and who does on force.

it's effectively dead and there are brill limits to what can be done in the political process. the second proposition is the opportunities are opening for free creating some of the best qualities of the american project so let a just say by american project them referring to the idea that came with the founders that individuals and families communities can be left free to live their lives as they see fit in the role of the government is to provide a peaceful setting for that endeavor but otherwise standing aside. you are not going to have a constitutional convention and you are not going to reverse held in v. davis or anything else but that is essentially that they option of rolling back the federal government's power -- >> host: want to jump right in and you mentioned helvering. your book is fraught with many supreme court cases and if he can footnote them for myself and

our viewers. we are not all constitutional lawyers but you play one on tv. when you say that these things are set in stone, what happens such that the dynamism that one might argue is characterized the landscape in these areas has somehow evaporated? >> let me distinguish two things. can we get better policy for my point of view or for that matter from your point of view? can we change education policy welfare policy, that kind of thing. >> you yourself i would argue have change policy. >> guest: you have too. also if we can change those things that are two institutions would have no reason for being there. you could still do it in that realm but if you talk about

regulatory state which is the center of my concern here the administrative state whatever you want to call it you are talking about a very large edifice that in the way it is constructed cannot be rolled back. for example a ronald reagan could not go into office and rollback purgatory state because he didn't have the authority to do so. >> host: can i ask you to be concrete about something within this regulatory which probably means different things to different listeners that in your view is in place and should be in place in your viewing could be rolled back? with social security be an example of? you mentioned helvering. >> guest: i'm referring to by the revelatory state the usual suspects osha, eta fda and the cabinet offices of some element. >> the education department? >> guest: it has lots of regulations. >> host: is this little bit of

a variance on rick perry comey couldn't quite remember the name but close this department that department education department and i'm not saying you agree but is that the same sentiment? >> guest: point number one is what is the regulatory state? the education department has lots of things that are not involved with regulation and sometimes lots of things that don't last that the country. you want to get federal funding and of course everybody does so the regulatory state is intertwined with all of the executive branch. point number two and i want the listeners to be clear on this that actually some regulation for a libertarian like me is perfectly okay because it advances public goods classically defined. the epa in my view is fulfilling constitutionally approved it functions insofar as if you have billowing noxious smoke, not

against regulations that prohibit that, not against regulations that once safe coalmines. i'm a softy on this. their regulations which are the low-hanging fruit of the radio tory state good things that needed to be done and have been done i don't want to touch those but you also have a whole of ways in which small businesspeople homeowners farmers and ranchers going about their daily lives doctors carpenters going about their daily lives in the radio tory state in which to prevent running their lives as they see fit for pointless reasons. >> i suspect there are viewers there right now who are saying okay jared and charles particularly charles where do you java line and since you

describe yourself as a libertarian and a softy libertarian you're going to draw the line differently than i well and in different places where other libertarians may draw the line so certainly that seems to be a challenging question. how do you know where to draw the line? >> guest: let me put in the context of my solution because i have a solution in this book so let me briefly describe that because one of the first tasks is to answer your question where you draw the line. what i have proposed his defense funds. i want a big dif funds fund the stone tropically comes to the aid not of corporations but for the little guy. the little guy. osha has come after him and says you have to redo your workplace and is going to cost $30,000 for some idiotic reason i want them to push back against that. i want there to be legal representation in the same way that you have authority and i

suggest occupational defense funds, real estate agents have an occupational defense fund and the phrase i used in the book treat government is an insurable hazard. so suppose you are starting up what i call the philanthropic funds. one of its first jobs is to say which regulations are we willing to say are okay and which regulations are we not so i have a chapter that lays out that, such as regulations that prevent things that are bad themselves. you don't go after them. you don't go after the irs because it's really hard to distinguish principle civil disobedience. yes go. >> host: first of all you should describe what you mean by civil disobedience because it's particular to your thesis but on the way up or hear, when i think

civil does obedience i suspect most americans think that if you think about the civil rights movement, civil disobedience against what i'm sure we he would agree with an absolutely pernicious episode in the american landscape not resolved because clearly racial problems persist in a big way to this day particularly we have seen vis-à-vis african-americans and the police. that strikes me and i'll bet it's a clear example of not only legitimate but essential civil disobedience raid in your case you were talking about some refined things. here is a workplace safety standards that you think is a bad idea and a waste of time. i could easily find someone on the other side of that argument and i'm sure you agree. that doesn't pelot the heartstrings of the mind strings that racial discrimination does.

