 This is Jeff Deist, and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to another episode of the Human Action Podcast, the only show where we're not afraid to tackle books, real books, actually read them and discuss them. And the point of the show is to get you interested in reading some of these important and seminal works in the Austrian and libertarian traditions. I hope all of you tuned in last week when we were joined by my friend Dr. Saphirine Amous, who is working on a new Austrian textbook, which is going to be really interesting, and he's doing that as a work in progress. So if you happen to miss that show, go back and give it a listen. I'm sure you'll like it. And as I mentioned on that show, we're going to start to get into some of the Hoppe books in the very near future. And at some point with Dr. Per Bieland, we are going to go through Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. So that will probably be a multi-show book. But I wanted to take a little break this week and work through a book by Henry Haslett. Now, all of you, of course, are familiar with Haslett. He was an unbelievable and prolific writer. He wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Newsweek, New York Times, The American Mercury, and of course wrote several books, the most famous of which is Economics and One Lesson. And as an aside, the Mises Institute has published a new version of that book, a beautiful little hardcover with my preface at the beginning of the book. And it contains maybe some biographical information you didn't know about Haslett. So it's really a fantastic little tool for your friends and neighbors and family because it's such a concise refutation of a lot of socialist fallacies. And it has these remarkable standalone chapters like on rent control and minimum wage and tariffs and full employment and such that you can just read that one chapter and disabuse yourself of a lot of fallacies. We're offering this book as a free book in hardcover. We have bought 100,000 of them, published 100,000 of them, and then we are going to try to blanket the country and especially universities through our network of professors to get those out there. So you can go to Mises.org slash one lesson and sign up there to get copy shipped to you. Now, we'd appreciate it if you would make a small contribution to cover the shipping, but you don't have to. We'll ship you the books anyway. And we'd love it if you sort of spread the word on this. In addition to economics and one lesson, Hazlett wrote a lot of books. I mean, he wrote a book about ethics. He wrote a book about method. He wrote a novel. He wrote books about willpower and self-improvement. He wrote a ton about inflation and Keynesianism. I mean, this man was really a self-taught economist and I would say the greatest financial journalist of the 20th century. And when I think about the 21st century, you know, who might be on par with Hazlett today, it's hard to come up with a name. There are people out there writing in economics with very little knowledge. If you look at the financial press, if you look at FinTwit, it's mostly overly credulous. I do like John Tammany quite a bit. He writes for real clear markets. I think he may be the closest thing we've got to a Hazlett type figure, someone who really understands economics thoroughly and writes about it well as a journalist rather than in an academic style. But I guarantee you there is one book by Henry Hazlett with which you are not familiar, because I didn't know about it until about a week ago. And our bookstore doesn't sell it. I had never heard of it. It is called A New Constitution Now. Henry Hazlett wrote this book in 1942. And what's amazing to me is I checked with Michael Bolden and Michael Mahari at the Tenth Amendment Center, two friends of mine, and they hadn't heard of it either. And they both deal in Tenth Amendment issues and constitutional issues and the corporation doctrine and all this sort of thing all day, every day. So it struck me that this book is not very well-known classic. So why did he write a book called A New Constitution Now? Well, he wrote it in 1942, and in part because he was worried about FDR's third term and he was worried about the growth in government and he was especially worried about the growth in executive power and presidential power. And of course that has only gotten worse in spades today. I mean, you look at someone like Donald Trump and then you look at the Never Trumpers and you think you guys were all, you supported the unitary executive doctrine when Bush and Ashcroft and John New were mucking around the White House. You know, the same people who have supported unbridled presidential power vis-a-vis the other two supposed branches of government are now calling Trump a tyrant and authoritarian and a fascist. Well, this is what you get. So one thing I really love about this book is it's an anti-executive book. It is a book about diminishing executive power in the United States and that has only grown worse, of course, since the 1940s. But this book, despite being written by the great Henry Haslett, is a bit of a mixed bag. He's writing this in the 1940s and he is much more of a small D Democrat than you might imagine and he's talking about gridlock in government as a bad thing under our presidential system, which he calls it. So a lot of this book is about a parliamentary versus presidential system and what he recommends for America is kind of a quasi-parliamentary system where we