How Evil are Politicians? (with Bryan Caplan)

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0:00:07.2 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Bryan Caplan, professor of Economics at George Mason University and author of many books. His latest is How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery. Welcome back to the show, Bryan.

0:00:20.1 Bryan Caplan: Fantastic to be here again, Trevor.

0:00:23.0 Trevor Burrus: How evil are politicians?

0:00:25.6 Bryan Caplan: Very evil overall. They’re people who wield immense power, for high-​ranking ones the power of life over death of freedom or imprisonment and most of them put minimal effort into wondering, “Am I using this power justly?” They focus with, can I get away with it? What’s the law? But is the law right or wrong? That’s the kind of thing that very few successful politicians actually bother with, obviously.

0:00:49.5 Trevor Burrus: I mean, but you’re willing to use the word evil here. It would seem misguided or ignorant or maybe they haven’t read enough of your books, you know, but like, I mean, people who haven’t read enough of your books are not necessarily evil.

0:01:02.4 Bryan Caplan: I completely agree. So what I say here is it’s not a matter of even disagreeing with the political views where I could see. Look these are complicated issues. Rather I or what I would say is that politicians violate a much simpler common sense principle which I like to call the Spider-​man principle, with great power comes great responsibility. It’s not a matter of you have to know, you have to agree with me on even a wide range of issues.

0:01:26.7 Trevor Burrus: It’s just the question of, Do they approach the taking of human life or the putting people in prison with great moral trepidation as one absolutely and obviously should? It’s like Well gee, I’m gonna go and put this guy in jail for selling marijuana. Is that the kind of thing that you should go to jail for? Not the sort of question that politicians have really just any tendency to wonder about. You could say well hardly anybody else does. So yes but most people don’t actually have the power to do it. It’s one thing to say, well he doesn’t think about whether it would be all right to go and kill an innocent person or put someone in jail for a peaceful act when he doesn’t have any power to do those things. Then you say well, what’s the big deal? He doesn’t have any power so he doesn’t think about it, but once you do have that power then I say obviously it’s incumbent upon you to wonder about whether that is the right thing to do, and we really see that almost no politician worries about this for the obvious reason that there… That is not the side that bread is buttered on. A politician who sits around saying, Gee, is, would it really be right to go and do that to another human being? Is wasting time they could be used… Using to amass their power.

0:02:33.2 Trevor Burrus: But can we blame them as much as you’re blaming them and look you know, we came out of IHS seminars and having good professors and good influences that made us think at least twice about putting someone in a cage for smoking marijuana but also came out of the ’80s drug war. I did DARE. I was told that, that was an absolutely moral thing to do. That was the right thing to do to people and so at least in terms of background like can we blame them for not thinking the thoughts that we’ve thought before?

0:03:07.4 Bryan Caplan: But again there’s a difference between thinking our thoughts, Trevor, which yeah, I think you’d have to be pretty dogmatic to say everyone has to think my thoughts versus just saying, Well wait a second, I’m about to do something really bad. I’m the person that decides if this person lives or dies. I’m the person that decides if this person goes to jail or not. Say, well this is what my society thinks, so I guess it’s okay.

0:03:28.8 Trevor Burrus: Right.

0:03:28.8 Bryan Caplan: And again this is really the same logic by which we condemn war criminals. If someone says, “Well, it was a war,” well yeah and this is a war crimes trial. This is where we go and we harshly punish people who use that lame excuse to go and murder innocent people, and say yeah and yes you damn well should have thought about it. When you’ve got a gun in someone else’s face and there’s no one leaning over your shoulder saying, Hey, is it all right for you to do it? Then who else can exert moral guidance other than the actor himself. This is something that Lord Acton pushes on very hard and you don’t have to read Lord Acton to understand it. With great power comes great responsibility, when you’re the one that is deciding whether or not a person lives or dies. If you don’t exert the moral judgment of saying, Well, wait a second just ’cause it’s in accordance with our laws it doesn’t make it right, there’s no one else to do it.

0:04:19.1 Trevor Burrus: Well let’s take a step back for listeners who aren’t familiar with the the basics of public choice theory and also your personal opinions about the behaviour of politicians but how do we, how should we understand the behaviour of politicians in general? I mean I feel like saying they’re evil is a little facile to say the least, and they don’t think they’re evil. Maybe some of them do but they don’t think they’re evil so we can’t just use the evil framework to try and understand politicians behaviour. We have to use something else.

0:04:50.5 Bryan Caplan: Oh who does think they’re evil? Do Nazis think they’re evil? Do Stalinists think they’re evil? Right they are. There is a point where it’s like, well gee, we can’t call anyone evil unless they agree. That sounds like a really low bar or rather a really high bar. It’s like, well then no one’s ever evil, no matter what they do. So I say that is a great mistake. Now in terms of what public choice theory says motivates politicians. Well, the main thing to remember is this is a very intense competition when we’re talking about the good jobs in politics, and there might not be really intense competition to be the assistant secretary dog-​catcher and then maybe you just land in that job because nobody else wants it, but for jobs where you are the head of state, a major minister, senator, congressman.

0:05:37.1 Bryan Caplan: These are jobs where there is an intense competition to get them. The way that you get them of course is by getting public support. You need to be popular, and so the usual public choice story is that politicians in order to get these jobs have to win this intense competition. I’d say that… Just to back up even further. So public choice is of course the jargon that we use for using economics to study politics. There’s a bunch of other names sometimes just economics of politics, that’s a pretty good one. Even appears in Star Wars episode two. [laughter] If you’re paying attention, the economics of politics, Anakin says it to Obi-​Wan. But in any case.

