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May 26, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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Military Intervention and the Surveillance State | Abby Hall | POLITICS | Rubin Report
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unidentified
(upbeat music)
dave rubin
So last week, "Sit Down with Brigitte Gabriel"
received quite possibly the most positive reaction that we've ever had to an interview.
I'd say that well over 90% of the responses that I saw on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook were appreciative of our discussion of her incredible story growing up in Lebanon during the civil war, about the roots of radical Islam and what living in a free society is really all about.
People were in awe of Brigitte's personal story, amazed by her passion, impressed by her candor, or some combination thereof.
If you haven't seen her episode yet, but you only have a few minutes, check out the last 5 minutes of our chat to see what a true love of liberty and freedom is all about.
We'll put the link to that right here in the description below.
Oh, and for the record, I wasn't tearing up because of her impassioned speech, it was because of these damn bright lights.
They were getting to my retinas, you know how it can be.
I mentioned the reaction to our interview with Brigitte because it reiterates a lesson that I've consistently learned while doing this show.
Before we had Brigitte on, I talked to my team about whether we should have her on at all.
After all, Brigitte is hated by a lot of people who call her the usual buzzwords like racist, bigot, far right extremist and so on.
While we all know that the people who are using these words are becoming the new boy who cried wolf, and that these words themselves are losing their meaning by the minute, the chill effect these words have still remains in certain quarters.
Even in my case, when I'm selecting my guests, I do have to think for a moment if there's going to be some sort of cost for me to sit down with someone.
I still get a ton of hate for talking to Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Tommy Robinson, Paul Joseph Watson, and a couple other people.
In none of those cases do I regret having the conversations, regardless of the blowback these interviews may have caused me, but it does bring to light an important topic.
It's not just those who are being targeted as bigots and racists who are in the firing line of those who would like to silence us.
It's also the people willing to talk to those people and hear them out.
This guilt by association is incredibly dangerous because it can bite any of us for having a family member or even a friendship with someone who shares political views that fall out of the mainstream.
Should we disown people with views different than ours?
Should we defame them?
Should we publicly humiliate them?
All of these are small steps towards reporting them to the authorities for wrong think.
We should also note that in the online world, there is an information battle constantly happening.
When you put Brigitte's name in Google, the first site that comes up, which isn't one that's directly affiliated to her, is Islamophobia.org, which is part of CARE, the Council on American Islamic Relations.
Think back to my interview with Brigitte for a second.
What was the bigoted part?
After living through everything she has, does she strike you as the problem in society?
Does she strike you as a bigot or a racist or a right wing nut?
I don't think so.
What I think is most interesting about the assault on conversation is how recent this phenomenon is.
My friend and mentor Larry King has built his legendary career on talking to people from every walk of life and from every part of the world.
On 5 days of any given week, he could talk to a member of the Ku Klux Klan, then Louis Farrakhan, then the cast of Friends, then Magic Johnson, and then the Pope.
Nobody ever accused Larry of sharing all their beliefs just because he talked to all of them.
Actually, this very concept would have been seen as totally ludicrous.
I'm proud to say that I know Larry pretty well, and it's his curious mind and real sense of wonder that made and still make him want to talk to all sorts of people doing all sorts of different things.
As you know, it's my policy that sunlight is the best disinfectant, that people with bad ideas will eventually hang themselves if given the room to do so, and I consistently try to do that.
This growing sense of guilt by association is just the next level of what the regressive left has built.
It's not enough just to label someone a bigot anymore.
Now we have to tar and feather them so that other people will be afraid to talk to them as well.
And if you're willing to talk to someone outside of their accepted group, they'll tar and feather you too in an effort to shut down any furthering of conversation.
And yes, unfortunately I do see this phenomenon far more on the left than on the right these days.
It's almost as if when you cut through the hysteria and the screaming and the slandering that they don't even believe their own ideas in the first place.
So they don't want counter ideas heard, but they also want to make sure people aren't entertaining other ideas in the first place.
This is incredibly dangerous, and it's not a game that I'll be taking part in.
Between this silencing of those who veer from the mainstream and the YouTube demonetization that I discussed last week, those of us who really are fighting for free speech have our work cut out for us.
I'm up for the challenge, by the way.
Fortunately, we're continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week, and joining me is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Tampa, Abby Hall.
Abby is also an affiliated scholar at the Mercatus Institute and a research fellow with the Independent Institute, a non-partisan educational think tank.
We're going to talk economics, war and peace, the drug war, our militarized police, and much more.
I'll gladly accept my guilt by association to her, and we'll see how it goes as to whether
she can say the same about me.
We're continuing our partnership with the good people over at Learn Liberty today and
joining me is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Tampa and an affiliated
scholar with both the Mercatus Center and the Foundation for Economic Education, Dr.
Welcome to The Rubin Report.
abby hall
Thank you for having me.
dave rubin
How was my intro there?
I felt good about that.
unidentified
Good.
dave rubin
Worked?
abby hall
I liked it.
dave rubin
All right.
There's a lot I want to get into with you because I was looking at your bio and a lot of the stuff that you talk about that you specialize in is stuff that I really like that we haven't done a ton on.
So can we jump into foreign policy first?
unidentified
Sure.
dave rubin
Foreign policy to me Seems like one of the craziest things that we have going on these days because everyone's talking about it and yet it seems like no one knows what they're talking about.
Is that a generally fair statement to start us off on here?
That just everyone's always talking about all this stuff and nobody really knows what's going on.
Not nobody, but the masses.
abby hall
If it's comforting at all.
Having a lot of foreign policy issues that people know nothing about is not anything that is new to today.
However, I would say that foreign policy is an area where a lot of people are, I think, rationally fairly ignorant.
Just because a lot of foreign policy people think, I think often incorrectly, that foreign policy doesn't have any kind of impact on what's going on domestically.
dave rubin
Yeah, so I like that you set it up that way, that it's not necessarily any worse now.
I think it seems like it's somehow worse now because of social media.
So you just see people all day long who you know don't really know what they're saying, and they're constantly saying things.
But as someone that knows a bit about foreign policy, what are some of the tenets you need in a solid, sound foreign policy?
abby hall
It's a complicated question.
dave rubin
Well, that's why you're here.
unidentified
It is!
Let's do it!
abby hall
I don't pretend to be able to sit from my position and prescribe foreign policy.
That is not what I see my role as an economist as being.
