economic adviser to vice president joe biden. >> host: it is a privilege to be with you today. tell us what it is you would like us to take from your new book. >> this is a cliff notes version. two propositions first the american project as i define it instead and third limits in what can be done in the political process. the second is the opportunities are opening for re-creating the best qualities. so by the american project i'm referring to the idea of the founders that individuals and families and communities can be left free to live their lives they see fit into the role of

the government is to provide a peaceful setting for that endeavor and otherwise standing aside. we are not going to reverse the database or any other things. the political process has essentially left that option of rolling back the federal government's power. >> host: you mentioned your book is fraught with many court cases and if you can footnoted them for myself and the viewers we are not all constitutional lawyers but do play one on tv. [laughter] but when you see that these things are set in stone - what happened so much so that the dynamism that one might argue has characterized the landscape in the areas has somehow evaporated? >> can we get better policy for

my point of view or yours. can we change education policy and welfare policy into that kind of thing? postcode you have changed welfare policy. >> guest: you have, too. also if we could change those things in our institutions would have no - so you can still continue down that road. but if you talk about the regulatory state which is the state of my concern here and that means the administrative state, you are talking about a large edifice. for example ronald reagan wasn't going to office and will back the regulatory state because he didn't have the authority to do so. >> host: can i ask you to be concreted up something that means different things to different listeners that in your

view is in place, probably shouldn't be in place and could be ruled out. with the social security be an example? >> guest: i'm referring to their victory over - regular suspects into some of the other agencies and all of the cabinet offices have some element of the regular - >> host: he could end - couldn't remember the name that is the kind of the same sentiment? >> guest: what is the regulatory state to complete the font? the education department does a lot of things that are not involved in the regulation but also does a lot of things in the country. this is what you have to do if you want to get federal funding.

the regulatory state is with all of the executive branch. under two and i want the listeners to be quite clear on this some regulations are okay because it advances the public goods. the epa is fulfilling the constitutionally appropriate functions insofar as if you have a smokestack so i'm not against regulations that prohibit that would prescribe safe tunnels and coal mines although some of my friends would argue that. there are regulations which are the low hanging fruit and are good things that needed to be done and i don't want to touch those but you also have a whole lot of ways in which small

business people come home owners, business card ranchers go about their dalia it's the doctors, dentists, going about their dalia lives in the regulatory state in ways that do prevent them from living their lives as they see fit for pointless reasons. >> host: so i suspect there are viewers that are saying okay where do you draw the line tax and since you describe your self as a puppeteer in your going to draw the line different than i will so certainly that seems to be a challenging question. how do you know where to draw the line between the two? >> guest: but we put it in the context of my solution because like i said i have a solution to let me briefly describe because one of the first tasks is to

answer the question where to draw the line. what i propose is defense cuts. i want a fund that is the bumper of the cleveland which comes to the aid of the corporations that have the little guy who has come after him and is that you have to redo the work place that's workplace that's going to cost $30,000 i want them to wanted to push back and have legal representation and i also suggest occupational defense funds. the phrase i used in the book treat the government as an insurable hazard. so it's starting up the philanthropic fund and one of the first jobs is to say which regulations are we willing to say civil disobedience is okay and which ones are we not so i

have a chapter that lays out guidelines for data such as regulations that prevent things that are not themselves. you don't go after the irs because it's really hard to distinguish principle civil disobedience. >> host: you should describe what you mean civil disobedience on the way over here when i think civil disobedience i would expect most americans think you think about the civil rights movement. civil disobedience against what i'm sure we would agree is an absolutely pernicious episode in the american landscape not to say that it's resolved because clearly the problems persist in a big way. we have seen african-americans and the police.

