AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

REBUILDING LIBERTY WITHOUT PERMISSION: A CONVERSATION WITH CHARLES MURRAY

MODERATOR: JONAH GOLDBERG, AEI

DISCUSSANT: CHARLES MURRAY, AEI

6:00 PM – 7:30 PM THURSDAY, MAY 14, 2015

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/rebuilding-liberty-without-permission-a- conversation-with-charles-murray/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM

JONAH GOLDBERG: Good evening. I know that guy. Good evening. This is Charles Murray. He’s the W. H. Brady scholar here at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s the author of a great many books that have sparked national conversations and actually changed laws. He’s arguably the most consequential social scientist alive today. I put the word “arguably” in there because I know there’re some people in this room who would disagree – (laughter) – and would like to argue it.

And I’m Jonah Goldberg. I’m basically here because I was lied to about there being an open bar. (Laughter.) So I guess sort of like a Pegasus, I’m going to try to have a very light footprint for a creature so large– because everyone’s here basically to see Charles. And to the extent anyone’s here to see me, it’s for the same reasons I go to NASCAR – to see someone spectacularly crash.

So I’ll try to be somewhere between Brian Lamb and William F. Buckley. I don’t want to just sort of disappear into the woodwork like Brian Lamb and I don’t want to veer into excessive sesquipedalianism – (laughter) – like my old boss. And we’re going to figure it out from there.

My first question is a question I love when I’m on a book tour and it is shocking, shocking how rarely it is asked. Charles, what’s your book about? (Laughter.)

CHARLES MURRAY: I think it shows the self-confidence I have gained with advanced age that I’m willing to put you on the same stage with me. (Laughter.) Because I know when Goldberg talks, I just want to sit back and listen to him. But I will tell you what the book’s about. It is entitled “Rebuilding Liberty without Permission” because that is the theme.

I thought people would say they couldn’t hear me, but that’s not what they were saying out there. “Rebuilding Liberty without Permission” because that is the ultimate theme. This is not a book addressed across the aisle as most of my books are, where I try to engage people from a wide range of political views with my argument. Rather, I am saying to people who, like me, are devoted to limited government, how can we restore, at least to some degree, the freedom that has been lost.

The twin premises of the book are, first, a very depressing one, that the American project, as it was originally conceived is effectively dead. By the American project, I mean the idea that people could be allowed to live their lives as they see fit, as long as the accord the same freedom to everyone else, and the function of the government is to provide a peaceful setting for those endeavors and otherwise to stand aside. That is essentially gone.

We are still free in the same sense that Norwegians are free, that Germans are free, that Italians are free. And that’s no small thing, but the – that wasn’t what we meant by land of the free, what we meant was that Americans lived under a presumption of freedom and a presumption that as long as they weren’t hurting anybody else, they could do pretty much as they pleased. And that’s gone. We now live under a presumption that we need permission. A lot of it is from the state and local levels, a very great deal of it is from the federal level. So that’s the first premise.

The second premise is that opportunities are opening for restoring the American project in a new incarnation. It won’t be the same, but we can do a lot to once again become the land of the free in an important way.

I feel that I had to start the book by making the case that the normal political process can’t do what I want to do because the book is about systematic civil disobedience and how it can be mounted. And civil disobedience is a serious thing. The rule of law is the foundation of civilization. You shouldn’t go around breaking the law knowingly unless you have a really good reason to do it. And I spent five chapters opening the book in which I make that case. And they go like this, the Constitution is broken beyond repair. It doesn’t make any difference if we get nine Clarence Thomases on the Supreme Court or nine Antonin Scalias because their hands are tied by a very untouchable constraint.

Namely, if they were to try to reverse the decisions of 1938 to 1943 that fundamentally changed the interpretation of key phrases in the Constitution, general welfare, the Commerce Clause, the rules under which the regulatory state can make up regulations, if they tried to change those, 90 percent of what the federal government does today would suddenly be unconstitutional. No Supreme Court can do that. It would never be enforced by a president. It would be the end of the Supreme Court.

Second chapter, we live under an increasingly lawless legal system. I don’t use the word “lawless” carelessly. At ground level, where we actually live from day to day, all sorts of things that go on do not correspond to our common sense notions of the rule of law, an objective set of things that reasonable people agree we must do. Rather, it corresponds to a complex gain that bears little resemblance to the rule of law traditionally construed.

Third chapter is the extra legal nature of the entire regulatory state. I bet a lot of people in this room are as ignorant as I was when I started the book. I was amazingly ignorant about how the regulatory state works. It essentially is as if the police force were empowered to create laws and then to enforce them and to pick the judges and to pick the Court of Appeals. And that’s pretty much the way the regulatory state operates. And they make up these regulations independently of any specific mandate from Congress, except we want fair regulations. We want clean air. We want clean water.

Fourth chapter, the systemic corruption of the federal government. All of these things, by the way, I’m giving you a telegraphic of one or two-liner and then Jonah will grill me later in more detail where he feels most interested.

Short statement here is not that we have more dishonest legislators than we used to have, but if you look at operationally the way Washington goes about its business, it is indistinguishable from the way a kleptocracy operates. Strong statement, I’ll leave it there.

