Speaker 1: Well whiskey, come and take my pay the money. They
Speaker 1: Oh why.
Speaker 2: Why think alone when you can drink it all in
Speaker 2: with Ricochet's three Whiskey Happy Hour, join your bartenders, Steve Hayward,
Speaker 2: John U and the International Woman of Mystery, Lucretia.
Speaker 1: Where this laps it up? And David, ain't you easy
Speaker 1: on the show taps? Gotta give me and let.
Speaker 2: That whiskey flo It's the three whiskey Happy Hour, but
Speaker 2: only two whiskeys on hand at the moment because John
Speaker 2: U is away today. So for the first part of
Speaker 2: today's episode, it's just me and Lucretia. We're gonna kick
Speaker 2: around some news and then we're gonna have a very
Speaker 2: special guest taking John's place. And oh my god, I'll
Speaker 2: just say that for now as a placeholder, But can I.
Speaker 3: Just tell everybody that here we are. We're actually in
Speaker 3: John's office at his underground bunker in Berkeley. It's actually
Speaker 3: not It's got a beautiful view of everywhere from a
Speaker 3: high high spot. But I'm steering here at his bottle
Speaker 3: of fifteen year old Glenn Livit. But we have to
Speaker 3: go teach a class, so I'm I am not imbibing
Speaker 3: in John's without permission. In John's fifteen year old Glenn livit.
Speaker 2: Well, we could come at the end of the day
Speaker 2: if we wanted, except we have to take our special guests.
Speaker 3: Buying it myself. It just happens to be here right now, true,
Speaker 3: really use it.
Speaker 2: Yes, we're here, actually, you know, deep behind the enemy lines,
Speaker 2: teaching a class on natural law and constitutional interpretation, supposedly.
Speaker 3: Property law and property rights.
Speaker 2: Right, okay, well, you know, we'll we'll we'll reveal all
Speaker 2: very shortly. But as we are, we were in class
Speaker 2: all morning and during breaks, and you know, checking social
Speaker 2: media afterwards, we realize that the world is not quite
Speaker 2: literally blowing up, and Washington is because of this very
Speaker 2: dramatic public in what do you say, public blow up
Speaker 2: between Trump and Vice President Vance and Zelenski at the
Speaker 2: White House. And I haven't caught up the whole thing,
Speaker 2: but I'm seeing some very interesting things on social media,
Speaker 2: both about A what happened and B what it means.
Speaker 4: And I think you have too, Ucretia.
Speaker 3: I have, and I'm one of the things that I
Speaker 3: think I reposted. I don't think I was clever enough
Speaker 3: to come up with this on my own, but it
Speaker 3: was basically the point that watch watch who cheers for Zelenski,
Speaker 3: and watch who cheers for Trump? And you will know
Speaker 3: everything you need to know about who's a deep state corrupt.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of adjectives, my kind of adjectives
Speaker 3: that I use in private, not as much on the
Speaker 3: three whiskey happy Hour, but that they were basically the
Speaker 3: corrupt pigs feeding at the corrupt public trough. Along with
Speaker 3: that diminutive little dictator Vogue dictator in his ugly stupid
Speaker 3: T shirts or whatever it is he thinks he's wearing.
Speaker 3: He could have had the decency to show up at
Speaker 3: the White House in the Oval Office wearing a suit.
Speaker 3: I saw somebody. Mark hem Way actually mentioned that, you know,
Speaker 3: he thinks anybody who goes to the Oval Office should
Speaker 3: wear a suit, and that goes for Elon Musk too.
Speaker 3: But here's my argument. Do you remember, Steve, a few
Speaker 3: years back, we went to a black tie affair and
Speaker 3: I think I think you were there. It was in
Speaker 3: NEWPORTA or somewhere like that, and we sat next to
Speaker 3: a lovely, absolutely lovely, charming, elderly gentleman who had invented
Speaker 3: some a very very important medical device. It is very
Speaker 3: has been, you know, very salutary, and you know is
Speaker 3: now a big philanthropist and was a donor there. And
Speaker 3: he came in chinos and a hoodie. And you know what,
Speaker 3: he can do that. And I say, Elon Musk can
Speaker 3: show up like that to the to the Oval Office,
Speaker 3: but Zelensky, the little scum that he is, cannot.
Speaker 4: Okay, So dress codes, okay, dress coats to the old Office.
Speaker 2: I'm down for that, can I One thing you pointed
Speaker 2: out to me is that and I've seen this other
Speaker 2: people on Twitter point this out.
Speaker 4: That apparently a lot of Democrats and you.
Speaker 2: Know, Victorian Newland and all the usual suspects. We're all
Speaker 2: telling Zelenski, don't be bullied by Trump. You should stand
Speaker 2: up to him, and and and so, first of all,
Speaker 2: I'm sure they probably meant behind closed doors. I don't know.
Speaker 2: One of the things that about this that makes it
Speaker 2: so extraordinary but also not extraordinary for Trump is that
Speaker 2: they let this argument play out with the whole world
Speaker 2: watching broadcast on live television, rather than having their sharp
Speaker 2: words behind closed doors, which is the way you would
Speaker 2: normally do it.
Speaker 4: And I think that is helpful to Trump.
Speaker 2: The second thing is think about that advice that Zelenski
Speaker 2: was given. It comes on the heels of two European
Speaker 2: leaders Sarkozy and then Kures Starmer making nice to Trump.
Speaker 4: Now they hate him. Well, I mean, I at.
Speaker 3: Least the public face of it was and Stummer did
Speaker 3: bring him the invitation to come back.
Speaker 2: Exactly they you know, I mean, who knows what they
Speaker 2: was said behind closed doors, but in public they were.
Speaker 4: They couldn't have been nicer and more flat.
Speaker 2: And I gather, well, okay, but look, I mean again,
Speaker 2: I gonna have to watch the whole thing. But supposedly, uh,
Speaker 2: Trump was trying to be gracious and gives a Lensky
Speaker 2: off rance, which Lensky didn't take. My bigger theme here
Speaker 2: and then I'll stop is I've been working in my
Speaker 2: mind for a while about how the Democratic Party. What's
Speaker 2: the old joke as Republicans are the stupid party. Well,
Speaker 2: Democrats are much stupider. Well, I can sort of go.
Speaker 4: Down the list. I mean, actually, let me go through
Speaker 4: this progression. It won't take very long.
Speaker 2: They hate Ralph Nader because they think he cost al
Speaker 2: Gore the election in two thousand. I say, okay, that's plausible.
Speaker 2: It might not be correct, but it's plausible who made
Speaker 2: Ralph Nader famous? Democrats? Did Jimmy Carter thought of putting
Speaker 2: him in his cabinet? Uh oh?
Speaker 4: Whenever.
Speaker 2: The rule around Washington the seventies was, if you want
Speaker 2: to get media attention for hearing, you invite Ralph Nader
Speaker 2: as a witness and the mediable.
Speaker 4: Well, they made him into the.