still have a president, we don't have a prime minister in the cabinet, but we have something more like a prime minister in the cabinet in the way that the president is forced to deal with Congress. And we'll get into all this because I'm going to work through the book here as a bit of a review. And if you haven't figured out by now, yes, this is a solo issue because, again, there's no guest out there who's read A New Constitution Now by Henry Haslett, so I had to read it over the weekend. It's a short book. You can actually find it on Amazon. It is just 160 pages or so before the appendix, so an easy read over a day or so. When I say that the book is a bit mixed, again, Haslett is saying there's all these problems when the president and Congress disagrees and so sometimes there's a crisis and they need to take action and this presidential system in the United States doesn't allow action to take place. We have to wait four years for an election or this or that. And so that strikes me as something that most liberty-minded people would share is the notion of gridlocking government or the idea that big sweeping changes are hard to do at the federal level. Now, we found that that isn't true. Congress has advocated Article I, Section 8. The Supreme Court has wildly stepped outside its authority. So there's all kinds of problems with federal growth even under our current system, but Haslett didn't quite see it that way. And one thing that strikes me is he laments the idea that if the president's really bad, basically you have to wait four years or however long remaining until the next election or alternatively you have to try impeachment, which except for outrageous, almost criminal matters is hard to achieve. It's very difficult to impeach a president and remove him from office that way. So that again struck me as a little odd because this idea that we're lamenting that impeachment is difficult. If you believe in democracy, as Haslett did, most listeners will know I'm not a huge fan of the concept, but if you believe in democracy then I guess a presidential election ought to mean something. But he gets into how presidential elections ought to be handled. So it's really a fascinating book and there are some basically an eight-point program which he lays out and we'll work through those and I'm going to agree with some of them and disagree with some of them. But it's a book that, again, he wrote in 1942, but he updated it. He revised it in large part and wrote a new preface in 1974. So at this point he is worried about Nixon and the goings on in the White House which had just wrapped up then. And you know, Spiro Agnew and the Watergate break-in and all the difficulties with Nixon ultimately resigning. So that was very fresh on his mind. And he was still very strong in 1974. Let's not forget, this guy was born in the late 1800s and he lived all the way into the 1990s. As a matter of fact, he lived to age 98. So this guy was tough. He was a stalwart, grew up poor, absolutely self-made. And you'll find out more about that if you order some of our new economics and lesson books and read my preface. Another little-known fact about Haslitt is he's an original board member of the Mises Institute and when he died in the 1990s actually left us a very considerable sum of money which helped build our first building across the street from Auburn University. Up until then we were housed in a renting space on the Auburn campus from the university itself. But Henry has this donation, a bequest at death, helped us build the building we built in the mid-1990s. So a little-known fact, a board member here with us. Parliamentary government, which I would certainly prefer to what we have here in the United States because let's think about it. We have 330 million people in this country and apart from Bernie Sanders as an independent, of course he caucuses with the Dems. He's basically a democratic socialist. But we don't have a single member in Congress other than Justin Amash who didn't win his seat as a libertarian, switched later. We don't have a single member of Congress who's a green or a libertarian or a peace and freedom party or a constitution party or a democratic socialist party or whatever it might be. The capitalist party, the conservative party, which is still active in New York State. We ought to have more than two parties representing 330 million people for God's sake. And we ought to have seven or eight or 10 or 15 parties in Congress and they ought to be able to join together, especially on a procedural basis to form single issue coalitions with respect to things like the Iraq War resolution or whatever it might be. So I very much lament the way the two-party system has rolled out in the United States and our history. And I also very much lament the language in the Constitution. Actually in Article 1, Section 5, Clause 2, basically says, you know, the House and Senate can just operate under rules that they promulgate as they see fit. So the rules for how the House and Senate operate on a day-to-day basis are just up to the House and Senate to write. And what this has led to is this weird majoritarianism where the majority party gets to control all the committees in both the House and Senate and get to control the floor proceedings and get to control the schedule and get to control the votes and the amendments and everything else. So in effect, but with just a very slight majority, one party has a stranglehold on either the House or Senate and I don't