but i bet that strikes most listeners as a clear example of not only legitimate but essential civil disobedience. in your case you're you are talking about some pretty we find things. here is a workplace safety standard you think is a bad idea and a waste of time and i could find someone on the other side of that argument. that doesn't pull at the heartstrings in the way racial discrimination does. >> guest: let's talk about vocational issues. for me one of the deep sources of satisfaction is practicing a vocation that you love to do well and take pride. and to the extent that you've had lots of people in locations including physicians and small-business people of all kinds where they say i can't do

what i want to do in terms of providing a good or service is getting in the way with competing freedom. >> host: presumably they can do what they want to do not because of some arbitrary regulator also it may look very much the way to you and your colleagues because somebody along the way thought it's going to hurt somebody else, so again your kind of a bit of a judge and jury it seems to me. >> guest: i have a different view of the governments role so for me the meaning of the experiment was the presumption of freedom so if you are practicing your craft you do that the very best you can.

you are vulnerable if you are negligent or screw up otherwise it's for the possession of freedom. i don't want to characterize your opinion. i would say that progressive movement is defined in the early 20th century terms with its dramatic origins. it was one of the first times that was assumed that the state is better and that experts can say you shouldn't live under the protection of freedom we will decide what is okay and what's not. we will decide this is not fair and we now live under a presumption of constraint so when you say somebody along the lines said this would cause a safety gap if somebody did the presumption this is where it really gets ideological.

if i am minding my own business and haven't heard anybody for someone to use the power of the state to say you haven't heard anybody but i'm going to leave these constraints on you because you might, that's wrong. >> host: so i don't think anyone would disagree with that and i don't want to belabor this because there are so many thousands of nitpicky regulations i believe we could find some that ought to be disregarded but i do think that there are two important things to do the first one is kind of in the book and the second i found to be missing so i will ask you to defend. we have to get down on the cases. we have to say here's an example of a safety standard we should get rid of and if we don't get

rid of that citizens ought to engage in civil disobedience to get rid of it because the ideological argument is pretty abstract and not as hopeful as we would like. that's the first place. and the second point where i thought something was missing, so i will put this in economic terms it would seem to me before you want to engage in a fairly potentially dramatic endeavor of civil disobedience funded by hundreds of millions of dollars you would want to make a pretty strong case that what you call the regulatory state has actually hurt not just individuals because i think it's hurt individuals but it's also hurt the broad economy and so here i think you have a tough sell to claim and you haven't

even tried to claim it in the books i would ask you to claim it here. prior to this regulatory state a lot of things were a lot worse. growth was slower, recessions came more frequently and they were deeper. many people were made ill by the conception that you and i were talking about a while ago that people young teenagers exploited etc.. the imposition of the regulatory state to use your term doesn't correlate with the economic outcomes. society has advanced in many ways. so i thought one thing missing was an argument why you would want to go after what you go after other than a fairly abstract libertarian discussion about personal freedom.

>> guest: points number one is i'm not so much interested in the economic outcomes. the value of freedom to live your life as if it seems to transcend a lot of that. having said that i have the trendline test and it goes like this. take some outcome that is reasonably well measured that you want to achieve in the number of industrial accidents. i've used one that's a classic is highway deaths per 100 miles. the trendline back as many years as you can and this would be before and after a major regulatory intervention then look at where it occurred and try to tell me that it gets better at a steeper rate and here is my proposition.

i can produce dozens of trendlines in which things are getting better in a classic case but then something like the 55 per mile speed limit you have this steep reduction that continued to fly them out so the first statement is incorrectly you can take some things like the content of certain contaminants in the air. that is fairly small. >> host: it would be a good debate to have because i'm sitting here thinking of my own examples which go in a different direction than yours. i was just thinking about social

security. >> guest: the reason i introduced that in the book is because of it decisions that congress and the general welfare. >> host: switch introduced and poverty of the the older we go overly tall from 10% or something like that and that shouldn't surprise any of us because of the fairly generous and progressive program of cash benefits to go beyond their working years. number one is getting back to this issue of particular line drawing endeavors and what belongs in the civil disobedience category and what doesn't. it strikes me as plausible if we were to go down the road you suggest some of your colleagues