0:06:16.7 Bryan Caplan: This is the area where we use economics to understand politics. We’ve got… There’s a basic logic of vote maximisation. If you are trying to win power in a contest against someone else’s also trying to win power. If whoever is most popular wins, then obviously it is a big popularity contest. Now you might say, “Well, since you had to win a contest in order to get there, you can’t be blamed” and say again, that is a very strange bar to put. You can only blame someone if there was no contest or no… There was not tight competition to get the job.

0:06:45.6 Bryan Caplan: I’d say, “Well, still we could blame you after that. Why not?” And then furthermore, once you have the power, this is where you don’t even have that excuse. It’s like, Well, Gee, if I don’t go and do all these terrible things that are popular, I’m probably not gonna get re-​elected. Say, well, how about you just do the right thing for one term and then lose office. [laughter] how about that? Is that within your capabilities to lose on purpose rather than do immense evil? “Aw, why? But I wanna keep ruling.” [laughter]

0:07:14.0 Trevor Burrus: Well, okay. Let’s defend the politicians here.

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0:07:19.7 Trevor Burrus: So they would like maybe in… They have issues that they care about that maybe the American people, their constituency doesn’t care about as much. Maybe they really want single payer healthcare, but their constituency doesn’t want single payer healthcare, maybe they’re actually like open borders. But they know that their constituency would not be for open borders or drug legalisation, but that would not get them elected, but it is not silly to say, I believe that I am still better than the person who could get this job instead, if I can get in there and say, well, I can’t legalise drugs.

0:07:56.1 Trevor Burrus: If I wanna keep my job and neither can anyone in this job legalise drugs, but I can work to roll back sentencing. I can work to make sure that the drug war is not as harsh and that’s better than just going in there voting to legalise drugs and then losing your job and then having someone worse come in, so that they defend it as the lesser of two evils or other people who would be in that job. That’s not morally incoherent, I would say. It’s better to do a little bit of… A little bit of good thing than like none of a good thing.

0:08:26.9 Bryan Caplan: Yeah. That’s a very reasonable argument, Trevor, of course, it’s also something you expect someone who would say if they are a power hungry person that actually in no way minds doing evil things or in fact wants to, and they meet you and they wanna get you off their back. So we ought… You really ought to be… To hear such things with great skepticism. I have actually talked to people that have talked to major leaders, presidents. I think I’ve actually sometimes got people independently saying they were told opposite things privately, right. Which huh, well maybe… Maybe one person was hearing the truth or maybe there’s this a general system of leaders of figuring out what each person wants to hear and telling them that while the whole time you are planning on just doing whatever will maximise your power. Although even that I’ll agree.

0:09:12.0 Bryan Caplan: I think that is too simple minded of a story that politicians are just trying to maximise power. I think a lot of politicians, they’ve got a philosophy, they’ve got an ideology, so they are… In their own mind, they’re making a trade off between advancing the cause they believe in and staying in power. And really what I am criticising is not meer lack of consistency with your own views of politics, but rather just the failure to sit down and wonder, Huh, maybe just my society’s evil and what we’re doing is really wrong. So again, I totally believe that a lot of politicians have the crisis of conscience where they say, Gee, I really believe in single payer healthcare, but I just voted for this compromise, is that okay? But do you have the crisis of conscience where you say, Mmm, is this really the kind of thing government should be doing anyway? That’s the one where I think very few people would ever bother with because it’s not the level of conscience that most people have.

0:10:02.2 Bryan Caplan: And yet it’s one where I say you don’t need to be very thoughtful to realise that you ought to have it. Here’s the thing. Almost everyone throughout history thought their society was fine. And now we take a look and we see almost every society, their history and say, Wow, these societies were really monstrously evil. You could say, Wow, we’re the one self-​righteous society. All the other ones were fine, really? All the slave societies were fine. All the societies where they go and massacre people ’cause they’re a different religion were fine. Seems unlikely. But then it’s like, Mmm, has our society reach the peak. We’re the one society in human history that’s been above criticism? I don’t think so.

0:10:39.9 Bryan Caplan: Say what should people in ancient Rome have been doing? Especially what should leaders in ancient Rome have been doing? Yeah. They really should have been listening to people like Epictetus saying, Is slavery actually okay? I know it’s… I know people believe in it. And again, it’s there’s is a big difference, I would say, between someone who thinks about these issues in a fair minded way. And then says, Yeah, I agree slavery’s really terrible, but I don’t think that I have anything that I could do other than moderate it a little bit. So I’m gonna stay in power lest someone even worse comes along. That’s someone where I would say that could be a very decent person. I just think that these people are ultra rare, like either that or they’re incredible actors [laughter] I just don’t think that they’re that good as actors. I think they are normal intellectually and morally lazy people, whose thought is, Well, am I gonna get criticised for this by people that I count on? No. Well then I guess everything’s honky dory, full speed ahead.

0:11:34.3 Trevor Burrus: That brings up a concept that you have written about extensively and you write about in the book, which is social desirability bias. I find it… I’ve always found it interesting you call it bias. There’s reasons to try and pursue social desirability. There’s reasons to hold your tongue at a dinner party when everyone… You’ll disagree with everyone and you don’t wanna rile up the dinner party and also make yourself seem like a pariah. So it’s a drive. It seems to me more than a bias, but it is important in this story.