Speaker 2: Celebrity that he was, and they got bitten in the
Speaker 2: rear end by him in the two thousand election.
Speaker 4: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Speaker 2: You can say kind of the same thing in certain ways.
Speaker 2: I could go down the list. Joe Biden is the
Speaker 2: biggest blunder, right. They foisted Joe Biden on us, wouldn't
Speaker 2: push him out, and now, of course they bitterly regret it,
Speaker 2: and the hatred towards Joe Biden is only going to
Speaker 2: grow as time goes on.
Speaker 4: I love all this.
Speaker 2: And now a bunch of leading Democratic thinkers told Zelensky, oh,
Speaker 2: you shouldn't let Trump bully you should stand up to him. Well,
Speaker 2: not like that, I mean, regardless of the merits of
Speaker 2: the whole matter, whatever you think, that was absolutely idiotic
Speaker 2: for him to have done.
Speaker 3: Okay, so Steve won't.
Speaker 4: Like this because I'm a squish.
Speaker 3: I no, no, no, because she's a lovely woman and
Speaker 3: I like everything else about her. But I like the
Speaker 3: rest of the New York posts. Their support for Ukraine
Speaker 3: has been unthinking and you know that. Yeah, they really
Speaker 3: do have a Ukrainian flag on their front page, for
Speaker 3: God's sake. And they also publicly came out yesterday telling Zelensky,
Speaker 3: you need to get up there and push Trump. And
Speaker 3: the message to Trump was the American people are are
Speaker 3: strongly in favor of a continued war in Ukraine, continued
Speaker 3: support for Ukraine, I should guess, you should say. And
Speaker 3: they were manifestly wrong about that, both about the fact
Speaker 3: that Americans support, especially Republicans, but that Americans support continued
Speaker 3: payments to that kleptocracy and the corruption there, and that
Speaker 3: they would care if if Trump did what was necessary,
Speaker 3: even if it meant negotiating directly with Putin, Where's my
Speaker 3: Pearls to end the war and bring about peace. When
Speaker 3: Trump says that he watches what happened there and the
Speaker 3: millions of Russians and Ukrainians who have died and suffered
Speaker 3: and so on, he means it. That's not just rhetoric.
Speaker 3: Steve and too many other people want to put this
Speaker 3: into some large your historical GLEO GEO Global contact. Sorry,
Speaker 3: it's been a long day. That really doesn't apply. This
Speaker 3: isn't the Soviet Union. We're not in the Cold War
Speaker 3: any longer. Europe doesn't have anything to fear from a
Speaker 3: an embolden Russia that's going to take over all of
Speaker 3: Eastern Europe and then Western Europe. I mean, none of
Speaker 3: those things matter, and the damn war move on. Get
Speaker 3: both of them at the table and see what happens.
Speaker 2: Two interesting pieces of writing caught my eye this week.
Speaker 2: One the most maybe not the most surprising, but the
Speaker 2: one was The Guardian or the graniad Is. They had
Speaker 2: an article a few days ago by Simon Jenkins. I
Speaker 2: don't know much about him, but he's one of their
Speaker 2: pillar writers and it said, you know, I may not
Speaker 2: like Trump advance, but they maybe write about this Ukraine
Speaker 2: business and about Europe and NATO and the end of
Speaker 2: the Cold War.
Speaker 4: I thought that's interesting for where it appeared.
Speaker 2: Second are my old friend and colleague Danny Pletka, in
Speaker 2: her latest what the Hell is going On? Wrote a
Speaker 2: piece a couple of days ago saying, you know, Trump
Speaker 2: and Dance, they might be onto something here about Ukraine.
Speaker 2: I don't like how they're doing it, but I think
Speaker 2: they might. There's a good chance of success. And by
Speaker 2: the way, they are making Europe shape up and nothing
Speaker 2: else has worked. So essentially the subtext was I'm gonna
Speaker 2: stop yelling at him, and.
Speaker 4: You would have I met to send you the piece
Speaker 4: because you would have liked it. It surprised me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it surprises me too. I never I always thought
Speaker 3: she was a bright woman.
Speaker 4: We'll just leave it at that.
Speaker 3: A bit misguided, shall we.
Speaker 2: Say, And at the post you were referring to, uh oh,
Speaker 2: I don't want.
Speaker 3: To call her out on this because she's such a
Speaker 3: great lady. And you know, our good friend whom we
Speaker 3: missed terribly because he's not here with us today. This
Speaker 3: is a shout out for you, John. I love John,
Speaker 3: even though he's completely wrong on all of these things
Speaker 3: having to do with Ukraine, but he's not here to
Speaker 3: defend himself, so I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 4: Well, we have the full spectrum here.
Speaker 2: We have three different styles of whiskey we like, and
Speaker 2: three different styles of Ukrainian policy.
Speaker 4: Right one, right one, Well.
Speaker 3: I'm happy to discuss it again if you need me to.
Speaker 3: We know, okay, I do want I have a call
Speaker 3: out for Mary Tobin, who is a listener and a
Speaker 3: follower on X and she said, would you please take
Speaker 3: this up on three Whiskey Happy Hour because there's been
Speaker 3: a lot of amazing things happening with this new Trump administration,
Speaker 3: but this whole business today may in fact be one
Speaker 3: of the most important. So shout out to Mary Tobin.
Speaker 4: We're doing it well.
Speaker 2: I am again, without having had time to review the
Speaker 2: whole scene, yet, I am wondering again. It's the old
Speaker 2: saying attributed to Twain that he didn't say that history
Speaker 2: doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. I'm wondering if this
Speaker 2: isn't the Reykievic moment of the Ukraine War story. Arc
Speaker 2: By that, I mean the famous summit with Reagan and
Speaker 2: Gorbichob that's supposedly ended in failure, dismal failure. It means
Speaker 2: World War three is inevitable, isn't it terrible? That collapse
Speaker 2: and they look grumpy and all the rest of that.
Speaker 2: And you heard they fought and it turned out we
Speaker 2: didn't realize till later that was the actual key moment
Speaker 2: of the.
Speaker 4: Whole thing, right.
Speaker 3: But the one difference I think here is that I
Speaker 3: don't recall after Reikievic, especially immediately after Reikievic, that anybody
Speaker 3: was praising it as a great victory and moving moving
Speaker 3: the situation forward with the Cold War in some sort
Speaker 3: of salutary way. I don't recall that.
Speaker 4: Well, not publicly.
Speaker 2: It took actually within a few days there were a
Speaker 2: few people said, hey, wait a minute, garbag Chop just
Speaker 2: put those huge concessions on the table. And although we
Speaker 2: wouldn't give him his condition of getting rid of missile defense,
Speaker 2: once you put out, they'll put out a position.
Speaker 4: You can't take it back.
Speaker 2: And that became the baseline for America. And it took
Speaker 2: a year, maybe more than a year to get Garbagechopp
Speaker 2: to back down on that condition.
