The Ricochet Podcast - Three Headed Hydra

Episode Date: June 25, 2015

Today on the Ricochet Podcast, a rare three guest show: first, the dean of political pundits Michael Barone stops by to give us the low down on Trump, Jindal, and the rest of the field. Then, our own Richard Epstein (aka “The Human Paragraph”) stops by to opine on King v. Burwell (spoiler alert: Professor Epstein thinks the court got it wrong), and finally. R.R. Reno, Editor of First Things joins... Source

Hello, everyone. I'm not going to get, I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't have any information on that. They don't understand what you're talking about. And that's going to prove to be disastrous. And what it means is that the people don't want socialism. They want more conservatism. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long on the road. I'm James Lilacs, triple play of guests today, Michael Barone on politics, Richard Epstein on SCOTUS, and R.R. Reno on the Pope. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Welcome, everybody, to this, the Ricochet Podcast. My stars and garters, it's almost July. Can I say stars and garters, or does that bring to mind the flag of the women who are slightly ambivalent about the Confederacy? Well, we'll have to ban that and many other things.

What we won't have to do, though, is ban great ideas. Well, not for a couple of weeks, anyway. And if you want to know about those great ideas, The Great Courses is one of our sponsors. For a limited time, The Great Courses, they have a special offer for you, the Ricochet listener. You can get The Philosopher's Toolkit, how to be the most rational person in any room for up to 80% off any room.

That's guaranteed. Go to thegreatcourses.com slash ricochet, and we'll tell you a little bit more about that later. greatcourses.com slash ricochet. And of course, we're brought to you by Casper Premium Mattresses as well. What is it? And we'll tell you a little bit more about that later. And, of course, we're brought to you by Casper Premium Mattresses as well. What is it? It's a great mattress for a fraction of the price. Trust me on this.

I sleep on one every single night. Casper is revolutionizing the mattress industry by cutting the cost of dealing with resalers and showrooms and paying for heat and guys. Passing that savings directly on onto you, the consumer. And, of course, we're also brought to you by what appears to be the sound of a dehumidifier in the background. Am I hearing that correctly? Well, that could be me, James. I'm on the road. Oh, that's right. That's right.

Rob Long is on a Mad Max-like journey through a dystopian, burnt-out landscape, searching for that last vestige of civilization, a croissant shop. Well, I'm not going to find it. I'm driving through Dixie. I'm in the south of the Basin-Dixon line. I'm driving literally through Dixie, James, all the way to New Orleans. I'm going to try to get there, you know, at some semblance before lunch tomorrow, which could be quite a feat, especially if I'm triggered. I have all these triggers possible if I pass a Confederate flag, which, as you know, will trigger me. So you're not having a driver. This is not the night they drove old Rob Long down. You're actually on your Adi Naki heading down there to St. Dixie. Well, while you're going, I'm sure you're thinking to yourself, all those people who are listening should actually be shoveling out the shekels for Ricochet as members because there's a lot that accrues to that, isn't there? Yes. Listen, I will say this about – I make a pitch for Ricochet membership all the time.

And I was thinking about this on my earlier drive last night as I was driving out of my parents' house in Maryland to pick up my dog to drive her back to L.A. for the summer. We are living in a world of freakouts. This culture in this country seems to freak out all the time over nothing. And it starts – it started a year ago as I was driving on the – heading east about Ferguson. What we now know was an entire town blew up for four days, five days, in flames over a fable, over nothing. And I think it's happening now.

I mean, obviously what happened at Charleston is not nothing. It was actually a great tragedy, a sacrilegious murder, quite literally. And yet it turned quickly into this art given about the flag. Our culture is in trouble. Ricochet is the solution. We are a civil, smart, witty, thoughtful conversation place. We are the light. I actually really believe this. This is not just, I know Peter was laughing at me, but I really believe it. We are not just

for us. We are an example for other people. I would like some enterprising left-winger to look at Ricochet, come to us and say, how do I start this for our side? And I will give him all the help he needs to start it because, my God, have you watched TV lately? Have you read the paper? People freak out over nothing. And the great thing about Ricochet is we are the single candle. Join us. Become a member. Stop the freakouts.

This is where smart, rational people prevail. Well, of course, that laughter you heard was Peter Robinson, who agrees completely. Laughing at me. I'd just like everybody to note that if you really want to have incisive commentary that understands and grasps the essential quality of the American soul and experience today, you want to trust a guy who just said, I'm driving my dogs to L.A. for the summer. Okay. Well, now, that's out of context, obviously. It's not dogs. It's one dog. And everybody who's got a dog knows exactly what I mean.

I know. Don't put the dog under the plane in the summer. It's a little dangerous. I'm giving you trouble. You love your dog, too, James. I do. And we might add that there are people who hide themselves in the donut, the beltway, in the bubble of D.C. and never actually venture down south, as Rob is doing,

on a very personal and atomic level, really. He's amongst them. As opposed to the people who just have these received notions of what the South is by what they know because they're bad, stupid, ugly, cladest, mouth-breathing, sister-marrying, snake-handling people. So do we learn anything this week exactly other than it is possible once again for the culture to change on a dime? A dime, might I add, that has the picture of a man who interned a bunch of people for the race but isn't that problematic? So is this the end then? Is the left satisfied now that Amazon and everybody else has completely banned the Confederate flag? Who are you asking?

You've said nothing. By the way, as Rob motors his way across the Confederacy, I'd like to know – that was not laughter of derision, Rob. That was a chuckle of appreciation. OK. All right. Only you can say Ricochet is out to save the republic and yet keep it so light and so – it's just the most breathtaking claims delivered in a kind of conversational way. Well, we are. We are.

Well, as you know, Peter, we're in the middle of raising our second big round of investment. And so I spend a good deal of time talking to investors. Luckily for us, we have a great, great product. So it's a joy to do. And there are a lot of investors who are interested and impressed by what we're doing and love the community and spend – we give them a free membership. They nose around for a while and they come back and they say this is amazing. But it really is – just driving and thinking is one of those things where you sort of put everything together. I have big thoughts here because I've been by myself for the past day.