And finally, I get into the reasons that Mancur Olson elucidated, the famous economist Mancur Olson, about the sclerosis that is endemic in advanced welfare states. So that being established, basically in the first five chapters I’m saying there is no hope of rolling back government through the normal political process. You can get better policies on education. You can get better policies on tax policy, on, you know, discrete policy issues. You can’t roll things back.

So that’s when I get to the point of the whole book. Let’s have systematic civil disobedience. By systematic, I mean that you don’t just ignore the rules you don’t like, but rather you go through a pretty complex process, again, one we can discuss during the questions, whereby you say, you know, here are certain kinds of regulations you can ignore. You can, are permitted to ignore.

Let me tell you how the book came to be written because it’s a good illustration of what animated me. My wife and I have a friend who runs a business – I’m not going to go into any more detail than that. The point is he was being harassed by the regulatory state and fined large amounts of money because he was not complying with the various regulations that it was impossible for him to comply with. He was being given competing instructions from the government. And he finally said, I’m going to fight this in court. And the bureaucrat to whom he was talking said, try that and we will put you out of business.

Well, when I heard that, as my wife will testify, I was so angry that I actually told her, I don’t want to hear any more of this because I just can’t stand it. And then, all at once, I had, first, an image in my mind. I’m not making this up. This is what really happened. I had an image – I think it was on a horse in my original image. A guy in pinstripe suit on a horse comes out of nowhere, taps the bureaucrat on the shoulder, and says, we are taking this man’s case. We are going to litigate it to the max, even though he’s technically guilty of the violation. But in the course of you having to demonstrate that, you’re going to wish you’d never taken this on because we’re also going to publicize it in ways which will embarrass your superiors and you. And at the end of the whole thing, when you finally levy a fine on him, we’re going to reimburse it.

This satisfied me a great deal, just thinking of this. (Laughter.) And then I said, then I said, you can write a book. And so ultimately, I end up writing this book as a way of saying we could systematically do this. If you had a foundation with a couple of hundred million dollars – I’m not talking a little foundation – a place like Institute for Justice or the Pacific Legal Foundation or Competitive Enterprise Institute do wonderful work in litigation, but they are doing selective cases, where they are trying to have precedents that affect whole classes of cases. I’m talking about pouring sugar into the government’s gas tank.

That – I want to overload the regulatory enforcement apparatus and I will simply assert right now, that apparatus is not nearly as daunting as you think it is. It’s daunting when it’s directed against the single citizen. It’s not an apparatus that can cope with a whole lot of challenges to it. The only way the regulatory state works is by getting overwhelmingly voluntary compliance, so that when the regulatory agency says, you were in violation of such and such, you owe $7,500, any smart business person or smart home owner writes a check knowing that they can’t afford to fight it. And I want to create incentives whereby the regulatory state must back off.

And I will summarize that in term of an analogy. Right now, with regard to the regulatory state, we are in the position of somebody driving along the highway at 71 miles an hour when the speed limit is 65 and it’s late at night. And it’s a deserted stretch of highway. We can easily get stopped by a state trooper doing that. You know, he may be bored. He may have his quota of tickets to fill and he’ll do it. The very next morning, as we’re driving along a busy stretch of the interstate at 71 miles an hour, six miles over the speed limit, you’re not going to get stopped because the whole flow of traffic is going 71 miles an hour.

The troopers only stop people who are driving crazy fast, which occasionally is me. But they only stop you when you’re driving crazy fast or you’re driving erratically. And they enforce the law when something really truly bad has happened. That’s the way I want the regulatory state to function. I want them to adopt a “no harm, no foul” regulatory philosophy, whereby they only go after people who’ve actually done something that’s wrong in some genuine sense.

If you did nothing more than that, you would lift a huge regulatory fear that we all have to live under. So we all end up trying to comply with OSHA’s rules or EPA’s rules even though we know the chances they are going to inspect us are relatively small because we can’t take the chance.

OK, Jonah opened up with the first question and I warned him in advance, the first answer is going to be a lot longer than the others. But that is essentially what the book’s about. I have more chapters after that, but we can get into that in the course of the discussion.

MR. GOLDBERG: OK, great. So first of all, I want to say that like whatever you think of Charles’s Madison project, which is this idea of this Institute for Justice on steroids. I mean, steroids doesn’t even cover it. It’s more like it was exposed to gamma radiation and the Hulk can run around the countryside smashing things. I would say that the first third – having read a lot of these sort of summaries of what went wrong with the Constitution, how we lost the Constitution and all the rest, I can’t recall a better, more accessible, and comprehensive summary of how the Constitution of the Founders was undermined during the progressive era and the New Deal. And it’s really very well done. And we can get into that. And I’m sure – hopefully there are some lawyers here who will tell me that, no, no, the Constitution can’t be saved without the Madison project, but I’ll leave that for the legal eagles in the group.

