Dr. Mike Munger critiques political messianism and media "truthiness," advocating for constitutional limits over hoping for savior figures like Obama or Trump. He defends third-party candidates like Rand Paul while urging "directionalist" libertarians to support policy shifts rather than purity, noting how states' rights and ballot access laws hinder progress. Munger argues capitalism eliminated absolute poverty better than welfare but supports Universal Basic Income to replace punitive systems, predicting the sharing economy will reduce ownership waste through software-matched rentals. Ultimately, he envisions strong institutions navigating industrial disruptions like the 1840s, ensuring a safety net that transcends left-right divides while fostering intellectual growth through unavoidable collisions with error. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the occupational hazards of doing a show like this is that my friends, my family,
people who come up to me at the grocery store and at Ikea, and pretty much everyone that I encounter
on a day-to-day basis wants to talk politics with me.
Fortunately, I love talking about politics and talking to people about politics, so I'm usually happy to engage with people even when I'm picking out an ice cream or testing out the Kivik couch, which is surprisingly comfortable and easy to put together.
One of the things I've noticed lately about our political climate is that people are having a harder time tuning out of politics, even briefly, to talk about other things.
This is somewhat anecdotal in my case particularly, but I'd bet that it's happening to you in your life too.
Suddenly it seems like every conversation is political, every discussion somehow gets back to Trump, and yes your aunt knows exactly how to solve America's healthcare crisis even though she can't figure out how to sync her iPad.
On face value, none of this is a problem.
I love that people who were largely apolitical are now becoming more politically engaged.
People are not only talking about politics, but in many cases re-evaluating what their beliefs are because of the upside down world we live in right now.
While everything may seem crazy, I really do believe this time we're in right now is a rare special moment when so many people are all doing the same introspection about their beliefs all at the same time.
Whether this will lead to more or less freedom, to more or less tolerance, or to more or less peace all remains to be seen.
But without question, we're in some pretty fertile ground for change right now.
And by change, I mean real societal change, not just hope and change.
One problem I do see attached to all of this opportunity for change and reevaluation is that people are becoming consumed by politics in a way which doesn't strike me as particularly healthy for a human's mental state or for societies at large.
It's one of the reasons I'm a small government guy.
I want a government small enough that we don't have to talk about it that much because it doesn't even have the power to do too much good or too much bad.
There's a built in trade off there.
Small government can only do so much, the rest is up to the people.
So if you want government to do everything, you really can't complain when it does all sorts of things that you don't like.
Well, actually, of course you can complain about it, at least until that big government comes and takes away your right to do just that.
So my message to you this week is, let's keep talking about all of these issues, let's keep staying engaged and trying to change things for the better, but at the same time, let's not let it consume us to the point where it changes who we are.
Social media can be an awful catalyst to the endless focus on politics, which is why I've been trying to take the weekends off and focus on the world that exists in front of my face instead of the one that exists in 140 characters.
When you are online though, try to find some nuance between Trump Derangement Syndrome and Nazi Frog Obsession.
Most people are good and want pretty much the same things that you do, so let's keep growing that new center.
And as long as you're here right now, we're once again partnering up with Learn Liberty this week and we've got author and director of the philosophy, politics and economics department at Duke University, Dr. Mike Munger.
We're going to talk politics, philosophy, economics and much more.
I like to think that I'm one of the few people that's using a political science degree actually to talk about politics and political philosophy.
So my first question to you would be, Do you think that political science right now is sort of needed more than ever, just to understand the basic philosophies behind so much of the craziness that we see in public discourse these days?
One, political science studies engineering, but it studies the engineering of rules.
And we tend to have this idea that what we need is better people.
We're probably not going to get better people.
What we may need is better rules.
The question is how to try to do that.
The other thing political science does is look at some of the ethical questions that have plagued human beings for the last 3,000 years.
So I see political science as being a kind of ideal liberal arts degree that combines analysis and ethics.
So of course I think, and I would, I'm a political science professor, that we need more political science.