So I'll probably drive everybody crazy with connecting dots that don't really need to be connected or shouldn't be connected. But there is something very strange going on in the culture. that one of the colorful – when people were writing the bits of color about Charleston is the absolute unfamiliarity anyone had with church or black churches. And the way white elites, white liberal elites describe black churches was this wonderful condescending Margaret Mead kind of celebration. Oh, the wonderful black church. church is so powerful in the community. Completely forgetting that Charleston is filled with churches and all the churches stood together, that the people in Charleston on Sunday, they go to church, which of course is bananas if you live in New York City or anywhere else. It's just a crazy idea, like weirdos. But Kevin Williamson mentioned something on a podcast we did a couple days ago, that the idea of

Dixie, and the idea of Jesus even, was part of popular culture whether you believe it or not, for years. It's kind of disappeared from the landscape for the past 20 years. They kind of disappeared it, but hippies would sing about Jesus. Let it be. The Beatles sang about Mother Mary. And James Taylor asked for Jesus' help in Fire and Rain. And nobody thought that it was a religious song

or they were talking about faith. They were just... People seem to think that the quantity of headlines about a particular cultural shift in the Washington Post somehow means that the brains are being rewritten across the country to conform to that idea. So Peter, yes, this is no surprise that there's actually a different culture than people expect down there. What I'm curious about is whether or not you think this was a case of everybody sort of coming to the right idea in that uh maybe that flag doesn't belong on state property yeah i i've given this a little bit of thought by the way i'm sorry rob we've got richard epstein coming up a little bit later just you know i know you're not able to message back and forth that's great i'm very excited and we have my silent while richard speaks and michael barone in mere seconds but i'll let uh

i'll let peter finish oh we have michael coming out all right in that case i'll talk fast i don't want to fall silent while Richard speaks. And Michael Barone in mere seconds, but I'll let Peter finish. Oh, we have Michael coming out. All right. In that case, I'll talk fast. I don't have anything to say that can hold a candle to whatever Michael is going to say, I'm sure. However, with regard to the Confederate flag, here's where I draw a distinction between what the governor of South Carolina and the legislature of South Carolina choose to do as a matter of official expression. If those people, those elected office holders whose job it is to remain close to the people of their state, believe that it would be a useful, even a necessary gesture to move the Confederate battle flag off the Capitol grounds, fine.

That's their decision to make. What strikes me as crazy is what I've been seeing on – and by the way, when Rob says the culture has gone mad, there's just no doubt about it. Facebook, my little Facebook page, it used to be cousins saying, look at us, we just had a graduate. And for the last couple of days, it's been one piece after another, one rant after another pro and against the Confederate flag but also – and this is my concern. Now, every Confederate memorial across the south is suddenly under threat. movements to remove statues of Confederate soldiers, monuments to the Confederate dead,

a Confederate memorial somewhere in Austin, I believe it was, was defaced overnight. There's no limiting principle here. It's one thing for an official government expression. It's another sort of contemporary that battle flag is flying over the state capital as if it is part of what's taking place, part of political – part of the act of governance now taking place in South Carolina today. It's another to begin defacing statues, memorials that were put up 80 years ago or 100 years ago and that are part of the fabric of southern history. History is complicated. We all have – we, every region in the country has unhappy aspects of its history. But if you start ripping stuff up to conform with contemporary notions of political correctness, that represents – that pretty quickly starts representing an assault on history itself and that really just – there I at least would draw a line and make a stand. That's just plain wrong.

Well, he who controls the past controls the future and any history that proceeds or is incompatible with the progressive narrative is relevant and at best and must be expunged at worst. But when it comes to the future, we've got politics coming up in a presidential election, and that's why we turned to Michael Barone, whose biography consists, or at least ought to have, he is Michael Barone. What more actually do you need to say? Trump's at 11%, Michael. What madness stalks New Hampshire? Well, what stalks New Hampshire? Bernie Sanders from the neighboring state of Vermont, former mayor of Burlington, self-proclaimed socialist, congressman at large, and U.S. senator.

The two recent polls showed Bernie Sanders holding Hillary Clinton under 50 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, with him getting in the 30s about 10 points behind. There's something brewing here, and I think that this, together with the large crowds that Sanders is drawing in Iowa and New Hampshire, confirms that the energy and lawn and enthusiasm in the Democratic Party is on the left, and that at least some substantial number of Democratic voters are ready to vote against Hillary Clinton and for a candidate who seems as a potential general election candidate to be unelectable, but who expresses views that they strongly hold. Hey, Michael, it's Rob Long calling you. I'm from the road south of the Mason-Dixon line. If you look at the past year, we were just talking about this, Ferguson, Baltimore, now Charleston, the debate about the flag. Is something happening in the culture that you think will find its way into electoral politics in the next 12 months?

Maybe even include there the populism of the message of Donald Trump. Are we going to look back on this year or this summer or last summer and say, well, you know what? You connect these dots and it's obvious what's going to happen or obvious what could have happened? Or is this just the natural sort of ebb and flow of American cultural politics? Well, I think that Donald Trump and the South Carolina murders don't have much relationship to each other. They're very different phenomena. You're seeing a

couple of polls now showing that Donald Trump is competitive with other Republicans. Remember that you've got 13 declared candidates and several all but declared candidates in the Republican Party, and they're pretty much bunched together in support between 5 and 15 percent. You apply a statistical margin of error to that. It looks like something like a tie. You know, we talk about people being frontrunners because they've inched up four points ahead of somebody else in the polls. That's not a very meaningful margin. And I think Republican voters are pretty fluid. You know, we're in a period when people are expressing a lot of dissatisfaction with government,

with major institutions, with the president, with Congress. We tend to treat this as somehow an anomaly in an America that has always had great confidence in institutions. I think, in fact, that it probably is more likely the norm in American history. A certain amount of grumbling, sometimes really angry grumbling, is a part of our political culture and not totally a negative part. I mean, you know, the people who say, well, confidence has declined, uses a benchmark that period right after World War II, the couple of post-war decades when America won a war.

We got unexpected post-war prosperity. People were unusually happy with their institutions. In most of the last 50 years, they have not been. And so Donald Trump is striking a chord with some people. You know, when you look at the polls, you find majorities of Republican voters saying, no, he's unacceptable. He's not going to win the nomination. If it comes down to a smaller number of candidates, Donald Trump is not going to lead in the polls. But it's a factor. The other point you point to is the idea that's being propagated,

that we have a crisis in race relations in this country, that white racism on the part of police officers, other large parts of our population is a major problem. I think that that's not an accurate picture of what's really going on in this country. The horrible murders in nine people in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston are something that just about everybody in this country hugely regrets. And one of the amazing things was the statement by members of that church who lost their relatives, their friends, their very close personal acquaintances, saying that they would forgive the assailants.