0:12:09.7 Bryan Caplan: Well, I say that we can make a distinction between just acting in socially desirable ways or keeping your mouth shut. What social desirability bias is about and why researchers call it a bias, is it’s referring specifically to cases where the truth sounds bad so people lie. It’s not merely trying to be polite, it’s not merely keeping your mouth shut, it’s actually affirmatively saying things that are untrue because the truth is so ugly. And then the higher level social desirability, just when the lies become so ubiquitous people often start actually kind of believing absurd things. So that’s what I am focusing on. Again, like there’s these standard textbook examples, things like people lie about whether they vote. There’s where we see the share people claim to vote is less than the share that actually vote. That is a bias. What people say is not… Is unreliable relative to actual behaviour, church attendance, same way, people exaggerate their church attendance. But then we see more striking examples things like, we actually do have data on two things. First of all, whether…

0:13:15.4 Bryan Caplan: What people say they would do if they had a down syndrome baby, right? Or down syndrome fetus, would you abort? And there the number… The share that say they would abort is quite low. Maybe if I remember something like 20%, 30%. On the other hand, the share that actually abort when they’re in that situation is more like 85% or 90%. Again, this is a case where there is a chasm between what people say they would do and what they actually do. And there are many other examples, a lot of what I say, in how evil are politicians is that once you understand this idea of this chasm between what people say and what people do, when the truth sounds ugly, you suddenly understand politics on a much deeper level than you ever had before. Because when you listen to what politicians say, so little of it is literally true.

0:14:02.1 Bryan Caplan: It’s standard, you’ll have something like PolitiFact where they’ll go and they’ll fact check a politician, they’ll say, well, 70% lies, 20% lies. And it’s like, look, oh, you’re getting those numbers because you have… Because you’re very forgiving when you assess lies. Like when someone says we will do everything in our power to go and help Ukraine, that’s not true unless you’re putting every penny in your budget above and beyond what you need to keep giving money to Ukraine, into Ukraine, you haven’t, you are not doing everything possible to help Ukraine. And yet no one like Politifact will just score that as a lie and yet. Huh, Yeah, actually that’s a lie, so are all the other things that people say, we’re gonna do everything in our power, and notice how often a politician will actually say for 10 distinct conflicting issues. We’re gonna do everything in our power. You pick one, dude.

0:14:46.5 Trevor Burrus: Well, I mean, I think people don’t take those lines necessarily seriously. They understand political rhetoric is political rhetoric. So whether it’s…

0:14:58.4 Bryan Caplan: No, to some extent, but here’s the thing. Why is all the political rhetoric, and it really is all, why is it all like this? Why is it all so packed with lies? And… I think it really is the case that while there is some tendency to realise, well, they can’t literally mean that. But on the other hand, you whip up support by saying things that naive people will take quite literally, when you can go and talk to a totally normal person, and they will speak in this very same bizarre way to you. And you realise like there are a lot of naive people who will actually take it for granted. And furthermore, I think it does explain why so often cost benefit analysis goes out the window in politics. ‘Cause once you say like, if it costs a single life, you back yourself into a corner, it is hard to actually make trade offs once you start talking in this way.

0:15:42.5 Bryan Caplan: So I think that when you see people going and still pushing outdoor masking of children, despite the astronomically low risk, this I think is actually reflection of people saying this nonsense of, if it saves one life too many times, never thinking, well, wait a second, like does that mean we can never drive to the movies again? ‘Cause we could die on the way to the movie. Does this mean that we can never give… Serve peanuts again? ‘Cause maybe there’s an ultra peanut sensitive person. And yet once you politicise an issue, it becomes very hard to do cost benefit analysis and then people find themselves backed into these corners. So I think another example in the book is, think about every pro-​war speech you’ve ever heard. I don’t think I’ve ever, ever heard a pro-​war speech saying something like 50% chance this war helps, 30% chance it makes no different, 20% chance it makes it worse. I like those odds. Let’s do it.

0:16:35.0 Bryan Caplan: Instead when someone wants to push a war, they just give you the most absurd, ridiculous hyperbole of, they’re like, This will definitely save things, there could be no doubt, victory, if we work together, victory is assured, and yeah, you say this stuff to go and get and start a war. I think it… Like the idea that this does not increase the frequency of war seems pretty implausible. Furthermore, the fact that once you’ve said this stuff, it doesn’t prolong wars and make it hard for people just to admit, Oh whoops, sorry. I guess we’re gonna stay in Afghanistan for 20 years. And I think it really does get you… Like that kind of rhetoric does get you in a position where you go and do terrible things, and not terrible things so that good will come, but terrible things, even though you don’t believe that good will come just ’cause you don’t wanna be embarrassed.

0:17:17.3 Trevor Burrus: I feel I have to ask, this is gonna be a little bit of a throwback to some of your early work. But some of our listeners might be thinking the problem is voters. I mean, you’ve talking about placating voters, and yes, absolutely. Everyone… No one, no sane person would deny that politicians do that, so… And we have uninformed people in this country, and they like to vote for things that they don’t understand.

0:17:44.5 Bryan Caplan: The irrational people.

0:17:45.0 Trevor Burrus: And irrational.

0:17:47.5 Bryan Caplan: Yeah, it’s like you’ve said you got irrational.

0:17:48.5 Trevor Burrus: They’re irrational, they’re rationally irrational, they’re rationally ignorant. They’re a bunch of things that you’ve written about, especially in The Myth of the Rational Voter. So that’s the reality that a politician has to accept and talk to them on their terms. So why wouldn’t we try to fix voters first? And then if we fix voters, we might get better politicians.