The first thing that comes to mind when you talk about the Madison, this idea of selective civil disobedience is the scene you often see in a lot of Westerns, where you see a crowd of thugs and the one good marshal, right, and they all say – and the leader of thugs says, he’s only got a six-shooter and there’re 11 of us. We can take him. And then, the marshal always says, yeah, but who wants to be the first to die? How are you going to find people who are going to be willing to be thrown in jail, which is the very possible – maybe some might argue probable outcome of this strategy? And what are you going to do when the administrative state or the regulatory state, as you call it, refuses to lie down and keeps throwing people in jail if – and it doesn’t bend? I mean, what is your tolerance level for mass incarceration of small businessmen and florists and all the rest?

MR. MURRAY: The Leninist part of me says that would be great. (Laughter.) Because – but in more practical terms, an awful lot of these challenges are of regulations that do not rise to the level of jail being a legitimate threat. I’m talking about – I’ll give a couple of examples that I have in the book. This is a brick company. And by the way, I should footnote here Philip Howard, who’s written some wonderful books, “The Death of Common Sense” I think is the one this comes from. He has a recent one that’s come out called “The Rule of Nobody,” which is also sensational.

Anyway, you’ve got a brick company. And they are being fined – and there’re just a couple of them. There is – they have railings, but – who are in exposed places, you know, above the shop floor, but their railings are only 40 inches high instead of 42 inches high. That’s 7,500 bucks. They fail to have a sign saying “poison” on a shed. The shed contained beach sand. But in the list of poisonous substances, OSHA, in its infinite wisdom, has decided beach sand is a poison because in certain grinding operations, it can cause, perhaps, certain kinds of respiratory problems, none of which apply to the brick company.

And they are told to replace their entire conveyor belt system, so it is – has an automatic shut off at many thousand dollars of cost, even though the conveyor belt is already partitioned off from access to people and there’s no problem to be done. Now, OSHA is not going to try for jail time if people ignore those regulations. And part of the Madison Fund that I’m talking about, a key part of it is that it will reimburse people who are fined. And my friend Steve Williams, judge emeritus on the Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, who’s not here tonight, but was really helpful, he – I asked him is that legal to reimburse people for these? And he got back to me with not always is not going to be, but a lot of – it will have to be litigated, but most of the time it is legal to reimburse these things.

So people can be made whole in terms of that. They are not – they are going to have the hassle of sort of having this legal action done on their behalf, and that’s not trivial. But they’re not going to end up with a bill.

MR. GOLDBERG: But what if, I mean, so if I have my 40-inch railing, which obviously a sign of anarchy, and the state says I have to raise it to 42 inches. They fine me. I was under the impression that the fine was also in conjunction with an order to raise it two inches.

MR. MURRAY: Yeah.

MR. GOLDBERG: I refuse to raise it two inches, and they say, dude, you’ve really got to raise this two inches, and I keep refusing. Don’t at some point men with guns come to my house and say, you’re in trouble?

MR. MURRAY: In all seriousness, to the extent that that starts to happen, point number one, one would expect that there is somebody within OSHA who says, we don’t want to go there. We just want to – we’re just going to pretend this is – we’re going to pretend that they changed it to 42 inches. We don’t want to make our stand with this kind of case. I would argue that is the plausible thing that will happen an awful lot of the time.

However, let’s go to the ultimate aspect of your question, do you have to have people who are willing to go to jail if it comes to that? And the answer is yes, you do. Then, the question is do we have such people? I don’t know for sure that the answer is yes. I get the sense that there are. The certainty of jail, that’s a tougher thing. The possibility of jail, I think there’re a lot of people who are willing to do that. We will find out, I suppose, but the degree of anger out there, real anger at the way the government is getting in their face when the government doesn’t have any business doing there, it’s real. You have a lot of really pissed off people.

MR. GOLDBERG: Yeah, I run into them all the time. So but why – let me ask – is it to a certain extent this call for civil disobedience – and you know, obviously, my heart is with you. I’m trying to bring around my head. But isn’t it to a certain extent this is less fighting back and more a sort of sign of surrender on democracy? I mean, we have lots of laws on the books that were, I would dare say even more tyrannical and oppressive than the 42-inch railing law or the sand shed poison law, things like Jim Crow, with slavery, but that’s a bad example because it was a war to fix that. But we had, you know, Women’s Suffrage movement, we had all sorts of movements to remove bad, in some cases evil laws by arousing mass democracy. Why the immediate shortcut to getting, you know, pizza parlor owners and lawyers to join hands and saying we shall overcome? I mean, why can’t we do it as a mass democratic movement?

MR. MURRAY: Here we get to the chapters four and five on the systemic corruption of the process and the sclerosis of democracy. A lot of you probably in the room have heard of Mancur Olson. He had – he wrote a pair of seminal books, “The Logic of Collective Action,” back in the 1960s. He followed that up with – I think it’s “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” Putting it real quickly, this is something that is inherent in advanced societies. And he uses the sugar subsidy as an example. The sugar subsidy is absolutely ridiculous. The Americans pay twice the world price for sugar in order to placate a small number of sugar growers.

We have used democracy to try to get rid of the sugar subsidy a whole bunch of times. And in fact, most recently, a couple of years ago, you initially get a vote to do so, but the fact is the sugar growers really, really care about preserving the sugar subsidy. And they are willing to reward legislators who are with them and punish those who don’t, whereas the rest of the country cannot be mobilized because our interest in getting rid of the sugar subsidy is just too diffuse.