Speaker 4: But then you start to work out the details.
Speaker 5: And that's no.
Speaker 3: All I was saying is that maybe if there had
Speaker 3: been X back in in Reagan's time, that maybe there
Speaker 3: would have been more support for Reagan that would have
Speaker 3: made it past the swamp into the stream media. And
Speaker 3: you know, the way I mean the funny thing is,
Speaker 3: so Steve and I are just kind of trying to
Speaker 3: communicate this as surreptitiously as possible during the seminar today.
Speaker 3: But you just see Steve's Steve's whole face lights up
Speaker 3: and he's are you seeing this? Are you seeing this?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 3: And my point is is that although I did see,
Speaker 3: you know, quite a few people comment things about, you know,
Speaker 3: what idiots Trump and Vands are this and that they
Speaker 3: were ratio so badly by people are just thrilled to
Speaker 3: death if for no other reason that Trump didn't allow ancient,
Speaker 3: an ancient sort of deference to diplomacy to force him
Speaker 3: to be even nice to that little I don't have
Speaker 3: words and Jade Van's just come on, came over here
Speaker 3: and campaigned for our opposition. You don't come in here
Speaker 3: and disrespect the president like that. It was wonderful. Right again, folks,
Speaker 3: let's heart, let's hear it.
Speaker 4: We're going to get special badge for this, like a.
Speaker 3: Mega hat. I was right about Van's hat.
Speaker 2: I think that again, regardless of what people think, and
Speaker 2: a lot of people probably don't know what they think,
Speaker 2: but what I think they can perceive is the normal
Speaker 2: meeting would be, oh, we're working things out, We're on
Speaker 2: the platitudes you got in the usual platitudes. In fact,
Speaker 2: I didn't see a meme that shows a defensive looking
Speaker 2: Zelensky sitting next to Trump saying, and the text is,
Speaker 2: last time I was here, I talked to some old guy.
Speaker 4: Can I talk to him again?
Speaker 1: That was good?
Speaker 2: You know, it's a different it's a different ballgame. And
Speaker 2: so there we go. I think it's fun to watch.
Speaker 2: What what else? I mean, we're we're been busy in class.
Speaker 2: Tell you a little about that in a minute.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's been a week. It's been a good week.
Speaker 3: I mean, I still want we haven't quite John down
Speaker 3: on anything other than his belief like mine, and I
Speaker 3: think Steve too on this whole business of district court judges, Oh,
Speaker 3: issue these edicts from their little tiny district somewhere one
Speaker 3: of ninety four districts in the United States, and try
Speaker 3: to impose that whole thing on the entire country and
Speaker 3: on the executive for the entire country. I just wonder
Speaker 3: how much longer we're going to see this continue to happen.
Speaker 3: Pretty soon they're going to get slapt down hard. Right now,
Speaker 3: that hasn't really happened. I mean, this elite excuse me, Roberts. Actually,
Speaker 3: let me get it right. It was yesterday and we're
Speaker 3: doing this on Friday. I believe it was yesterday. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he was the the justice that took something that came
Speaker 3: from whatever circuit and stayed the injunction for sending the
Speaker 3: money to you.
Speaker 4: All foreign eight I think could be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I saw on on x Marco Rubio saying
Speaker 3: today I haven't had time to run it down. Neither
Speaker 3: has Steve, but saying that they were going to stop
Speaker 3: as of the twenty eighth of February, all funding to
Speaker 3: NATO and all funding to any foreign entity that was
Speaker 3: not in the interests of America's security something along those lines.
Speaker 3: It looked real, right, Steve, But dang, well.
Speaker 2: You have to look at the fine print because that
Speaker 2: last caveat is it could mean Israel still goes. I'm
Speaker 2: for that and maybe a few other countries, but not
Speaker 2: I saw an item that apparently we actually even send
Speaker 2: some foreign aid or the money that's you know, in
Speaker 2: the foreign aid bucket to China.
Speaker 4: Why are we doing that? They don't need it and
Speaker 4: they shouldn't have.
Speaker 3: It, right since we're borrowing money from China, right at
Speaker 3: least near pure adversary or that enemy we have money
Speaker 3: back and then giving them money back. Yeah, I mean yes,
Speaker 3: So whatever else you think about this or that particular cut,
Speaker 3: you know, whether it's eure upset about anybody who's probationary
Speaker 3: in the government for and most of the time that's
Speaker 3: two years, not always. Some jobs are one, but some
Speaker 3: of the higher ones are too. I say that those
Speaker 3: are more likely than any of them to be DEI
Speaker 3: hires or you know, other unsound kinds of policy initiatives.
Speaker 3: So I'm okay with it now. You know, Elon says,
Speaker 3: if you're actually really good, if you can make a case,
Speaker 3: if then you get to stay regardless. And that's kind
Speaker 3: of the way it's been across the board.
Speaker 1: We'll see how it goes.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The others web I saw, and I think it's a
Speaker 2: genuine news story, is that a transgender surgery clinic in India
Speaker 2: has had to close. Why because we were paying for
Speaker 2: it through USAID? Like never mind even issues, Why are
Speaker 2: we paying for anybody's clinic for any purpose in another country?
Speaker 3: Last one I do want to bring up, and then
Speaker 3: I know we all have to end this so we're
Speaker 3: not boring people to death. But that's the taking the
Speaker 3: money out of WHO, the World Health organisations. Oh yes, right,
Speaker 3: you thought I was asking a question, right, And the
Speaker 3: what's his name? You know, that crept guy at the
Speaker 3: head of WHO. He's very upset and he says, you know,
Speaker 3: we don't know what we're going to do if we
Speaker 3: don't get us money back. But the support for Trump
Speaker 3: doing that in the wake of their just despicable behavior
Speaker 3: during COVID and so on is you know, you don't
Speaker 3: expect that those kinds of things to happen because you're
Speaker 3: just so used to the corruption and the inertia and
Speaker 3: all those other things that ran our government for so long.
Speaker 3: He seems serious. He's not giving any more money to WHO,
Speaker 3: and I couldn't be happier when he finally decides to
Speaker 3: stop sending money to the UN all together. Maybe next Steve,
Speaker 3: I'll buy you a drink. I know, I'll buy you
Speaker 3: a twenty one year old McCallen.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, I'm going to start lobbying for that right away.
Speaker 3: Okay, So let me just say you're you're going to
Speaker 3: have a real treat. Some of the people who pay
Speaker 3: attention to power Line probably already know who our very
Speaker 3: very special guest is going to be but Steve will
Speaker 3: be introducing him, so I hope you guys enjoy.
Speaker 2: Well, it's Richard Epstein, John's freaking partner on law Talk
Speaker 2: and all the rest of that. And if you ever
Speaker 2: listen to law Talk or any other podcast that Richard
Speaker 2: is on, including his own that he did for a
Speaker 2: long time called The Libertarian, he's a handful and we
Speaker 2: handle him as best we can. So without further ado,
Speaker 2: let's go to Richard. All right, So now we welcome
Speaker 2: our very special guest in place of John today, it's
Speaker 2: Richard Epstein. Thirty minutes worth of titles and distinguishing things
Speaker 2: to follow, and so we're just going to drop straight
Speaker 2: in Richard, since time is short and we all have
Speaker 2: to go back to class.