think it ought to be that way. There's all kinds of bills which might be interesting or different which never see the light of day and are guaranteed never to see the light of day as long as Mitch McConnell is running the Senate and Nancy Pelosi is running the House. So you can imagine back in the Ron Paul days when he was in Congress, we had a very difficult time. We would sometimes try to work with R's and D's in coalescing together to oppose an amendment which was particularly bad or something. So very, very tough situation. So I think with a parliamentary system like you have in the UK, there's more opportunity for slices of minority voices to come together on single issues. So I think this is an important point to make going into this. And if we think of parliamentary government, what we're talking about, that's where the head of government comes to power by gaining the confidence of the elected legislature. So the Tories have their vote and then there's enough of them and Boris Johnson becomes PM. Whereas here, we have a very distinct separation or in theory we have a very distinct separation between the three branches of government and the parliamentary system, the executive and legislative branches are intertwined far more. And Henry Haslett makes the point in this book, at least back in the 40s, where he thought that members of parliament were generally a cut above U.S. representatives and senators in terms of their intelligence, ability, education, all of that kind of thing. I don't know if that's still true today, but it was certainly how Haslett saw it in the 40s. So that was another argument for it. What are his proposals? How would we make America more of a parliamentary system? Okay. They are based in strange part on the work of Walter Badgett, who is the English theoretician, wrote a lot about the English constitution and later the U.S. constitution, but also the work of a young Woodrow Wilson who was writing his PhD thesis in his 20s when Woodrow Wilson wrote about some of the problems he saw with the American constitutional system and its gridlock and this and that. So those are two of the influences behind Haslett writing this book. So again, a mixed bag, a strange influence, Woodrow Wilson for a giant like Henry Haslett because most of us would think of Wilson as perhaps the biggest monster of the 20th century or certainly among them. I mean in America, not worldwide. So with that in mind, let's talk about these eight proposals that Haslett has. The first is that the president can't serve two terms, at least not consecutively. So this would mean that we still have a president, we still have a four-year term, but not two back-to-back and certainly not three like FDR. So he thought just limiting the amount of time any one person was present would be a good idea because the president, again, as he states in the beginning of this book, has way too much power. The president appoints the cabinet rather than being in any way answerable to the cabinet. It's the other way around. So that's different from a parliamentary system. And it's very easy to gain re-election for any president in Haslett's view because you basically get to use the office itself as one big campaign apparatus. You get to fly around now anyway in Air Force One and you get all these cabinet members doing what you want and you can be on TV or on the radio or whatever anytime you want and you're sort of the figurehead of the American government. So all this in Haslett's view just lends too much power to the presidency. Now, in addition to this, his second idea is to eliminate the office of the vice president altogether. He terms the vice president as generally a mediocre man hastily chosen. A second-rate man is another term he uses. Of course, we hadn't had any female vice presidential candidates at that point. But what he talks about is that under the American system, back then they had actually real primaries and they had real conventions at times the victor was not known going into the primary, yet bloody primaries oftentimes. So he says what happens is once somebody becomes the nominee of the R's or the D's for president, they tend to have to run out very quickly and find this hastily chosen vice presidential candidate. So he talks about how some people like Thomas Eagleton and of course, Spiro Agnew, who was fresh on his mind in the rewrite of this book in 1974 as being these sort of bad guys who aren't very smart, aren't very capable, you wouldn't really want them as president and we ought to eliminate this useless office. So that's a pretty big change in the constitutional system because that would mean that, for example, who becomes president upon the death or incapacitation of the president himself or herself? Well, Hazlet says let's have the House and Senate choose the new president for the remainder of the term. So that would be very, very different. Right now you'd have some sort of gridlock between whom the R's running the Senate would choose and whom the D's running the House would choose. So it's not completely clear how that would work, but I think he would probably suggest just a majority line vote in each body. So that's very different than what we've got because we think of the vice president as the heartbeat away, but not to Hazlet. The third suggestion that Hazlet has is one where I squirm a little bit, have some disagreement with this, is to give the president a new power, which I'm always loathe to do, but in the form of a line item veto. And