Well, you multiply that kind of asymmetry between people who really care about holding on to their special interest and the very large group of people that have very diffuse reason for not liking it, and you end up with the kind of gridlock we have now. So that rolling back large chunks of the federal regulatory code would involve Congress saying we are going to have a grand solution that steps on the toes of 5,000 of our largest campaign contributors. That’s not going to happen.

There is – I don’t ever say this as explicitly in the book as I’m going to try to say it now, there is a sense in which we are stuck with this blob, called the federal government, which apart from the legitimate functions that it’d better do well is basically a dead weight on us that we are learning to live with. And the optimistic part of the last part of the book is basically not that we’re going to reform it, it’s that we’re going to work around it. That’s a very pessimistic statement, but the reason I spend those first five chapters trying to destroy your hope, I’m sorry that you’ve got through them with a shred of optimism left. I did my best. (Laughter.)

MR. GOLDBERG: Well, my motto is cheer up for the worse is yet to come. As you heard because you’ve heard me talk about it a bunch of times, I’m sort of fascinated with Joseph Schumpeter’s understanding of the new class, which, you know, which Irving Kristol wrote a great deal about as well, which (borrowed ?) from James Burnham and the managerial revolution. And the basic gist of it is that the problem with intellectual – the problem – a lot of the problems that – (inaudible) – America are the product of affluence, that you have rich rubber barons. You don’t get much education. They create vast amounts of wealth. And then, as a hedge against failure, they overeducate their kids. Their overeducated kids become lawyers. Maybe the next generation, they become intellectuals. I think Warren Buffett’s son is a poet. (Laughter.)

And the ultimate problem that you get is that you have a class of people who basically become the storytellers of the civilization. And they become in effect this – what Burnham called the managerial class – this – (inaudible) – group of intellectuals, storytellers, lawyers, educators, social workers, who have glommed on to the administrative state that comes out of Woodrow Wilson and all that. And they’re in effect a priesthood. And their close cousins, I would argue, are the bureaucrats. They see their interest alone –

MR. MURRAY: They’re apparatchiks.

MR. GOLDBERG: Right. They’re almost perfectly stated apparatchiks of the state. And the intellectual classes see themselves as beneficiaries and kindred spirits of these guys. And so part of my concern is, you know, this idea that you’re going to drain the resources of these bureaucracies hinges on this idea that their concern is overwhelmingly with financial resources and limited manpower and all of the rest. When I think the human nature is much more inclined to care about status and power. And the approach that you advocate, in many ways, is a – I mean, I think this is a fair description – is a silver bullet at the beast, right? I mean, you were trying to destroy this system.

And it seems to me that if they actually engage and take your argument seriously and this endeavor gets up and running, they will move hell and high water to kill it and to protect what is there. It’s because their interests are deeply bound up, not in maintaining the sugar subsidy, but in their divine right to be the arbiters of what kind of civilization we’re in, the kind of people who get the side of the story of our culture, who get to tell us what the role of government.

And so it’s not obvious to me that you can actually just gum up the works of these bureaucracies if they actually understand the threat that you’re trying to pose. And you put it all in writing. (Laughter.)

MR. MURRAY: Well, let’s go back to the origins of when this administrative state was looked upon with great hope and optimism. And by the way, “Liberal Fascism,” which is Jonah’s book was for me a major source in understanding the progressive era. And I got insights from that I had never had before. And one of the insights is this. I always thought of the progressive era as being a kind of good government, you know. You get rid of the bad meat packers and you have more direct democracy. And it was in part that. But there was also this strain of which Woodrow Wilson was a passionate advocate, which drew from the Germans, and said, experts, we now have this thing we’ve never known before in history. We have experts who know the truth, the objective truth about how to solve certain problems. And what we do is we give them a buffer from the political messy stuff, so they can make these fair, disinterested decisions, free from checks and balances.

I’m not putting words into Woodrow Wilson’s mouth. I’m virtually quoting him, drawing quotes that Jonah had in the book. Well, the initial – if you had seen something like the Forest Service, where you actually did have experts in forestry who actually did for some years do a lot better job of managing the nation’s forests, and that kind of task was suited for, for experts. We have degenerated a long way from that. So now you have what I agree is the priesthood. And these are the people in academia. They are the people in journalism, a great deal. They really do exist. But their apparatchiks are a different kind of animal.

There’s a very good book called “A Government Ill Executed” by a guy named Light. Does anybody in the audience – yeah, yeah Paul Light. Where he – it’s an analysis, a very dispassionate, nonpartisan analysis of what it’s like in the federal bureaucracy. And the answer is you have people who really like their job security and people who are very happy with their pay because if you’re not talking about the top levels of the bureaucracy, people in the bureaucracy get really well paid. So they’re like that and in every other way they’re deeply demoralized bunch.

And so it’s not the case that given the kind of challenges they’re going to be given by my lawyers in the Madison Fund that these guys are going to be saying, we will work 80 hours a week as long as it takes to fight back this. You want to people that want to put in their eight hours max with as little effort as possible and are not the shock troops that the priesthood needs to defend themselves.