Speaker 4: I'm particularly interested in.
Speaker 2: For our audience in two of your books, one an
Speaker 2: old one, one a little more recent. And the first
Speaker 2: one is your book from I think nineteen ninety three
Speaker 2: to ninety two, Forbidden Grounds, the Case against Employment Discrimination Laws,
Speaker 2: and the title I think did you mean the title
Speaker 2: forbidden Grounds meaning this is a question that is forbidden?
Speaker 2: I mean you question, right, okay? And the reason why
Speaker 2: I wanted to revisit the book is several reasons. One is,
Speaker 2: I think the arguments of powerful arguments about the defects
Speaker 2: of the Civil Rights Act are newly salient in the
Speaker 2: aftermath of the Harvard and unc Affirmative Action decisions. And Second,
Speaker 2: as I've mentioned to you before, your book changed the
Speaker 2: mind of Lucretia's and my great teacher, Harry Jaffa, which
Speaker 2: was a very rare thing to happen. And I was
Speaker 2: startled and pleasantly surprised at his effusive praise for your
Speaker 2: book in the Wall Street journal Man, one of the
Speaker 2: few Well see he Okay, I won't go off on him.
Speaker 2: But now it's been a long time since I read
Speaker 2: the book, and as you always do, you get into details.
Speaker 4: But is it time to say Title six? Is the
Speaker 4: title six?
Speaker 2: Title seven the employment discrimination laws today need to go?
Speaker 5: Well, I wouldn't stop there. There's also Title nine, having
Speaker 5: to do with the educational institution. Yes, I thought the
Speaker 5: time had never come. They should have never been used.
Speaker 5: The question is why, And it's a very simple question
Speaker 5: that you have to ask, is if there is free
Speaker 5: entry and exit into a market that is relatively competitive,
Speaker 5: will these people get to the social equiliment more rapidly
Speaker 5: than a government that imposes selective commands whose content is
Speaker 5: only determined afterwards, when the thing is subject to administrative
Speaker 5: em bookmentation and judicial review. And the answer I've always
Speaker 5: given to that question is you've got competition. They could
Speaker 5: respond much more quickly to the changes in the trend.
Speaker 5: So I wanted to have nothing to do whatsoever with
Speaker 5: the Civil Rights Act. And this comes in the heels
Speaker 5: of my taking this book written some seven years before,
Speaker 5: where I gat the same kind of argument, and as
Speaker 5: I recall with great effection on page two eighty one
Speaker 5: of that book, I declare the New Deal unconstantitutional because
Speaker 5: essentially what it tried to do was to substitute government
Speaker 5: regulation for competitive markets, and that case was often through
Speaker 5: monopolization of a particular industry or trade, National Labor Relations
Speaker 5: Act and a Motor Vehicle Act and so forth, or
Speaker 5: had strong restrictions on entry. Agricultural Act was the same thing,
Speaker 5: and in all cases it led to kind of calamitous ruin.
Speaker 5: So throughout the nineteen eighties what I did is I
Speaker 5: started to write about the employment relationships, and in nineteen
Speaker 5: eighty four I wrote an article one that has actually
Speaker 5: been fairly well cited, rare called in Defense of the
Speaker 5: Contracted Will in nineteen eighty four, in which what I
Speaker 5: did is I explained why the contracted will was essentially
Speaker 5: the desirable arrangement as opposed to compacts for four cause
Speaker 5: we had to say the reason before you could fire
Speaker 5: somebody in a competitive market. And I kind of half
Speaker 5: danced around the civil rights laws, only half.
Speaker 1: And afterwards I was done.
Speaker 5: I said, well, why is this an exception to the
Speaker 5: general rule of contracted will that I put forward? And
Speaker 5: I couldn't think of a reason. And so as I
Speaker 5: continued to work on this subject, I first finished my
Speaker 5: Takings book, and then I did a long harb forward
Speaker 5: on unconstitutional conditions in nineteen eighty eight eighty nine, and
Speaker 5: then I essentially I turned to this particular subject. And
Speaker 5: the more I wrote, the more convinced I became that
Speaker 5: I stumbled upon a very important insight. In part it
Speaker 5: was based upon the work that Gary Becker had done
Speaker 5: on the economics of discrimination.
Speaker 4: I'll bring up Becker, but keep going and I'll come
Speaker 4: back to it.
Speaker 5: I'm nineteen fifty seven saying the same kind of point.
Speaker 5: But what he did he was an economist, saying at
Speaker 5: the abstract level it didn't work. I was a lawyer,
Speaker 5: and so I tended to have the advantage of fifteen
Speaker 5: to twenty years of case law that he ignored or
Speaker 5: couldn't do because it hadn't happened yet. Plus essentially more
Speaker 5: of an idea of institutional detail that lawyers tend to
Speaker 5: have and economists tend not to have. And so I
Speaker 5: went through this thing, and I wrote first the theoretical section,
Speaker 5: and then I went through each of the various statutes,
Speaker 5: and one after another. I was told by many people
Speaker 5: that this would be the end of my academic career.
Speaker 5: I said, well, perhaps, but I thought not. And the
Speaker 5: reason I thought not was that this book was written
Speaker 5: at a level that was so abstract and so for
Speaker 5: in technical that it didn't have any obvious animis to it.
Speaker 5: And if you want to attack somebody with being essentially unscrupulous,
Speaker 5: they have to do is have to be able to
Speaker 5: open up the book and find a bunch of passages
Speaker 5: that you can deal with. In some cases, it's extremely troublesome,
Speaker 5: because even one or two passages that are inflammatory can
Speaker 5: get you into trouble. For a book that's five hundred
Speaker 5: pages that never quite happened. So there was actually a
Speaker 5: conference that was had on the book, and people come
Speaker 5: after me one way or another, and I thought I
Speaker 5: survived with respect of what was going on.
Speaker 4: Well, let me come after.
Speaker 1: You if I could.
Speaker 2: I mean, I was going to bring out Becker because
Speaker 2: I think I've met him several times.
Speaker 1: Well, I knew him very well. I've figured you probably did.
Speaker 2: And for listeners who don't know who Gary Becker was,
Speaker 2: he won the Nobel Prize in Economics under in nineteen.
Speaker 1: Ninety ninety one, right before Ronald Coast.
Speaker 2: Right correct and his dissertation later his first book, The
Speaker 2: Economics of the Script Donation. I think either read or
Speaker 2: maybe he told me that he was told in the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties, you shouldn't you shouldn't.
Speaker 4: Investigate this subject.
Speaker 2: It will be it's a dead end for academic career
Speaker 2: to even way back in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: This was it.