>> guest: not your heartstrings may be. >> host: to me. >> guest: let's talk about vocational issues. to me, one of the deepest sources of satisfaction in life is practicing a vocation that you love and love to do well and take pride in. that's a big deal and to the extent that you have lots of people including physicians and small businesspeople of all kinds where they say i can't do what i want to do if the terms are providing a good or a service is getting in the way and impeding freedom and a really important way. >> host: let me jump in here. presumably they can do what they want to do not because of some arbitrary regulator be in the bonnet although it may look that way to you and your colleagues but because someone in the way thought what you want to do is going to hurt somebody else.

but again you were a bit of the judge and jury hear it seems to me. >> i have a very different view about the government's role is so for me the meaning of the american experiment was a presumption of freedom. so if you are practicing your craft the presumption is you do that the very best you can. you are vulnerable to the tort system. >> host: that goes back to our founders. >> guest: you are vulnerable if you are negligent or screw up otherwise there's a presumption of freedom. i don't want to characterize your opinion. i would say the progressive movement i'm defining that as early 20th century terms whether it's dramatic origins. it was one of the first times that the state knows better and experts can't say no actually

you should not live under the presumption of freedom leaving aside what's okay and what's not. we will decide if this is not ethical. we will decide if this is not there and they will promulgate these rules and we now live under presumption of strength. so when you say somebody along the line said this is going to cause a safety problem, somebody did that a presumption, here's where we got it ideological. if i minded my own business and i have not heard anybody, or someone uses the power of the state to say you haven't heard anybody and you haven't done anything wrong but i'm going to lay some strengths on you because you might, that's wrong. >> host: i don't think anyone would disagree with that the way you have queued it up. and i don't want to belabor this because there are so many thousands of regulations that i guarantee we could find i

guarantee ought to be disregarded but i do think that there are two important things to do. the first one was in the book and the second one i found to be missing from the book. it's a bit of a hole in the argument. i really do think we have to say gerald says to charles here's an example of a safety standard that we should just get rid of and if we don't get rid of it then citizens ought to engage in civil disobedience to get rid of it because i do think the ideological argument is pretty abstract and perhaps not as helpful as we would like. that's the first . the second , and here's where i thought something was missing. i'm going to put this in economic terms. it would seem to me that before you want to engage in fairly potentially dramatic endeavor of

civil disobedience funded by hundreds of millions of dollars at least as per your hypothesis, you want to make a pretty strong case that what you call the regulatory state has actually hurt not just individuals because i think you hurt individuals but also our economy. here i think you have a tough hill to climb and you haven't even tried to climate. in the book and i will ask you to climate here. prior to what you are calling a blow to the regulatory state of a lot of things were a lot worse actually growth was a lot slower. recessions came a lot more frequently and they were much deeper. many more people were made ill by the kinds of externalities you and i were talking about a while ago, people of very young ages etc. etc.. the imposition of the regulatory

state to use your term does not correlate with worse economic outcomes. in fact economic outcomes have been proven. society is advanced in many ways. there's an idea that could have advanced better but i read in the book the one thing was missing was an argument as to why you would really want to go after what you go after other than a fairly abstract libertarian discussion about personal freedom. >> guest: point number one is i'm not interested in the economic outcome. the value of freedom to live your life as you see fit seems to transcend a lot of that. i have what i call the trend line test in the trend line test takes an outcome that is recently while measured, an outcome that you want to achieve whether mortality poverty reduction a number of industrial

accidents. i will use one that is classic. here's the thing, that trendline back as many years as you can and does covers before and after and major regulatory intervention. and then look at where the intervention occurred and try to tell me if did the good thing is happening to forget that are at a steeper rate and here's my proposition. i can produce dozens of trendlines in which things are getting better and it's a classic case and regulation came in. something like the 55-mile per hour speed limit there's a huge regulatory intervention. you have a steep reduction was flattening out and continue to flatten out some eye for statement is empirically you can take some things like certain

contaminants in the air and you can show me a trendline. after the epa came and they got a lot done. that's a fairly small step. >> host: it's an important debate to have you no because i'm sitting here thinking up my own example which probably would go on a different direction than yours but i think it's important. it was just thinking about social security. social security again you don't object to social security. >> guest: the reason i introduced that in the book is it was a decision by congress instead of the social welfare. >> host: social security was introduced in the poverty of the elderly falls and that shouldn't surprise any of us because it's a fairly generous particular progressive program of cash benefits for people beyond their working years.