But I really do worry that people just think, well we can ignore the Constitution, the living Constitution, we'll change it to interpret it the way that we want it.
We don't understand enough about rules to be able just to change it willy-nilly and have it turn out well.
Okay, and I want to unpack the differences between that and talk about sort of the ever-changing label thing, which is sort of becoming meaningless at the moment.
So, with all the political philosophies out there, do you sense that some of the freedom stuff is taking root right now?
Because to me, things are going crazy right now, but I sense that Liberty, reason, getting back to some of the constitutional stuff.
I do sense people talking about it a little bit more now than perhaps two years ago.
I had a bunch of colleagues who, after Trump was elected, colleagues at Duke, so political science professors and other people on the left, who would come into my office and sheepishly say, you know, you were right.
All this stuff about we need to worry about the constitutional powers of the president.
When George W. Bush was president, they were worried.
With Barack Obama, they say, you know, I don't mind so much as long as my guy is in charge.
That's the point.
Your guy won't always be in charge.
So, what you might want best is a dictator that you can pick.
That's not how it works.
That means that we have to have rules, and it's very frustrating.
The Constitution builds in conflict.
And Barack Obama in many ways was a terrible president in trying to negotiate things with the Congress.
So I do think that a lot of people on the left are much more worried now about sort of traditional constitutional protections of freedom of speech and about the separation of powers.
So a number of them have actually said, you know, those Federalist papers.
Yeah, so when George W. Bush was signing executive actions, I assume you were basically against them.
When Barack Obama was signing them, I assume you were basically against them.
I assume you're not thrilled right now with the amount that Trump has done.
But that's really interesting to me, that your colleagues on the left are suddenly going, oh, now I get it.
You know, we have people on the left now fighting for states' rights because they don't want the feds coming in and closing sanctuary cities, which I think is what a phenomenal I can't help but gleefully remind them, you know, you told me that was code for racism.
So I have this conversation all the time on the show but also privately because I'm a big states rights guy and and what people will say to me sometimes even just a conversation I was having this weekend someone was saying to me well I just don't trust That the states will do the right thing, that the southern states will do all these backwards social things or all that stuff.
Now, I've had many people on here, including Randy Barnett, who I'm sure you're familiar with, who talked about the foot vote and that you should leave states and take your economic value and your personal value and your family and move somewhere else, and that's wonderful, and your ability, that's the beauty of America.
Do you think that's a sound enough argument for states' rights?
I guess I would argue for the way that we've elaborated states' rights, which is we take the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and we apply those also to state laws through incorporation, through the 14th Amendment.
So there are limits on what the states can do.
But other than that, yes, the states can have all sorts of different things.
And the Ninth and Tenth Amendments both reserved a bunch of powers to the states.
And that, I think, the expansion through the Commerce Clause, we're sort of getting down in the weeds, but the expansion of federal powers at the expense of the states has been one of the catastrophes in constitutional jurisprudence.
And I hope we'll go back in the other direction.
But it doesn't seem like that.
President Trump's appointments seem to be more like 10th Amendment skeptics.
Right, well, even just in the last week, it's a little confusing what the truth is, but it sounds like Sessions may go after the states because of medical marijuana.
These are the things that I just simply don't understand.
If the Republicans, or conservatives, or the Trump people, whatever that is, wouldn't you want to take a stand that would make some logical consistency?
Like, that the second they get this, and it's still a little unclear to me what Sessions is doing about the medical marijuana thing, but if he was to do anything other than respect states' rights, it shows me that once you have power, you just suck more power.
So the norm of toleration That we actually require, that this sense that it's wrong to do this just because it's wrong, even though I have the power, that's breaking down and I don't think that institution can easily be rebuilt.
Yeah, do you see that breaking down in sort of every facet of public life right now?
Like for a moment before we started we were talking about the media and it seems that mainstream media norms are crumbling and we have activists that are now masquerading as journalists.