Speaker 5: Yes, But of course what he did is he didn't
Speaker 5: have real races as an economist. He had the X
Speaker 5: and wis right, And so what he did is he
Speaker 5: started to talk about segregation in some sort of an
Speaker 5: abstract sense. And what he realized Essentially, if it's imposed
Speaker 5: by the state, it's going to be highly inefficient. If
Speaker 5: it's chosen by private individuals, it's likely to be efficient.
Speaker 5: So the real question is could you find some kinds
Speaker 5: of firms for which discrimination on the grounds of race
Speaker 5: or ethnicity is going to be appropriate? In other cases not?
Speaker 5: And you sort of look at the market, and by god,
Speaker 5: it's pretty clear what the distinction is. So if you
Speaker 5: are basically in a close family business with other Korean grossers,
Speaker 5: you will not admit non Korean grossers into that business,
Speaker 5: even though you will trade with them as strangers. And
Speaker 5: so the question people ask, well, why don't they want
Speaker 5: to put these people in Well, it turns out virtue,
Speaker 5: all of these economic situations are embedded in a larger
Speaker 5: social arrangement. They're members of the same church. There are
Speaker 5: all sorts of informal insurance arrangements that take old amongst
Speaker 5: these members. If something goes wrong to one of them,
Speaker 5: you take somebody who's a member of the firm but
Speaker 5: not of the social client behind it. This mechanism starts
Speaker 5: to fray and it doesn't work. So what they do
Speaker 5: is they very much cleave to this and then how
Speaker 5: do they do the rest of it? Or they reach
Speaker 5: out to the rest of the word by contracts for trade,
Speaker 5: and so you have a very sophisticated firm, and some
Speaker 5: large firm wants to do something, they hire you to
Speaker 5: do that particular task and then they do the outreach
Speaker 5: to the world. So if you understand the way firms
Speaker 5: are put together, it makes sense. Then you take other
Speaker 5: kinds of firms. Take a large firm like Goldman Sachs,
Speaker 5: and I remember once a partner of that place told me,
Speaker 5: this is the way we work.
Speaker 1: What we do is we.
Speaker 5: Are working crisis management all the time, and we have
Speaker 5: a problem that we're going to have to fix in Bangkok,
Speaker 5: and we're going to assemble a team and that team
Speaker 5: is going to come from six continents and going to
Speaker 5: have fourteen different in the cities.
Speaker 1: In the team. You decide that you.
Speaker 5: Won't work with anybody who is not of the X race.
Speaker 5: You can't be worked for us because we have to
Speaker 5: put together these all purpose teams. So essentially the internal
Speaker 5: norm in these large firms is a non discrimination norm.
Speaker 5: In fact, it's even more than that. In some cases.
Speaker 5: If you look around, then you have a large constituency
Speaker 5: of X nationality, and you have a weak constituency in
Speaker 5: your firm. Undoing that, what you will do is you
Speaker 5: will hire people to match X. Because it turns out
Speaker 5: if there's ethnic commonality, speaking the same language, sharing the
Speaker 5: same culture background, it's easier to make deals. So large
Speaker 5: firms have a completely different ethnic on this. And so
Speaker 5: the question is what's wrong with that? And half try
Speaker 5: as I can, I can't figure out a reason why
Speaker 5: it is. That's something that everybody in the world accepts.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's not as though people refuse to do
Speaker 5: to a concrete and grosser or anything of the sort.
Speaker 5: If it works for everybody, why is it somehow or
Speaker 5: the illegal? And the great tragedy of trying to deal
Speaker 5: with the anti discrimination laws is practice that everybody wants
Speaker 5: is one that's nobody allowed to have. Now, where does
Speaker 5: it really matter? The ethnic stuff is important. The most
Speaker 5: important application of this principle is with age discrimination. Okay, well,
Speaker 5: let's put it this way. You take any well organized
Speaker 5: voluntary institution, and there's no anti discrimination stuff. And remember
Speaker 5: that people who get older are the same people who
Speaker 5: were younger, So there's no obvious bias between men and women,
Speaker 5: black and white, or anything else. And there isn't a
Speaker 5: single one of these things in the university world of
Speaker 5: the business world that doesn't have a mandatory requirement policy.
Speaker 1: So you're asking, why.
Speaker 5: Does everybody put this into place? And your job is
Speaker 5: now to find efficiencies with respect to this or otherwise
Speaker 5: it looks to be a kind of bigotry or whatever.
Speaker 1: Well, it's abundant what those.
Speaker 5: Efficiencies turn out to be. And I'll take the universities
Speaker 5: because I actually worked on this in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 5: and nineties with no success, a great tragedy in my life.
Speaker 5: And what you discover, in effect, is that universities need
Speaker 5: to have a faculty governance structor that is independent of
Speaker 5: the administration. The administration does the financial stuff, the external relationships,
Speaker 5: and all the support work, but you need to have
Speaker 5: faculty independence on academic matters. If you don't have a
Speaker 5: tenured body, you can't do that. And so you establish
Speaker 5: a situation where you consciously create a counter way to
Speaker 5: the administrative side of the building and then have this
Speaker 5: very delicate question of how you integrate the administrative side
Speaker 5: with the academic side. Well, if you're going to do this,
Speaker 5: the only way it can work as a governance body
Speaker 5: is to be permanent, because if you could fire everybody
Speaker 5: in it. It's like the National Labor Relations Act. Every
Speaker 5: time you see a union form, you fire all the
Speaker 5: union leaders. You never get unionized. You're not allowed to
Speaker 5: do that. So what happens here is you do this
Speaker 5: and then in fact you have to get people in
Speaker 5: and out. And what everybody has learned by this stuff
Speaker 5: is that four course exit never works. So I could
Speaker 5: remember in nineteen seventy three, when I first came to Chicago,
Speaker 5: the question was whether or not we extended one of
Speaker 5: my rather do colleagues another two years, as were allowed
Speaker 5: on the term and the Dean film Neil called the
Speaker 5: medium myself and several of my grave beers. I was
Speaker 5: last to speak, and I never spoke because what happened
Speaker 5: was the other two guys were good friends of this
Speaker 5: fella and said, of course we want to keep him.
Speaker 5: And I'm sitting there saying to myself, I don't want
Speaker 5: to keep him, but what's the point of losing two
Speaker 5: to one when you're a junior faculty members. I just
Speaker 5: kept quiet, Well, now let me do that, but I'm
Speaker 5: mortematic firing Lemon yeah, okay, let me.
Speaker 2: Give you the say the citizens question who was untutored
Speaker 2: in law on economics? And I'm sure you've heard it
Speaker 2: before and it is okay. It's one thing if your
Speaker 2: Goldman Sachs, you're very sophisticated, your global What if you're
Speaker 2: a textile mill in South Carolina and you discover I mean,
Speaker 2: I remember Clarence Thomas when he was running the Evil
Speaker 2: Employment Opportunity Commission, is very dubious about disparate impact and
Speaker 2: opposed it, but said, you know, once the while, we'd
Speaker 2: find a case where the evidence was compelling that they
Speaker 2: were discriminating on a basis of race.