But I can say that economics gives us a lot of insights as to How we should expect foreign policy to work or in a lot of cases to not work in the way that it's intended.
Whether we're talking about humanitarian interventions or if we're talking about military interventions, economics and the frameworks that are given to us so that we can talk about from an economic perspective are helpful in understanding what's going on with a lot of foreign policy.
dave rubin
Yeah, how much of our foreign policy is directly economically based?
Like, we like to think, oh, we do this for humanitarian reasons, or we do this because of some other reason, but is it, at the end of the day, is it like 90% that's really just about economics?
abby hall
It's hard to describe something as being just economic.
As I try to pitch my students when they're in class, everything is an economics problem if you look at it hard enough.
dave rubin
Says the economics professor.
abby hall
Of course!
But if you look at foreign intervention, there is absolutely what we would call the public choice aspect of foreign policy. What Dwight Eisenhower referred
to as the military-industrial complex, so you have congressional
leaders, you have the Pentagon, you have private interest, who all have a vested
interest in engaging in foreign policy or particular types of foreign policy, I should say, regardless of whether or
not it's actually productive or serving the quote-unquote "common good."
dave rubin
Yeah, when you say particular types, you're talking about some sort of military intervention, basically.
abby hall
Military intervention, although one thing that we have observed for the last several decades, humanitarian interventions are becoming more and more something that's falling under the umbrella of military execution, regardless of whether or not that's appropriate.
dave rubin
Yeah, so when you see something like Syria going on right now and there's a humanitarian disaster, are they bringing in economists to say, guys, there's a humanitarian disaster, there's hundreds of thousands, something like 500,000 people have died over the last eight years or something like that.
What are the economic choices we have to make to make this viable?
Or is it just that the machine just kind of exists and they're just gonna make the decisions and do what they want?
abby hall
I can't say that I know exactly what the Obama administration and what now the Trump administration are doing as far as consulting economists about what to do in Syria.
Unfortunately, and this has been a point of a lot of the research that I've done, is people tend to think about foreign intervention as being something really simple.
It's a math problem, or very just linear.
Here's a problem we want to get from this point to that point, and here's a solution that's supposed to fix it.
So we go from A to B to C.
Right.
Unfortunately, that is not how things work.
dave rubin
Has it ever worked that way?
unidentified
No.
dave rubin
Has there ever been the A to B to C?
abby hall
Not that I'm aware of.
Things are not linear like that.
And so when you think about issues, especially something that's as complex as foreign policy,
where you are dealing with millions of actors and parts of an economy, social issues, political
issues, all of those things are coming together and they're working or not working.
But when you intervene in one place in that system, it's totally just fantastic thinking
to look at that and go, "Sure, if we intervene at one part in the system, there's no way
that there's going to be an impact in other parts of that system as well."
And that's where you wind up running into some really nefarious, unintended consequences, which we have seen over and over and over again.
unidentified
Right.
dave rubin
Is this also sort of the idea of like mission creep, where they, you know, they always sort of have one goal and then it keeps becoming another goal and another goal and another goal, and then you don't even know where you started at the beginning?
abby hall
Maybe part of that, so when we talk about mission creep, that's certainly part of the economics of bureaucracy.
One thing about foreign intervention, of really any flavor, whether we're talking about humanitarian aid or we're talking about war, it's all done in this bureaucratic regime, so overlapping layers of bureaucracy.
Bureaucratic firms don't compete for profit like a standard firm would.
So, the way I typically explain it, if you have a for-profit firm, they look at their financial statements at the end of the quarter, they're earning a profit, that's indicating to them that they are providing something that is adding value to society.
A negative profit or a loss indicates the opposite.
Bureaucracies, however, they're not competing for profit or loss.
They are competing for government resources, so pieces of some larger budget.
How do they convey that they should get a bigger piece of that budget, that they should have more personnel?
By taking on more and more activities which are important to the powers that be.
dave rubin
Yeah, so just to be clear, they basically, they're competing for this budget, so they have to spend money, even in cases where they wouldn't have a good reason to.
Is that fair to say?
abby hall
Absolutely.
There's no incentive to cost minimize.
There's a decentive, right?
dave rubin
I mean, there's reasons not to do it, because then your budget will be cut.
abby hall
Right.
If I'm a government agency and I go to you as the federal government and I say, hey, I can do the exact same job that I'm doing with 20% less money, the next year I'm going to have 20% less in my budget, which is not what you're incentivized to do.
as somebody operating a bureaucracy.
Now, this doesn't mean that the people who are working in the government are necessarily terrible people
who are sitting there wringing their hands trying to get as much money as possible.
But as an economist, we look at that and we say, well, this is the incentive structure that they face.
dave rubin
So how did that system get built?
I mean, how did this come to be?
I'm not an economist, but it sounds quite ridiculous.
I would want something that was slim and trim and took as little from the people as possible and that could, you know, every year become more efficient and need less resources and all that, and that's quite literally the reverse of what we have.
abby hall
One thing about this bureaucratic system is that there is that incentive to expand.
Not saying that it's not possible to constrain it, but there's actually an entire branch of economics called constitutional political economy, which is trying to answer the question of if we want something like a government who will provide quote-unquote national defense or roads or education, whatever you want to put in
that bucket. How do we construct a political system where we can empower our
leaders to do the things that we want them to do and yet simultaneously constrain
them to not go outside of those stated confines that we would prefer,
or those functions that we want them to fulfill. In terms of how we got there, it's
a tricky question.
It requires a lot of historical knowledge.
My experience has been looking at how things have evolved militarily, particularly that military-industrial complex, because we've always seen a relationship between private actors and public actors.
That's nothing that's new.
However, this massive kind of military spending that we have right now is not something that has always been observed in the U.S.
And that really starts, I think, if you want to pinpoint it, during the interwar years between World War I and World War II.
Because you've got contracting rules that change.
So it used to be if I had an idea for something that the military could use, I would pitch that idea.
To various boards.
They would look at it.
They would look to see if it was a good idea.
They'd send out bids.
But now, and this kind of started during that period, the rules of the game have changed for those kinds of contracts.
So instead of who can build something the cheapest, it might be, oh, we have a relationship with this particular company, or they're familiar with our processes.
And so it's built up over time.
dave rubin
Do you think there's any kind of functional way to roll back some of that?
I mean, if you wanted to have a fair bidding process, or something that was going to be a little more fiscally responsible, or any of that, is it possible to roll back things that are inside of such a massive complex, as you're mentioning?
abby hall
I would like to say that I think anything is possible.