That's a pretty amazing response, and I think one that has touched many people around the country. Michael, Peter here, Peter Robinson. You grew up in Detroit. As we know, the population of Detroit has collapsed, what is it, about 40% or even lower than it was when you were a kid growing up in that once magnificent city? Well, it was 1,849,568 in 1950. I was one of those people. And it's now 2010, 713,777. That's more than a million down.

And it's declined since then. And a large proportion of those people who left were African-Americans. And a large proportion of them moved back south. One of the headline demographic stories taking place in the country over the last decade and more is that the great migration from the south to the north of African Americans has been reversing itself. Why would African Americans move to the south if it's as racist as Paul Krugman seems to suggest? Well, the answer is it isn't as racist as Paul Krugman seems to suggest. And, you know, we had this enormous movement, 1940 to 65, just one generation, in which something like one third of black Americans moved from the South, mostly the rural south, to the big cities in the north, the industrial cities.

The black population of Detroit went up from 150,000 to about 600,000 during that period. That's an enormous change, and it's one that produced a lot of friction and a lot of problems. The north turned out not to be as much of a promised land as many black Americans believed during that 1940 to 65 period that it would be. We've had movement from black Americans migrating from the North to the South, and incidentally from California to the South. That has picked up starting in the of the nineteen nineties and going on through the past decades why more economic opportunity uh... in uh...

they think also a certain cultural affinity black american culture is in its own way a sort of southern uh... culture with sort of particular characteristics, the positive characteristics of the South, and sometimes elaborate politeness. People like signs of friendliness. And you see this, so people are moving to where there's economic growth and also perhaps a more culturally congenial climate. So, you know, you just have to look at the census statistics in the 25 or so counties in the Atlanta metro area, and you're seeing tens of thousands of black people moving there from other parts of the country, from inner city Atlanta, uh, in the central cities living in a suburban life, um, you know, off

freeway interchanges near malls, uh, middle-class upper middle-class subdivisions. Um, and they, uh, obviously don't see the South as the kind of place that it was in the 1940s and 50s. Hey, Michael, it's Rob Long again. Is that migration, what are the political ramifications of that? Is that good for Democrats in the South, or is that good for Republicans? Are the African Americans re-migrating to the South? Are they winnable or persuadable for the Republican Party, or has that ship sailed? Well, they haven't been particularly persuadable.

They haven't been particularly persuadable to the Republican Party. We saw that President Obama got 45 percent of the vote in the state of Georgia, even though something over 70 percent of white Georgians voted for Mitt Romney in the last election. Some Democratic strategists think Georgia might be winnable for a Democratic presidential candidate. I think it's a little bit out of reach for them still, but you do see that. I mean, if you check the vote totals in 2004 to 2008, you'll see in the counties around Atlanta, the West, the South, Southeast, you'll see big increases in voter turnout, which reflect black support for Obama, but also reflect population growth and big increases in Democratic percentage. I think, you know, Republicans have an uphill road to go with black Americans. I don't think that black voters are ever going to produce as large a margin for Democratic candidates as a percentage of total vote as we saw them do for President Obama in

2008 and 2012. But they're still likely to be a heavily Democratic group. Well, that'll be the subject, no doubt, of an upcoming podcast. You're going to do with Byron York, you guys. I've got a new one coming up, and I imagine that it's going to be a festival of analysis and details and fun stuff to crack people's brains and inform them as to what's coming along. Thank you for being with us today, Michael. We'll talk to you soon as this election season

continues to unfurl. Always good to be with you. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Michael. If we had more time, I would ask him exactly what Bobby Jindal can do to reassure everybody that he's sufficiently ethnic for the Washington Post. The Post and the New Republic, of course, have been saying that in order to get ahead in the GOP, you've got to completely de-ethnicize yourself. And I think General is probably going to have to show up in a room with a picture of Ganesh, the elephant god, in one hand and a sitar in the other. And then show everybody this wonderful table of Indian food. A seven-course banquet saying, here you go, enjoy it. And frankly, as somebody who loves Indian food, a seven-course banquet of that stuff would be fine for me.

But there's also such a thing as a banquet for the mind, and that's what the great courses give to you if you are so inclined to do. Now, if you want to argue with somebody – I just started driving, and the Segway was excellent. The Segway is smooth as the freeway I'm on. If you would like to tell somebody exactly if there's a rational argument why the Washington Post and the New York and the TNR is engaging in race baiting, well, you're going to have to learn your skills. And that's where the great courses comes in handy. Most of you listening to this podcast are lifelong learners like ourselves, I'd like to think. And you're interested in learning for your own personal enrichment. And that's the motivation behind

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80% off. And give your brain a favor. It's like a college course without the walking across the quadrangle in the middle of winter, shivering and wondering what you're going to do with your life. Thegreatcourses.com slash ricochet. Lots of news today in the Supreme Court. And it would be just great if we had somebody who could tell us what's going on there. And that's where our own Richard Epstein comes in handy. We welcome him back to the podcast. Well, thank you for having me.

So much today. Yes, I mean, I could tell you something about what's going on, but let me tell you, there's a lot going on. Well, there are a couple of things. One, we can get to whether or not it's good for the Republicans or the GOP that they don't have to fix Obamacare right now. Let's talk about this fair housing decision, which seems to institutionalize the concept of disparate impact as something actually now a standard against which we have to hold things.

Because you don't have to actually try to do something discriminatory to get a disparate impact. But if it arises, that's proof of an imbalance, an injustice that now apparently the law is going to. Yeah, I think it's even worse than that. You can do everything you want, but it's humanly possible in order to stop it. And if some judge decides that the efforts that you've taken haven't gone quite far enough, then the upshot of that is you can have a massive structural injunction, as it's called, in which the courts start to oversee the way in which somebody like the Texas Housing Authorities and so forth administer their various programs.

In terms of its long-term effect, this is a much more important decision in many ways than is the King v. Burwell case. King v. Burwell, obviously, is a decision which says, go ahead with the program that you've already had, and it's a one-and-done kind of situation. There'll be no repetition. With the issue that you have in Burwell, it's not just a question of how this thing plays out in the housing cases. It's also a question of how it's going to play out in the educational area, how it's going to play out in the employment area, how it's going to play out in the pension area.