It’s a case – well, let me just give you a few nuts and bolts, so you know I’m not blowing smoke when I say that the enforcement capability isn’t that great. Let’s go back to OSHA again, which is one of the best-known offenders. OSHA, even when you add in the state level inspectors that collaborate with it, you’re talking about 2,200 inspectors and you’re talking about eight million workplaces over which they have responsibilities. So this is not – this is not a huge enforcement capability. You will have to bring hundreds of cases to start to get them overloaded, but you aren’t going to have to bring tens of thousands of cases. And furthermore, if the Madison Fund does its job right, it’s going to be kind of the same thing that the regulatory agencies do now.

Now, the regulatory agencies hit you with your 7,500-buck fine and you write the check because you don’t want to get involved. All at once, you’re putting the bureaucrat in exactly that same position. He’s brought a violation of a regulation and he wants a compliance order and, all at once, he hears the Madison Fund is going to take this guy’s case. And he has a real incentive at that point to say, “Well, maybe not,” and back off and so forth.

So you do not have the priesthood would be trying – whipping, they’ll be whipping the apparatchiks fiercely as the troika tries to go through the snow, but I think I’m mixing up my metaphors here. (Laughter.) But –

MR. GOLDBERG: I just like the whipping the apparatchiks part, so you had me there. (Laughter.)

MR. MURRAY: But the point is that this is not a highly motivated opponent. On the contrary, it’s a very demoralized opponent in most of these agencies.

MR. GOLDBERG: Just for those of you who know, we will going to have Charles Murray Bingo cards made up and Mancur Olson was going to be on there and cognitive stratification, which we haven’t hit yet, but whipping the apparatchiks, that really should be put on there. (Laughter.)

We want to move to Q&A in just a little bit, but you know, I understand that as a guy who wrote a wonderful book called “What It Means to Be a Libertarian,” this is probably not a devastating critique. But isn’t this profoundly unconservative, right? And I think that has a couple of implications. One is philosophical. And a colleague of mine reminded me of the speech that Abraham Lincoln, admittedly who was a lawyer, gave at the Lyceum, when he was a young lawyer, he said, let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity swear by the blood of the revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country and never to tolerate their violation by others. Let reverence for the laws become a political religion of the nation. Bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible. Still, while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed because reverence for the Constitution and its laws is indispensable for preserving our political institutions in retaining the attachment of the citizens.

So there’s a philosophical problem, right? There’s also the political problem. While I am sure there are hotbeds of hot-blooded libertarians who love this idea, and I’m sure there are hotbeds of conservatives who love this idea, the average conservative voter is actually pretty conservative. And you tell them, oh, we’re going to gin up this big organization to foment lawbreaking and civil disobedience. It’s not entirely clear to me that you’re going to get the kind of public democratic support that you kind of still need, even if you’re going to do this through the courts. So take your pick on either of those.

MR. MURRAY: Well, the first point is you’re right. It’s very unconservative. The violation of laws is momentous. I’m happy to say that Bea Kristol is in the audience today and I sent her a copy of the book a few days ago. And the inscription was to Bea with some trepidation, Charles. Because I wasn’t at all – and at this very moment – I’m going to find out after the presentation – I’m not at all sure that Professor Kristol is going to be happy with that very aspect of it.

MR. GOLDBERG: It’s too late to call back the book, though.

MR. MURRAY: It’s too late to call back the book, but let me also then go back from the Lyceum speech to another document that I’m not quoting exactly, but when I say that government should not be changed for light and transient reasons. And – but when governments betray their duty, as I’m now paraphrasing, it is – not only is it right, but the obligation of people to rise up against that government.

I feel it incumbent upon me to make the case that these are not light and transient reasons for taking this strategy, but that it is in fact true that the government we have now is so far removed from the government that commended Abraham Lincoln’s allegiance that we are justified in taking steps to change it.

So take your question seriously. I think we have an extremely serious problem that does not lend itself to a solution by anything else, except trying to take back some portion of the freedom, the God given freedom that has been taken from us.

MR. GOLDBERG: And on the political question? I mean, what if –

MR. MURRAY: Here’s my – it’s not a complete answer to your question, but I talk at great length about the criteria for deciding which laws can be ignored. For example, I say you can’t have civil disobedience for the tax code. The tax code’s terrible. That’s many unfairnesses, but principled civil disobedience with regards to the tax code is operationally indistinguishable from cheating on your taxes, so you can’t go that route.

But aside from all the specific criteria I lay out, I say over and above all is this rule that if this case that you’re defending, where the guy has ignored the regulation, gets publicity, an overwhelming majority of Americans who hear about it will be on the side of the defendant. So that is a calling rule. You only pick things where ordinary Americans see what the government is doing and saying, that’s really stupid or that’s really wrong.

MR. GOLDBERG: OK. I meant to bring this up earlier about the political class thing. I was talking about the rise of the new class in the intellectuals and the capacity for bureaucrats to get into mission creep. For some reason, I was reminded of the new head of NASA, early in the first Obama term, when he was asked what his number one priority was – and I know you wrote a book about NASA with your lovely wife, the Apollo program – his response was reaching out and building bridges with the Muslim world. (Laughter.)

MR. MURRAY: I know.