of course a lot of people have discussed this over the years. The line item veto has been around as a kind of a hot potato in U.S. politics for quite a long time. Now Hazlet is honest enough to admit that this would require an outright constitutional amendment to do because Article I, Section 8, is very clear that the purse strings and the budgetary power belong to the House, reside in the U.S. House. But he says, you know, the presidential veto, such as it is, where the president can veto a bill overall, yes or no, and then the House and Senate have to override that veto, he says this isn't much of a power at all, because what appropriators do, and this is absolutely true in my experience working for Ron Paul, is they simply get these huge spending bills together and they glom a ton of appropriations into one bill. So there's always stuff in that bill, which the president likes, and so it makes it very tough to veto the bill in its entirety. So let's say you have something in there like money for the Export-Import Bank, which is a really disgusting SOP which guarantees... U.S. taxpayers are forced to guarantee loan payments made to foreign governments so they can buy things like Boeing aircraft and caterpillar tractors. So the Export-Import Bank is a naked subsidy in effect to foreign governments. Not a subsidy necessarily in operation, but in the sense that it's backed by the U.S. taxpayer in case of default on those loans. And it's designed for protectionist purposes to prop up exports from U.S. manufacturers. So this is a political type football. The Export-Import Bank and the COKS and their organizations have railed against this for years, years and years and years, and we've never been able to get rid of it. And part of the reason is something like Export-Import Bank funding will find its way into a giant spending bill which also contains, let's say, spending for farm subsidies or for defense or whatever it might be in so-called omnibus bills. And it's going to vote against that bill to get rid of the Export-Import Bank because his opponents are immediately going to say, you know, President so-and-so voted not to fund the troops while they're over there in Afghanistan, you know. So you get this kind of stuff all the time and has it way back in the 40s correctly saw this. And so his suggestion is a line at Ibiza. You can take out a single line in a spending or budget bill and sort of, you know, take a magic marker to it and line it out. And I think that's a big stake. I think that is blurring the distinction between the budgetary powers of the House and the executive powers of the President. I don't think presidents should be making policy or making decisions on appropriations. I think the U.S. House, which is most closely in theory anyway, answerable to the voters every two years is tasked with that and that's probably a good idea to separate those two things so that presidents aren't out there making their own budgets. Again, the separation of powers have been eroded and eroded and eroded for so long. You have lobbyists. You have White House officials directly writing language for bills all the time and then it's just introduced by the House of the Senate, you know, even though it was written over in the West Wing. I mean, this happens all the time. Lobbyists write portions of bills. They aren't, last time I checked, they aren't officially part of any of the three branches. And we all know the Supreme Court is a de facto legislature at this point. So it may seem a little silly at this point to still cling to this idea of separation of powers but nonetheless in 1940s it made good sense to Hazlett to give the president a line item veto power. His proposal number four is again mixed. I'm not sure how I feel about this. And he says that representatives or senators must be an inhabitant of the state. Now, there are some requirements about this, but especially in state law in state constitutions, but in general we've had a history of carpet baggers. If you look at someone like Hillary Clinton who grew up, I guess, in Chicago, Illinois and then lived in Arkansas for a long time and then in D.C. for a long time. As First Lady, she had no business being a senator from New York state. I mean, that was just pure carpet bag and that was complete bullshit. And New Yorkers voted for it. You look at the Romney family. I mean, they have pinged around Massachusetts, Michigan, Utah. People may not know this, but I mean, I was in La Jolla, which is a very fancy suburb of San Diego. I used to look at that house sometimes, which was not far from the Torrey Pines golf course, but, you know, I mean, Mitt Romney just went back to Utah because there was a Mormon base there to vote for him as a senator. I mean, he can't really be said in any real sense to be a resident of Utah until it served its purposes. Unlike most of us, he can just buy a house anywhere he pleases, you know, an established residency and, you know, there's something to be said for that, that the person ought to actually live in the district and ought to have some rootedness or connection to a place. Of course, cosmopolitan libertarians hate this. They think America should be purely a propositional nation and a nation of ideas. But, you know, there's kind of two sides to this because on the one hand you get these members of Congress who really represent a national constituency and AOC is a perfect example of this. She's a left socialist. She is a media darling. She's youthful, reasonably