0:18:09.8 Bryan Caplan: Yeah, of course. Fixing voters is super hard, I’ll be… Precisely because they have no, they’re really not held any level of responsibility, in terms of how can you blame a politician when the only way he has to win is to go and make, and say a bunch of demagogic lies. This is where I come back to what happens to them if they break their promises to voters. Realistically, the only thing that happens is they don’t get reelected. Is that really so bad? There is in the law, a duress defence. I murdered that person because someone had a gun to my head and if I didn’t commit the murder, then I would’ve been murdered. That seems like a reasonable defence. Politicians very rarely can give anything remotely comparable. It’s like, Well, if I don’t do this, then… If I don’t do this, then I would probably lose the election… Lose re-​election.

0:18:53.0 Bryan Caplan: I’d only get to exert great power for four to six years. You can imagine how tough that is. And then when I retire, I’d have to only… I’d have to settle for just another really comfortable upper class job. So you can see how that’s kinda like having a gun at your head. It’s like, no, it’s not like having a gun at your head to say that I only get to wield immense power for four, six years. And afterwards I have to settle for having a job that is better than 99.99% of jobs. That’s why I had to go and murder a bunch of people. No, that is not remotely comparable to a real duress defence, and the right thing to say to someone like that is, look, the only ethical thing you have to do, is use the power justly for the time you have it, and then accept that people will be mad at you, and you give up power. And of course maybe you’ll get lucky and the economy will boom. And you will actually get re-​elected. Not for anything you did, but just hang on the coattails of something that you didn’t have control over, which we also know is how voters vote, is if the incumbent’s party… If the economy is doing well, then the incumbent’s party does well. Even if they were doing a bunch of unpopular stuff.

0:20:04.2 Trevor Burrus: The difficulty here… I mean the book is very interesting to take an overview of the book, the essays in demagoguery, and different ways that politicians hide the truth. One of my favourite essays in the book, which gets to some of these issues is about phasing in the minimum wage.

0:20:23.0 Bryan Caplan: Yes.

0:20:24.6 Trevor Burrus: Which is a very interesting phenomenon, I’d never thought about it this way before, that the phasing in the minimum wage is some sort of concession to a political reality in a way.

0:20:37.1 Bryan Caplan: Alright, so when you raise the minimum wage, it is totally abnormal to say, effective immediately, minimum wage goes up. Instead, the way that it works is, it says, starting on a certain date, some months or even years in the future, minimum wage goes up to this amount and then often it’ll be, and then a year or two after that, it goes up to another amount, and then there’s the question, “Well, why didn’t you just say it goes up immediately?” And this is one where you say, “Well, there’s all these jerks that wouldn’t allow it.” You have the votes. So why not? To me, it’s just strongly that even people who dismiss the idea of the minimum wage has dis-​employment effects actually believe in it themselves, and they are thinking, “Yeah, if we go and we raise the minimum wage immediately, there’s going to be… There will be dis-​employment effects, and then people will get mad at us.” Alright, now, this point, you might say, “Alright, well, they’re trying to go and prevent the harm from happening.”

0:21:34.7 Bryan Caplan: It’s like well look, once you admit that there are dis-​employment effects that would happen if you raise it immediately, shouldn’t you also believe that they will happen over the longer run. In fact, if you know even some very basic economics, it’s really the other way around, standard economic says that responses are stronger over a longer time frame, that’s why, for example, when the price of gas goes up, this doesn’t immediately change the gas mileage of the American car fleet, because we’ve already bought the cars, we got a bunch of… What were they called in the old days?

0:22:02.9 Bryan Caplan: Oh, yeah, gas…

0:22:04.0 Trevor Burrus: Gas-​guzzlers.

0:22:05.3 Bryan Caplan: Gas-​guzzlers, yes. It’s been so long since I heard that phrase, like…

0:22:09.5 Trevor Burrus: True.

0:22:09.8 Bryan Caplan: I grew up on it. Now, once again, the gas-​guzzlers much on people’s minds to do the… Very high price. Rather, when the price of gas goes up, over the longer run, people, the car fleet changes, people switch over to lower gas mileage car or higher gas mileage cars, electric cars, and so there is a strong response to a price change over the long run, which is the way that economics usually works. Therefore, if you say the minimum wage is gonna cause dis-​employment, if you raise the minimum wage a lot suddenly, you should believe there will be at least that much dis-​employment that will be caused over the long run, in fact, you should believe there’ll be dis-​employment caused in the long run, so then why would someone be motivated to want to phase it in rather than do it immediately? It can’t really be because they want to reduce the dis-​employment effect, rather it’s because they want to fuzz the dis-​employment effect, they want to blur it.

0:23:00.4 Bryan Caplan: It’s the idea, “Well, if we go and we raise the minimum wage a lot right away, and then this causes a lot of jobs, people who blame us, but if we raise it over the course of years, then we’ll always have plausible deniability, and there’s never gonna be a smoking gun, and then we can continue to go and libel and slander opponents of the minimum wage as being liars and making stuff up.” Which is what I think is really going on, that’s why I call it a demagogic theory of the minimum wage. This one where, on the one hand, you wanna go and pretend like anyone who opposes the minimum wage just hates the poor, same time the people that are pushing for the laws themselves believe this very same theory secretly in their hearts, otherwise, why would they design the laws these ways?