argue paying taxes is just something they ought not do. are they wrong? >> guest: yes i would say that's wrong in particular when it comes to the income tax. there is a classic example of my position. the way the income tax is currently administered it was approved by the constitutional amendment so for someone like me that is in love with the concept of the original founding document i would have to say what they did it the right way they passed the amendment but let me give you an example of how the other guidelines are used. i'm going to use the phrase strict scrutiny to subject writes in the constitution and certain ones for more strict scrutiny than others. i would say there is no whole category of regulations but

regulations to try to prescribe test practices do something for strict scrutiny. regulations that prevent the owner of the property from doing what he or she wishes as long as they don't interfere with the neighboring property should be subject to strict scrutiny and i go through and i take a chapter or give other categories where you look for targets. >> host: thank you for getting down to the more granular level. that's helpful. i've read many of your books and you and i have argued about some of them in the past. i found this to be your most pessimistic book. it seems like you've given up on the system than the initial comment you said something about it being irreparably broken.

where you go with you that i that i found to be beyond pessimistic and into an area that felt less than democratic. the idea as i pored through the pages was the system is broken. the depth to which the system is broken with this to be irreparable and ergo democracy don't work. we have to try to find something else which is breaking the law. that struck me as deeply pessimistic and undemocratic. >> guest: you tell me how mine is different from james madison and the other founders that were deeply nervous about democracy.

>> host: i think james james madison would say - and i think that his actions corroborate this but if you can't fix what is broken through the system then you either have to live with it or try to use the system to change it. >> guest: medicine didn't write the declaration of independence but it's a founding document of authority that the government becomes abusive of its proper powers it is not only the right but the duty of the people to rebuild. >> host: said they had the king of england in mind as you're talking about. >> guest: they were talking about the role of the government and saying it's not because england has done this but because then the governments do this it's the right of the people to establish.

i don't disagree with the quotation of the texture. i don't think they were thinking of the workplace regulations. >> guest: when you get to the federalist ten or 51, i get them mixed up but when madison discusses the faction and the terrible danger that opposed if you substitute the word faction and special interest that they were describing is what would have happened and here i will appeal to an economist who's not an ideologue on either side as far as i know whose work i describe in some detail but as you are aware they came up with a theory of sclerosis which is endemic in the democracies. >> host: and you can see from blocks when we speak.

>> guest: it's going to to happen in any democracy. there is no way of stopping it because of the asymmetry of the power of the groups to organize versus how difficult it is to organize large groups so completely apart from my views on things i think they had hold of the truth about the current state of the eu and the united states and japan and it will be true of if china isn't already whereby sclerosis sits in and you have the government by the special interests and for the special-interest. i've done chapters in the book to justify the civil disobedience on the grounds that a lot of these dynamics do not lend themselves to the solutions to the process. >> host: i still haven't given you a chance to say what you mean by civil disobedience and you should.

>> guest: that they but think of the story that prompted this book without many details because i don't want my friend to be identified. we have a friend who has a small business that employs latinos. but the difference is he documents them. he spends 20 to 30 grand a year to do this but what happened is doing the right thing and documenting them he made himself an easily visible target so she's been have asked by regulatory agencies not because he doesn't pay good wages were perfect good living conditions, he does but there are things that you can't have enough nativeborn americans working for you to comply with certain regulations because it's hard to get nativeborn americans to take

those jobs. so finally one time he thing he said was a particularly stupid allegation i'm going to fight this and they said you tried that and we will put you out of business. and that is not an uncommon story. i was furious when my wife told me. i could barely stand to listen to it. i should imagine a lawyer standing up out of nowhere saying we are taking this man's case. we know he's in violation of the regulation. we don't care. we are going to litigate this and our legal system is such that we can do that and make life miserable for you so we will reimburse him for it and then i said to myself you can write a book and that's what

