taking him out of the race? I think that if... When Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi come at him with guns blazing that well, she has two walls. My prediction, and again, should never make predictions, but I'm going to make it. If Republicans take both houses, I predict he will not run. I predict that... I mean, those already just majorities of Democratic voters don't want him to run. That's usually a bad sign. And if they're being unsuccessful, I think it'll be a stampede of Pete Buttigieg and whoever the hell else will come in and... Gavin Newsom versus Ron DeSantis. I want to jump off. I think it's... I think you're... I was going to say Jared Leto, which would be a real wild card, but I think Jared Polis is going to make a big bid to be the candidate of centrism. I wish that was 24. I typically don't vote, but I would vote for Jared Leto just if you could just like run on a... It's morbid and time platform? Yeah. No, if he did a Morbius theme campaign, that would be great, but he could also be like... He could be the vice president if he's the character from the Dallas Buyers Club. So it's a balance ticket. It's a man and a woman. Let's go to our end of podcast, what we have been consuming in the cultural arena. Fiona, take us. I've been so tired of the true crime and the political stuff and sports documentaries. I'm reaching the end of the 30 for 30. So my pick for this week is Perfect Bid, The Contestant Who Knew Too Much, which is a delightful somewhat old documentary about a guy who was obsessed with the prices right. He realized that there was a pattern to the prizes that they would show and he would memorize all of the prizes and he would attend the tapings. He would drive to the tapings in California and he would shout out the answers to help people get the Perfect Bid on the show. And the central conflict is this person who got the exact right price for the final showcase and he always said that he did it with no assistance and there's this diverging narrative of whether he actually got help and we hear from friend of reason Drew Carey and some old archive footage and it's just a delightful, wonderful, somewhat thrilling saga. I found myself really, really liking it and it's a good cleanse from the whole wide world. So highly recommend. That sounds terrific. But then he got sentenced by one of those weird California judges, Matt, who make people have a punishment that is somehow demeaning. So the guy was spayed and neutered by Bob Barker, tragic, unexpected turn. Nick, what did you consume besides drugs this morning? I am, yeah, I am reading Burning Down the House, How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by X and Y. What do you think it is? Burning Down the House by How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Blank and Blank? Racism and Nazis. No. Anyone want to try? How Libertarian Philosophy, I feel like we're on a match game. Making whoopee. You know, Little Susie said that Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Blank and Blank? Rainbow Fentanyl. No, it was regular Fentanyl. It was actually, it was, no, it was How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed. Yeah, Greed, this should have Greed. Burning Down the House, How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed. It's written by Andrew Koppelman. It has a blurb from a longtime reason contributor, Deirdre McCloskey. And it is an interesting attack that is, like all such things, is ultimately has bad faith behind it, but it's a very good read because on the cover, which is one of the, it's published by St. Martins, but it has a cover that would make the Cato, the eagle, the bald eagle that appears on every cover of every Cato book cry, because it's so bad, but Tuesday, capital rotunda. Oh, that would be really nice. Yeah. Or Uncle Sam has like a belt that's tightening on him while he's playing chess with jigsaw puzzle pieces of countries from the Middle East. No, it's Friedrich Hayek in the outline of a house with flames coming out of it. Oh, my. It is so hilariously awful to cover, but it's a good book. It's an important book because it is a massive critique of Libertarian thinking, and basically the guy is arguing that Hayek who should, you know, is really the heart and soul of Libertarianism has been hijacked by people, particularly Rand Rothbard and Nozick, or follower of these people who have taken Libertarianism, which is a species of classical liberalism, which is a species of, you know, kind of a, you know, a liberal philosophy that includes conservatives as well as liberals, and Libertarians are somewhere in the middle, and taken to the outer reaches of anarchism. Why it's bad faith is that he also hates Hayek, and that's kind of bad. He's like, oh, you know, if only Libertarians were more like Hayek, that would be great, except that I kind of hate Hayek. But having said that, it is a serious critique, and it is one that I find extremely, you know, compelling and engaging. And it is something that I think the Libertarian movement is at a crossroads. You know, when we're seeing this in the way that the LP is going, I think we see it even in generations at reason. Younger people tend to be more explicitly either Rothbardian, you know, explicitly or implicitly in a move towards anarchism as opposed to liberalism. It's a good book, Burning Down the House, Andrew Copeland. Peter, what have you been consuming? I watched the season finale of House of the Dragon on HBO. It is the prequel to Game of Thrones. And over the course of 10 episodes in the first season, it mostly won me over, like Game of Thrones. It's a show about a power vacuum, about the patriarchy and political