0:23:39.9 Trevor Burrus: And demagoguery, which is a word you use a lot in the book, and it’s in the subtitle, is it demagoguery to take this political phasing in position just to make what… Let’s stipulate that they believe that the minimum wage will help people overall, people who really advocate for the minimum wage, as you know, and there are serious economists who do think that the benefits offset the costs. So again, phasing it in is a way of making sure that we see this happen gradually, and even understanding that and doing it for the politically possible for something you think is a good thing. Now as you said, to not be evil, you don’t have to agree with us on minimum wage, you don’t have to totally agree with our subsidy policy positions. So is it really demagoguery as opposed to political strategy?

0:24:36.6 Bryan Caplan: I see that it is political demagoguery, ’cause normally this goes part and parcel with acting like anyone who opposes raise in minimum wage is demonic and saying… Then calling us liars and saying, we’re just making this up, or we’re just ideologues. So this is not really a case that where someone has calmly reasonably figured out that it’s totally worth it, and then, “Well, I gotta do some evil that good might come.” This is more of a case where they just want to avoid having any kind of actual reasonable discussion about the facts in order to look good themselves and gain power. Yeah, so while… I will confess, though I wrote this book, I do not have telepathy, I don’t actually get inside the heads of others, I can only infer what’s going on from their actions, but when I go and look at politicians that are pushing for minimum wage, I don’t see that more than a tiny handful of them have ever done any kind of independent review of labour demand elasticity and said, “Oh, well, it turns out that it’s actually quite low and absolute value, and so this is safe.”

0:25:35.1 Bryan Caplan: The most that I think you could ever get a politician of this sort to do is to say, “Well, what do people on our side say?” And then they go and they get some favourable numbers and then say, “Okay, great, let’s go and use those numbers.” That is not an intellectually honest thing to do, it is evil. It is just what an evil person would do, say, “Hey, well, I know I wanna do this, and this is gonna make me popular, and now can I find some hired guns that have my back and then repeat what I say?” What an intellectually honest person would do is precisely say, “Well, yeah, of course, that’s what my people say, what are people on the other side say?” At this point, you might say, “Well, Bryan, do you do that?” Yeah, I do actually, I do read people on the other side, I do try to find out what their arguments are. Honestly, my favourite thing is just to find out what are the numerical estimates of the most boring walk, person who doesn’t care… Seem to care about politics at all. Is a person who’s just like Ben Stein out of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off saying, “And so our best estimate of labour demand elasticity is negative 0.4, with a standard deviation… ” That’s the person I trust the most, honestly, ideally.

0:26:40.3 Bryan Caplan: I really will say that when I wanna go and get answers to an empirical question… It’s true. I don’t immediately go to the other side. I certainly don’t go to my own side where I’ll say, “Well, yeah, people on my side… ” Of course, they’re probably gonna go and have a bunch of optimism. So I try to find out what do the most boring neutral people say about it first. Now again, also, I wanna read the other stuff too, but to realise like almost no politician’s gonna go and read that guy saying labor demand elasticity is negative 0.4 and then say, “Huh. Well, given that, is this actually a good idea to go and raise minimum wage or to have a minimum wage?”

0:27:14.8 Trevor Burrus: In this context, then I guess you would say that ultimately there’s not a huge, and you do say in the book, difference between Republicans and Democrats in this regard. And it’s almost all rhetoric.

0:27:25.0 Bryan Caplan: Yeah. They’re all power hungry. They’re all liars. Obviously. Obviously. Really the best that you could get out of it would be something like, well, I’ve really thought about these issues in reasonable way and turns out that one group of intellectually dishonest people is actually pushing for better policies than another group of intellectually dishonest people. It doesn’t really make them better people, probably. The only case that I think that you might make for one side over the other is say, look, one side is fighting to defend a system that we know from experience works, and the other one is pushing to change the system in a way that we know does not work. So maybe you could try that. Although even there you might say, well, alright, but there’s like every existing system has so many bad things. And just to try to preserve it as it is, that is pretty bad too.

0:28:16.4 Trevor Burrus: And as you point out the interesting thing which I’ve thought that this many, many times, I think anyone, especially with our ideology where the difference does seem to be rhetoric, because if you say you look at how people talk about the other side, when they say, “Hey, the Republicans wanna mildly reform welfare.” But the accusation from the Democrats is that they wanna destroy welfare entirely.

0:28:42.0 Trevor Burrus: The Democrats want to increase environmental regulation, but the Republicans are gonna say, “Oh, they wanna turn us into a green socialist state.” It’s all fairly ridiculous. One of my favourite, and I’m sure you would very much sympathize in this is the description of policies as open borders, when they are slightly… Maybe not even really like with the Biden administration, who has done very little to open up immigration, but if you turn on Fox news, it is just described daily as open borders policies of the Biden administration. So is this just the feedback loop between evil politicians, as you say, and partisan voters who prefer team sports to intellectual honesty?

0:29:27.4 Bryan Caplan: Yeah, of course. Right. So hyperbole is something that is intellectually very appealing and I might… One of my slogans is hyperbole is the worst thing in the universe, which obviously it’s not the worst thing in the universe. It’s a joke, but yes, you can… But if you, again, like if you just try talking and listen to your own words, that human tendency to use hyperbole is quite strong. Like when something’s going down 3%, say everyone is changing. Yeah. 3% of people changed. 3% isn’t everyone. So it does require intellectual self discipline to not use it. But then you observe in politics that rather than not using… Rather than merely refraining from using the natural self discipline, you actually see people whipping themselves up to a frenzy because they realise, “See the more hyperbolic I get, the more people on my side like it.”