happened. but what i'm trying to convey is i want to certain categories of regulation to become de facto. >> host: but you're talking about - and i don't mean this in to be more negative but were talking about legal harassment basically just writing them up in court. tying the regulator up in court. i want to get back to that but i just want to know to understand what you were talking about. by the way one of the ways i think that this is a full employment program for lawyers. what i want to do and this is similar he has a book called the rule of nobody that makes the

same point. the analogy that i use is on the interstate highways. if there's not a traffic jam at several miles above the speed limit. technically we could all be stopped. they stop people who are going crazy fast with a stop people who are driving erratically. okay it's not perfect. the perfect thing would be to have a speed limit of the person should go about so let's have have commonsense enforcement and regulation. so what i want is an example that's not in the book i encountered a bartender that had been fined for not carting a person in a place where you are required to card everybody.

you don't want kids and bars. the card was her father. the idea that if a pure crack here that and not laugh and say forget it, but it was a $3,000 fine and that stupid. i want no harm no foul. >> host: that sketch back to my accusation that there's something undemocratic. >> guest: you're correct in saying that. >> host: now that we have established again the kind of granular meaning of civil disobedience in the world i want to get back to that because when i look out at the world, i see a lot of the problems he identified and the anecdote you'd just told is one of them. problems exist, overzealous regulation, you won't find

myself or anyone else in the real world questioned those assertions however in my view they included the meaning which matched together the system that is broadly representative of the majority of the electorate wants with all of its blemishes. what makes me nervous about by the people is that it sounds like a relatively small group funded by billionaire's taking things into their own hands that purports to fight this that i've mentioned this matchup that we call democracy that's very messy and has embarrassing corners in the wrong way. ..

from my point of view the constitution was trashed. it was 1943 when nbc tried to fight the federal committee qishan system because the

legislation had asked for faremack were bulldozed -- rules on licensing. always before all legislative power is vested in a congress of the united states, there had to be an intelligible principle in regulation whereby administrators apparently there are limits because congress said we want to accomplish this and they were specific about what they wanted to accomplish. that was a requirement. in nbc versus united states the supreme court dispensed with the requirement and here's my argument. i would say what we have in the regulatory state there is no resemblance to what a majority of americans want. i would say if you took some huge proportion of the regulations now and asked congress passed them under an up-or-down vote hardly any would get through but congress in its usual preening self-indulgent undisciplined way --

>> host: you are beating up on an organization with a 10% approval rating. >> guest: you are right i'm piling on. they passed legislation with high-minded goals and some pretty big instructions and after that the regulatory state makes up in its view appropriate circulations for implementing that. i guarantee you jared their point of view about what is appropriate is way different. >> a couple of things. first of all i guarantee you are right it be said to the average person on the street had he liked the regulatory state him and not much i don't know what it is but it sounds bad and what should we do about it and then if he started saying how do you feel about the minimum wage they would say i actually like it great how they feel about those rules against child labor?

how do you feel about locking looters. >> guest: i heard he said there are large categories of low-hanging fruit in the rate of three state in some of the ones you mentioned call category. i have no problem with them. we have now gone and asked the man on the street and as you say he doesn't like predatory state. that's not what's going to happen. if you ask the man in the street as a person is a small business, a person has tried to put a deck on the back of his house in the last three years if it's people that tried to -- let me finish though. if it's a case of neighbors coming together to solve a problem you aren't going to get some vague, you're going to get a very specific -- >> host: that's a fair point. i put it back on the back of my house and i remember having to

work a couple of days because of 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 the point. that made make a point and ask a question. every regulation you can think of including the one i just jokingly complained about having to wait for somebody to sign the paper on my deck every regulation many you and i will agree on. the bouncer who got things are not carting their father. there is somebody on the other side of that regulation that has been well served i 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 who is on the other side of that regulation for a good reason and