Speaker 4: And then we' prosecution. Are you confident markets would have
Speaker 4: road that to the match year?
Speaker 5: Absolutely? In the following way. I mean, you start appointing
Speaker 5: a firm like that. First of all, many people who
Speaker 5: are of the dominant race will not work in a
Speaker 5: firm which engages in a discrimination.
Speaker 1: So they're going to move somewhere else.
Speaker 5: That firm, in effect, is now going to put up
Speaker 5: a sign and it's going to be able to take
Speaker 5: away the opponents from other places. So you say, every
Speaker 5: once in a while you find this sort of case and.
Speaker 1: The issue I'm going to ask is what's the frequency?
Speaker 5: And suppose you turn out that the frequency turns out
Speaker 5: to be one firm in a thousand, and then you ask,
Speaker 5: well why, and it turns out there's a good reason
Speaker 5: why that firm is segregated or a bunch of biggest
Speaker 5: Let's assume that right nobody else would want to work there.
Speaker 5: So if you've got a firm, which is called biggoting,
Speaker 5: anybody else who would be a bigger than another firm
Speaker 5: will go there. And so the event of having a
Speaker 5: firm that essentially has these peculiar preferences is it makes
Speaker 5: a governance process either everywhere else because you don't have
Speaker 5: these die hard resistance guys in the other place. And
Speaker 5: in fact, when you screen for firms, like in the
Speaker 5: Goldman Sachs example, what is realized as you is that
Speaker 5: this is a huge liability and you can't do it.
Speaker 5: So you now ask yourself, what's the better way to
Speaker 5: run things. Have a thousand firms also which have a
Speaker 5: couple of diehards and make life miserable for everybody else,
Speaker 5: or you have nine hundred and ninety eight firms and
Speaker 5: two others who are essentially doing very bad things who
Speaker 5: realize that they have to trade with the rest of
Speaker 5: the market and will do so in arms length exchanges.
Speaker 5: And so still asking the wrong question and saying what
Speaker 5: do we do about this firm?
Speaker 3: But that assumes I'm sorry, that assumes years of actual
Speaker 3: progress in civil rights, some of which may have actually
Speaker 3: some of which may have actually come about as a
Speaker 3: result of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 3: Because you did not answer, he's quite wait wait, wait,
Speaker 3: you did not answer his question about a steel miller
Speaker 3: aeto textile mill in South Caroline. Sure, no, you didn't.
Speaker 5: You said, Look, the textile firms are a living example
Speaker 5: of what goes on in that In fact, they were
Speaker 5: the only firms which there was some kind of systematic
Speaker 5: discrimination by law. And so the first thing to say
Speaker 5: is if there's a legal regime outside that props up
Speaker 5: the segregation system and prevents the entry of other firms,
Speaker 5: then you have a serious problem. But I said, this
Speaker 5: only appart with their pure competitive markets, and if in
Speaker 5: fact other firms wanted to come in, won't do it.
Speaker 5: So I'll give you an example of how this works.
Speaker 5: The great question you had to ask in the South
Speaker 5: was there was only one firm or one law that
Speaker 5: people knew in South Carolina which had an explicit racial
Speaker 5: discrimination opponent in it. Right, Okay, so you get rid
Speaker 5: of the stack. Why is it that the practice turns
Speaker 5: out to be uniform, that is segregation in the South.
Speaker 1: You have to figure out an answer.
Speaker 5: So you go back and you read ce Van Woodward, right,
Speaker 5: and try to figure out what he's going to say
Speaker 5: about it. The strange Korean Jim Crow and he said, Oh,
Speaker 5: I don't know why it happens, but it does happen.
Speaker 5: He says, all social norms. Well, no, it wasn't social
Speaker 5: norm What happened was I learned this from my late
Speaker 5: uncle Albert. He was thinking of leaving New York City
Speaker 5: because you can't run a textile business on two floors,
Speaker 5: and he was thinking of going to South Carolina. And
Speaker 5: when he got there, this is where he was kind
Speaker 5: of told, well, you know, you may be liberal, you
Speaker 5: may be Jewish, but we want you to know the
Speaker 5: moment you get out of line, you will find that
Speaker 5: your electric service and your gas service, and every other
Speaker 5: monopoly service provided by the state will be suddenly and
Speaker 5: mysteriously interrupted. And so what essentially they did is they
Speaker 5: took monopoly power over the public utilities and held that
Speaker 5: as a threat over everybody who wanted to integrate, and
Speaker 5: so nobody did it. So he had the choice of
Speaker 5: either playing the game or moving, as he did to
Speaker 5: York Pennsylvania, and so it was not an open market.
Speaker 5: The thing the most understand about this is if you
Speaker 5: were trying to discriminate, the worst thing you want to
Speaker 5: do in nineteen fifty five is to have a public
Speaker 5: policy which is going to be hit by the separate
Speaker 5: but equal decisions of the Supreme Court in Brown. You
Speaker 5: want to be able to do it absolutely undercover. You
Speaker 5: want to have no tracks that are going to be
Speaker 5: able to trace. And the common carrier hookup was what
Speaker 5: they told him they had available, and he said, I
Speaker 5: don't want to play this game, and so he moved elsewhere.
Speaker 5: And that was true of a lot of other firms
Speaker 5: that wanted to integrate. There was a barrier to entry
Speaker 5: which was not fully understood at the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, the species of an argument that I often
Speaker 2: make the people, which is why do they need Jim
Speaker 2: Crow laws? Why did you have to have a law
Speaker 2: of mandating segregation and street cars in Louisiana for example
Speaker 2: the Plessy case.
Speaker 4: Let me come at you from a different angle on this.
Speaker 5: And by the way, the remember plus was a collusive lawsuit, right,
Speaker 5: and they wanted to stop it, and it was the
Speaker 5: state that imposed it. The carrier was against it.
Speaker 4: Right exactly.
Speaker 2: That that's a point for Becker's what I'm saying, and
Speaker 2: for me, yes, exactly, let me come at you from
Speaker 2: a different point of view, which is everyone shall here
Speaker 2: a certain kind of libertarian say we shouldn't have discrimination
Speaker 2: laws because discrimination should be allowed. The slightly more refined
Speaker 2: I serious verse that this is. Well, look, freedom of association.
Speaker 2: It's similar to the freedom to exclude and a property
Speaker 2: we're talking about yesterday.
Speaker 4: So you see where this is going.
Speaker 2: And freedom to associate is also implies a freedom to
Speaker 2: non association. So well, why can't I have a club
Speaker 2: that says no Blacks, no Jews, no women whatever. Why
Speaker 2: can't I have a business that does that?
Speaker 1: Well, in fact, you can.