MR. GOLDBERG: Which –

MR. MURRAY: It’s hard to believe.

MR. GOLDBERG: – which it’s like out of the Onion. (Laughter.) But it is a great sign of how you can get – how the storytellers can corrupt the bureaucracy in all sorts of ways. I think I’m going to be incredibly disciplined and move this to the Q&A portion. We have about 20 minutes, which was the plan. My only request is that you make all of your statements in the form of a question. And we’ll have at it. Yes, Martin.

Q: Hi, I’m Martin Wooster. I work for many people. (Laughter.) First off, on the subject of Peter Buffett, let me just say, he isn’t just a poet, he’s a pop singer and writes sort of New Age pop psychology books about how awful it is to have too much money. Thank Rod McKuen. (Laughter.)

Mr. Murray, I’ve read you for 30 years. You’ve always had a dark view of the world.

MR. GOLDBERG: (Laughs.) Unlike you, Martin. (Laughter.)

Q: Say something that will cheer me up.

MR. MURRAY: I’d be happy to. Uber. (Laughter.) In Uber, we have the first of what will be many, many examples, many – we can’t even – who could imagine Uber 15 years ago – of ways in which we are going to have workarounds that stymie the overreaching state.

I assume almost everybody in the room knows how Uber works, OK, because it’s here in Washington, D.C., which is a classic case. Because Uber just came in and started operating, which is what it does. It doesn’t say, please let us in on your taxi monopoly that the City Council and taxing companies have set up. They just start operating and then the Council was against it, was going to get rid of it, until they realized Uber was already so popular there was a political price to be paid if they tried to get rid of it.

Uber also has deep pockets. So the government can’t go after Uber hoping just to overwhelm it with money because Uber’s got more money than any city government’s got. So that kind of thing is going to become increasingly prevalent. Remember what I said a few minutes ago, that you have this kind of lump. It’s dysfunctional. It’s incompetent in a lot of cases. We’re just going to work around it. That’s what I had in mind.

But the really optimistic thing for me is to think ahead 200 years. I know all about Keynes and what he says about the long run, but still, here’s my proposition to you. Two hundred years from now, the information technology revolution, which has transformed our live already, will have gone into realms we can’t possibly imagine. The amount of information that will be available to people is just going to be incredible.

Also, we will have learned all sorts of things about all sorts of other aspects of human nature, down to the genetic level, which is going to give – take away a lot of the stupidity of contemporary sociology departments. We’re going to be able to make much better social policy on the basis of here’s how human beings really flourish. Here’s how they really live happy lives.

It is – one other thing, we’re also going to be much, much richer. The fact is you don’t need limited government to have economic growth. And short of Soviet stupidity on the part of America’s leaders, which is not impossible, but not probably, we’re going to be vastly richer than we are now. It is inconceivable to me that 200 years from now we will still be thinking, you know, the way to live our lives is to have armies of bureaucrats enforcing minutely prescriptive rules about how we live our lives. I just don’t think that’s going to happen.

MR. GOLDBERG: You’ll be dead then, Martin, but still. (Laughter.) All the way in the back. Make the guys with the mike run.

Q: John Graham, National Center for Policy Analysis. I shouldn’t have identified myself because my question’s going to get me in trouble, but it’s about – I really respect your perspective, but I’m thinking about – I read National Review all the time, so I’m up to my eyeballs in the great gay wedding cake photographer catering wars. You seem to be in a position right now where you don’t have the ability to be civilly disobedient. Your ability to even civilly non-perform is stifled because they will come and provoke you when you’re minding your own business and crush you immediately for not performing according to what the government wants you to do or the – I’m just wondering your comment on that.

MR. MURRAY: Of course, the pizza guys – how many hundreds of thousands of dollars of contributions they’d gotten? There’s some civil society at work. And I’m not saying that’s going to happen every time. I actually – I actually refer to that in the book before a lot of these things had come up. A side effect of a lot of cases of civil disobedience in which ordinary people are obviously right and the government is obviously overreaching, I think would have a spillover effect. And what I would like that spillover effect to be that, once again, when somebody doesn’t want to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding, that the response of people is, well, it’s a free country, a phrase you don’t hear very often anymore.

I take your point about what’s going on now with the kind of ferocious suppression of free speech. I think that is approaching the same level that it would be if the government starts throwing people in jail for having railings two inches short. We are getting very close to a point where an awful lot of ordinary Americans are saying this is ridiculous. I’m kind of optimistic about this one, too.

MR. GOLDBERG: Erik in the back.

Q: Hi, Mr. Murray. Erik Townsend (sp).

MR. GOLDBERG: Please wait for a mike.

Q: Is it necessary to have civil disobedience that goes into lawbreaking? If you think of the criminal justice system, if everyone arrested demanded an actual trial, the system would collapse because it’s predicated on having some 90 percent or more settled through plea bargains. What if anyone were to require the bureaucracy to jump through every one of its own hoops as a way of exhausting it?