pretty, and so she gets an audience, especially in the social media age, from all over the country. More importantly, she gets donations from all over the country. So this makes her, in effect, not really a representative of her district, which I believe is Queens and maybe part of Brooklyn, I'm not sure, but she's a representative of, let's say, democratic socialism as embodied in the people across the country. And, you know, just earlier I was lamenting the fact that there's not any third-party members in Congress so is this a good thing that AOC is essentially representing an ideology or a voting block rather than a district? Because that's what she's doing, in effect. Her district is sort of secondary. Well, Ron Paul arguably did the same thing. Now, he was pretty attached to his district. He had lived there for years and years and years. He had delivered babies all over it and he cared very much about constituent service in that district. And to be fair, a lot of people in his district really agreed with him on things like the Second Amendment and radically reducing the size of the federal government and they having to take a pro-life position, which he did as well, you know, things like that. I'm sure there's a good percentage of AOC's district which agrees with her. It's hard to say. But was Ron Paul representing libertarians across the country as a member of Congress or was he representing the 14th district which was Gulf Coast south of Houston, Texas? Well, arguably he was representing both. So I'm not sure that I agree with Haslitt here, but I understand his hesitation about carpetbaggers because what this does is it gives us a political class which can move anywhere for just a short time and seize a seat. And Terry McAuliffe, who was governor of Virginia one time, is a good example of that. I mean, this guy is a real low life. A bag man for the Clintons. A political hack. I mean, this is like having, you know, Roger Stone or the late Leigh Atwater be your governor. You know, I think Roger Stone has his charms and his downfalls. Leigh Atwater was known as a really hard-toed guy, but none of us, these political types, you don't want them crossing over to become actual politicians, these sort of fixers. And that's exactly what Terry McAuliffe was able to do because the growth in the northern Virginia blue suburbs from all the defense contracting and all the growth in the federal government workers turned Virginia blue over time. It turned it into a blue state like Maryland. And that was just inexorable and it happened. And so now the red part of Virginia is effectively disenfranchised, which is to say the southern and rural part of the state. So this is, again, our blue-red dichotomy and how difficult it is. So I understand Hazlet's point about carpetbaggers, but I'm going to just have to think about that one. His fifth suggestion for a new U.S. Constitution is to make the U.S. House a staggered term. So what this would, again, he acknowledges require defending the Constitution to say that you serve four years instead of two. So I'm not sure how I feel about that. Right now, U.S. House serves two years, but he said, you know, if it's four years instead of two, they won't always be campaigning and raising money, which even back in the 40s was true and imagine what that is today. I mean, it's now you have to have a million dollars to run, or at least a million dollars, if not two, three, four, five to run just a little penny ante house races. You know, three or four or five million dollars used to be all you needed for a statewide Senate race. Now you need 20, 30, 50 million for a Senate race. So the numbers keep going up, which means the amount of time that these clowns have to spend fundraising goes up and up and up. So I think he's on to something maybe by having a four-year term. But what he said is we'd have elections each year, each fall a quarter of the U.S. House would be up for reelection. So we'd kind of have elections more frequently. And so he thought that frequent elections would keep the people closer to the representatives, and he talks about the Federalist Papers advising this. And he says, we want constant public interest and the feeling of control over policy among the public. Hmm, I'm not sure I agree with that. Constant public interest in politics is what we got too much of right now is, in other words, a heavily politicized America. And this feeling of control over public policy is illusory. Even members of Congress don't really have any control of public policy. I mean all this stuff is done at the 11th hour and it's mostly done by presidents and the Supreme Court or at least House and Senate leaders. So the idea that we're going to have a less attenuated sense of our ability to control the rules we have to live under, of course we would say that's bunk, voting is mostly bunk. But I think what has what's getting at here is the idea of a more informed electorate. You know, if we're going to have democracy, and again he's showing his colors here as a small d-democrat, we ought to at least not have idiots voting people who are wholly self- interested, have no knowledge and are just deficient in every way, voting for what happens in other people's lives. That's no good. Now, when I say he's a small d-democrat, this book definitely reads different than the essay he wrote later on for the Freeman in 1968 called the Task Confronting Libertarians. There you see a guy who is really talking about an unbridled attack