Speaker 5: Nothing's more common than all sorts of institutions today saying
Speaker 5: it's a women's only book group and things like that,
Speaker 5: or a men's only this kind of thing. I'm actually
Speaker 5: a member of a club which is men's only and
Speaker 5: it makes a difference, but it's not as though that's
Speaker 5: the only kind of club by join. And so the
Speaker 5: answer is, again, don't look at it by the individual case,
Speaker 5: answer the following systematic question. You have an only and
Speaker 5: then you fill in the blank religion and so forth.
Speaker 5: And what you do is you get one hundred clubs,
Speaker 5: of which five percent of them are segregated on that ground.
Speaker 5: Or what you do is you have a law which
Speaker 5: integrates integration, and all of a sudden you only have
Speaker 5: ninety clubs. And it turns out there are fewer opportunities
Speaker 5: for people to join open end clubs in there are
Speaker 5: if you don't have the statue. So again it's the
Speaker 5: same logic. If they're a group that want to do this,
Speaker 5: let them do it and the rest of us benefit.
Speaker 5: And remember also in these hypotheticals, there are very few
Speaker 5: people who join only one group, and they will join
Speaker 5: multiple groups, some of which go exactly the opposite way.
Speaker 5: And I think once you have that kind of associational freedom,
Speaker 5: it's fine. The trick is can you find a hidden
Speaker 5: barrier to entry? Which is analogous too of the situation
Speaker 5: with respect of the intelligence hooker and in the net
Speaker 5: choice cases right, a recent case in which they said,
Speaker 5: we have autonomy, we should be out a little bit
Speaker 5: anybody we want on our service. It turns out those
Speaker 5: guys with monopolies because they can control the new entry
Speaker 5: of any rival system by the way in which they
Speaker 5: run the back end of their network operation. So finding
Speaker 5: the monopoly turns out to be the key question to ask,
Speaker 5: not attacking the competition a.
Speaker 3: Key question to ask for whom? And how do you
Speaker 3: enforce that?
Speaker 5: Well, what happens is it's easy to enforce some kind
Speaker 5: of against monopolis. They're easy to identify because there's.
Speaker 1: Only one of them. And then there's an extremely long.
Speaker 5: Tradition which has to be respected in all these cases,
Speaker 5: which says these people are under they basically have the
Speaker 5: following obligation. They have to called a friend obligation. It
Speaker 5: has to be fair, reasonable and non discriminatory. And the
Speaker 5: reasonableness goes to the price so you can't jack it up,
Speaker 5: and the non discriminatory goes to the point that you
Speaker 5: can't pick your favorites and charge them less than you
Speaker 5: pick the other guy. And if you put those rules
Speaker 5: into effect, it's not going to solve every problem. And
Speaker 5: there are a lot of difficulties when you start to
Speaker 5: deal with people in slightly different positions and so forth.
Speaker 5: But that particular situation is governed the railroads and the
Speaker 5: telecommunication system for a long time, and what happens is
Speaker 5: it often overstays. It's welcome because you have a monarct
Speaker 5: that start a monopolistic and then becomes competitive. You don't
Speaker 5: want to have rate regulation in that monopoly once the
Speaker 5: competitors arrive. And that's one of the problems with that
Speaker 5: neutrality in the way in which you start to deal
Speaker 5: with telecommunications.
Speaker 2: I have one more challenge for you, and then if
Speaker 2: you want to lucrety, you saving one up.
Speaker 4: So last question on the subject, I think.
Speaker 2: Step back a bit from the law and economics and
Speaker 2: the parts that generate six hundred pages from you. The
Speaker 2: argument that's popular with a lot of our friends, again
Speaker 2: political theorists, not lawyers or economists, is it's the thesis
Speaker 2: of Chris Caldwell's book The Age of Entitlement, which I
Speaker 2: had some criticisms of, but his main point I think
Speaker 2: has a lot of merit, which is the Civil Rights
Speaker 2: Act of sixty four, when once you move beyond trying
Speaker 2: to break down discrimination, employment, whatever. It has supercharged the
Speaker 2: leftist idea of equity, which is different from equality right.
Speaker 2: Harvey Mansoel used to say this too. This has set
Speaker 2: up a parallel principle of constitutionalism for us. Does that
Speaker 2: argument have any attraction with you?
Speaker 5: I mean, as a descriptive matter, it shows the peril
Speaker 5: of having the Civil Rights Act, because what happens is,
Speaker 5: in the beginning you mainly targeted government operations which are proper,
Speaker 5: and you found that there was rampant discrimination by a
Speaker 5: bias legislature in which there was a very small fraction
Speaker 5: of backs who were part of the electorate. And so
Speaker 5: you start looking at the payment in school systems, and
Speaker 5: black teachers would get one third or forty percent of
Speaker 5: what white teachers did. And in the silent phase of
Speaker 5: the Civil Rights Act, before the litigation took place nineteen
Speaker 5: sixty five to nineteen seventy, all that stuff was cleaned out.
Speaker 1: If you then, in effect say what do we do
Speaker 1: here afterwards?
Speaker 5: The correct version, if you have the statute on the books,
Speaker 5: is so limited to the intentional cases of discrimination that
Speaker 5: our good friend Clarence Thomas did. But in the first
Speaker 5: of these cases, called McConnell, and Green. They basically messed
Speaker 5: everything up. What they said is, well, there's a prema
Speaker 5: facire case if you're a member of one race and
Speaker 5: somebody else gets better treatment, and then you could give
Speaker 5: an efficiency justification. But then people who are a member
Speaker 5: of a protected class can show that this is a pretext.
Speaker 5: Three part that well, why do you introduced the protected
Speaker 5: class language that's not in the original Civil Rights Act?
Speaker 5: And what it does is it takes a race neutral
Speaker 5: situation and without even acknowledging the massive transformation, it turns
Speaker 5: this into a race specific situation where only some people
Speaker 5: could take the benefit of this, and then o it.
Speaker 5: Then you have the affirmative action problem. And this was
Speaker 5: also a collblind statute. And when it got the Briggs
Speaker 5: against stup power, what happened is they said, if you
Speaker 5: have a rational test and blacks do not do it
Speaker 5: as well as somebody else's whites, Essentially, what you have
Speaker 5: to do is to prove that the test was needed
Speaker 5: by a business necessity, a test which became almost impossible
Speaker 5: to start to achieve. And so what you started to
Speaker 5: do was essentially to make the market inefficient because you
Speaker 5: could not use testing to figure out where people are
Speaker 5: and where they were going. And I mean it is
Speaker 5: true in fact that you find most of these tests,
Speaker 5: those which have any kind of sex or race, screw
Speaker 5: or anything else in them, that if you apply the
Speaker 5: business necessity test, they always fail. And so large number
Speaker 5: as a businesses cannot use intelligence tests or apptitude tests
Speaker 5: of one sort or another not to figure out where
Speaker 5: people are today. But are they going to be in
Speaker 5: our organization ten years from now? And are they going
Speaker 5: to have a leadership position? So you do as you
Speaker 5: make it more difficult to organize the long term firm.