so i guess that was .2. .1 is getting back to this issue of reticular line drawing endeavors and what belongs in your civil disobedience category and what doesn't. you take taxes out of the mix. it strikes me as extremely possible that if we were to go down the road if you suggest some of your colleagues would argue that paying taxes is something they ought not do so they are wrong? >> guest: yes, i would say that is wrong and particularly when it comes to the income tax. that's the sick example of my decision. i think that taxes idiotic. the way the income tax is currently mistreated i'm sure you think is idiotic and it was approved by a constitutional amendment so for someone like me who is very much in love with

the concept of the original document i have to say look they did it the right way. >> host: let me give an example of how the other guidelines are used. i use the phrase strict scrutiny is the phrase they said we will subject rights of the constitution to more strict scrutiny than others. i would say there is no full category of regulations but regulations that traded prescribed best practice in a vocation are subject to scrutiny. regulations that prevent someone from doing what he or she wishes with a property as long as they don't interfere with a the neighbors property that is subject to scrutiny and i'd go through a chapter where i give categories, this is where you look for targets. >> host: first of all thank

you for getting down to the granule lover -- or annular level. you and i have argued about some of them in the past. i actually found it to be your most -- book. it seems like you have given up on the system in your initial comment he said something about the american project is being a preferably broken. and where you go with that is i found to be probably beyond pessimistic and into an area that felt less than democratic. the idea is i poured through the pages was a system is broken. the depth to which the system is broken leaves lease it to be reparable, can't be fixed and democracy won't work. we are going to have to try something else which is in fact breaking the law in the civil

disobedience context. you are not talking about -- that struck me as deeply pessimistic and somewhat undemocratic. defend yourself. oscar you tell me how my attitude toward democracy is any different than james madison's. james madison and the other founders were deeply nervous about democracy, deeply. post goes to answer your question i think james madison would say and i think his actions, you know more about this than me but his actions corroborate this that you can't fix what's broke into the system but then you either have to live with it or you have to try to use the system to change the system. i think that's a madisonian and you can correct me if i'm wrong. >> guest: it certainly is a founding document of authority that when government becomes abusive of its proper powers it is not only the right but the

duty of the people to rebel. >> host: they have the king of england in mind. >> guest: come on jerrett, they were talking about the role of government and saying when governments is because when governments do this is the right of the people to establish new -- >> host: i don't disagree with your quotation of texture. my thing, i don't think that they were thinking of workplace regulations. >> guest: the federal standards, when madison discusses the terrible danger that posed if you substitute for the word faction special interest which is a 21st century word as opposed to an

18th century word what they were describing was what we had happened and here i will appeal to an economist who is not an ideologue on either side as far as i know. olson as you are aware of came up in a series in government which is endemic in advanced democracies. >> host: answered by one you could see blocks from where we sit traded. >> guest: exact weight and it's going to happen in any advanced democracy. there's no way of stopping it because of the asymmetry of the power of small groups to organize resistance. so completely apart from my libertarian views on things i think there was a truth about the current state of the e.u., the current state of the united states, the current state of japan. it would also be true of china

if it wasn't already whereby you have government of the special interests by the special interests for the special interests. i spent five chapters in the first part of the book justifying civil this obedience on grounds that a lot of these dynamics do not lend themselves to solutions. >> host: a couple of things. i still haven't given you a chance to say what you mean by civil disobedience. >> guest: let me give you the story that prompted this book without many details because i don't want to be identified but is a true story. my wife and i have a friend who is a small-business that employs latinos as certain kinds of businesses do. the difference between him and everybody else in this part of the country is he's documented. he spends 20 or 30 grand a year to do this but what happens is

doing the right thing and documenting them he has made himself a visible target so he has been for lack of a harassed by a far different with her agency is not doesn't pay good wages are provided living conditions, he does but there are things that you can't have enough native-born americans working for you. it's really hard to get native-born americans to take those jobs but a bunch of other things. once i find the obtuse allegation on going to fight this in court and the bureaucrat i was talking to said you tried that and i will put you out of as this and that was right. that's not an uncommon story. i have this image and i was furious and i could barely stand to listen with it.