on government and to reduce his power. So in those decades between 1942 and 1968, I think Haslett changed a little bit at least in his tenor now. I think he still believed in voting and democracy in a constitutional system. But in terms of how strident he had become because some of the things that he suggested in the 40s in this book, I think were not coming to fruition, he was starting to see that maybe voting and the idea of an informed electorate was pretty hopeless. Number 6 his 6th suggestion, which is still very, very important today, is to abolish electoral college. That's interesting that he was saying that back in the 40s and as he points out there's a lot of confusion around the electoral college. It's very cumbersome and again, it's not part of the framers' original conception. It's the present form of the electoral college actually comes from the 12th amendment, which wasn't ratified until 1804. So little known fact, people think that the full version of the electoral college was found in the original constitution, it was not. So he says, you know, it's very, very confusing and it doesn't really serve us too well and we ought to do away with it and he offers some suggestions. So again, this is Haslett being prescient, talking about something in the 40s which is still hot today 80 years later and also we actually had a 2020 Supreme Court case called the CF follow case which dealt with some of the ideas out there floating around like the national popular vote which is the interstate compact where states get together and it's not enforced yet but without going to congress without using constitutional process they say we're all going to enter into a compact with one another no feds involved and we agree that we're all going to throw our electors to the national popular vote winners. So that's in effect a way of working around the electoral college. Now this compact is not in effect yet, it requires a certain number of states to be signatories which it has not yet reached but it's an interesting idea. I don't care about popular vote totals, I don't care about popular votes but if you do then that's a very, very interesting idea and it's nice to see some movement on all this. I mean it's nice to see some new ideas being thought about or tried because what we've got clearly isn't working. Let's just start with that. Kagan Elena Kagan actually authored the majority opinion I believe was 6-3 in that case where she said no, no, no the electorals have to channel the will of the people in the particular state and this is our voting system and so that case basically not in so many words but basically seems to uphold the electoral college system and would also potentially serve as precedent in future litigation if the Dems try to do away with the electoral college and that's challenged in federal court. I suspect that as Texas and Florida turn blue the Democrats will just drop the electoral college issue because they'll be winning national elections at that point but who knows maybe Texas and Florida won't turn blue as fast as I think they will. It's hard to say. So what alternatives do we have to the electoral college? Well, Hezlett says there's basically three. One is of course just a direct popular vote nationwide the second is that the electoral vote of each state would go would be divided and they would go in proportion to the popular vote in that state so a particular state rather than having a winner takes all like Donald Trump or Joe Biden would look at its total popular vote and see who got what and divvy up to electoral votes that it sends to the college in proportion to that so that's kind of a roundabout way to have a popular vote but again it reflects more of the electoral college system because the amount of votes that particular states get. So you know you'd have some rough proportionality there but not exact you wouldn't have the same proportionality that you would have in a direct popular vote and the third way says well we can do this by congressional district so the electoral votes go to the popular vote in each congressional district so again more proportionality than the pure electoral college less proportionality than a popular vote outright but there's a twist here the electoral votes go to the popular vote winner by congressional district but there's also two electoral votes just go to the candidate with the most statewide votes so you'd have districts representing themselves a bit more in the electoral college but then the whole state would assign two of its electoral college votes to the statewide winner so a little bit of a mixed idea and how these would all operate and he lays out some objections to these and he lays out some scenarios as to how these might operate it's really interesting because he's thinking about some of the what ifs and he's thinking about some of the objections so after abolishing the electoral college he wants to change the way we vote in national elections and so his seventh suggestion in the book is to create what he calls a majority preferred system of voting the idea here is to avoid having winning candidates with no majority of votes and we see this all the time we see in national elections and in state and local for that matter we see plurality winners being declared victor you know we saw that with you know Ross Perot had a big influence on the 1992 election helping Bill Clinton to win the Voting against George Herman Walker Bush Bush Sr. in that case so the idea that you can win