I'm not sure that I think it's particularly likely.
You have massive entrenched interest for, I mean, you look at something like drones or tanks.
There have been tanks, for example, that the military has said for years We do not want them.
And yet, they continue to be manufactured and they are quite literally sitting in a compound somewhere and they are just rusting.
Why are we still manufacturing these?
It's because the places where they're manufactured, their elected officials, keenly aware of the fact that if they shut down these factories, some of their constituency is going to be unemployed.
That does not bode well for their re-election.
They fight really hard to keep those things in place.
And so you're fighting those battles at so many different junctures.
I'm honestly not really sure what it would take.
dave rubin
Yeah, how could you even start to fight that at the political level?
Because you'd have to have a politician who'd be willing to say to his own people, you're going to lose some jobs because it's the, unfortunately in this case, it's the right thing to do.
abby hall
Right.
dave rubin
We don't get many politicians like that, do we?
unidentified
No.
abby hall
And there's actually a famous economist named F.A.
Hayek, who in Chapter 10 of his book The Road to Serfdom, talks about why the worst get on top.
So why it is that you are unlikely to have those kinds of political officials get into place.
Because the people who are going to seek out those positions, and people who are going to, importantly, be successful in those positions, Are not to the people who are going to say, let's take one for the team and roll back these policies.
People like to think, and economists make this mistake as well, that political officials are publicly interested.
So they set aside their own incentives, their own desires, and instead they're trying to fulfill some broader notion of the public good.
So they've set it up, oftentimes, what's called a social welfare function.
So you put societal welfare on one side of the equal sign, and if you just Have all of your math correct on the other side.
You can make people as happy as possible.
But this really ignores things that you learn on quite literally day one of your economics classes.
That people respond to incentives.
So political actors, just like any other actor facing scarcity, we should expect that they're going to respond to incentives as well.
dave rubin
Yeah, is there any sensible way to disconnect the politics from the way that the military is run and funded?
I mean, it's sort of the same question that I've asked you before, but is there some possible way that we could have some sort of go-between between those two things so that they could run more efficiently?
abby hall
It's tricky because oftentimes when people look, and even people who acknowledge that maybe there is an issue with military spending or the U.S.
is too involved militarily, which Can get you in hot water very, very quickly because military is one of the sacred cows in the United States.
People will suggest doing different kinds of things.
Well, maybe you should limit lobbying or campaign contributions or something like that.
But again, we go back to one of the first things that we learn in economics, which is that when you have scarcity, so when people are competing for resources, that competition is ever-present.
Whether you are competing in the marketplace for profit, if you are in a bureaucracy and you are competing for pieces of government budget, just because you change the system, not going to change the fact that
there's competition there.
But, so that entire field looking at how do we devise rules.
dave rubin
Right. This is kind of a funny place for an economist to be because you're dealing in a system that doesn't deal with
the normal rules of an economy.
abby hall
So, I mean, it's...
It is and it isn't.
I can see, because oftentimes when people look at economists, they think that we are exclusively looking at how markets operate.
But economics is much more fundamentally about human interaction.
So given the fact that resources are scarce and people respond to incentives, how is it that people coordinate in exchange with each other?
And in that case then, economics is much more broad in terms of the scale and the scope of what it is that economics can talk about.
dave rubin
So from a purely economic standpoint, if our military just had less money, do you think there's any reason that it couldn't function basically as well as it functions now?
Because I would probably, I see no reason why we couldn't probably cut, let's just pick a small number, 10% of the military budget.
I suspect there would be probably no real effect on a military's ability to do stuff.
abby hall
I would not think that a cut in the military budget would have a particular effect, although I know as soon as those words come out of my mouth... Right, you're going to get attacked!
dave rubin
That's why I went with the 10%.
I thought that would be... I didn't say 40%, you know?
abby hall
I think also a lot of it too has to do with what people see as being appropriate for the military.
So again, anytime you see people going to try to cut military funding, there is an immediate outpouring of, this will make America less safe, Which I don't think is true at all.
If you look at a lot of the data about, I mean, you are incredibly safe in the United States and in Western Europe for that matter.
dave rubin
Certainly at least from an army attacking you.
There's other risks, but those aren't really military risks.
abby hall
Even things like terrorist attacks, which is what people tend to worry about now.
I give actually a fairly, on a fairly regular basis, a talk about the economics of terrorism.
And one thing that I do at the very beginning, regardless of who I'm giving the talk to, is I give them a list of two PowerPoint slides just full of things that are much more likely to kill you than a terrorist attack.
dave rubin
Give me a couple things.
Let's calm people down.
abby hall
Being struck by lightning.
Drowning in a bathtub.
You're more likely to be killed by a toddler wielding a firearm than you are to be killed by a terrorist.
dave rubin
Really?
Well, babies with guns.
abby hall
I mean, you know, those toddlers can be really scary.
I nannied for a while.
I know.
Police officers, you're more likely to be killed by a police officer in the United States than you are to be killed by a terrorist.
And these statistics also hold for Western Europe as well.
dave rubin
So how do we then make sense of that?
Because the media obviously has us thinking that that's not the case.
So how do you make sense of that?
abby hall
You mean just in terms of why do we tend to stick with issues of terrorism?
I think that there are some politically motivated reasons for Really pushing the issue of terrorism, making people think that they are a lot less safe than they are.
One thing that my co-author Chris Coyne and I look at is how fear is used as a rallying point.
Fear can I'll make people more accepting of behaviors of government activities that maybe they were not comfortable with before.
For example, if you had told someone in, let's say, 1998 that every time you fly, You are going to have your person in your property
subjected to search by government agents.
And if you set off some alarm, they can pat you down, including in areas that you may not be interested in having
people touch you.
People would just say that that was absolutely nuts.
But then you have something like 9-11.
And then after that, people are convinced that things like the TSA are important and necessary for maintaining safety.
Even though we know, statistically and empirically, that the TSA is basically nothing but a giant money suck.
dave rubin
Yeah, so I take it you're not a big fan of the Patriot Act?
abby hall
No.
dave rubin
Yeah.
So what was the goal?
Like, what was the goal then?
If you were the people that were in charge of writing the Patriot Act, was it then really just, let's just figure out more ways to control the populace, to spy on them?
Like, what's the goal then?
Is there an economic goal for them?
Or is it to make these agencies bigger because that just gets more money going in the system?
abby hall
I think there is the goal of expanding the size of your bureau.