Anytime you can do something, it can have a disparate impact. In fact, if the world is an honest and sensible place, typically there will always be a disparate impact one way or another, because, as you know, a bell-shaped curve has a distribution. And what the disparate impact test kind of says is you're dropping pennies down, and you want to see whether or not they're going to be heads or tails. And you have 1,000 pennies. You better get 500 pennies heads and 500 pennies tails, or maybe 502 to 498. And it turns out that every distribution has tails,

and it will be the tail on which the litigation will be concentrated. And so what will happen is you're now in a state in which perfectly random, respectable behavior, some fraction of the cases, will always be subject to this kind of an attack. And it turns out that it will be subject in situations like the one in Texas, where there's little reason whatsoever to believe that there's any discriminatory intent involved, so that the original justification for a disparate impact case, we have to smoke out the bad

guys, because otherwise they'll just go underground, doesn't apply with the kinds of programs you have today and the kinds of sentiments that you have today. It's no longer 1965, although some people in the Supreme Court and elsewhere seem to forget that question. Peter Robinson here. How are you? I'm fine. No, you shouldn't be, though, Richard.

That was the question about the court. I mean, I sing in the morning when I get up, what do I think about the judicial system? I'm not surprised that that's the question. No, here's the question. Here's the question. King v. Burwell. Justice Scalia announcing his dissent from the bench. Quote, the court's decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery.

It is up to Congress to design its laws with care, and it is up to the people to hold them to account if they fail to carry out that responsibility. We should start calling this law SCOTUS care. Justice Scalia said, I'm reading from the New York Times, to laughter from the audience. You have your disagreements with Mr. Justice Scalia, but in this case he is simply correct. No? Well, let me explain to you why he's correct and why it is that he lost.

There's a very kind of strange dichotomy that goes on in interpretation. And the first one is, are you the empire who called balls and strikes, to use the famous Justice Roberts metaphor? And if you just look at this statute, there's only one sentence that actually pertains to what's going on, and that sentence says that the exchanges have to be established by the states. There's a little bit of interpretive wiggle room in those cases where the states ask the federal government for help.

But these are cases in which the states have refused to establish an exchange, and now the federal government is saying, whether you like it or not, we're doing it over your head. As a matter of textual interpretation, that is simply indefensible. Well, then you look at it as a matter of motivation, and we have our friend Mr. Gruber, who's out there saying, you know, this is really very clever. What we're going to do is subject these states to enormous penalties if they don't put it in there, and they're going to play ball. Well, you know, like an MIT economist, people don't cooperate. Gruber's saying we did it on purpose. We wrote it that way on purpose. Purpose. That's exactly right. Now, that's why it's such a clear case if you're Justice Scalia,

and to some extent if you're me. But this is what's happening. And it's a very difficult kind of contrast. It's much easier to put this position into place if you can make this challenge in 2012 before any reliance interest gets established. What happens is you then put these things in place. There are thousands of people who get coverage under this stuff. You're looking at this thing down the tunnel and saying, if, in fact, we strike this down, a most uncooperative Congress and a very truculent president are going to end themselves into a long war.

Nobody knows which way it's coming out. There's a maxim, which I like to quote from the Roman law, which translated in English says, the error of the community,ath the force of the law. And what that kind of means is that after you do something wrong long enough, it becomes right. That's what the law of adverse possession is about. And that's what essentially took Justice Roberts in this way. Remember the last time this case came up in the whole Obamacare constitutionality thing, people said, well, Justice Roberts is somebody who doesn't want to override the Congress, thinks the people ought to decide

these things. It was a pro-democratic decision. And now, of course, it's not a pro-democratic decision in that sense. It's a matter of statutory interpretation. And the Congress said one thing, and the president and the Department of Health and Human Services did quite the opposite but what's really going on with respect to justice robert is he's a guy who essentially has no deep intellectual convictions as to right or wrong or unlike just we have no deep convictions

on statutory construction his basic principle is supreme court does not rock boats and this is so so we have so what we have enunciated this morning, Richard, I speak as a layman who sits at your feet. One of my happiest postures in all of my life is sitting at the feet of my friend Richard Epstein and asking questions. All right. Well, I'll just lift up on my toes. So I sit at your feet and I put it to you this way. Professor Epstein, is it not the case that as of this morning with this decision, we now have a new Roberts doctrine which runs as follows.

First of all, spend some months trying to figure out who has standing to bring suit. Then spend some months working your way up through the appellate courts. And then by the time you get to the Supreme Court, my friend, by then it's too late for us to – I mean, it's absurd. I'm sorry, but I'm with Justice Bill. The more I think about it, the angrier I get. Why aren't you angry? I mean, I'm past anger because I've seen this for the last 40-odd years.

But it's not the Roberts Doctrine. It's the Charles Evans Hughes doctrine. I mean, amongst others. Charles Evans Hughes is in the 20s and early 30s? Give us his dates. No, he was the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1937

when the New Deal progressive constitutionalism took over from the classical liberal constitutionalism broadly speaking. The switch in time that saved nine? Yeah, well, yes, that was the famous expression. That was about Owen D. Roberts. No relation to the other guy.

But Hughes was every bit as dramatic. In 1935, he writes neoclassical opinions explaining that when you're talking about interstate commerce, there's a period when you're on the bus in the local train, the local system, you're in local commerce, you get on the airplane, you're in interstate commerce, you get off the plane and get into a cab at the other thing, you're back in local commerce. And then two years later, he looks around and he just completely flips this thing over and says, you know what, I don't care whether or not you're in commerce or not in commerce, you could be a manufacturer or not manufacturer.

As far as I'm concerned, the federal government has the whole ball of wax. And it was a transformation in terms of its significance, which is about a thousand times as important as the single outcome with respect to what has happened in the Roberts case. And why was that? Because Hughes was basically a man who sort of read the political team even with the term and not the stand up for square against it

you with the governor in his former days he was the secretary of the state under the harding administration it previously been a supreme court judges presidential nominee well he called this group which i don't know what's happening here what you're telling me is you haven't been angry with anybody since Charles Evans Hughes? Here's my response to this. No, no, no, I'm angry at everybody.

But what happens is, this is what I'm telling you. If I get angry, it takes out my stomach lining. It doesn't take out anybody else's. So what I try to do is to not be angry but to be as forceful as I can. I also try in all of these cases to figure out what's making – I don't want to think of myself only – Answer me this, Professor. Answer me this. Is it not the case? So Charles Evan Hughes, flip-flops.