you yourself said that we don't card folks we are going to end up hurting very vulnerable people but that's my point. my question, i don't know that ronald reagan or the bushes or whomever were heroes of yours but i argue with conservatives and you are one and i guess my question would need why can't the ronald reagan so's of the world and maybe there is only one i can't the reagans, the rubio's the cruz whoever we are talking about hear why can't they be counted on to solve this problem? >> guest: the answer is simple ronald reagan had the power to appoint the head of ocean and so forth and i guess technically he could have demanded somebody resign unless they have minister to regulation the way they wanted me but if you go deeper

than that presidents have little authority over there are three state. there's a book called -- but it's extralegal. administrative state is extralegal in the sense that it has its own court system. it has its own judges. it's as if jared and i don't think this is hyperbole as if the police could make up the laws come enforce the laws and also choose the judges prosecutors that it wanted and served serve as court of appeals. this is a vast body of laws and a fact that affects daily life of millions of americans that lies completely outside, not completely outside, largely outside the normal political process. >> every sort is -- as we move towards the latter part of our

discussion here that's the very system he wants and gauge and. that's a system you want to go into and argue. >> i want to selectively civilly disobey. >> host: those are the gas tanks you want to pour the sugar in and here i'm concerned your solution is potentially an effective. i read one review of your book. i think the author was mad earning and he 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. the government its regulations in place to protect honorable parties. i happen to believe that's important and you happen to believe that's overdone. i am sure you can find examples where that's overdone but broadly speaking i think that's a sound principle traded if an

individual is able to ensure against those damages than the regulation is for not and that is part of your solution here. what would stop the federal government are the core system from saying i'm sorry you simply can't assure against regulatory damages because that would be completely vitiating the spirit of the regulation to just go here are exposing my leninist heart. the worse the better which was a saying back in those days and what they meant by that was 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 because i think -- here's my reading of the situation. you are familiar with the famous poll that asked to you trust the federal government to do the

right thing all of the time, most of the time are some of the time and three-quarters the population in the 1960s to 13% most recently. this has been secular throughout the entire period. that's not a partisan mistrust of government. i think there is a large, 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 government anymore. the definition of the government as an entity that is largely concerned with the self-interest and health of itself not the people and so i don't think that my sentence in the book where he said my legal thumb started right away if somebody wanted to contribute $100 million, don't think i should have put that in

there and the reason is as follows. my sense is that this thing is going to get funded i hundreds of thousands of small contributions that the reaction the downright reaction is not billionaires and yes i want to help out the little people. it's a little people saying it's about time that we had this pushback. >> host: as an impaired detestable motion. let's argue a little bit about government. i certainly don't question or read of the poll. i think there 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 are the poll resort is something different. for the reasons you said, but if you drill down and you ask people about some of the most

important things government, after they feel about the troops, as they how they feel about social insurance. ask them how they feel about social security and medicare. ask them how they feel about minimum wages for example. i'm sure we disagree on that topic but in polls even among conservatives these are not only core functions of government but it's by far 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 these large social insurance probe rams and so on. and i'm remembering the old adage get the government out of my medicare. so i think there's kind of an interesting disjuncture between government and the way you talk about it and government in the way you experience it.

i'm going to ask you to react to that impart to there are lots of people and i suspect we both object to that. i may object moore, who say washington is broken. so for me and i will go to washington and make sure it stays that way. these are people who are using government dysfunction is a tool to discredit the institution so that they can protect their friends in ways that you and i would both find very wrong. >> guest: the first part about how people experience it, let me turn that on its head and say what is government doing a good job and worthy of a workforce is highly motivated and is quite competent. the armed forces is a good example of that. james q. wilson in his book bureaucracy talks about this where people feel they have a mission air traffic controllers and other people. never meant people are as

hard-working and competent as anybody. social security agency and a reputation for a long time has been a higher more outpatient because the people have a strong sense of mission. that's what they were doing. all the things that you have mentioned go back to i guess my point about some regulations are okay. i'm not an anarchist. their functions of government that i want to perform very well. i would argue where it has done the best job is one that's been those core functions and jared what has happened is it has acquired incrementally over time this vast additional number of functions which are not core and where the government screws up ready badly. >> host: my second was this idea of government dysfunction and a strategy.