I think that's just the standard economics of bureaucracy.
I think for most people when they attempt to pass legislation, and there are some exceptions to this I'm sure, but I really don't think that most political actors are just nefarious in their motives.
I think a lot of times that people are genuinely interested in trying to help People trying to make people feel safer.
Note there is a big difference between feeling safer and actually being safer.
But I think one of the things that we miss out on is the consequences that come as a result of a lot of these policies.
When you give government additional powers, There's the potential for the abuse of those powers.
And oftentimes it happens in ways that maybe we can't quite see from the very beginning.
It goes back to that linear thinking that we were talking about a few minutes ago.
When you think about things in that very mathematical fashion, Yeah, I'm trying to think.
dave rubin
Is there any instance that you can think of where we gave the government a certain amount of power and then eventually it gave that power back?
There must be something, but I can't really think of anything.
abby hall
A great book by an economist named Robert Higgs called Crisis and Leviathan came out in 1987.
And his work has been the basis for a lot of the work that my co-author Chris and I have done.
And what he talks about is what he refers to as the ratchet effect.
So you have government that's growing at some standard pace, then some kind of crisis happens.
Whether it's something like a 9-11 or Or if it's a perceived crisis.
So if every American is laying in bed tonight and thinks that there is a monster under their bed, it can count.
Real or perceived crisis.
dave rubin
I'm pretty sure that half the country thinks that Trump is under their bed.
abby hall
They might.
But there's this outcry to do something to mitigate this threat.
And so government will expand the scale and scope of their operations, so they'll ratchet up.
And then what Higgs describes is that after that crisis abates, you do see a decrease in government activity, but it never quite goes back to the level that it was before.
And so I'm sure that if People who know a lot more about various specific pieces of legislation better than I do would be able to find examples where something was put in and then subsequently taken out.
But I think by and large the pattern is confer the power, might decrease a little bit later on, but still there's not that contraction back to where we were.
dave rubin
Yeah, so for the libertarians watching this that want us to never have interventions and be total pacifists and not do anything here and take all our soldiers and bases and bring all of that stuff away, The economic repercussions of something like that would be pretty severe, right?
Even if the morals behind what they wanted to do were okay.
abby hall
You're talking about closing bases in terms of a monetary issue?
dave rubin
Yeah, that if we really were just, for all the people that, not just libertarians, but for plenty of people that go, why do we have bases in Japan, and why are we protecting them, or why do we have bases in Germany?
Still, this isn't 1945, and all this other stuff.
There's a lot of economic impact that that would have.
Beyond just the idea of it would be nice not to have our troops and people all over the world.
abby hall
I mean we could say undeniably like anything would have an economic impact.
The question is compared to what?
And that is the question that is a lot harder to answer.
Because oftentimes when I'm talking to people about foreign intervention and they will ask me very loaded questions.
So it's like well wouldn't you want to do this thing and prevent this terrible atrocity that happened?
dave rubin
Right, I'll ask you some loaded questions in a moment.
abby hall
Excellent.
(laughing)
And those kinds of things, it's hard because you don't have a counterfactual.
You can't say what would have happened absent all of these interventions.
So if instead of having the military budget that we do now, instead of having all these military bases, had that funding been used for something else, what would the economy look like?
I can't answer those questions, and other people can't either, which is always nice when you're put on the spot I don't know, but no one else knows either.
dave rubin
Why is it that the government always has more money for bombs but then doesn't have money to do other things that you might want them to do?
Is that just a function of this whole thing?
abby hall
It's incentives, really.
People are incentivized to put their eggs in some baskets more than others.
And when it comes to foreign intervention, again, whether we're talking about things that appear to be benevolent, so whether it's intervention for humanitarian purposes or whether it is an offensive, aggressive intervention, you have a lot of people who have a vested interest in engaging in those activities.
dave rubin
As an economist, when Trump was running and he was saying things like, you know, we're going to charge Japan to defend them and we're going to do, maybe we're going to get out of NATO now, we're staying in NATO, all this stuff that sort of had this populist feel to it of we're not going to spend so much money overseas and all that, did that stuff resonate with you?
As like sensible economic policy?
abby hall
I tend to prefer less intervention to more intervention.
All of the trade policies, or a lot of the trade policies, so things about, you know, we'll make Mexico pay for the wall, or things like that, I think that a lot of that reflects just a poor understanding of economics.
dave rubin
Yeah, so who's in charge of his economic policy?
Do you know?
Do people know, really?
It seems to be that it's always just coming off the top of his head.
abby hall
That's a good question.
Although, maybe this is the right way to say it, to his credit, I don't know, really, with a lot of presidents who is calling their economic policy.
So again, that is not exclusive to President Trump.
dave rubin
Is that a strange thing about Trump, though, in general, that it's like, we don't really know what the doctrine of Trump is?
Like, even partly economically, it's sort of isolationist, and then also he wants more government involvement, foreign policy, it all sort of seems the same, so it makes it tough to kind of figure out what's going on here.
abby hall
Maybe a little bit, but politicians in general, if you look at the literature on public choice economics, there's a lot that discusses why politicians say the things that they do, and There's a really good book.
Holcomb, I think, came out with it just last year.
It's a brief introduction to public choice.
It's a relatively short book, but it's very, very good.
And he talks about how if you listen to politicians, they'll say things over and over again that sound really good, but there's not actually a lot of substance there.
So you'll see things like, you know, "Make America Great Again" or, you know, "Hope and
Change."
All of these things sound really good.
dave rubin
Wonderful.
abby hall
But then when you press, well, what would these actual policies look like?
There's not enough, there's not really any kind of firm backing there.
It's just we're gonna talk about things very generally.
dave rubin
And so- Is that also just the media's fault too?
Like they just love soundbites like that.
And if there was a guy, I mean, that's what I think now.
It's like if there was ever a year coming up 2020 where we could have someone that actually really wanted to talk about issues and let's really talk about the economy and let's really talk about foreign policy and all those things, it could be this coming There's interesting things to be said about media.
it's like that person would get no coverage.
You know, like if you was just a guy who was like, these are the real issues, forget the slogans,
let's just talk it out.
abby hall
There's interesting things to be said about media.
I know that there are a lot of people who have researched how media has evolved and changed over the years.
And certainly it has from the time where if you wanted news, you had to go out in the morning and grab your newspaper
and sit down to now where I'm scrolling through Twitter, seeing in a hundred and forty characters or less.