Speaker 1: Now, what happens is if you don't have.
Speaker 5: A discrimination law, and you believe, as many firms do,
Speaker 5: that it is important to make some kind of adjustment
Speaker 5: so you don't have an all white firm. You get
Speaker 5: rid of the affirmative action laws. That is no longer
Speaker 5: a problem. What you do is you set up the
Speaker 5: ranks and the order that you think, and you use
Speaker 5: different cutoff points for the two groups. And if there's
Speaker 5: one that's you supplemented with additional training or whatever it
Speaker 5: is that you think to be appropriate. And there was
Speaker 5: a case called Teal from nineteen eighty two where they
Speaker 5: try to do that, and a black person who is
Speaker 5: excluded said the entire system is worse.
Speaker 1: And so what you did is, instead of being able.
Speaker 5: To keep people in rank order within a minority group
Speaker 5: so you get the best first, it became a random
Speaker 5: choice as to who got preferred and who did not.
Speaker 5: So as yet another illustration where the system of regulation
Speaker 5: interfered with the operation of a firm, and the same
Speaker 5: thing is true with sex discrimination. I mean, you start
Speaker 5: looking at the kinds of aptitudes and desires of people
Speaker 5: in certain areas more fifty years ago than today, you
Speaker 5: would find eighty five percent of the applicants were mail engineers.
Speaker 5: For example, naval engineering it was ninety seven percent. And
Speaker 5: if you're supposed to say, well, no, we got to
Speaker 5: get fifty percent from both groups because they are fifty
Speaker 5: percent women fared to this firm and perfectly prevent men,
Speaker 5: you have to completely convulse the whole situation, and it
Speaker 5: doesn't work. So then what you do is you have
Speaker 5: to seek some kind of special exemption from the way
Speaker 5: in which the thing works. You may or you may
Speaker 5: not get it. And it turns out if you actually
Speaker 5: look closely at some of these things, if you were
Speaker 5: a democratic administration with a democratic firm, you'd get it
Speaker 5: if you're a publican administrator. But if you wanted to
Speaker 5: go across the races, it turns out that these exemptions
Speaker 5: were much more difficult to obtain. And so you do
Speaker 5: is you give too much government power under these circumstances.
Speaker 5: So my view is just take the most explosive case,
Speaker 5: women an athlete. In nineteen seventy there were very few
Speaker 5: women who were in athletes. By nineteen seventy two, the
Speaker 5: number had started to change before the statutes were put
Speaker 5: into place, and it became a real rush because as
Speaker 5: institutions like Harvard and Columbia integrated, they have women and
Speaker 5: men in the same classes starting around nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 5: and so the pressure became such and everybody started to
Speaker 5: respond to it. And so if you just let this
Speaker 5: go on another three years, you would have solved the problem.
Speaker 5: But no, we know better what the ratio is, and
Speaker 5: so what happens is in consequence of this, it turns
Speaker 5: out three hundred racing wrestling teams have been abolished because
Speaker 5: you don't have women wrestlers in the same number. UCLA
Speaker 5: and University Illinois, they don't have swimming teams. And you
Speaker 5: know why that's the case. Men both those places don't
Speaker 5: care to swim. Now, it's because they're basically barred. And
Speaker 5: what happens is in equilibrium, when you're supposed to have
Speaker 5: equality between the sexes, you will pay thirty thousand dollars
Speaker 5: to get a woman athlete, and you won't take a
Speaker 5: male athlete. And on the other side, even he's willing.
Speaker 1: To swab the decks of the gym be on a
Speaker 1: swim team. Is this equality.
Speaker 5: So all of these statues have unanticipated consequences, and Becker
Speaker 5: never dealt with it at that particular level of particularity,
Speaker 5: in part because the second edition of the book was
Speaker 5: in nineteen seventy one, and this follows it, Well, I
Speaker 5: dealt with this kind of stuff, and you know, I
Speaker 5: think in effect the arguments I made were correct. Essentially,
Speaker 5: you do not know exactly how a bad statute is
Speaker 5: going to play out, but you know it can't do
Speaker 5: any good. And so the prophylactive position is to say,
Speaker 5: the general tendencies are so strong that you do not
Speaker 5: allow people to especially plead why we need it in
Speaker 5: this particular industry, because almost invariably it turns out that
Speaker 5: it's wrong. And what you discover, amazingly enough, is that
Speaker 5: people have both preferences. So take SKI schools, right, Oh well,
Speaker 5: I mean the number of women who want women instructors
Speaker 5: and men who want women instrights very large, and the
Speaker 5: number of people want male instructors.
Speaker 1: It's very large. But they're not the same people.
Speaker 5: And you basically we find people say I won't go
Speaker 5: with this guy because he's gonna take me over the
Speaker 5: edge of a cliff. And I won't go with this
Speaker 5: namby Pam because she's going to keep me on the bunnies.
Speaker 1: Lie.
Speaker 4: I don't know, I might if she's pretty.
Speaker 5: Wait a second, you're not allowed to say that right
Speaker 5: under the current law. If you basically want to have
Speaker 5: an exogenous strait taken into account, and they try to
Speaker 5: cater to that, they're in violation of Title seven. I
Speaker 5: should understand. Don't ski anymore because you basically are going
Speaker 5: to be guilty of inciting deviations to Title seven.
Speaker 2: Okay, Richard, we could go on all day about this,
Speaker 2: but I think that's enough for one go so so thanks. Okay,
Speaker 2: So there's Richard Epstein at full blast and we're gonna
Speaker 2: make a quick excit because we have to get the
Speaker 2: back to class with Richard for our hour three hour
Speaker 2: afternoon class on natural law. So a couple of Babylon
Speaker 2: bees and then an abrupt sign off and lucretia, what
Speaker 2: do you.
Speaker 3: Got and we'll see you next week. Yeah. Zelenski tries
Speaker 3: bold news strategy of insulting the people he's begging money from.
Speaker 4: Move cotton. Let's see what he does Nexton.
Speaker 3: Trump hangs up sign in White House you must be
Speaker 3: this tall to receive foreign aid. FBI investigation shows Epstein
Speaker 3: list shredded itself. Oh, Zelensky kicking himself for not wearing
Speaker 3: his more formal olive green T shirt to White House meeting.
Speaker 4: Who does he think he is? John Fetterman, this is.
Speaker 3: One of my favorites. A little bit off? Oh no,
Speaker 3: we mentioned this. Trump assures Prime Minister Starmer that England
Speaker 3: is still his favorite Muslim country. I love that one, true,
Speaker 3: and that's all I got, Steve.
Speaker 2: That's okay, because we need to go. I have to
Speaker 2: do both ends of the sign. Austins, John's not here.
Speaker 2: Always drink your whiskey neat and don't forget to.
Speaker 1: Milk the Margaret Brennan did.
Speaker 4: It in Bye Bye Buddy.
Speaker 6: Next week, Ricochet join the Conversation