It's been seven, eight decades since then. There's been a slow-moving attempt to restore the Constitution, to move us back a little bit, a degree or two, to original understanding. And you've got Alito and Thomas and Scalia begging the Chief Justice to go ahead and restore just this one act and a little act of restoration. And if the Chief Justice had gone with them, he could have brought Justice Kennedy with him. And this decision would have gone the other way. And Justice Roberts instead ratifies the Hughes principle that we flip flop whenever we like. Well, I mean, first of all, I don't know if he would have been able to take Kennedy with him. I mean, these guys

all you have to understand, there is nobody who can reach a Supreme Court justice, given the places where they sit. And if they have decided that they want to do something in a particular way, they vote. I mean, it's like the College of Cardinals if you want. You have all the disputation you want, but in the end, they will

sort of refine their intellectual and moral preferences and vote them. None of these people think that they're exercising naked power. They all think that what they're doing is they're exercising the highest form of judicial behavior. And so Justice Roberts, when he looks at this thing, this is what he sees about the bill. He says, you know, it is absolutely crazy to have this system of state exchanges, of federal exchanges, determine the fates of hundreds and millions of people in this country.

It's nuts. And of course, you know what? It is nuts to do that, to which Justice Scalia has a very powerful report. The guys in New York say it's nuts of Congress. Our job is to figure out what they did. Their job is to make sure that it's right. And that's the traditional view of the subject. But he says, you know, I'm just not going to go along with that.

And this was my reaction when I first heard this case was coming up. People asked me what the census was. And I said, well, if you looked at the outrage down below by people like Harry Edwards, taking Tom Griffiths, one of the most honest of judges, and saying he's got all these nefarious motives, you realize that the resentment on the other side was at a boil. And the longer this thing went on and the longer you started to see the establishment figures in the United States basically arguing in favor of continuity,

the more convinced I became that my original projection was wrong. And so that by the time I was thinking about this yesterday, I thought it was at least 80-20 that the bill would be uphold. The guys who are holding their breath in great relief are the Republicans, as well as the Democrats. The Democrats like the Republicans. The Republicans essentially are happy that this thing is off the political table. What it does show you is, given the attitudes of the courts on this stuff, it really matters who wins the presidency for two reasons. It's not just the veto machine. It's the interpretive machine.

If you had a Republican president having to draft these regulations, they would have drafted them straight. And the same Supreme Court would not have had the temerity to say, we know that the language is clear. We know that it's your administrative power, but we think it ought to be otherwise. The key thing to understand is, if you get the president and the administration and the executive branch on your side, it's a lot easier for the court to hold them up than it is to strike those guys down. And that's why the presidency has become so important. And it's the same issue with respect to this other case on the housing. You will never get the kind of madcap enforcement of the disparate impact test under a Republican regime.

They will pay it lip service. Occasionally they may bring an egregious case, but they're not going to be going out and looking for trouble. And, you know, you think the housing stuff is bad. It's much worse than education, where these guys are using that to essentially turn the entire private and public school education system in the United States into a kind of a subordinate office of the federal government. It's amazing how intrusive these people turn out to be. That one, to me, is in many cases much more important, because there'll be a thousand kinds of attacks that will be made. And if you get a Hillary Clinton, well, she may deviate

from Obama. I think she's a little bit more pragmatic than he is. But it's going to be a 5% change. You put in a decent Republican, it's going to be an 85% change. And that's going to be on every single administrative issue that you can't mention, on the appointment of every board. So the way in which the Supreme Court has now put itself together by essentially saying we don't rock any boats, it means that the presidential election is more important now than it's ever been because not rocking a boat means you're not going to strike down liberal initiatives.

There will be very few cases where you'll go in the opposite direction. There was the Shucky case dealing with affirmative action. Well, you remember Justice Sotomayor goes into a rage virtually because they use a colorblind rule. Well, Justice Sotomayor, of course, was the only one to say that it's right, meet, just, and good for the federal government to continue to confiscate raisin harvests. But they did strike that one down after 80 years. Yes, but I mean, don't get too happy about that. The problem is they struck it down on an ad hoc basis so that you have no idea what will become to the next case. Remember, if you're serious about constitutional law

you want to do rock the boat but this is what justice robert that you know that we can't escape the reasons that the physical taking can't do it the government decides to tell and others you can't plot plant twenty five percent of your land with exactly the same economic effect he said it's fine. Right.

Well, that is it. The entire takings law of the United States is a complete intellectual mess, because regulations and takings are treated by completely different standards. The great danger of the Roberts opinion there, which is why it's a very bad opinion in terms of long-term effect, is he over and over and over again says, I think this distinction is just wonderful. He explains it. He doesn't understand it.

There's no critical understanding. Let me give you an analogy. If you go back 20 years, there was the great Supreme Court case having to do with the Guns Act in Texas, right? The question is whether or not the federal government can tell states where they can and cannot have guns. And, you know, Justice Rehnquist wrote this opinion, which he says,

I'm striking this statute down under the gun laws. Well, what has happened? What he did is he wrote an opinion which says, Wicked and Filbert is just fine, ladies and gentlemen. And Wicked and Filbert is, of course, the statute which authorized the program

under which you get all of the raisin confiscations that you're talking about today. Well, I have to stop you there. I have to stop you there, right there, because we've got somebody else who's waiting in the wings, even though we're loving all this stuff and we need to talk raisins more.

I just worry, of course, that the Republicans would celebrate this and then they would be portrayed in the press as somebody who wants to increase the price talk raisins more. I just worry, of course, that the Republicans would celebrate this, and then they would be portrayed in the press as somebody who wants to increase the price of raisins for people who themselves today can barely afford a box of raisin bread. Richard Epstein, we thank you very much. We have no idea what this is going to do to raise in quotas down the road, because Justice Roberts' opinion is essentially a New Deal opinion in the same way that Lindquist's opinion was in the Texas gun case.

And it's gone. We thank you for being with us. We'll see you back at the site and in the Law Talk podcast as well. For more on this, you know where to go. We thank Richard Epstein for coming today and telling us about the decisions. I like the idea of the College of Cardinals as the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court actually did behave like that, then the College of Cardinals would be saying, well, actually, the Ten Commandments were inartfully drafted,

and that whole thing about coveting your neighbor's wife is actually okay. That's pretty good. Then one day they would elect a new pope, and they would have to go find the straw. And where did they find that straw, incidentally? Was it special Vatican straw that they had to put on the flame to get the right color? Well, in the early days, actually, where it came from was the sleeping pallets that they had there where the cardinals would go in between sessions to rest and nap. This is the best segue ever.

Well, it was a challenge by Peter Robinson, actually, and that those cardinals themselves would sleep on a bed of straw on a wooden pallet. And that was uncomfortable. And you can't imagine how cranky you get from that. And who knows how that would influence your decision when it came time to vote for a pope. But you don't have that problem because, A, you're probably not a cardinal. B, you're not voting for a pope. And C, you don't have that problem definitely because this is the modern world.