especially something as important as the presidency with less than 50% of the total vote less than an outright majority strikes has it as a bad thing so he points out that what he wants is not a runoff he doesn't want this kind of system of a runoff election because he thinks that's cumbersome because everybody has to come back on another Tuesday and you know we shouldn't have to do that and he doesn't want ranked voting because as he points out he says you know the ranked voting can hurt the chances of your first choice so we all understand ranked voting you put down your first, second and third let's say and if a bunch of people apart from you choose number two as their number one well then on the ranking system your number two ends up helping that person so it's just not in Hazlett's view as clear cut as it ought to be in determining who is really the majority favorite so he's not for ranked voting again because it can hurt the chances of your first choice he says you know when you have more than two candidates what you should do is you make your first choice on the ballot and then you mark either one or more of the other candidates maybe there's a whole slate of candidates for a single office you mark one or more of the other candidates acceptable and then you combine all the various candidates vote so they all get one basically one point or one vote for all of their first choice votes and all their acceptable votes for any particular candidate are just worth half of that so the idea here would be like let's say in a congressional race a U.S. house seat let's say a candidate gets 100,000 first choice votes they get 50,000 acceptable votes so the 50,000 are only worth half so call that 25,000 so in effect the candidate is deemed to have received 125,000 votes and you compare that with the other candidates whether that's one or more and you determine that person the winner so this has that system very very interesting you know he says this way you get a candidate that's acceptable to more voters as opposed to you know look I do Donald Trump and Joe Biden did Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton really have these vast policy differences between them maybe you know I mean we can argue that I understand taxes and culture wars and all these others I get it but for the most you know what really comes out of Congress is probably not all that different you know between the R's and D's I think you know you guys know that I think that the left is really becoming unhinged and I think that the right is useless and has lost its way but I don't know that there's still this argument there's not a dime's worth of difference maybe there is but regardless of that the point is that psychologically as silly as it seems a lot of people are just going to be gutted regardless of whether Biden is declared the winner or Trump's declared the winner and I say declared because who the hell knows who actually wins or whether the votes go or whether the mail carrier in this mail about dumps him in a sewer and who really certifies all this who has the you know chain of evidence on all this the chain of custody over your ballot give me a break it's even with the electronic systems in person you know we really have no idea and it looks like that's going to be Biden or Trump could be Kamala Harris I suppose and a lot of people are going to be deeply psychologically unhappy about this and that seems absurd and silly and but nonetheless that's the world we live in and that's I think what has it was getting out here is we ought to be able to use a voting system which A hopefully gets us more candidates that would be very nice more choices but B gets us a candidate that is more acceptable to more voters or at least acceptable so number eight his last and final recommendation in this really remarkable little book is about reigning in the federal courts in general and the supreme court specifically and that I can get wholeheartedly behind because we all know this absurd system where just you know just a handful of judges can determine our fate on something you know some enormous cultural issues something relating to guns or abortion or something relating to the Obamacare tax versus penalty these are in effect defacto black-robed lawmakers they have no business doing this the concept of judicial review is nowhere to be found in article three of course judge nap disagrees on this point but it's not there folks Marbury versus Madison and actually earlier cases is in my view on very infirm footing but nonetheless we have come up with this idea and there were arguments for this in the federalist papers that the interpretation of laws and the constitution is the proper and peculiar province of the courts and has it points this out and he says well that may be so but this power has been perverted and it's been abused and the supreme court in particular has used this power to write legislation of their own and that's what they're doing and we need to rein this in and so if we're going to have a new constitution it ought to consider this problem so he argues that because federal judges and supreme court justices are appointed by presence they end up becoming willing creatures of this sort of a grand eyes central government in other words they tend to look favorably on centralized federal government growth and disfavorably on arguments against that so that's how over the years we managed to end up with a 10th amendment which is utterly ignored and utterly toothless and