The most famous incident was Dan Rather and some producers at CBS with the letters from the Alabama National Guard about George W. Bush.
And the letters were provided by someone.
He said he'd found them in some files.
But when you looked at them, it was pretty clear that they couldn't have been done on an IBM Selectric typewriter.
They're a proportional font.
They had the wrong size footnotes.
And they should have backed off.
They made a mistake.
They didn't.
They doubled down and said, well, but there's an essential truth here.
And so what happened was, and this is the origin of the pajamas media, the CBS producer said something he thought was true that turned out to be true in a way he didn't expect, which was, who are you going to believe?
CBS News or some guy in his basement wearing pajamas?
Well, it turns out that the guy in the basement wearing pajamas is pretty good at fact-checking.
And so, it didn't start there, but that was a catalyzing moment where people said, CBS News, Edward R. Murrow, this is as professional as it gets, and they substituted their own ideological judgment for any sort of concern about facts.
So then how do you, as a political science professor, as someone that's trying to frame this for young minds, how do you give them something that they don't walk out of your class at the end of the semester and go, oh man, we're screwed?
Or maybe they do and that's how you eventually fix things.
Well, I want them to walk out of class saying, we could be screwed.
We have an obligation to try to act against this and one of those obligations is to do the right thing even when it's not in our self-interest.
And so one of my students from a while back from Duke is a guy named Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth College who writes a lot about this sort of problem.
And so I think if readers are interested, if you look at Brendan Nyhan's work on this question, I think there is some hope in this direction, but we're going to have to enlist the aid of more of the mainstream media and the problem that you have is You may just lose the ratings war.
It seems to me that the election got us to sort of parity between the online media and the mainstream media.
Like that night it sort of became equal and now at this point I think the online media actually has more influence.
And that's sort of why the clickbait style and some of the stuff that we've seen with CNN over the last couple weeks, that's why it's gotten crazier because they're just grasping for the last bit of relevancy.
It is true, remember we talked about states' rights were misused by segregationists.
Well, it's true that some of the power for curation of the mainstream media was misused, and now we no longer trust them.
But it's much easier now to produce content.
And I, self-serving, but your show is a sign that people are actually willing to spend more than three or four minutes or 140 characters and try to understand things.
So there is this desire to know, if not the truth, at least the nuance of the different claims.
And the ability to leapfrog.
You can just put something up on YouTube, you get subscribers, and to some extent that's going to determine something like ratings.
So you don't have to go through these institutions that, until now, have meant that only a relative few people could participate in the conversation.
I mean, as someone that's an outsider for that crumbling thing, which I think it should crumble, I do want some new institutions to exist, because otherwise we're just gonna filter ourselves into total distance from each other.
But for a libertarian, do you do think Trump has been a disaster?
Because I can see arguments that make some sense libertarian-wise in terms of some of the state stuff and some of the taxes stuff that kind of make sense on a traditional libertarian or even conservative side, and then some of the bigger government things that don't make sense.
And that alone, the sort of the no states rights, no Fourth Amendment, Jeff Sessions is terrible.
I have some friends, including Walter Block at Loyola University in New Orleans, who is hoping that Trump will be something good on foreign policy.
I think you can make that argument.
I don't think that I think Trump's inability even to consider rule of law and the constitutional restrictions on the presidency make even worse the slide that we've been in for an expansion of an imperial presidency.
So I worry that all of those bonds are now going to be broken and we're going to look for the big man, the messiah, and we're just going to trade back and forth between different visions of that and that can never work.
Yeah, and that goes exactly to where we started this conversation about looking for that messiah.
Do you think that our institutions are actually strong enough?
I mean, I'm a believer that these institutions still have enough power that if Trump was to do something truly illegal or truly overstepping executive authority, That even though the Republicans control Congress, that we still have enough juice left in the system to take care of that.
So that I think would sort of mitigate some of my fears about him for sure.
Yeah, so as a guy that I can tell, obviously, you're not a big Trump fan, but you still trust in the system, what do you make of when you hear someone like Maxine Waters constantly saying, we're gonna figure out a way to impeach him?