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$50 off your purchase. Start sleeping better as soon as that big, beautiful white box arrives. All right, gentlemen, we're moving right along with our next guest, R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things. Welcome to the podcast, sir. The Pope had a few things to say. Are people taking the right message from what he said, or is there just a lot of stuff in there for everyone to agree or to raise an eyebrow about. Well, I think this pope is, he always has a lot to say. Spicy, you know, piquant, bold words. I think there's a lot in the encyclical for different folks. It opens out in lots of different directions.

There's a kind of anti-modern quality to it, you know, critique of modern technology. But at the same time, it lines up with what a lot of progressives want in the way of environmental action and so on. Rusty, Peter Robinson here. What do we do? You're a Catholic, I believe, are you not? Yes, I am. Okay, and I am too. So what that means is you and I have to be careful to include everybody else in the conversation.

But having said that, I now ignore my own rule. What does a Catholic do with something like this? Here's a quotation from the encyclical. The pontiff, the successor of Peter, writes, quote, the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth, close quote. And I think, no, it isn't. Holy Father, you don't know what you're talking about. You have not paid attention to the trends of the last half century when the countries that are most industrialized have been able to do the best at cleaning up

their air, at cleaning their water, at improving living conditions for their populations. In China, you may say that the pollution, air pollution in the growing cities of China is quite bad. No doubt it is. But that's as nothing compared to the filth, literal filth, living in proximity with animal dung, when the Chinese just a generation or a generation and a half ago, literally tens of millions of Chinese were still in truly poverty stricken villages. So what does a Catholic do with a statement like that, which simply seems to suggest that at least it is arguable, and I have just argued it, that the pope hasn't quite got a firm purchase on the major trends of reality?

Well, the pope can speak. I mean, in order to write this encyclical, he has to make all kinds of claims about what's going on in the world. Those could certainly be wrong and mistaken because he's ill-informed. And then the document also makes statements about theological and moral truths. And I think as a Catholic, we're obliged to honor his authority to speak on these moral and theological truths. But we don't have to assume that he's any more informed than any other person about these empirical questions about, you know, the effects of global development, which, as you pointed out. I mean, there's another place in the encyclical where he suggests that people are dying, more and more people are dying because of the pollution caused by development. But if you look at life expectancy in Mali, for instance, which is a very poor country, it's gone from 40 years life expectancy in fact extended life expectancy even in the poorest countries in the world. Right, right.

So it's – all right. Let's – Rusty, if we could, what are the bits of this – what does the pope in your judgment get right? Where does he say things that are useful and worth meditating upon and and where does he say things in which he is within his right as pontiff to speak authoritatively well i think he's right that we are in bondage to consumerism i think that that's actually a widespread um spiritual disease that we suffer from. Right. I think that's obviously the case, and it's a very important reminder. We need to be reminded of that again and again. I think he's right that there's something called the technocratic mentality

and that it has become dominant in our global elite. Everything has to be thought of in terms of cost-benefit analysis. And we've lost sight of what the economy is for, what our productive activity is for. Presumably, we want our society to promote human flourishing and not just to create wealth. We rightly recognize that wealth provides us with the resources to help other people, to promote other people's well-being, but it's not an end in itself. GDP is not the be-all and end-all of a society. The richest society is not necessarily the best society. So I think he hammers away on those points over and over again. I think they're quite apt and

important. Right. And all of this, if one thinks of it in terms of the name of your journal, First Things, where the pontiff is talking about first things, the aim of economic growth is not material acquisition but human development. He's saying something profound and worth reflecting upon. Is that fair? Yes. And I think it's in some ways no one really disagrees with that. But it's a truth that needs to be stated again and again so we don't lose sight of it. And I think that one of his strengths is as a speaker and as a writer is his ability to put these sorts of truths in a very bold form to shock you and arrest you

and force you to take seriously things that you already, in many cases, very few people listening want to be in bondage to consumerism. I mean, who wants that? But I think it's easy to wake up and realize, like, my goodness, why do I have all this stuff? Why is my life revolving around all this stuff? And so this pope is a person that can help wake us up. So you wrote this. I find very interesting.

The men trained in the coherent old theological systems of the pre-Vatican II era have passed from the scene. The church is now led by men. I believe you intend to include the pope here. Now led by men who came of age during the Great Disruption. That is the uncertainties that followed the Second Vatican Council. you intend to include the Pope here, now led by men who came of age during the Great Disruption, that is the uncertainties that followed the Second Vatican Council. This will have an effect on church teaching, I'm afraid, and it won't be in the direction of consistency and clarity. What do you mean by that as it bears on the current pontiff? Well, I think this document is uh it doesn't is not a strong teaching document you have a tension between this very vivid criticism of the technocratic mentality

and then later in the document you have a call for one plan for the whole world which is now the tech that what's the technocrat's wet dream? I mean, you're going to have to have a huge bureaucracy, endless reports. You know, it is a sort of technocratic, to my mind, it's a technocrat's dream and it's my nightmare. Right. So it's – would the contrast be between say Benedict XVI who is deeply informed historically and theologically and a systematic thinker and communicator and the current pope who's just – he's not systematic. He's an advocate rather than an instructor. He's not teaching. He's not leading us through a line of thought.

Is that fair? I'm putting it crudely. No. I think that's right. But I think it even goes deeper than that. The men who were formed in the 40s and 50s were formed in a Thomistic system that was comprehensive and coherent. It had a lot of limitations and was very much criticized in the 1960s. But it did have those features, comprehensive and highly coherent.

In the 60s and 70s, men who were being formed in theology and so forth were exposed to all these different experimental theologies, and for good in many instances, and then perhaps for ill in other instances. We don't have to worry about that. We just need to keep our eye focused on what kind of effect is that going to have on the church in the long run? No kind of single, consistent, coherent formation of its leadership. And I think the effect, as we see today, where you have, it's just pieces don't all fit together. And that's I think to be expected. We're in for a season of the church not having altogether a clear mind.