tapping the bureaucrat on the shoulder and saying we are taking this. we know he is technically in violation of this regulation and we don't care. we are going to litigate this to the max and are sclerotic legal system is such that we can do that and make life miserable for you and when you finally -- we are going to reimburse him for it. and then i said to myself you can write a book. ultimately that's what happens. what i'm trying to convey is civil dispute and is i want certain categories of regulations to become de facto unenforceable. >> host: but you are talking about, and i don't mean this this is going to sound more negative than i mean it, you are talking about legal harassment? basically getting, tying the regulator up in court? tying the regulator up in court.

i want to get back to that but i wanted our listeners to understand what you are talking about. by the way one of the ways i think of this is a full employment program for lawyers. >> guest: the regulatory status the full government. the me just finish up raid what i want to do and this is very similar to what philip howard wants to do. he is a book called the rule of nobody that is the last of a sequence of books that he was -- has written. want to for some commonsense regulatory states and the analogy i use is the behavior state troopers on interstate highways. the flow of traffic on interstate highway if there is not a traffic jam several miles above. technically we could all be stopped. i am one of those people. they stop people who are going crazy faster they stop people

who are driving erratically. it's not perfect raid the perfect aim would be to have some kind of spittle limits which no reasonable person should go above but we don't have that select have some commonsense reinforcement regulation. so what i want is an example that is not in the book. and countered bartender who was fined $3000 for not carding a person where you are legally required to card everybody. you don't want kids and bars. the idea that it your crack could hear that and not laugh and say forget it don't worry about it, it was a 3000-dollar fine. that's stupid. i want no harm, no foul. >> host: i want to get back to my accusation that there's something undemocratic.

>> guest: you are correct in saying that. >> host: i would like you to defend that a bit further another way established the granular meaning of civil this obedience in your world. i want to get back to that because when i look out at the world i certainly see a lot of the problems you identified and the anecdotes you just told was one of them. problems exist overzealous regulation exists. he wants either myself or anyone else who lives in the real world questioning those assertions. we in my view have kludged together and kludged meaning a mishmash together a system that is broadly representative of what the majority of the electorate wants. with all of its blemishes. what makes me nervous about by the people -- "by the people" your look is it sounds like a

relatively small group of believes funded by billionaires as you suggest are going to be taking things into their own hands that purports to fight this kludge that i have mentioned, this mash-up that we call democracy which is very messy and has some embarrassing corners in the wrong way to tying up the courts with legal harassment versus what? versus to the courts, through the congress? i think you are confusing, i could be wrong and i don't, not saying you don't know what you're talking about and this is not an attack. i think you are confusing the swinging of the pendulum and the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of wedlock but the swinging of the pendulum with a fundamental fissure in the

system that you are trying to fix by ex-illegal methods funded by billionaires in a way that sounds almost scary to me. >> guest: first let me go to the issue of the extralegal state. to me one of the most pretentious decisions in the five or six or period from my point of view the constitution was trashed was 1943 when nbc tried to fight the federal communications commission because the legislation had asked for fair and equitable rules on licensing. always before all legislative powers vested in a congress of the united states there had to be unintelligible principle and regulation whereby administrators apparently there are limits because congress said we want to accomplish this and they have been specific about what they wanted to accomplish. better than required. nbc versus united states the supreme court dispensed with the

argument. here is my argument jared. i would say what we have in the regulatory state there's no resemblance to what a majority of americans want. i would say if you took some huge proportion of the regulations now and asked the congress to pass them on an up-and-down vote hardly and of them would get through but what congress does is its usual self indulgent undisciplined way and i'm betraying an animus here. >> host: you are beating up on an organization with a 10% rating so you're probably not alone. >> guest: the regulatory state makes up in its view what are appropriate regulations. i guarantee you jared if their

point of view about what's appropriate is way different. >> host: a couple of things. first of all to your editor said to the average person on the street but elect the regulatory state they would say not much. then if you started saying how do you feel about the minimum wage they would say i like the minimum wage. how do you feel about rules against child labor? those are important. what you think about blocking polluters? >> guest: talking about piling on i have said there are large categories of low-hanging fruit. the ones that fall in that category have no problem with. we have now gone and asked the man in the street and you say he doesn't like the radio to restate. that is not what's going to happen. if you asked the man on the