You know, like, we don't know what it is yet, but we're gonna get there.
To me, that is almost more undermining of the system than the excesses that Trump may or may not have Or may or may not be doing at the moment.
So we don't have a parliamentary system where a vote of no confidence is enough.
It takes high crimes and misdemeanors and I was actually proud of the American system in 1998 where for no good reason Bill Clinton, there's a lot of problems with Bill Clinton, but he was impeached and the Senate said this is stupid.
Well I think that that would happen again.
The Democrats were very upset when there was a movement among Republicans to say we should impeach Barack Obama.
So I think this may just be background, and the nice way to interpret it is it's a way for Democrats to raise money from their base.
They don't actually mean it, but it's just, you read me.
In August, I endorsed him, basically, with the idea of let's get the guy to 15% so that at least for one debate, because we know the Democrats and Republicans control the debates, at least for one debate, because they'd never let him in a second one, but at least for one, let's hear some of these limited government ideas.
And unfortunately, there just wasn't enough juice there.
But you know what, I'm hearing you, and maybe I will ease off him a little bit.
Third parties in a system of first past the post, which is what we have, You're always going to have two main parties in a first-past-the-post system.
But the positions of the parties will depend partly on the pressure that's brought to bear.
And if you have someone who can participate in debates, particularly at the state level, you can remind the two state-sponsored parties of the things that are in their platform that they're leaving out.
So I don't think a third party's going to win, but what I care about is the policies, not the face.
Remember, I care about rules and not the people.
So if the two state-sponsored parties are obliged by opening up to the scolding winds of competition, and they have better policies, that's what I hope that the third parties can do.
Yeah, I hear people on the right all the time say, well, if we back a libertarian, what you end up doing is splitting the vote on the right and then you help people on the left.
How would you explain to somebody that that may not matter and maybe that has to happen?
And sometimes people do advocate what political scientists call voting the lote, lesser of two evils.
If you vote for the lesser of two evils, you're certainly going to get an evil.
The only way to waste your vote is to vote for a candidate you don't actually want.
And if you vote for a candidate that you do want, that's going to give a signal to the two state-sponsored parties that we don't find this to be acceptable.
So, all your votes are wasted.
They don't determine the outcome.
Now, what I get then is conservatives particularly saying, what if everyone thought that way?
Ah, a Jedi you are!
So, your vote affects thousands of others?
No!
You have one vote.
You can choose to waste it, or you can vote what you actually believe and try to send a signal.
Do you think part of that also is that the whole system now, and when I say the system I mean our political system and our media system, there's only a certain type of person who would run.
And now we can talk a little bit also about your 2008 campaign, but that it would take, you know, the idea of having to deal with what your family will have to deal with.
They're gonna track down every email that you ever had, every affair, whatever it is, just all that nonsense.
You're only going to get a certain type of person that wants to do this, and that basically good, decent people will self-select out.
I hear this all the time.
Every time I see somebody or I talk to somebody that I think should be in politics, I wouldn't want to subject myself to that.
I've had many guests here that privately I've said, you want to run for something, and everyone, no, never.
Yeah, which is also a great argument for small government to admit it every now and I don't know what to do so maybe we shouldn't be passing just things that are going to completely change the system because the truth is nobody knows what comes out on the other side.
And the 10 say, I'm really glad those others didn't come back.
They weren't real libertarians.
Because what they're mainly concerned about is checking each other's papers.
So you can tell if it's a real libertarian meeting by how long is it before there's an argument about whether individuals should be able to own nuclear weapons.
Nobody cares about that.
When I was running for governor, people would say, would you end the Fed?
I'm running for governor, actually.
But I want to know.
So what we really care about is ideological purity, because if you cared about actual policy or winning, you would suck it up and be a Democrat or Republican.