Rusty, one more question for me and then Rob Long is going to come in and try to persuade you of the delights of consumerism. So here's my question. I'm talking about my inbox and my own reading and responses to the pontiff run fundamentally two different responses. man. But he's a Jesuit, formed in Argentina. He did his doctoral work in Germany. What we are getting here is just what Rusty Reno says. This is the backwash of the 1960s. He's 78 years old. Just wait him out. He's a sweet man. Take what he says that's useful and ignore the nonsense. Just wait him out. That's one. The other is, Ross Dowlett, in fact, said this after the synod this past spring, this pope may need to be resisted. It may be the duty of Catholics in good conscience, certain Catholics, perhaps bishops, perhaps laymen, in one way or another, to resist him. He will insist upon action that is wrongheaded,

and he must be opposed. What does Rusty Reno say? I find neither of those responses persuasive. I think that this encyclical shows a man trying to get his arms around the most powerful social reality in the world today, which is global capitalism. It's a juggernaut. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has moved from strength to strength. And I myself think that we need to figure out how to humanize it. He at times sounds

like he wants to have a revolution and overthrow it. But I think we have to face up to the fact that this is going to be a massive challenge for us going forward. What are we going to do about a world that's dominated by global capitalism? Hi, it's Rob Long calling. I'm calling from the railroad, I should say. I am not a Catholic, so it's easy for me to answer that question, which is we should celebrate it. It is unsurpassed good

to the most people in the world. Global capitalism has been the only force that has managed to take the most people out of poverty and misery. So I think it's a really easy thing. It's a really easy answer. The answer is celebrate global capitalism, obviously with compassion, but celebrate it over all the other forms that have done quite the opposite. Why is that so hard for this pope to say?

Well, look, there are two things. Global warming. pope to say well okay there are two things global warming if the worst case scenario of global warming turns out to be true then global capitalism will be seen as a kind of shiva like the god uh the hindu god shiva the great destroyer um and so that's wait let me push back on it why capitalism i mean why why would you say capitalism if warming – if anthropomorphic global warming is true, if human activity is what has a major effect on the temperature of the globe, then surely the solution – the problem is a billion people in China and a billion people in India being pulled out of poverty. That's not capitalism. That's progress. No, but capitalism is what unleashes the creativity of the human person, which I think is one of its great strengths, and it's a moral reason why we should be supporting it.

But we have to recognize that on the other side, it creates – it could potentially be an extraordinarily powerful engine driving a serious, serious global problem. The second problem global capitalism creates is it threatens political institutions. We see this already today. It's difficult to see how political institutions globally can kind of keep up with the power of global capitalism. So someone like Bill Gates exercises more policy influence in the continent of Africa in terms of medical policy than any sovereign nation in Africa does. And that's a good thing.

I mean, that's unreservedly a good thing. I can't think of one government in Africa right now that I would trust with the actual health and safety of the African people more than I would with Bill Gates. Well, I'm not a big Bill Gates fan, to be honest with you. Which African leader do you trust more than Bill Gates? Yeah, I don't. I don't trust Bill Gates to be responsive to the popular will of the people. I mean, you have to take a balance between a legitimate government and an effective government. And so the paternalism of the Gates Foundation, I would find, I would resent if I were an African.

And in fact, the Gates Foundation is, in fact, resented by non-political leaders in Africa. And so this pope coming from Argentina, he sees that effect of these supposedly benevolent global institutions. He feels that paternalism. And that's one reason why he speaks so much more harshly about things that you and I sort of see like, hey, come on, you know, this is actually for the best. Maybe it is for the best in terms of maximizing utility, but it's not for the best in terms of empowering people. But I would just push back on that just slightly. I would say as a non-Catholic, when I read about this encyclical and I hear about his pushback on sort of global capitalism and its benefits and his concern about global warming, And I think, OK, well, the head of the Catholic Church, a church that I do not belong to, he resembles to me the leader of a large NGO with classic NGO style progressive liberalism that has done really – it contributes in general to the morass of poverty and despair of the world. And in whatever his tower is, he clucks and wrings his hands in a kind of an elite way.

But in fact, when it comes down to it, would rather complain about Bill Gates than Blaise Comparé, the president for life of Burkina Faso, or any of the psychopaths that run African countries now. Because that would be actually difficult, more politically difficult for him to do than to jump on a popular bandwagon now with the other media elites and complain about global warming. So how unfair am I being?

Not completely unfair. I mean, look, one of the weaknesses of this particular encyclical is there's just too much of the talking points of the left environmental progressive elite. And it's a great paradox and a kind of irony that the document strikes out against technocracy and then adopts a lot of the technocracy's language and solutions. So I'm with you. I think that the Catholic Church needs to plunk down much more clearly on the fundamental principles that we think ought to govern our debate about the global future. And I don't think this document does a good enough job bringing them to the fore. Yeah.

I return to one final point and then I really will shut up. But I just can't get away from the feeling that the pope – this just is the best way to put it. He doesn't know what he's talking about. His point of departure is turning into a pile of filth. It's just mistaken. For example, you read this encyclical forward, back, upside down, inside out. There is no recognition that the one industrial country, put it this way, all the countries that signed the Kyoto Accord have actually increased their greenhouse gases. One country which refused to sign the Kyoto Accord has decreased its greenhouse gases and that country is the United States of America.

Why? Because the fracking technology has permitted us to shift from coal to natural gas, driving down greenhouse gas emissions. would get off the back of the industry, we could have some capital allocated to nuclear energy where there have been all kinds of theoretical breakthroughs in the laboratory and in engineering labs designing nuclear reactors to make them safer, to deal with the question of nuclear. In other words, there is a very good argument. I'm not sure that it's the correct argument, but there is a very good argument, which is nowhere reflected in the encyclical, that the way to approach the problem of global warming, the effective way to approach the problem of global warming, not the way to make liberals feel good about themselves, but the way actually to address the problem is through more technology and more capital allocation rather than less.

Why can't the Pope at least acknowledge that point of view? There's a tension that runs through this document. There's a part of the document that I think says things that could actually be construed in favor of what you're saying. You know, in other words, to get the sort of the right sort of approach to cost benefit analysis and to move forward with remediation of potential problems with global warming. But there's another part of the encyclical that almost relishes the prospect of the humiliation of the modern scientific technological project. Yes. And it's that.

Yes. There's almost a gloating taking place just between the lines, isn't there? Yes. of this in modern Catholicism, a feeling that modern society that's detached itself from the authority of the church is going to fail, has to fail. And you get this in this document, and then global warming becomes a kind of divine chastisement of the hubris of modern man who thinks he can live without God. And I think that that's a very powerful element of the hubris of modern man who thinks he can live without God. And I think that that's a very powerful element of the encyclical, one that I don't agree with, actually,

for the same reasons that the Second Vatican Council, I think, actually wound up putting the Catholic Church in a much more positive relation to the modern world. But it's always a tortured relation between the church and the modern world. And we see the tortured aspect of it returning perhaps with this particular Pope. Rusty, James Lilacs is going to, James is our maitre d' here. So he's going, now that we're done dining, he's going to thank us. But I want to say thanks to you because you've been a wonderfully good sport. We have in fact forced you to defend the Pontiff more than we really do in print.