street the person as a small business and the person is trying to put a deck on the back of his house the last three years. as people try to get -- if it is a case of neighbors wanting to get together to solve a problem you aren't going to get a very specific set of stories. >> host: that is a fair point that i put it back on the back of my house and i remember having to work delayed a couple of days because somebody had to sign off on something and they didn't show up. i got off very easy and i have a lovely deck and i'm not complaining however i have a question and a point. but they make the point and then asked the question. every regulation you can think of including the one i jokingly complained about having to wait for somebody to sign a paper i

might deck every regulation and many of them you and i will agree on, the bouncer who got yanked, the bartender for not carding their father, there is somebody on the other side of that regulation that has been well served by would wager. when someone doesn't card their father that's absurd and it shouldn't happen. the question is can you fix that without hurting the person is on the other side of that regulation for a good reason? you yourself said if we don't card folks we are going to end up hurting some very vulnerable people so that's my point. my question i don't know that ronald reagan or the bushes or whomever were heroes of yours but for someone -- >> guest: two out of three. >> host: i argue with conservatives and you are one so i guess my question would be why can't the ronald reagan to the world and maybe there's only one

, why can't the reagans and the rubio's and whomever we we are talking about hear why can't they be counted on to solve this problem? why haven't they been able to? >> guest: the answer is simple. ronald reagan had technically he could have demanded must administer regulation the way he wanted but if you go any deeper than that presidents have little authority over the radio to restate. it's a really good book by philip hamburger called the administrator of state, and have it quite right. the administrative state is extralegal and the sounds that it has its own court system, has its own judges, it's as if jared and i don't think this is hyperbole. it's as if the police can make

up the loss, enforce the laws and also choose the judges and prosecutors that it wanted and serve as court of appeals. this is a vast body of laws in effect that affect the daily lives of millions of americans that lies completely outside, it lies largely outside the normal political process. >> so as we move towards the latter part of our discussion here, that's the very system that you want to engage in it seems to me. that's what you want to go into and argue. >> guest: i want to selectively stably disobey. >> host: that's the gas thank you want to pour the sugar in. here i'm concerned that your solution is potentially ineffective. i read one review of your book. i think the other was matt bruning andy argued that your idea won't work because the

government has simply prohibited insuring against damages and that didn't strike me as all that far-fetched. in other words the government is regulations in place to protect foreign robo -- vulnerable parts. i happen to believe that's important. i'm sure you can find examples of words over them but roughly speaking i think that that's a sound rentable. if an individual is able to ensure against those damages than the regulation is for not and that ultimately is the goal of your solution here. so what would stop the federal government of the court system from saying i'm sorry you simply can't insure against regulatory damages because that would be completely officiating the spirit of the regulation? >> guest: here you are exposing my leninist heart.

the worse the better which was a saying back in those days and what they meant by that was in the process of implementing a revolution you want the empire to overreact and so what i'm hoping actually is that it will provoke overreactions. i think here's my reading of the situation. you are familiar with the famous pole that ask to what extent do you trust the federal government, all of the time, some of the time, all of the time. 13% of the most recent but this is not been under obama. this has been throughout the entire period. that's not a partisan distrust of government but there is a widespread sense among the american people the federal government has become a thing apart. it is not the things we do

together. that's not the definition of the government any more. the definition of the government is an entity that is largely concerned with the wealth, self interests and health of itself, not the people. so i don't think my sentence in the book where he said my legal funds could get started right away if somebody wanted to contribute $100 million i don't think i should have put that in there. my sense is this thing is going to get funded by hundreds of thousands of small contributors, that the reaction is not a billionaire saying i want to help out the little people. so it all people saying it's not time that we have this ability to push back. >> that's an empirically testable notion and i think we are going to find out. let's argue a little bit about government.

i certainly don't question your read of the pole and another very pole you are talking about but i ask that think there is something more pernicious going on. here is where i should write a "by the people" book of my own because what i think is going on is behind the poll results and i agree it's not a partisan result , something different. i actually think when you ask people about the government any trust the government you get results for the reasons you say but if you drill down and you ask people about some of the most important things the government has done asked them how they feel about the troops and how they feel about social security, ask them how they feel about medicare. ask them how they feel about minimum wages for example to i'm sure we disagree on that topic but in polls there is plurality even among conservatives. these are not only corp. oceans of the government but by barb

what we spend the vast majority of our budget on. i think something like 30% of the budget at this point is discretionary so the rest is a large social insurance program. i'm remembering the old adage get the government out of my medicare. there are people who say washington is broke and. vote for me and i will go to washington and make sure it stays that way. these are people who are using government dysfunction as a tool to discredit the institution so they can protect their friends in ways that you and i would both find very wrong.