And so I think that's definitely changed.
There's also some interesting Things to look at about interaction between government and the media.
So one project that I'm working on now is examining how government influences media, particularly after 9-11.
So looking at things like selling the Iraq War or the Department of Defense paying the NFL to do things which look patriotic, things like that.
So there's a lot of interesting room for talking about that, I think.
dave rubin
Yeah, how much is the government affecting our media directly?
abby hall
I think quite a bit.
I'm trying to remember the exact number at this point, but I think the U.S.
government is maybe the second largest PR firm.
So they're spending a lot, both to craft its image domestically as well as abroad.
The abroad thing people tend to, I think, be maybe more aware of, but domestically there's a lot going on as well.
dave rubin
Is there any direct evidence of that like the like the real direct evidence between government and media like sometimes I'll see just out of nowhere suddenly like a lot of stories will be written about one specific thing at once through all the mainstream you know or just even the way the fake news You know, no one had heard of fake news then the day after the election because the election didn't go the way the mainstream media wanted.
Then we all started talking about fake news at the same time.
And then you see Politico putting out the same story that Daily Beast is putting out and all that.
Is there a way to directly link some of this back to what the government's putting out there?
abby hall
In some cases, yes.
So one of the things that I was reading actually on the plane to come here is looking at that sales pitch that the Bush administration gave to the public for the Iraq War.
And there was a point where there was what they were referring to as a feedback loop.
So you had people like Vice President Cheney who were saying, well, this is evidence about, you know, Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction is coming.
That's not from me.
That's coming from the New York Times.
dave rubin
Right.
abby hall
However, it was coming from the Bush administration.
And so you do see also in that same time period people who were getting daily briefings from administration officials.
On what was supposedly going on, but they were being pitched then to networks as being independent experts when really their talking points had been given to them by officials from the Bush administration.
So there's definitely places where you can draw those lines very clearly.
dave rubin
Yeah, so the crumbling of the mainstream media, we can consider that a good thing?
Fair to say?
unidentified
I don't know.
dave rubin
All right, so quickly let's boomerang back to foreign policy, and then we're gonna move on to something else.
I say boomerang, and you know why, because you talk about the boomerang theory.
Can you explain what this is?
abby hall
Yes, so my co-author, Chris Coyne and I, we wrote a paper titled Perfecting Tyranny.
It's accessible for free at the Independent Institute website.
dave rubin
What kind of economist puts out a paper for free?
abby hall
Well, we did not elect to put it out for free, but I am totally excited that Independent is about putting out knowledge to make it readily accessible.
Fair enough.
And so he wrote this paper, and we're currently working on a book.
It's under contract.
I know it's coming out.
Still working on a title at this point.
dave rubin
I saw they're bouncing around between a couple titles.
unidentified
We are.
abby hall
We're trying to work with the editors to figure out what title would be best.
But the theory is looking at the relationship between foreign intervention and domestic policy consequences.
Because one thing with foreign intervention is that people tend to try to put foreign policy and domestic policy into two completely different spheres.
So foreign policy is just that it's over there, no consequences domestically whatsoever.
What we argue though is that you really can't make that distinction and in fact foreign intervention can and does have a very real impact domestically.
And for those people who are concerned with issues of Scale and scope of government for people who are interested in issues of civil liberties.
Foreign intervention is something we really need to be paying attention to.
So what we call our framework is the boomerang effect.
So explaining how it is that foreign intervention serves as kind of a testing ground for new types of social control techniques and how those techniques ultimately wind up back in the US.
dave rubin
Yeah, so can you give me an example?
Is there like an example from the Iraq War that maybe would play out for us?
abby hall
So there are a few things that we can talk about.
The War on Terror, more broadly speaking, is a pretty good example of How some of these policies have wound up being used in the US.
In the book we talk about a few different examples.
So surveillance is one of them.
We talk about domestic police militarization and that's connection to foreign intervention.
Talk about the use of drones domestically in the United States and that.
So there are a lot of different examples.
One thing that has been interesting and challenging about this work at the same time is looking at examples and getting all of the historical knowledge that's necessary.
Because one thing about this type of research is that since you are doing case studies, you have to have a lot of historical background.
dave rubin
So in cases like that, like something like drones and something like surveillance, basically the argument is that we sort of test this stuff out across the world and then we sort of bring it home and use it against ourselves here.
Like is that test run?
Is that just the government's way of It's not necessarily one of those.
We are doing this explicitly abroad to try to do it at home.
But one thing that we can see in the U.S.
just acquiesce to it happening right here.
abby hall
Yes, so again, it's not necessarily one of those we are doing this explicitly abroad
to try to do it at home.
But one thing that we can see in the US is that for, if you look at a spectrum
of functioning governments, whether you like it or not, government, relatively well-constrained, relatively well-functioning compared to what else is out there.
However, if you take the U.S., and other governments too for that matter, outside of their own geographic boundaries, Their constraints are much weaker or altogether absent.
So there are lots of U.S.
interventions, for example, including things like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which are done without approval of the U.N., and yet there are no sanctions for that.
We talk about other reasons why maybe those constraints aren't there.
So you go out, you are facing, you being government, facing weaker or absent constraints.
And so you can maybe try things and do things that would not fly domestically.
But that doesn't mean that those things don't wind up showing up back at home.
So we identify how it is that those things come back.
So one way is through what we call human capital.
So just the skills that people possess.
So in order to be successful in a foreign intervention, whatever your role is, You have to either possess or develop particular skills and characteristics.
When you finish with that foreign intervention, the individuals who are involved, they don't suddenly forget that knowledge.
They bring it back with them.
This relates to the administrative dynamics of the organizations in which these individuals operate.
Whether that's a public enterprise or a private enterprise, they may be well known for a particular skill or it may just be the attitudes that have been cultivated as a result of these foreign interventions that they then bring back with them and implement into these organizations.
And physical capital, so the kinds of technologies that are developed.
Drones is a prime example.
Drones are developed for use abroad.
Been used for a really long time, but extensively throughout the War on Terror.
People come back from these interventions.
They see the potential use for this technology that they have become very accustomed to, and then push to have them used domestically.
dave rubin
Right.
Some of that stuff, I suppose, at least on the technological side, can be used for good, right?
Like Amazon using drones now, if it's going to get you your stuff quicker, and they got some of the technological know-how through a military thing, that could be seen as positive.