has a writing about the 10th amendment in 1942 is of course still a little different than us talking about it in 2020 because now it's an absolute dead letter has it suggest two alternatives in his quest to reign in the supreme court first and he again says we need constitutional amendments for this he never just wants to do this in some lawless way we might say he's always very clear in his recommendations where he says I understand I accept I recognize that this requires an absolute an actual constitutional amendment so this first one is that we ought to have an amendment making it easier to make constitutional amendments you all know we have this idea that you need two thirds of both bodies in the house and senate and you need three quarters of the states or you need to call a constitutional convention the states can do that this is a very very circuitous and cumbersome way to amend the constitution I kind of like it because I tend to think that almost all constitutional amendments have been you know a lot of them have been bad and a lot of them have allowed government to grow and God knows with the state of education this country with the state of where we are socially and culturally what people might demand in the form of a constitutional amendment some sort of right all kinds of rights to housing and rights to welfare and rights to an educational you know the kind of thing we see in lots of constitutions including the South African constitution with which the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg took pains and went out of her way to praise as a model for us so we don't need that model haslet so I'm not sure I agree with this but he does he says you know when it comes to crises and changes in our society ought to be easier to amend the constitution the other really interesting suggestion he has and this is we're just wrapping up his eighth bullet point in this book is to amend the constant to give governors of each state a say in appointing judges and justices especially supreme court justices that's kind of a cool idea I mean wouldn't that be wild I mean I'm not sure how that would work technically imagine Kristi Noem versus Andrew Cuomo trying to figure out who is the next supreme court justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg hmm that's pretty interesting but is it workable I'm not sure but haslet seem to think it was in the 1940s and you can read his book you can read it in its entirety where he fleshes these ideas out in you know in a better than I can of course and also in in a more of a written format with deeper arguments than we can do in a podcast but really I just wanted to bring your attention to this book by Henry House at a new constitution now because right now we're thinking about how to to get us out of this political morass in which we find ourselves and you know Tom Woods has his famous dictum which is political arrangements exist to serve us not the other way around they ought not to be unyielding and unchangeable you know we ought to be able to change the way and the manner and by whom under which we have to sever governance so I I love the idea that has wrote this book I love that it's full of concrete proposals where he fleshes out to an extent how they might work and objections and actually lays out examples it's an excellent example of haslet being a real journalist I love William Anderson Bill Anderson who writes for our site he's a professor at Frostburg State up in Maryland I hope I hope that's correct it might be Pennsylvania but I believe it's Maryland sorry Bill and you know he comes from a journalistic background and really has that vigor and verb to his writing that punch that snap that haslet has in spades so I love that and so here haslet is giving us an enjoyable book a thought-provoking book that could give us a more parliamentary type system for the United States and I think it deserves some attention I think it certainly deserves greater attention than it's gotten and that's really why I just struck me that I would do a human action podcast episode about this book to try to breathe some life into it and to you know hopefully get a few of you to check it out you can find it on Amazon you cannot find it at themesis.org bookstore because we've never carried it I'm going to try to rectify that but this is just interesting so you can find some kind of odd versions of it we happen to have in our library a beautiful second edition hard cover with an eagle on the front of it I encourage you to check out this book I encourage you to check out haslet more generally because he's an absolute master and he can present complex economic ideas and problems and conundrums and concepts in a way that lay readers can grasp he's an absolute gentleman a self-made man really a legend and by all rights an economist a self-taught economist versus a lot of PhD economists today can't hold a candle to him in terms of his knowledge of the history of economic thought or much else so all that said thanks again for tuning into the human action podcast we're going to again start to dive into Hapa and some of his books laid this year and into Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations so I hope you enjoyed this I hope it piques your interest in haslet and his book and most of all I hope you tune in next week thanks so much The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and on Mises.org Subscribe to get new episodes every week and find more content like this on Mises.org