MR. MURRAY: That’s a very nice point. One of the things that’s very clear to me, I just had some people in talking to me about taking first steps toward organizing a real functioning Madison Fund. I have gotten a very surprising amount of emails already about people who are seriously interested in being committed to it. Well, one of the things that’s going to happen if we start thinking seriously about this are all sorts of additional strategies of exactly the kind you raised, where you’re going to have somebody advise, let’s say, my friend who wanted to fight it in court and was told it will ruin you. It may very well be that he can start getting advice that says, you know, you don’t actually have to spend a whole lot of lawyers. Here are steps a, b, c, and d you can take simply to require the government to file these forms and so forth that won’t really require you to do much of anything and are going to make them really irritated because it’s going to put a lot of work on them.

That’s the kind – I really want to start out this with a kind of Saul Alinsky development for libertarians, whereby we – and I will use the phrase again, all the ways in which we can pour sugar into the government’s gas tank when it is engaged in activities that are arbitrarily and capriciously interfering with our ability to live our lives as we see fit.

MR. GOLDBERG: What has Arthur Brooks done to AEI that Charles Murray describes himself as a Leninist – (laughter) – and sings praises to Saul Alinsky here at AEI? It’s terribly disturbing. Yes, sir.

Q: So what’s the end result of the Madison project is simply that – (off mic.) – stop enforcing arbitrary regulation or they just sort of whither up and die? Is it sort of – (inaudible) – functioning instead of consuming public resources? Or does it actually disappear?

MR. MURRAY: No, I’d assume that you still have exactly the number of people employed by the bureaucracies. You still have the same regulations on the books for that matter. But that a very large chunk of the federal code of regulations is known to be de facto unenforceable. And the regulatory agencies know if we go after this, the damn Madison Fund will come after us and say, yeah, we’re going to defend the guy and we don’t want to do that. You will simply have a whole lot of deterrence, but the apparatus, at least for a while, will remain in shape.

I will say that in the book I have a couple of subsequent steps whereby there are plausible changes in Supreme Court jurisprudence that would have a much more structural effect on the regulatory state. Those would be icing on the cake. The initial effects I have would leave the regulatory state in place in terms of its cost, manpower, and things like that.

MR. GOLDBERG: Yes, sir, over here. You can call on people if you have the –

MR. MURRAY: No, I’m enjoying having you do all this. It’s very restful to have you on the stage with me.

Q: So if I were a cunning government bureaucrat and I use a subjunctive, fortunately I’m not a government bureaucrat, but why wouldn’t I say, OK, you know what, I’m going to charge you for continuing violation of the 40-foot fence. You don’t have to replace it, but every day you’re in violation, I’m charging you $7,500 and I will happily accept the Madison Foundation’s check for that violation a year down the line. And so now what we have is hundreds of millions of dollars going from the conservative citizenry right into government coffers, where who knows what they’re going to do with it then. How do you consider that possibility?

MR. MURRAY: No. (Laughter.) It’s a very –

Q: You can acknowledge –

MR. MURRAY: You know what it reminds me of? What it reminds me of is the Sackett case that came up a few years ago. And the Sackett case, for those of you who don’t know, this is a family who wanted to build a house on two thirds of an acre that was sandwich between a row of lakefront houses and a paved road. And this two thirds of an acre was deemed to be wetlands and they were not allowed to build.

What the Sacketts won from the Supreme Court was the right to have their case heard without accumulating potential fines of millions of dollars because they were racking up at $65,000 a day or whatever. That was kind of similar, where the regulatory agency was putting – for a minor violation was putting the family at risk of utter financial ruin.

Now, you’ve raised an interesting strategy and if I were the Madison Fund, I think I would probably take that and make that my poster child, that here is this violation of a regulation which is very trivial and they are using the power of the government to try to extract this absolutely absurd amount of money. It’s a shakedown. And that’s – I’d go into public press with it because legally, maybe they could continue to do it, but I think it’s like throwing people in jail. The government, if it – to the extent it is overreacting, it’s creating more revolutionaries rather than fewer. Now, the Vietcong comes into it. (Laughter.) I really have – something’s happened to my sensibility, I think.

MR. GOLDBERG: Yeah, it’s all but certain. Mark back there.

MR. MURRAY: And we have –

(Cross talk.)

Q: First off, I want to say that I’ve already read the book and it’s excellent. And I really wanted to echo what Jonah said about how the first third of the book being just a tremendous explanation for what went wrong. I fully plan on having both my children read it as soon as they get to high school and are capable of understanding that. I think that alone will ensure that they have my politics.

But I wanted to ask you about one issue that you kind of dance around a bit in the book, which is civil service reform. It seems to me a lot of the problems of the regulatory state are directly tied to the fact that we have, you know, a million and a half federal bureaucrats in this area making 130 grand a year. But it also seems to me that there’s an actual political potential to do something about it that, you know, with the IRS scandal and all these other things happening, and plus when, you know, American citizens hear, you know, that these guys are literally making double the private sector average on these other things, there seems like there’d be real political potential to pit, you know, ordinary citizens against the federal bureaucracy, which they don’t like anyway. Have you considered that possibility?