Now, having drones flying over us, spying on us all day, This could be a problem.
unidentified
Of course.
abby hall
It's not to suggest that anything that comes out of a foreign intervention is necessarily bad.
So I think drones is a fantastic example, because there are certainly instances where drones have very positive uses.
I'm really excited for the day that I can get food delivered by drone.
dave rubin
Yeah, it's coming.
abby hall
It's coming, yeah.
I will greatly look forward to that day.
Drones have been used for search and rescue, they are used extensively in agriculture, and those are all things that I I think most people would agree are great.
Most people probably wouldn't have too much of a problem about those, or with those.
But once you start getting into those issues of surveillance, weaponized drones, so you have police departments who are equipping drones with, at this point I think, mostly less lethal weapons.
You start getting into those kinds of areas, and obviously you have people who look at that and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's happening here?
dave rubin
And it also goes to what you said earlier about sort of the creep of all this, because you just said the phrase, less lethal weapons, but it's almost like, well, now you've just paved the road for eventually they will have the lethal weapons on them.
abby hall
There are some states that are trying to prevent that from happening.
Other states, not so much.
And drones are an interesting area of study because they're not a new technology, but the rate at which they are being used is substantially greater
than at any point before and so you are now seeing the Explosion of the use of this technology. Yeah, and so the
question again comes to those How do you get the uses that you want out of those but
avoid?
unidentified
Those things that maybe we we don't want right and all of these unintended consequences
dave rubin
When I lived just across the hill in West Hollywood, there was a guy that was flying a drone around the neighborhood constantly.
So not only do you hear it, and you can see it obviously, but I had a little outdoor patio and it was like, I don't know, does this guy have a camera on this thing and is staring at me?
Now that's not the government, well for all I know it was the government, but I'm assuming it was somebody in the local area.
But it's like you just start giving away your privacy.
You don't even realize what's happening and next thing you know you've got a drone and they've got a drone and everyone's looking at everybody and then who can hack into all this stuff and it's a big mess.
abby hall
There was an individual in my neighborhood who has a drone and he likes flying it.
And at one point there had been a couple of kids who'd been breaking into cars in
the neighborhood and so he offered to fly his drone around.
And sure enough, within just a few days of this being offered,
you have people in the neighborhood who are saying, I don't want that thing flying over my house.
Cuz they're genuinely concerned for their privacy.
Right.
And so you get into a lot of really interesting legal issues, issues of privacy, social issues, I think, with drones.
And so it'll be really interesting to see how this continues to unfold.
dave rubin
Yeah, let's circle back to the surveillance stuff related to the state, though, because I haven't done a tremendous amount on it just in the last two years or so, because I feel like we don't really talk about it that much anymore.
There was a point maybe four years ago when all the NSA stuff first got released, and that ridiculous testimony that James Clapper gave in front of the Senate House Committee, and Rand Paul's filibuster, and all that stuff, where it was like, there was a moment where it felt cool to be against the surveillance state.
I think that kinda disappeared very quickly.
And it seems like we don't talk about it anymore.
You think that's fair to say?
abby hall
I think that there are people who are still talking about it.
I do think, though, that there is a definite ebb and flow to when people are talking about it
and not talking about it.
When the Snowden leaks came out, you had a lot of people who were talking about it.
Before that, Thomas Drake, you had a lot of people who were talking about it.
Now, maybe not so much.
Surveillance is a hot-button issue, even for people who tend to be inclined
toward a smaller government or a more limited government.
When people talk about surveillance, they will usually say things like, well, but it's making us safer.
Or I know my dad going through the airport, for example, of like, "Well, you know, as long as, you know,
I don't have anything to hide, therefore, this is fine."
dave rubin
Oh no, that's the worst one to use.
unidentified
I know, it's the worst, I try.
dave rubin
Have you made any headway there?
That's the worst one to use.
abby hall
You know, maybe, but there are times to just, you know, you piggy pick your battles with your parents.
dave rubin
Fair enough.
We don't have to turn this into a major psychotherapy situation.
But what happened there that we don't, it seems like just at least generally speaking, we now have just accepted That there's a certain amount going on between phone calls and internet and back doors on websites and all this other stuff, like we've just kind of all accepted it.
Is that just a function of living in a Western democracy where we've got it pretty decent and you just...
You can't fight everything all day.
That's partly what I think it is.
abby hall
I think a lot of it comes back to that fear issue that we talked about earlier, is that people are genuinely pretty bad at assessing risk.
And that's not to say that people aren't smart, just that people tend to not do a very good job of knowing how much of a threat that something is.
And I think that people get complacent.
So now, the TSA example again, You go back before the year 2000 and that seems absolutely preposterous.
Now people just kind of take it as a given.
dave rubin
And doesn't so much of it seem like theater to you?
Like whenever I go through, I travel a lot, and it's like when I go through all this, so much of it seems like sort of nonsense.
like they made me throw away my hair gel.
And it was like, I had this new gel, like obviously I was like, you guys wanna smell it?
Like I put it in my hair right now, like I'm not trying to build a bomb here.
I only had a carry-on, a little backpack with me, like you can look at everything else I can't build.
Like that it just seems like, well, this is why we do this, and this is why we do this.
And they were throwing away all this like perfectly good stuff and fresh bottles of water
and all this other stuff.
Can't be economically sensible either.
abby hall
There's a lot of discussion about the TSA security theater.
Pretty much any report that you read about the TSA indicates that they are not effective at all at reducing any kind of terrorist threat and are spending a ton of money on an annual basis.
It comes back to that bureaucracy point.
Because then when you have the TSA who is giving itself an exam and it fails 95% of the time, it is not a time for reflection of, well, is this really doing the job that we want it to do?
Instead, it's a, we need more personnel, we need more money, we need better technology.
dave rubin
Wait, let's not gloss over that.
So they do these things, right?
They do these tests where they have people try to get stuff through and it fails.
It fails something like 95% of the time.
abby hall
It's astronomical.
dave rubin
Right, so people are getting in with knives and all sorts of other crazy things.
abby hall
Right.
dave rubin
And then the answer is not, how do we fix this?
The answer is always, we gotta throw more money, because it goes back to the earlier thing.
abby hall
Right, so the response is, because when you're confronted with failure or less than stellar performance as a bureaucratic agency, you've got a couple of different choices.
You can decide, well, that didn't work, we should disband this and try something else, or...
You can say, this was really not our fault, it was because we didn't have the funding that we needed.