>> first part, let me turn that on its head little bit. where is government doing a good job and where do you is highly motivated? armed forces is a good example. in his book talks about this at some length where people feel they have a mission like an air traffic controller. government employees are productive and hard-working as anyone in the private sector. the social security agency had a reputation or a long time as being a high morale agency. people distributing social security checks have a strong sense of a mission. all the things you mentioned go back to my point about some regulations are okay.

there are functions of government that i want to perform very well. i would argue that where it hasn't done the best job is where it's been the most core functions. jared was happened is it's acquired incrementally over time additional functions which are not core where the government screws up pretty badly. >> host: my second was this idea of government dysfunction. >> guest: there was a good article published a couple of days ago where you have the identical education plan and you tell democrats this is a republican plan or democratic land and you do the same thing with republicans. in both cases they are identical plants in both cases. democrats and republicans by a huge majority were opposed to it that the other party had done it.

let us say something loud and clear. if you want to know who is complicit in a regulatory state big businesses usually complicit rate of regular tory state is wonderful from their point of view because they have the clout to craft the relations they want them and also that corporations can deal with regulatory burden that put -- potential competitors cannot. >> host: getting back to some of your earlier work or would like you to tie this book in to at least two of your past books that i know pretty well. one was common ground losing

ground in coming apart. losing ground had a lot to do with policy which i found coming apart there was a lot of that i tend to agree with that someone that works in the inequality state the extent to which income wealth class dispersions against the equal opportunities for both of us i think are very important is i think is a serious problem. both in terms of anti-policy falls under your that's the part of government that i think is okay and opportunity where i think we should be doing more.

indiana in current -- unearned income tax strongly pro-work and strongly wrote poverty and spending 60 billion a year on that and i think quite effectively. again can you tie those together? >> guest: as far as antipoverty losing ground by not walking away from it all but i do think income transfers guaranteed income as a replacement for the welfare state is the way to go. i'm happy to have and this would be for everybody over the age of -- i have a book called in our hands. in that sense i think in a society as rich and powerful everyone should have access and whether they use

in many ways we are offered for from this regulatory state and there is a whole set of americans that are not only buffered, but their lives are deeply impacted. >> host: at the risk of being highly repetitive let me once again take a stand for someone who is missing in both the book and that analysis which is the people on the other side of those regulations to for free regulation you can disparage a new and i can find examples that are worth disparaging, there is someone who is being protected i would argue and at least potentially a useful way. but i want to try to maybe draw you a little bit since i feel over the course of our conversation you have actually said they be more positive things than i would expect about

certain aspects of government activities that you don't judge to be harmful in your accounting of the rigger tory stating get you to think more about kind of an opportunity agenda that could help the kinds of people that were left behind in coming apart or for that matter in putnam's book which is a similar thesis and ask you if you think that perhaps government could do more which is hard for a libertarian to maybe embrace but you have -- you are little pregnant on that already. some of the things we know for example is that kids, i saw a statistic the other day that showed smartphone come kids they score high on a math test smart low income kids are just as likely to complete college is not very smart rich kids. so we don't have the meritocracy we want.

is that not just ate critical market failure and wouldn't that be a great space for the government to try to intervene in a way to boost college for smart kids who face barriers in a cheating that goal? >> guest: that's an empirical question. my two younger children went to public schools in maryland which had lots of work in class kids. so we would go to the final ceremony brought the kids would say where they are going to college and what scholarships they got. i have to say i'm familiar with kids that don't go to college even though they test well anna, and from amman is to go to college but they don't go to the elite college. and when you do have those who don't go to college it's not

because there's no way they can afford it. it is because of familial cultural characteristics which have discouraged them from it and here we have opened up the topic of conversation which gets very complicated. let me cut to the chase. i don't think it does that very well. what the government does effectively is right checks. i think if you had a basic guaranteed income that would do far more to open up college. >> host: let's speak about this for a moment and i only use the college example. >> guest: i think that one of ronald reagan's jokes that i believe in most deeply is the most terrifying words i'm from the government and i'm here to help. the government has in contrast to an invisible hand, has an