MR. MURRAY: Well, in the second to the last chapter or the last chapter I think it is, I talk about ways in which there might be alliances across political divide for certain kinds of policies. And what I was thinking of especially was reconsideration of public service unions. And to me the big vulnerable point there is not so much the federal public service unions because that’s kind of invisible in everyday life, but think of all the cities where the potholes aren’t fixed, where the police cars are out of date or they aren’t well maintained, where schools don’t have enough textbooks and good ones, but they have cups that are making really good salaries and retiring after 20 years and teachers making really good salaries these days. You can make six figures as a teacher, by the way, in certain big city school systems. And in effect you’ve had public service unions which have been negotiating with the very people that they’ve elected through their political support, which means that they have extracted large amounts of money which is not available to fix potholes.

Seems to me that this has been – this is so obvious in so many cities that this is where the potential for public arousal is possible. And if you could get rid of public service unions, you could have huge reforms at the city and state levels. Going after the federal bureaucracy, it’s harder for me to see what is the visceral issue that you’re going to coalesce widespread political support around. Whereas potholes and bad schools, even though you’re spending $20,000 per student, those are pretty visceral.

MR. GOLDBERG: Yes, ma’am.

Q: Thanks for your presentation. I just wonder if you can address the people who lost their liberties with – first of all, you said, all regulation is created or made by other people, whether you are in a government or not in a government. So the government is sort of – only half of the picture. So I just wonder if you have those people who are doing wrong things, whether in regulatory agencies or government (commissioning?) and whether the people who does abuse the law or even violation of law or Constitution –

MR. MURRAY: There are government officials who abuse or violate the law.

Q: You don’t need the government officials, just the financial institutions who disobey the law, fraud, and crime against the normal citizens. So – (inaudible) – whether you have information or – (inaudible) – or comments on agency who are supposed to enforce the law. Supposed you file a complaint to the Department of Justice and they do nothing. Instead, they harass you. You know.

MR. MURRAY: OK, I’m not sure – I’m not sure I fully understand the question –

Q: You want me to rephrase it?

MR. MURRAY: Insofar as you’re talking about people breaking criminal law –

Q: People who break the criminal law is not the citizens. The citizens –

MR. MURRAY: Oh, you’re talking about noncitizens?

Q: No. They are all citizens, all the people, whether the citizen or anybody, it doesn’t mean – one person is harassed – (inaudible) – one person whose money was taken away or whose house was taken away by financial institution or by the IRS. They’re related to that. So when a citizen who complains to DOJ or housing agencies, they do nothing. Instead, they harass you.

MR. MURRAY: I’m afraid, ma’am, you’re talking about specific problems that you may well encounter, but I’m sorry, I can’t speak to those usefully, OK?

Q: But I just wonder if you know that information, that’s all. All I had – (inaudible) – is that whether the Department of Justice has information on how many complaint they’ve filed.

MR. MURRAY: No, I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.

MR. GOLDBERG: All the way in the back, back there. Yeah.

Q: So thank you very much for your book and for this talk. It’s been very interesting. So my question relates to kind of trying to understanding your own mind. What is the – is there a relative gravity of the offenses committed by overly intrusive local ordinances or state level versus federal level? So I’m just wondering that – so often between conservatives and libertarians, we have debates about is federalism a good thing always because you can have horrible regulation and laws on the state level, on a local level, but conservatives tend to have a bit more respect usually for federalism and how we can give more license on the local and state level.

So I’m wondering in this pursuit of trying to get rid of overly intrusive laws and regulations, do you see the federal government as being the larger offender and do you think values of federalism and the comparative value between a very local and accountable institution like a school board of something having power of your lives, versus somebody in Washington. Does that play into your thinking as far as where we should have a targeted effort?

MR. MURRAY: When you’ve got two minutes to go, you always get a question like that which is incredibly complicated. Great question. Real quickly. The rationale for an awful lot of federal supremacy over states regulation has been the prevention of local tyrannies. So that the federal government was able to intervene when you had Jim Crow, when you had lynchings, when you had – or when you had a company town in which people were being abused. That was always for me the weakness of localities that you could have local tyrannies operating with impunity. Short statement here is that is completely obsolete, that there is nothing that the local television news station relishes more than a corrupt official or a corrupt company or something. They go about and do an exposé of. We have reached an information age, which, among other things, has pretty much obviated a lot of that function of federal supremacy.

Second short point is that whereas there are really onerous regulations at the state and local levels, the federal government has never shown any capacity or interest whatsoever as serving as the protectors of the population against those onerous regulations and so forth. And so in that sense, I don’t see – I don’t see a danger in federalism in the sense that you lose anything good that the government’s been doing with regard to holding back bad local regulation, which does not mean that local regulation should not be just as a subject to the kind civil disobedience is to federal regulation.

MR. GOLDBERG: Do you want to wrap it or do you want to do one more?

MR. MURRAY: I think that probably we kept people for an hour and it’s dinner time and –

MR. GOLDBERG: I want to thank you all for coming. I want to thank Charles. And there will be a book signing out this way, I believe.

CAROLINE KITCHENS: It’ll be right here. So Dr. Murray is going to stay to sign a few books if everyone could just get in a single file line right here, we’ll put a table right in front of him. And wine and cheese are available.

MR. GOLDBERG: And that’s Caroline Kitchens, who both Charles and I follow obediently, So thank you all very much. (Applause.)

MR. MURRAY: That was fun.

(END)