That's interesting because to me after doing this show for about two years and having you know a lot of classical liberals on a lot of libertarians and I've had progressives and conservatives and everything that to me Basically, the difference that I see between classical liberals and libertarians is a little more realistic utility for the state.
So when someone comes in with that question and says to you, well, you're gonna get rid of the Fed, and you go, I'm running for governor, and also that's a really high-level philosophical thing, that to me, it's just a more realistic approach to how to change things.
Yes, and I've made a distinction in a couple of things that I've written between directional and destinationist libertarians.
Destinationist libertarians have a particular libertopia in mind.
Anything that's not like that is out.
Directionalists would want to say, are there policies that we could choose that would be cheaper, lower deficits, lower the power of the state, and increase personal responsibility and liberty?
So an example would be when I was running for governor, my educational platform was vouchers.
And a lot of people means-tested vouchers.
So the poorest 40% would get more school choice.
Many of the wealthy have it now.
Let's have more school choice for the very poor.
And a lot of people on the left were kind of interested in that.
There's a lot of African-American citizens that are just desperate to get their children into better schools.
Libertarians, almost without exception, said, oh no, the state would be involved in that.
The only acceptable libertarian policy is the immediate elimination of all taxes.
So the destinationists are always going to be there.
The libertarians, if they're going to have any success, are going to have to appeal to the directionalists in both parties that say, look, the government has too many powers.
We may disagree about how far back we want to move it, but let's move the train in the other direction.
We're going the wrong way.
I think there's a consensus.
We should move it back.
Where we get off the train, that's a different question.
What would you say is the easiest way to explain state power, when I mean state I mean local or federal, to the person that doesn't quite get this, to the person that when you talk about Government power and government overreach.
They just think it's like you're talking about some sort of ephemeral thing that doesn't really exist.
What do you think the best argument to get them to start understanding the ideas of what liberty really is?
Now you could object, well I think there's a problem with this actually because unicorns don't really exist.
Close your eyes.
You see one.
So do I. They totally exist, in the sense that I can imagine them.
That's how people think of the state.
When I say, look, the state is messing up.
Well, right, because we have bad people.
All we need to do is get the right people, because I can imagine a state that's doing these things.
It's very difficult to fight that.
So the argument that I try to make, having given that caveat, that it's hard to fight unicorns, because that's what people want, is something they can imagine, not something that exists.
But the argument that I actually try to make is that every flaw in consumers, and there are many, is worse in voters.
So you think consumers are too stupid to be able to choose what size coat to buy or which car to buy?
Voters have all those problems and more.
So my colleague, Dan Ariely at Duke, who writes about rationality and consumer problems, and wants the state to intervene, there's no such thing as the state.
There's just people.
If we're gonna have voters choose what these experts are gonna make people do, it'll be even worse than the market.
Which means that the best system is one that recognizes that and doesn't try to do too much.
Because if we give voters enough power, they'll do what they did in the South.
and afflict minorities, or they'll say no same-sex marriage.
There's no reason to think that if you take one person who's too stupid to make his own choices at the grocery store and put them together into an angry mob, they can then choose a good president or a good Food and Drug Administration.
So let's talk about that mob for a second, because I sense that both sides right now are being led by their mob.
I see it more on the left, But I do see it on the right as well, that just the hysterical people who have all the magical answers, who have, if it was only their messiah, so the hysterical people on the right, they have their messiah in office right now, but the hysterical people on the left, that if they only had Bernie, it would all be okay.
The middle, it's hard to get that middle mob to get going, right?
It was very difficult to be deeply committed to moderation.
So, Yates has that poem where he says, the worst are full of passionate intensity, while the best lack all conviction.
Because you think, well, this is actually hard.
There's a bunch of people who think it's not hard.
They know exactly what to do.
And politics, if it's going to work, needs to have rules, institutions, constitutions that prevent them from being able to control the government.
And that's the genius of what our Constitution has done, that separation of powers.
I understand it's really frustrating because it means that you feel strongly, there seems to be majority in favor of it and yet we still can't do it because the President doesn't go along, the Supreme Court doesn't go along.