invisible flood. it tends to screw things up all the time. >> host: i very much object to that assertion in the following way. it's one of those things that sounds good and in the spirit of some of the egregious examples you could pull out of your book it's not without merit, but there's a strain of work recently and i know you like social science and health into these results as much as i do but i would push you in that direction because i'm not sure how much of this you have seen, there is no work, we have now been doing this stuff long enough in collecting data -- data long enough that there is work that tracks these kids over time come kids who receive nutritional benefits and now it's called knott. kids who gut medicaid are compared to kids who didn't. kids who went to head start compared to kids who didn't, kids who got -- >> guest: head start is not a

good -- what these studies have consistently found is that in fact not only do we reduce poverty when we provide resources to folks in a mechanical way that these programs work like lasting investments and these kids will make rob to be adults appear to kids who didn't get the benefits have a higher level. >> guest: we are running out of time. >> host: we have four minutes, we have ample time. those kids have higher earnings than those in the control group and are likely to complete college. they are more likely by the way to form a family structure that is more conducive to the type you were talking about a few minutes ago, less likely to have out of wedlock words especially as teenagers so if you check the

record the ronald reagan's quip and it's hard not to agree who does want to -- the government, it's not there. >> guest: like categorically reject your portrayal of this data. there is no way that i can document why i category weighed weighed -- i will go to the map with you on these numbers in a number of settings and number -- another time. >> host: give you a chance to revisit. >> guest: i have read the stuff, believe me. >> host: some of these are random controlled. it would be a good debate for us to have because i think at the end of the day there is a level, keep pushing you towards granularity because i think it's , when you're flying along at 30 or 40000 feet beating up on the rate at troy state in the government and the congress you are going to get a lot of people on your side.

>> guest: my argument is this book is at ground level, as have 30000 feet that these things look to and the closer you get to the ground of how people live their lives the more you see ways in which government is not an ally but an enemy. >> host: in the last couple of that was a good thesis, and our last couple of minutes tell me what you will do or say if in fact this doesn't pan out the way you would like it to? if there are no billionaires who say good idea charles goforth and if there are a bunch of individual who think this is a good idea, what will you conclude, what will you do if you and i meet each other a year

or two from now and it has amounted to step? >> guest: i will be completely unsurprised. i mean jared, i am deeply pessimistic in many ways. i think there are some natural forces that blog meant the kind of thing that motivates me to write this book that are working in the right direction. information technology revolution and some of the cultural diversity is working in the direction of subsidiarity in terms of control of daily life but i'm not optimistic rate since we are almost at the end i would like people in the audience to realize you have two guys here who deeply disagree politically and ideologically and we have had what i consider to be a lovely conversation which is owed to your civility and good sense. >> host: right back at you and it's always a pleasure to interact with you. >> guest: thank you. >> host: you are welcome.

>> vallis "after words" booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed at journalists published -- public policymakers and others familiar with the material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9:00 p.m. on sunday in 12:00 a.m. on monday. and you can also watch "after words" on line. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. >> it wasn't a choice and initially. i think i started working in the first for the third person and then i realized that the

struggle of the text was how do you get a reader not to think they are ready no because i think these are all problems. they are ancient and they have stayed with us. now we can say centuries and so how do we re-enter and a way that allows us to have to interrogate again? the second person, it meant the reader had to say this person is doing that and that person is doing that and i perhaps see myself standing here. so those people who have said they didn't see race, i don't see race, you are a little

obsessed by race because i only see human beings begin to say things like while that person must be the black rouson or that person must be the brown body or that is probably a white guy. and then suddenly race enters the space. one has to take a position around whether or not one is capable of holding the actions of one of those people. that was the thinking behind the second person. another part of me loves this idea that if you are talking about minorities that you are talking about the second person, the position of the other is the second person so on a learning level there was that delicious mess around the way the second person meant the use of the word out there.

up next susan southard talks about the people of not psaki from the morning was him today, august 92015 marks the 70 anniversary of the u.s. bombing of not psaki. >> susan southard is one of this community and that's what makes this event so special. susan southard holds an mba from antioch. she lives and works in tempe. where she is the founder and artistic director of essential theater. she has taught nonfiction classes at her estate