We didn't have the technology that we really needed.
And so there's always that fallback of, it's not failure on our part, it's failure because we didn't have the resources that we needed.
dave rubin
Yeah, and there's the same political problem that you mentioned earlier about closing down a tank manufacturing place that we don't need.
It's that if any politician was like, you know what, we're gonna cut the TSA by 20%
and try to streamline it, whatever, and then there was a terror attack,
well, that guy's gonna be voted out of office immediately, if not impeached or some other situation.
So we've really created this self-sustaining monster here.
abby hall
Right.
dave rubin
How do we beat this monster?
Give me some answers here.
abby hall
This is the million dollar question.
I challenge this, my students with this all the time, that if they can figure out things like an alternative drug policy that is politically viable, a war on terror policy that is politically viable, or social security.
That's the other one.
If they can figure out a workable solution, please go and collect your billion-dollar check, retire, and let me know.
These issues are really complicated, and one thing that I know I find really humbling is that I don't have the answers.
And I don't think anybody really does.
So when you look at issues like surveillance, when you look at things like police militarization, when you look at things like the war on drugs, you are confronting A potentially infinite number of vested interests.
I think at a bare minimum, changing any one of those things requires a massive shift in public opinion, which oftentimes I think is a pretty heroic assumption in and of itself.
But even if you do have that major shift in public opinion, then you have to figure out, well, how do you disentangle these interests that you've spent in oftentimes decades Cultivating these relationships between government and private industry.
How do you go about divorcing those?
And I don't have a clear answer.
dave rubin
I've had a lot of academics in here.
I don't know that I've had anyone say that they don't have a clear answer on something.
That's actually quite refreshing.
abby hall
Oh, well thank you.
It's true though.
I get really nervous when I hear economists saying that they have a very particular policy prescription
of this will fix whatever the problem is.
Because one thing that economics teaches us is that every policy has costs and has benefits.
And so no policy that you implement is going to be perfect.
At the end of the day, the question that we want to ask is how good of a job do the policies
that we are implementing do of achieving the particular goals that we're interested
dave rubin
Does anyone check this stuff?
Does anyone go back and go, when they were just trying to get this other healthcare, the Trump healthcare thing, or the Paul Ryan healthcare thing, whatever it is, passed, and it was like, well, the CBO said it'll cost X amount, and it's like, well, they had, Projections when Obamacare was coming across like does anyone look back and go because I just don't trust any of the numbers You know, like you're giving me a number before this thing is kicked in like we crunched some numbers But as you're saying there's all these unintended consequences all these other things that happen Does anyone ever go back and go, you know?
Let's look at all the projections that the government made all these Nonpartisan groups and all this stuff for the last 20 years and did anyone get any of these projections, right?
abby hall
I feel like they probably are never right I mean, anytime we're doing forecasting, you have to make certain assumptions.
Sometimes the assumptions that you make wind up being pretty good, and other times they are totally off the mark.
I think it's something that economists have predicted twice as many recessions or something
as there have actually been.
But certainly, if you go back and you look at what people have said with regard to policy,
you'll find that some people have maybe been accurate.
Some people, a lot of people, have not.
Do we learn from the mistakes that we have made?
dave rubin
Right, I guess that's the real question.
abby hall
I think that that's a taller order.
And again, I think it comes back just to the very simple, what incentives do you face?
Even though people might be aware that a policy hasn't really been effective, does that really change the motivation that they have for continuing the policy?
And in a lot of cases, the answer to that question is no.
dave rubin
Yeah, so you've done a lot of videos with Learn Liberty about some of the stuff we've talked about, and we'll link to some stuff below so people can check that also.
One of the other things you talk about a lot is police militarization and how we've watched that really expand.
I think it's directly related to everything going on with the surveillance state.
How much has this expanded?
You know, we see now when there's riots and whatever, we see things that look like tanks on our streets.
We see police officers that look like soldiers.
I don't think we saw that not too long ago.
abby hall
You didn't.
So the trend of police militarization is something that People really talk about starting to happen in the 1960s.
I think there were some trends prior to that.
But it didn't really take off like it did until you hit really Vietnam and then more on drugs.
And that actually is one of the things that we talk about in looking at and linking up foreign policy to domestic consequences.
So police, military, sorry.
dave rubin
Yeah, no, so in this case, like, we had the Vietnam War, we then get protests against it, and then the state kind of uses that as an excuse to become more militarized.
abby hall
SWAT teams are probably one of the best examples.
SWAT teams are now something that pretty much any moderately sized police department has, so if you have a town of 50,000 or more people, chances are you have got a SWAT team.
So special weapons and tactics teams, also referred to as police paramilitary units or PPUs.
So the fact you've got the word military in there I think is fairly pointed.
But where did those come from?
We actually know exactly where they came from.
You have two people who are generally considered responsible for SWAT teams.
Daryl Gates and John Nelson.
So John Nelson was a former Marine, a Vietnam veteran.
He was part of the Elite Force Recon Unit.
So this unit was tasked with going deep behind enemy lines, and despite having the name Reconnaissance in the title, they were actually a very effective killing force.
They engaged the enemy, I think it was something 90% of the time, which was incredibly high.
And he came back, joined the LAPD, and you have the Watts riots.
And looking at these race riots, he goes to his boss, so Inspector Daryl Gates, who's a World War II veteran, And says, hey, I have an idea of how we might be able to better control crowds.
And he suggests modeling a unit after these recon units that he had been a part of in Vietnam.
And so Gates likes this idea, runs with it, and what was originally supposed to be called the Special Weapons and Attack Team, but it was thought attack was politically impalatable, SWAT Team was born.
It's modeled after That particular unit, according to the LAPD history, every member of the original SWAT unit had prior military training.
They were interested in, and if you read Gates' biography, he talks about Watching what was happening in Vietnam, getting training from the military.
And so you start to see these kinds of very intimate connections that are happening between police and the military.
And they're interested in using not only those mentalities that they've cultivated abroad, but they're also interested in using those technologies that they've developed.
dave rubin
How do we, well, if you had your druthers, would these things just not exist at all?
Like policing would just be purely the way it was before all this?
abby hall
So policing historically in the United States has been distinct from the military.
So if you look at the Constitution, if you look at laws that came after that, probably the big one that people point to was enacted right after the Civil War called the Posse Comitatus Act.
dave rubin
I don't even know that one.
What's that one?
abby hall
Posse Comitatus literally translates to a force of the people.