violence. And it is, it's really effectively done in a lot of ways, in particular, given the risks that it took this show replaced the cast like three times throughout the season. So many of the main characters show up as multiple different actors. And that allows the show to sort of hop through through big moments in time. I think in some ways that is also the weakest thing about the show. Like I said, it mostly won me over because it just focuses on the really big moments, you know, sort of turning points in this story of a house divided against itself in a, you know, sort of medieval fantasy setting. And a weird way it reminded me of that movie based on a play Closer, which had like Clive Owen and Natalie Portman in it, and a couple other famous folks. It was a quartet of famous actors, actresses. And every scene in the movie was a scene of either breaking up or getting together, right? There was no in between in the relationships. It was always like, let's just get to the chase at every point. And House of the Dragon operates somewhat similarly in that every single episode is something really big happens. There are big portentous moments in particular. This the finale here, of course, ends on a very big turn it your sort of turning point in what is promises to be a major war throughout the throughout the land. But it's a good show, a good, a very effective kind of late peak television experiments in late peak television, because they've realized at this point that they have to outdo themselves every single episode. And so every single episode delivers some sort of mega spectacle of the kind that you just couldn't find on television even 15 years ago or so. And so in that way, it's very impressive. I do hope that the second season slows down just a little bit and gives us some of those smaller character moments that are missing from this season. So my consumption is an article, a long magazine article that I haven't even yet finished, but it's so delightful at the top half of it that I can tell it's going to be just one of the best things that is it a William Langovish, but it is pacemap. Is it the one about the treaty of the sea? Dear God, my name's not Fiona. His 911. So it's in the Atlantic. So it's it's language in that sense. It's called the original Tiger Kings, the improbable rise and savage fall of Sigfried and Roy. That's right. That is absolutely right. It's great. I've been thinking a lot lately for whatever reason about the kind of transmission of cultural knowledge and history and such. And that brought you to a book length expose of Sigfried and Roy. A depiction of a moment in time of American culture of Las Vegas. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a starring role as he always does, especially when he's in the supporting role. It's just like crazy, wonderful and very, very well done writing. It's a model for a long form Mac magazine. What's the point? What I mean, what is the moment? I mean, it's just it's a it's a you're going to get to it at the end, whether it's going to be a horrible mulling. But it's just the rise of why in the world were there two weird sculpted German magicians with a bunch of wild cats in a gigantic Las Vegas hotel on top of the world. It's such a random bit of modern cultural history. And it's wonderful to read about. You learn about yourself, Nick in it. We're all Sigfried and Roy in some way. But no, did you relate more to Sigfried or Roy or the Tiger? They're actually their assistant. I think I would have liked them more if their official name was Sigfried or Roy. Because that's a real challenge to the audience. It's about choice, not control. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Anyways, terrific piece. Who wrote it? Matt Welch, who wrote it? Is this like originally from like, you know, the 19th century Atlantic? Is it like, well, you've called it Brian or something? It's a tune for and I was supposed to put that I have to cut and paste and share. Chris Jones and Michael J. Mooney. I don't know why you needed J in your Mooney, Michael. And Larkin Hogle was the art director to distinguish yourself from all the other Michael Mooneys out there. He's a Mooney running down the holler. Isn't there a famous like Kentucky drinking song about Mooney running from revenues? Language you're speaking. Any rate, great article. Go check it out. The original Tiger King's in the Atlantic. This is all the Nick interruptions that we have time for in one podcast. I think we got time for one more. If you like what we do, at recent, go to recent.com slash donate. Give us money. We have lots of other podcasts. Go to recent.com slash podcast. Find out all about it. Nick, do you have any upcomings you want to advertise here? Oh, yeah. Zach Weismiller for Wednesday's recent interview with Nick Gillespie is actually by Zach Weismiller and he talks to embattled controversial Philadelphia D.A. Larry Krasner. That's exciting. It's this one is pure fire. That's nice. Zach Weismiller, a great American. A great American, great Floridian. He really is. Despite a name that is very suspicious to be quite honest. Pure fire, just like the cover to that burning down the house book. Yes. Well, that's false fire. I think that's a lot of smoke, but not so much fire. Zach Weismiller brings the heat. Okay. I'm going to say stop now so that we stop podcast. He brings the fentanyl like a Chinese illegal immigrant coming in through a legal port of entry. So one of the documented by Fiona Harrigan. One of the recommended articles alongside of that secreted Roy piece in the Atlantic is how to end a conversation without making up an excuse. Goodbye. Maybe you should read that one, Matt. Goodbye.