0:30:17.9 Bryan Caplan: So why, yeah. Why shouldn’t I just go and tell outrageous lies and libel and slander the other side and pretend like they’re way worse than they are. The only thing I would say is, you know, yeah. Like the mitigating factor, I would say for people that are political inciters is if you look at like the most extreme 1% or 2% of the elected officials of the other party, they probably are as bad, and they are the ones that are making compromises to get power. And yeah, so I believe there probably are some fanatical green socialists in the Democratic party, but not just in the party, but in Congress. And there probably are a few Republicans, although I think that one is a little, who actually want to get rid of welfare, but getting… Yeah. So obviously there are plenty that were really happy to get rid of Roe versus Wade. They weren’t taking much action for a long time and things like that. I can believe there’s a few elected Republican Congressmen who wanna ban contraception, not many, but you know that there could be five like that wouldn’t be shocking at all.

0:31:15.3 Trevor Burrus: And then those people are the ones who get… They get all the press…

0:31:18.3 Bryan Caplan: Yeah. The other side just encounters them, that kind of thing. And it’s like, hey, there’s a couple, if there’s a couple, then there’s some other people who are as bad as they are for tolerating them. And there’s another group that’s as bad as the first group for tolerating the people who tolerate those people.

0:31:32.3 Trevor Burrus: And it goes all the way down.

0:31:33.7 Bryan Caplan: Yeah, yeah. And so on. And that’s why everyone on the other side is satanic.

0:31:37.9 Trevor Burrus: So how are Libertarians demagogic?

0:31:41.0 Bryan Caplan: A great question. Of course, since very few libertarians actually have power, that is a sign of not doing it so much, although it’s only a symptom and if you look more closely, so if you actually go and listen at a Libertarian party convention, then I think you’ll see, yes, it’s a very high level of demagoguery geared to a different demos. Say, when you are trying to get elected for the libertarian party convention, what the mob wants to hear is very different from what a normal audience of Americans wants to hear, but still the winners are making outrageous lies openly, obviously right now. So the hyperbole, if we do this, this will lead to night and day differences, even for very small thing. Let’s see. So you remember the term, I think this was like the… I think it was the 1980 libertarian party convention. I think they actually had an auction for different bureaus that you basically would bid to buy the bureau you wanted to abolish. Right.

0:32:44.8 Bryan Caplan: So, “I just bought the EPA for 50 bucks.” And that shows that I wanna abolish that one.

0:32:51.1 Trevor Burrus: Well, yeah, you did and you…

0:32:53.2 Bryan Caplan: Even if we did… Do elect a libertarian President, you’re not gonna be able to abolish these things.

0:32:56.0 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. And you and I have both been in situations as IHS students and members of these libertarian meetings of various sorts where you can see the kind of flexing of libertarian muscles against each other. So the famous story of Mises, Friedman and Hayek talking at the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting, it’s like, “Oh, you believe in Rodes, you’re a bunch of socialists like that kind of thing.” And it’s an interesting… It’s a display of… I always say there’s no feasible upper limit to human superiority complexes. So, if libertarians are the vegetarians and the anarchists are the vegans, and the mutualists are the going raw, and they all crap on people to the other side, right? So the vegans crap on the vegetarians, the vegetarians crap on the pescatarians, for not being morally pure. So that is a pretty good situation for a type of demagoguery, at least within these demoses.

0:33:54.0 Bryan Caplan: Yes. Now of course, once you understand the literal meaning of social desirability bias, just having a more extreme moral position would not qualify, what would qualify would be actually saying things that are untrue because they sound good. So, the better analogy would be something like, “Look, going vegan isn’t even a sacrifice, because vegan food tastes better than non-​vegan food.” It’s like, not to most people and then like, “And actually I think I saw you sneaking some meat the other day too. Why did you do that? If you really think that vegan food tastes better. Come on. You don’t really think that. Of course, it doesn’t taste as good.” And again, same thing with, “If we go and have one more regulation, this will crash the whole system.” Actually, I remember when I was in the green room at Fox News. Anytime you’re in a green room, it’s a surreal experience because they have the show you’re going to be on, on, and then you watch the show and then the person from TV walks back into the room a few minutes later and is like, “Wait a second. A person from fantasy world just crossed over into real world, that can’t be.” But watching Fox News there, I remember this is during the 2020 election. I can’t remember who it was, but one of the main anchors says, “Look, if the Democrats are elected. The US economy will collapse. Not in a matter of years or months but weeks.” All right. Well wanna put a bet on that? Yeah, I don’t think so.

0:35:14.5 Trevor Burrus: Changing gears a bit, but still on the same topic. Why are you a pacifist and how is that connected to your theory of demagoguery?

0:35:23.9 Bryan Caplan: So just to start, pacifism is a word with multiple meanings. There’s one meaning that I disavow on that, is saying you should never use violence in any circumstance. And then there is another meaning though, of having a strong presumption against war and that is the one that I do have, right. Now, why am I a pacifist? Because the following arguments, even I really will say, this is the arguments where when I thought about it, I said, this is an argument that is intellectually solid. And this is one where I’m not merely just stating my opinion or rationalising my opinion. It’s one where I say, look, this is an argument with steps. If you disagree, you’ve gotta disagree with a step. And tell me what the step is and what’s wrong with it.