And so the purpose of this law was to separate police from the military.
So military could not be used as a civilian police force.
Pretty much as soon as the ink is dry, this thing is getting violated, it's getting suspended in I think World War I, World War II, then there are a series of court cases in the 1970s that pretty much take any kind of Sticking power that this thing had to begin with completely out of it And so you see this big blurring of these lines In addition to things like SWAT teams which comes within this time period The war on drugs and the war on terror are particularly important because you see that continued interconnectivity between domestic law enforcement agencies and
And what the federal government is doing.
So now you have police departments who, instead of having their job, which has historically been to be peacekeepers, uphold domestic law, protecting the rights of citizens, both individuals who are the perpetrators of crime and the victims of crime.
Instead of serving that function, they are now on, quote-unquote, the front lines of two perpetual wars.
The war on drugs and the war on terror, which are different from other conflicts that we've seen before.
Because if you think about Vietnam or one of the world wars, the enemy is very clearly defined and external to the United States.
But with the war on drugs, you not only have things like South American cartels, but you have people who are domestically manufacturing, selling, and consuming drugs who are enemies of this war.
There's been a big emphasis on homegrown terrorism.
And so now your police Departments are tasked with another job that is not part of their job description.
And so it's been a building and a combination of all of these things I think has really contributed to this police militarization, which now I think a lot of people are more aware of.
dave rubin
Yeah, but it seems like we're slowly getting, accepting of it, because if you look at, you could look at something like Ferguson, and then you could look at something like what's happened at Berkeley, and in both cases, you see a big sort of state response, but I've talked to people who said that the police weren't doing anything, you know, like at Berkeley, that the police were just sort of letting Antifa run across and be violent and do all this stuff, and then other people are gonna have to step in.
So we're in a strange place with policing in general, too, I think.
abby hall
I think that police, and I've made this argument to people when talking about policing and talking about the military, too, that I think a lot of times the job that's been pushed on members of law enforcement and members of the military is particularly unfair.
One thing we talk about in economics is this idea of comparative advantage.
You do what it is that you're particularly good at.
Soldiers are not trained to be humanitarians.
That is not their job description.
Police officers, their job description is supposed to be, again, peacekeepers.
But it is a precarious position.
And oftentimes people will say things to me like, well, but if you're The people that they're fighting have tanks and AK-47s, like, don't you want them to have superior firepower?
To which my response is always, yeah, maybe, but if you look at what people are actually fighting police officers with, or the probability of being shot and killed if you're a police officer, again, it's that risk assessment thing that people aren't particularly good at.
So I think police have been put in a position that they weren't intended to be in.
And oftentimes when we see police are being used, like SWAT teams again provide a really good example.
SWAT teams are used in a lot of times in cases where people would look at that and say, there's really a hard case to saying that that's appropriate.
Like you have SWAT teams who are being used when people are threatening suicide, for example.
I have a hard time squaring in my brain people going out in full Kevlar in a Bearcat, so a big armored, mind-resistant vehicle, for someone who's threatening to shoot themselves in their house.
Part of that is, I think, part of the stipulations on the equipment that a lot of police forces are getting, so this came along with that war on drugs and war on terror.
People who are familiar may be familiar with the Department of Defense program that allows for the transfer of excess military equipment to law enforcement.
Part of that includes a use-it-or-lose-it provision.
So if you don't use the equipment as a police department within a year, you're supposed to return it to the Department of Defense.
dave rubin
Which goes back to what we said earlier.
They never want to return it.
We always want to spend more.
So now you literally have the SWAT team With all this crazy stuff going out to stop a guy that maybe is jumping off a bridge.
abby hall
Right, and it creates a really strong incentive to use these items even in cases where they aren't appropriate.
A pretty, I guess, infamous example would be the word.
Keene, New Hampshire.
It's a town of about 20,000 people.
Haven't had a murder in Something like two decades, and yet their police department got a Bearcat, so a mine-resistant vehicle.
It's a little hard.
dave rubin
A lot of mines all over New Hampshire, right?
unidentified
Right.
dave rubin
They're pretty much everywhere.
abby hall
And so there are lots of cases where you see things, and this is not to say that, you know, police having the equipment that they need is not something that's necessary.
But I think that we should be turning a very critical eye to what it is that has happened in U.S.
police departments.
Because I think it's been a growing issue for a long time, but when you start to have things like Ferguson really put a spotlight on it in a way that I was frankly surprised.
Because prior to that, the thing that people forget about is Watertown, Massachusetts.
So, after the bombing of the Boston Marathon, you have police who are removing people from their homes to search for the suspected bombers.
With no kind of pretense for thinking that they were in a person's house, issuing curfews and things like that, and that to me was a much stronger display of the kinds of things that I'm talking about, but Ferguson is what gets the play.
dave rubin
Yeah, so the through line through everything we've talked about for an hour has been just sort of that this thing just kind of grows.
It kind of grows for economic reasons and for political reasons and everything else.
So to kind of wrap this all up, If someone's watching this and goes, well, I don't like that, I don't like this idea that this thing's growing all the time and taking more money and not doing things that are economically sound or socially sound, and I don't want more militarized police on the streets and all that, what would you say are some of the ways that we can start influencing our politicians and other people to reel some of this stuff back in?
abby hall
I think that one thing that people can do is to really educate themselves about things like the terror threat.
So knowing that you're more likely to be killed by a gun-wielding toddler than you are to be killed by a terrorist.
dave rubin
I normally freak out every time I see a toddler in a wheelchair.
abby hall
As you should, they're dangerous!
dangerous. Knowing that, being aware that what is happening today can and does have
a very real impact on what may happen tomorrow.
And that's not intended to be alarmist or a very tinfoil hat, like you have to be super careful because they're going to try to use this for something.
But to look at and be aware of These types of issues to understand how it is that we've gotten to this point because there is one thing and we say this toward I think in the conclusion of our book is just because we see these things doesn't necessarily mean
that it's a permanent state of affairs.
And one thing that can be a very effective control on inappropriate expansions in the scale
and scope of government is the ideology of the citizenry.
And so there have been cases historically where you look and people just, they're not willing
to swallow certain things when their elected officials attempt them.
And so if people make their voice heard, if they develop and they articulate those preferences that this is not something that is acceptable, I think that there's a real power there.
dave rubin
So be smart, be engaged, be aware.
I think those are all the things I've been trying to do around here.
I've thoroughly enjoyed this.
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