>> guest: there was a really good article publicized a couple of days ago where you have the identical education plan and detailed democrats this is republican planner you tell them it's a democratic plan and see how they differ in and you do the same thing with republicans. in both cases there are debacle plans. democrats or republicans by huge majorities were opposed to it if the other party had done it so people who trade on that absolutely. let me say something loud and clear. if you want to know who's complicit in the regulatory state my big business is hugely complicit. the revelatory state is wonderful from their point of view it as they have the clout to craft the regulations they want them and also corporations can do with the regulatory burden that potential competitors cannot.

all of those things i think probably run different parts of the same page. >> host: getting back to some of your earlier work i would like you to tie this book in to at least two of your past books that i know pretty well. one, is the common ground? sorry, losing ground and coming apart created losing ground had a lot to do with antipoverty policy and coming apart which i found, coming apart there was a lot in there that i had to agree with someone who works in the inequality. the sense to which income wealth class dispersion are recounting

against equal opportunities in both of them are very important is a serious problem. can you tie some of the themes in this book in two games in those books both in terms of antipoverty policy which i would argue and i want to see if you agree under your that's the part of government that i think is okay and inequality in opportunity where i think we should be doing more to help the less advantaged people. by the way on my list of things that government does well i think the unmanned armed -- i'm there and income tax credit strongly anti-property and strongly pro-work. we are spending 60-plus billion a year on that and i think quite effectively. again can you tie this together? >> as far as antipoverty, losing ground not walking away from it all but i do think income

transfers in the way of replacement for the welfare state is the way to go and i have a book called in our hands. guest:not means tested. >> guest: in that sense i think in a society as rich as ours everybody should have access whether they use those is another question. they should have access to it. so that's not a big issue but coming apart to talk about pessimism. it's a deeply pessimistic book. what i have is a solution to the problem that had no real solutions at all. so jared what i'm doing in this book is different than coming apart. seeing the civic culture that i cherish in this country is, part and i don't see any way back and

i'm sad about that. and this book i'm saying you still have an awful lot of americans who are doing everything right. they are trying to raise families, make an honest living, minding their own business and increasingly the government is making life hard for them. i want to help them out. so i'm talking actually about them or restrict the set of the population and frankly jared gets a population that doesn't include us. in our professions we don't have a government in an interfering with the way we make a living. a lot of us don't do the neighborhoods which neighbor still get together to help solve problems and in many ways we are buffered from the effects of this regulatory state. there's a whole set of americans that are not only not proffering proffering -- profiting from it but their lives are deeply impacted. >> host: let me once again take a stand for someone who's missing in the book and that

analysis which is the people on the other side of those regulations. for every regulation you can disparage and again you and i can find examples that are worth disparaging there is someone who is being protected i would argue and potentially in a useful way. but i want to try to the ad, maybe draw you a little bit since i feel over the course of our conversation you have said may be more positive things than i would expect about certain aspects of activities that you don't judge to be harmful and your account of the regulatory state and get you to think more about an opportunity agenda that could help the kinds of people that are left behind and coming apart or for that matter a similar thesis. and ask you if you think perhaps your son area where government could do more of which is hard

for libertarian to embrace. you are a little pregnant on that already. one of the things we know for example is that kids -- i saw a statistic the other day that showed a smart low-income kids, and other words they score high on a math test, smart low income kids are just as likely to complete college is not very smart as rich kids. so we don't have the meritocracy we wanted a probably agree with that. is that not just a critical market value your if you want to call it that and wouldn't that be a great space for the government to try to intervene in a way to lose axis of completion for smart kids who pays barriers for achieving that important goal? >> guest: well here i guess that's an. question. my two younger children went to public school in new brunswick maryland which had lots of

working-class kids. we would go to the final ceremony for all the kids and to find out where they were going to college and what scholarships they got. i'm familiar with kids who don't go to college about an update test well of the more common phenomenon is they don't go to the elite colleges for reasons that aren't just thing and when you do have those who don't go to college it's not as there's no way they can afford it. it is because of familial cultural characteristics which discourage them from it and here we open a topic of conversation which gets very complicated and let me cut to the chase. i don't think government does that area well. with the government does effectively is write checks. i think of the data basic guaranteed income that would do far more to open up college.