And it's been a pleasure to do so. And what's even more shocking is that I took issue with you and I'm an Episcopalian. I mean, I have no leg to stand on. We're practically Satanists. That's true. Well, it's been a pleasure to talk with you guys. Oh, no, a pleasure. Thank you. Absolutely. We'll talk to you once again. Come the next encyclical. Yeah, I don't know. It just seems as if you have two competing ideologies here and you have a pontiff who sees capitalism perhaps as the other game in town. And I don't know. I tend to err on the side of the science guys who can get us out of the mess that we're actually not in and do so with their God-given brains. That is the best statement of the world-forming dilemma I have ever heard.

We must rely on technology to get us out of the mess that we're not actually in. Hey, Peter, how often do these encyclicals come out? That is purely at the pontiff's discretion. Really? Benedict XVI was pope for eight years. He produced two encyclicals. He resigned when he had drafted most of a third. The current Pope Francis has produced two encyclicals, but the first one was editing and adding a couple of paragraphs to and then releasing to the world what was Benedict's third encyclical.

John Paul II, Pope for what was it? Not quite three full decades. And I lost count of his encyclicals. His came along quite often. So how does that work? Is there like a Peter Robinson in the Vatican, a speechwriter saying, you know, helping with the stuff? I mean is it reviewed? Is there a state department?

Are there mandarins? I mean to coin a phrase in the Vatican. Well, you know. A hundred percent at the discretion of the pope. But it is certainly true that they have theologians. There is I believe – I don't know about the current pontiff but there is actually a theologian. There's actually a position of the theologians, the papal household, that sort of – Wow. The theologians, the papal household, that sort of – so there are guys who draft these things. It would astonish me if Popes didn't – well, we know that his – I don't know how Francis worked except that he's announced – some of the people who advised him have been out giving interviews.

So his crowd is all these European lefties. Yeah. Right. The world is heaped with filth. You know, I caught immediately on that line. I mean, if you want to talk about the favelas of Brazil, perhaps go right ahead. And with the people who live in those things think, no, no Bill Gates for me. Thank you. I prefer to encourage a responsive local government that will fix this.

I mean, if you want to find places of filth, you can find places that have been mired in poverty in Central and South America for a very long time and lifted out of it only by the engine of human ingenuity. I don't see this as competing ideas and I am suspect of somebody who did it. If you want to see a place that has actually lost ground

that's more polluted now than it used to be, go to Fidel Castro's Cuba. Go there to see buildings crumbling and pipes, lead pipes corroding and poisoning the water. And who's the pope making merry with? Fidel Castro's Cuba. Oh, dear. Go ahead, Rob. What about you Catholics?

Whenever you bring up this pope, all the Catholics I know say, well, he's a Jesuit, you know. He's practically an Episcopalian. Yeah, maybe the next one will be a Knights Templar who will show up with a sword. Well, that would be at least he's got some, you know, got some principles. But I think with the filth, the world encrusted with filth or piled high with filth, I mean, he sort of is true culturally if you, you know. Yes, yes, but he wasn't making that point. He wasn't. As I I mean, he sort of is true culturally, if you – Yes. Yes, but he wasn't making that point.

He wasn't talking about an accretion of moral depravity that's heaped around our ankles every time we turn on the television set, unless, of course, it's the product of a Rob Long production. I know he was very specific. And that would be interesting. I mean, that would be an interesting good debate to have about the effects of popular culture, which I think are probably more of an impact on the way societies develop than whether or not the temperature incrementally ticks up by 1.1 degree.

Well, but certainly I think popular culture has this, or at least I should say contemporary culture, that we live in an era now in which there are no buffers to the stimulus that – or the stimuli that come in. And so people – this is what I was talking about at the beginning. The freakouts that occur are freakout because people react instantly to things that we are – kind of like a viral infection. These little moments that happen around the world or someone's idiotic viewpoint is broadcast instantly around the globe with all the sort of new technology we have. And we've created the same kind of contagion you had with a bunch of bad loans being written for the financial business or one crazy antibiotic-resistant virus in some rural area in Africa or China

making its way to a metropolitan European Western city in 36 hours, it's the same thing as some idiot tweeting something or reading something or putting up something on a website and some other idiot reading it then gets some kind of crazy notion to go and kill some people. There is this idea that we're almost too close to each other. We're too proximate. We haven't yet built up the buffers that we need to, as the kids say, chill. I understand. But perhaps one fears that if this pope did indeed say that we need to take time away from the pernicious flood of popular culture and other media and engage in meditation, that he'd bring David Lynch on the stage then to teach us

about TM or something like that, or perhaps Jerry Seinfeld, who's also a devotee. You never know with this guy. Yeah, well, you never know, but that would be, I think that would be an improvement. Yeah, it might. But then on the other hand, you know, what you just said, Rob, I, I, I, I, I, I disagree. And I think you're a stupid, you're a stupid poopy head for saying so. Stupid, stupid poopy head. And if that doesn't sound to you like a very good way to argue, it's not.

If you'd like to argue rationally, that's where you go to thegreatcourses.com. And thegreatcourses.com slash ricochet is where you'll get up to 80% off for whatever you... This is a home run day for James.

Whoa! You need to go there, folks. We need to have Richard Epstein on every podcast because you bring the a-game when richard's on well it it it is sort of like walking up to niagara with a cork that's all like i say i've earned i've earned my keep and I've earned a good rest as well. And I'll take it on a Casper mattress. Thank you very much.

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in this, the world of filth. That's casper.com slash ricochet and thegreatcourses.com slash ricochet. And of course, Ricochet itself. Ricochet.com where you should go. Sign up. Join up. Join in the most... Here, here. You like this? That's what we are. And we're happy that you've

joined and we're happy that you're listening. See you next week, guys. And everybody else, we'll see you at the comments at RigorShake 2.0. Next week. Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning. Nothing could be sweeter than my sweetie when I meet her in the morning. Where the morning glories twine around the door. Whispering pretty stories I'd like to hear once more Strolling with my girly where the dew is pearly early in the morning

Butterflies all flutter up and kiss each little buttercup at dawning If I had a last laugh for only a day I'd make a wish and here's what I'd say Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina In the morning Ricochet! Join the conversation. Strolling with my girly Where the dew is pearly in the morning Butterflies all flutter up and kiss each little buttercup at dawning If I had a Latin slam for only a day, I'd make a wish and...