0:36:04.8 Bryan Caplan: The steps of the argument for pacifism. Premise number one, modern warfare always involves murder or manslaughter of innocent people. There’s no such thing as defensive war in modern war because the weapons are just too indiscriminate, There might… If you really look hard, you might find a handful of examples, but that’s… It’s not gonna be anything notable. You can say, look, there’s unprovoked aggression of North Korea and South Korea. Yeah. Well, do you know what during the Korean war? Pyongyang was leveling, 99% of the buildings were destroyed. And was every one of those buildings inhabited by someone in the Korean Workers Party plotting mass murder? I don’t think so, there were just a lot of totally innocent people in there, which often leads people to say, “Well, you know, every single citizen of the country is guilty.” Like, what about the people who were against the government, they’re guilty? It’s like, “Well, they should have overthrown it.” How? How is Joe Blow the janitor supposed to overthrow Kim Jong-​il? Seems… Yes, Kim Il-​sung.

0:37:11.6 Trevor Burrus: Kim Il-​sung, yeah. But seems like quite a demanding requirement to begin morally.

0:37:16.0 Bryan Caplan: And then finally it’s like, fine… How about the babies? What about the babies? What about them? What do they do? So this is the first premise that actual war in the real… In the modern world, it is a myth to say that you can fight a defensive war because you wind up, normally murder, where you just deliberately go and kill a bunch of people. In minimum manslaughter, where you say, “Look, we didn’t wanna kill all those babies. They just happened to be within a 100 miles to the people we were trying to kill.” If you tried this defence, when you’re accused of killing some babies, you will not get away with it. Even if you have ironclad proof, “Look, I was shooting back at someone shooting me and the killer happened to be in a building, and I had a rocket launcher. So, I blew the whole thing up. I didn’t wanna kill the babies, but blame the guy shooting at me for why I destroyed the entire building.” No, your right to self-​defence does not extend to going and killing a bunch of innocent people. Even if you say, I didn’t want to. Even if we can prove that you didn’t want to, that’s not good enough, all right.

0:38:16.1 Bryan Caplan: So that’s the first premise. Second premise is a moral one. This one says that before you go and murder or manslaughter, innocent people, you ought to know with confidence that the benefits substantially exceed the costs. It’s not enough just to say, look, I murdered a 100 people to save 101 people, you’ve got to show there’s actually a multiple. This is inspired by a famous thought experiment in philosophy sometimes called the force organ donation hypothetical. It involves a surgeon who has five patients. Each patient needs a different organ transplant to live. One needs a lung, one needs a heart, one needs two kidneys, one needs a pancreas, so on. And then a perfectly healthy guy with all his organs attached walks by. He has no friends, no family, no one will miss him. And if you kill him, no one will ever find out you did it. So is it morally permissible to go and murder that guy and harvest his organs because you can save five lives at the expense of one?

0:39:14.4 Bryan Caplan: There are some people who bite the bullet and say that’s fine. And for them, my argument doesn’t work. But for everyone else, I’ll say, “Look this… You could raise the number up and of course people will, how about if we can save a million lives.” Then there’s almost always some point, all right, fine, for that many. But five to one is a line where most people say, “No, that’s not enough, we can’t just go and murder one innocent person to save five strangers.” And if you still apply this ratio to war and say, “Look, we’ve got to be able to say with confidence that we are gonna save five times as many lives as we kill when we go and start doing murder and manslaughter on the other side.” This is the standard for what you would’ve to be able to say in order to go and justifiably do that kind of thing, which is integral to modern war. And finally, there’s the third premise. Third premise just says that the long run benefits of war are actually highly uncertain. How do we know this? Well, there’s a number of ways we could show it. You can go and look at the best research on this ever by Phil Tetlock in his book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? This was some of the most amazing political psychology ever done in the ’80s.

0:40:19.2 Bryan Caplan: He actually gave a whole bunch of political experts, a bunch of forecasting problems, he broke down their answers and he waited for the events to unravel. To unfurl. And it turned out that even the greatest experts in foreign policy were very bad at actually predicting what would happen. All right. You can do that and say, look, someone may say, “Oh, I’m confident that if we just go and invade Iraq, this is gonna prevent something much worse.” But normally people are actually really bad at making these forecasts. Often they’re just totally wrong. We can look at some of the most egregious ones like World War I was called the war to end all war. Why do you think we call it World War I, Trevor? [laughter] ‘Cause it wasn’t the war to end all war. Now, and of course, when you act, you have to act with uncertainty. This means that we have this last empirical premise of people are just very bad at judging this, people are very quick to go and do horrible things in the short run promising that great good will come even though they don’t really know and in fact, have a high degree of being wrong.

0:41:22.7 Bryan Caplan: Right now again, if all that we had was the uncertainty, then you could just say, Well, maybe the war will turn out much better than you thought, maybe much worse. This is why you do need that middle premise of you’ve gotta have confidence that we have a large excess of benefits over cost before war’s justified. Anyway, these are the three premises and I say when you snap them together, you just get a very strong presumption against war because if you look at any possible war and you… How often can you honestly calmly say with confidence, this is this… If we fight this war, it will save save more than five times as many people as we are going to go and kill? There’s innocent people, innocent people that we’re going to kill.

0:42:01.5 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. And as you pointed out before, if you bring in the demagoguery, the rhetoric around war is usually at minimum, quite ridiculous if not verging on evil.