>> host: let's become us for a minute and i only pulled a college example of a excessive think it's a pro. esque i think one of ronald reagan's jokes that i believe in most deeply is the most terrifying words are i am from the end i'm here to help. the government has contrast to an invisible hand and the economy has invisible foot. it tends to screw things up all the time. >> host: i very much object to that assertion the following way. it's one of those things that sounds good and in the spirit of some the egregious examples you could pull out of your book it's not wholly without merit but there's a drain at work recently and i know you like social science and like to delve into these as much as i do and i very much would push you in that

direction and i'm not sure how much of this you have seen. there is no work -- do we have been doing this stuff long enough and collecting data and often some of these folks that there's work that tracks these books over time kid to receive nutritional benefits for example and is called s.n.a.p., kitsy gut medicaid our kids -- compared to get to do than kids who want to head start were compared to kids who didn't. kids who got an a.c.t. -- >> guest: that is not a good -- head start. >> host: there had starts with high-quality and head starts with low-quality somewhat these studies have consistently found is in fact not only do we reduce poverty when we provide resources to folks in a mechanical way, but these programs work like lasting investments and these kids when they grow up to be of elves

compared to get you didn't get the benefits -- >> guest: we are running out of time. >> host: we have four minutes which is ample time. these kids have higher earnings than those in the control group and more likely to complete college. they are more likely by the way to form a family structure that is more conducive to the type you are talking about a few minutes ago, less likely to have out of wedlock births especially as teenagers still a few track the record the ronald reagan quip that is catchy and who doesn't want to bash government. yes i categorically object to your portrayal of this data. there is no way that i can document wide categorically object that i will go to the map on these objectives in another setting at another time.

i have read this stuff, believe me. >> guest: some of these are random. i do think at the end of the day there is a level -- do i keep pushing it towards granularity because i think when you're flying along at 30 or 40000 feet beating up on oratory state in the government and the congress you are going to get a lot of people on your side. >> guest: jared my argument is this book is at ground level. 30000 feet these things look good in 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: for the last couple of minutes and that was a good thesis, in our last couple of

minutes to tell me what you will do or say if in fact it doesn't pan out the way you would like it to? if there are no zillionaires who say good idea charles goforth and civil obedience and individuals who think this is a good idea what we can include it , what will you do if you indict meet each other year or two from now and it has amounted to sit? >> guest: i would be completely unsurprised. i mean jared, i am deeply pessimistic in many ways. i think there are some natural forces that will augment the kind of thing that motivates me to write this book. i think the information technology were wishon and some of the -- is working a subsidiary of daily life.

you want to say 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 always a pleasure to interact with you. >> guest: thank you. >> host: you are welcome.

booktv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer. >> i'm reading a book by mona i also holly which is all about women's rights in the middle east and i'm reading a minnesota author by the name of macon who wrote a book called underground which is about the 1916 miners strike which took place in minnesota, very exciting book and she's a schoolteacher at southwest high school in minneapolis minnesota. and i just finished up doubles in the grove which is a book by an guy named gilbert king. it's all about the life of thurgood marshall before he was

a judge but was litigating cases in the south at tremendous risk to himself but basically fighting for justice. i read at least two books at once all this time so that's what i have been doing in july. >> booktv want to know what you are reading this summer. tweet us or answer a booktv are posted on our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. joining us on booktv is author martha biondi. professor what do you do at northwestern university? >> guest: i'm a professor back in american studies and history. >> host: what do you teach? >> guest: like teach courses on the civil rights movement. i teach a survey of academic in history. i just finished teaching a freshman seminar called is america post-racial so generally i do african-american history after the civil