It means that a lot of times the status quo is privileged.
But the alternative is to have a mob.
And Plato, when he thought of democracy, actually talked about too much liberty means that you've got the butlers that are drunk on liberty's heady wine.
Is part of this also that we think that we need to get our morals from our leaders too?
And maybe that's changing a little bit with Trump, but that we thought that, you know, they always want you, you're gonna be married, you're gonna have the perfect family, we're gonna show you the kids.
We know that it's always a fraud and they're all cheating on their wives and doing all sorts of awful things, but that we've tried to make our politicians into be perfect humans, which again is the Messiah thing you're talking about, but it's just, it's just show.
We have other things, you know, there's basketball to watch, there's baseball, there's picnics to go on.
We don't really want to have to watch politicians very closely and so we substitute, I was really surprised at this, how little voters knew or cared about Actual issues.
Issues that I, as a political scientist, I want to talk about that.
They're going, I gotta go.
I'm really not interested in that at all.
Oh, but it's an important issue.
Yeah, I'm out.
I'm sorry.
What they're interested in instead is your character.
So if your character is very much like them, it means that you'll go off and when they're not watching, they'll do what they would have done.
You will do what they would have done.
And so they want you to know, are you like me in terms of core values?
And that's why family and things like that matter, is that you're a good person.
And there's all sorts of reasons why actually you can say that that's true, but as a political strategy, it didn't work.
And so Clinton, when she said, how am I not ahead by 50 points?
It's amazing that they didn't recognize that they had actually to appeal to a majority of Americans, not to try to put together a coalition of disparate interest groups that are united by nothing, except the promise that they're going to get paid off.
Yeah, so you wrote, I wanted to ask you about it, so you wrote a piece on Learn Liberty in defense of safe spaces, which as I read it, you parsed it to a point that actually makes some sense to me, because I'm not a safe space guy, so take it away.
Well, to me, the main principle universities are operating on is not freedom of speech, where you can say anything you want.
But academic freedom, which means that you can go off into little groups and be insulated from people that you disagree with so you can work on something.
So the political scientists are working on something in a particular way.
Sociology is working on something in a particular way.
We have communities of scholars that work on things, and in our talks there's a bunch of things that are shared premises, shared assumptions, Right.
and we're gonna try to advance without constantly having to confront
all of the other possible ways of thinking about this.
Well, but then we can go on to raise the question.
And Van Jones has this amazing video where he makes exactly the right argument, I think.
What you cannot do is annex the entire university as a safe space.
You cannot say, I want to be all across the university safe from anything that I disagree with.
So it's the very fact that there's these different safe spaces that nearly ensure there's going to be somebody working on things you totally disagree with.
And they have to be safe within that space.
You don't get to prevent them from doing that.
So I think we need safe spaces, for example, for fraternities.
And that's the, you know, the safe space people are, fraternities are terrible.
No, people need to be able to come up with associations.
So there's five freedoms that are guaranteed in the First Amendment.
And we forget freedom of association.
Freedom of association means I get to choose the people that I hang out with.
And if I want to have a club or organization and we have rules, and we want to talk about the stuff we want to talk about and have in the speakers that we want, even if it's my luck, okay.
And listen to the answers and you can either turn it off or maybe you'll learn something.
So John Stuart Mill has this great idea of education where he says it requires collision with error.
And the way I try to explain it to people is, and I think this happens much more on the left, a lot of the young students on the left have just learned one move chess openings.
They move the pawn in front of their king out two spaces.
It's funny, because some of my best moments, you can see the way I interview, and I haven't looked down at the notes once, and I'm trying to hear you and just go where it feels natural.
But some of my best moments on the show, I think, are where someone has pinned me into thinking, Wait a minute, I really have to reevaluate something, and that's how you evolve, and that's how most of us are, and yet we've so let go of that in the public square.
A lot of the young students just have never thought about the problem of having to learn by arguing.
So one of the things that I do in class, and it worked better than I thought, was I divide the students into pairs, and they have to choose a question they're going to debate.
And then on the day of the debate, the debates are thirty minutes, on the day of the debate both of them hold up big-ass yellow dice because there's not enough ritual in our lives.
So you have to hold the dice over your head and you roll it and whoever gets the higher roll gets to choose which side they're on.
So you don't know which side you're arguing until that moment.
And they're not so emotional, where I have an attachment to a particular position.
It's hard for me to explain it, because I just know it's right.
Whereas if it's an argument I don't agree with, I'm thinking of it logically, step by step, and I'm presenting evidence.
And a lot of times they end up saying, I've kind of got to change my mind, that's not really what I believed after all, or at least I can see why someone would believe the opposite.
Yeah, so it sounds like your situation at Duke is pretty good and maybe they've managed to figure out the free speech thing a little bit better than most universities.
So do you think the students or the faculty or whatever it was at Brown, when they do that sort of thing, do you think they realize that they ultimately strengthen the ideas that they're going up against?
So for example, I've had David Horowitz on the show.
I think he's a decent guy.
I agree with him on some stuff.
He was a former leftist and I think 30 years ago was struggling with a lot of the issues that I'm thinking about these days.
But basically I sat across from him and I thought, he's a decent guy.
I didn't think he was some right-wing maniac or all the things that they say about him.
So that when they then, you know, burn the newspapers or whatever, and then now you have people doing a little research on him and then they may go, well this isn't all crazy what he's saying, but look at the reaction to him.
Yeah, so we've got about 50 minutes and we really haven't done that much on economics, so I want to shift a little bit.
Because to me it seems that economics, if we could get the economic system to work right, whatever that means, that it does resolve a lot of the political things.
Basically, if people have jobs and can buy some stuff and feel that they own property and things of that nature, That those other things will become less important.
That's my basic belief.
Do you think that's a fair premise to start off with?
Now, I know some people are gonna hear that and go, ah, you libertarians, what he's saying is, you people on the bottom have a TV, have a cell phone, have a, what about the people that don't have that stuff?
Now, I get what you're saying, those, that most of the bottom has sort of moved up to have a decent level, but what about that other, what's the libertarian view of how you help or not help the people that don't have that baseline?
So, for example, if you're living through subsidized housing in a decent area with a decent school, and even if you don't want those handouts, well, then you realize, well, I'm going to have to work a third job now, and then they're going to force me to move to a much worse place to live.
And let's say, and another problem as I see it is minimum wage.
Now the effects of minimum wage on overall employment economists debate.
But it's almost certainly true that it's very difficult for people to get a first job or acquire the experience that allows them to start the staircase to the American dream.
So the unemployment rate in some urban areas for like 15 to 25 year olds is 40, 50%.
There's no way for people to find a first job.
Why do we do that?
Well, we wanna say people should be able to live on this.
It's not clear why your first job should be something you should be able to live on.
Of course some people, but a surprising number of people on the left believe that, yes.
So one of the things I like about this is it sort of divides the usual political split by how paternalistic they are.
There's a whole bunch of people on the left that really think Experts and, honestly, rich white people should be saying, here's how these poor people should be spending their time and money.
Yeah, which is probably not, well, that shows you a lot about paternalism and authoritarianism and all that.
So your next book, which is called Tomorrow 3.0, this is sort of partly what it's gonna be about, right?
Because we're about to go into another revolution, which is gonna be a shared economy and technological revolution, and that all sort of plays into, I suppose, basic income and just the way technology, you know, iPads are replacing people at McDonald's.
It's interesting, so Marc Andreessen in November 2011 wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he said software eats the world.
And what he meant was that software is to service jobs, as robots and automation are to production.
So we're used to thinking of factories as being a transformation from a bunch of people putting stuff together to machines putting stuff together.
And it's more efficient, but it means there's fewer jobs.
So capitalism almost always Reduces jobs by increasing productivity.
So Trump was wrong in saying that we're sending jobs to China.
The whole world is losing jobs to productivity and that's good because consumer products are reduced in price and it means that we're all wealthier.
The reason that everyone, almost everyone, can afford a car and a cell phone is that the price of those things has fallen so much.
Problem is, until now we've said, well there's always the service economy.
People can always get service jobs.
They can't.
And that's being hastened by the push for increased minimum wages.
So in Seattle, for example, if you have a fast food restaurant, you're probably investigating kiosks so you don't have to pay $15 an hour to have some guy who really isn't worth $15 an hour at the front desk.
It's not clear to me that We're going to be able to take people who are not sufficiently well trained by the state education system to be able to work in the new economy to make that transition very quickly.
So I think universal basic income, you can make a static argument, we're spending the money already, so we might as well spend it more efficiently.
But then there's a dynamic argument too, over time The move to the sharing economy probably benefits most of us.
The sharing economy, just so for the people that don't fully get it, so basically that you wouldn't even have to necessarily own your car.
That all of the things that we kind of have, we'd figure out better ways to use them so you wouldn't have to fork out as much money for them in the first place.
And we'd figure out, well, I'm gonna use it on Tuesdays at this time, and you're gonna use it then.
The example that I always use, and I think people recognize it, is I have a black BMW 330i, and I'm just the sort of person you think I am, that drives a black BMW 330i, zooming in and out.
It's a very expensive car.
I park it at a special shrine at my house.
When I approach it, the door opens.
Now, it's a garage, but that's pretty expensive storage.
And since I worked as an administrator at Duke for a long time, I have the parking space of God.
I can park in a great space.
So my car is really expensive, and it's always taking up two pieces of real estate, the garage and my parking space at Duke, which is reserved for me.
When you multiply that by the... I drive my car 30, 40 minutes a week.
All the rest of the time it's just sitting there.
I think what's going to happen 50 years from now is that people are going to look back and be astonished at the extent to which we were so selfish that we wanted to keep stuff so other people couldn't use it and spend a lot of money storing it so other people couldn't use it.
Now, to some extent that gives us status.
I'm an old guy, I probably have pictures of my pathetic car on Facebook.
Young people don't do that.
They're more interested in accumulating experiences than they are stuff.
So I think that there's a cultural shift towards a sympathy towards not having such a big impact on the environment, reducing your footprint.
So if a car is constantly in use instead of sitting in my garage or a parking space all the time, we'll need far fewer of them.
We'll be able to have bike lanes because we won't need to have all this parking space.
We won't need to have closets or storage units where we have all this crap that we don't even need.
And in our current system, owning it is the cheapest way to have something available to use.
But it's fairly common for... I have a tuxedo, I don't wear it very often.
Many women have gowns that they wear maybe once.
Now the reason that they don't rent the gown is that it's too difficult to find it in exactly their size.
But suppose you had an app that could take computer laser measurements and get exactly the right measurement and it's delivered to you two days from now.
And instead of an $800 gown that you wear once, it's a $100 rental.
So everything's changing, I think, is the theme of this hour.
There's a lot changing politically, there's a lot changing economically, and we just got to be smart enough to hopefully not, you know, go totally off the ditch as we're navigating it.
I'm mostly optimistic because I think our institutions are pretty strong and people recognize that there's a problem.
Social media, the internet, access to software, all create disruptions.
But when you look at human history, a lot of the best things have happened after a period of disruption.
But the period of disruption can be pretty bad.
The 1840s and 50s in Europe, cities were on fire because of the Industrial Revolution.
The result was mostly good.
So it's not clear to me what's going to happen, which again is one of the reasons I'm for universal basic income.
Let's make sure that those who are least well off, and who are through no fault of their own, find themselves not able to work in the traditional manufacturing jobs that they expected to be there.
Let's make sure that there's some minimum on how bad off they are.
Yeah, I love the framing of that, because it really is an argument that transcends the left-right thing, because you're hitting them both at their soft spots.