0:42:16.7 Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Yeah. Again, this is where even if you wanna be really forgiving, it’s like, “Look, this guy’s gonna go and murder a million people for vanity?” This is an example, this is… Lyndon Johnson, far from the worst guy of the 20th century, I don’t know, maybe he’s not even the top 100, when you really go and do the count. But from my understanding, from what his own sympathetic biographer says is by about the middle of his second term, Johnson’s like, “Yeah, well, the Vietnam war’s unwinnable, but if I go and back out it’s gonna make the Democrats look bad and we’re gonna do badly in the election.” And it’s like, so hundreds of thousands of people, you’re gonna kill them? Innocent people? Even American soldiers you’re gonna kill them because you don’t wanna go and lose office? And then you… Oh my God, you have to just go and be a really famous big shot who’s out of power and write your memoirs and give speeches for, I don’t know, at the time…

0:43:11.0 Trevor Burrus: Tens of thousand. Yeah, 5000.

0:43:14.4 Bryan Caplan: For the rubber chicken circuit. Oh, poor you. Oh my God. How awful. Yeah, you wanna like… That’s… And again, that’s a politician who’s not even that bad in the broad scheme of things. Someone who will go and murder very large numbers of people for a war he doesn’t even think is gonna work out. It’s just like, Well, you know, it’d be embarrassing at this point. We sort of have to let things play out and wait for our hand to be forced otherwise they’ll call us chicken. Jesus Christ, man. That’s the way you think, you’re a monster and, and a monster and he’s “Well, there’s worse than me.” I know, I know Lyndon, I know there’s worse than you. [laughter]

0:43:48.7 Trevor Burrus: Are we just too cynical then? It seems at the end of this conversation and finishing your book, you’d sort of say, kind of throw up your hands and say, “Well, what can you do? What can you expect of politicians? What can you expect of voters? Not much.” And at the…

0:44:06.4 Bryan Caplan: Not nearly cynical enough Trevor, not nearly cynical enough. [laughter]

0:44:13.7 Trevor Burrus: Is there a cure? Is there a thing we can do to try and fight against these forces?

0:44:21.0 Bryan Caplan: Well, step one is to be the change you wanna see in the world. Just to realise, “If I ever get power, I’m gonna act with conscience.” That’s… It’s a small thing but, anyone listening, anyone here who has power, look, power is not an excuse to do horrible things, it doesn’t mean… Well, people, the voters gave me this power. Yeah, Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but who else was given power by voters? Adolf Hitler [laughter] he really was. Yeah. Last elections, there were some voter tampering, but still, he got… He genuinely… It’s very hard to deny that he got a higher share of the vote legitimately than any anyone else in the Weimar democracy ever did. He just did really well. People, they voted for this and that’s not good enough. Not, not, not by a long shot.

0:45:14.6 Bryan Caplan: You’ve got to be… Or you have to monitor yourself. You have to be precisely when no one else is monitoring you, when no one else is there to stop you, that you have to be your own self monitor because otherwise you will become a villain. And there’s really no two ways about it. If you do not consciously strive to not be a villain and you have power, that’s what you will become. That’s step one. Of course a lot of what I’m trying to do is just to spread these ideas, especially among the elite, just to make people more mindful of the more responsibility leaders face to hold them in lower esteem, to be… And yes, to be cynical about them. There’s another chapter in the book called “Could such a man care” where I just talk about what really should be a great puzzle.

0:46:01.0 Bryan Caplan: Of the large number of murderous brutal dictators who come to power not by saying I’m going to be a murderous brutal dictator, not by saying I’m going to be a normal guy, but by putting their heart on their sleeve and saying, “Unlike all of the other politicians, I genuinely care about the wellbeing of the people.” I love the poor, the orphans right? This is a standard trope of politics that someone gets power by demagogic-​ally saying, “Unlike all the other politicians, I am an incredibly caring person.” And then this very person becomes a standout mass murderer thug. Why does this work? Because of human gullibility because of insufficient cynicism. If people really were suitably cynical, they would use base rates and say, “Well, how often do politicians say that to gain power? How often do they really do it?

0:46:56.6 Bryan Caplan: Say, they say it often. They do it basically never. And then furthermore, the really cynical insight is to say the people who cry the most about how much they love the poor are the worst of the worst. They are terrible. They are psychopathic fanatics who are planning on doing horrible things in the name of the orphans and the poor but the only thing they’re really gonna be able to deliver is the blood bath. Helping people is much harder. It doesn’t take great competence or skill as a leader to murder a million people but to go and save a million orphans. That takes actual ability. Right. And we see it, the politicians that will do the first. Do the horrible blood bath. World’s full of them even the countries where we say they don’t have good state capacity. Yeah, well, they still have the state capacity to do mass murder right? You know, Rwanda [chuckle] but to actually cause economic growth to go and lift the poor of their country out of poverty. Very few have that.

0:48:01.0 Trevor Burrus: So don’t be an evil murderous dictating dictator. That’s step one. Don’t trust murderous brutal dictators. That’s step two. And what about as a voter? What should you do?

0:48:10.7 Bryan Caplan: Yeah, like I said, don’t trust people who say that, I love the poor. Don’t trust those people. When someone says, I’m going gonna save our country, do not trust them. Right. Affirmatively distrust them. Those are on average the worst of the worst. Honestly, if you have someone who just says business as usual and another person who says let’s go and have a violent blood bath, in order to go and reach paradise, definitely go with just the horrible troglodyte who wants to keep things the same. Right. In terms of reformers, I would say like the only ones to trust are the ones who can sound like the first generation of post-​communist leaders in Eastern Europe. People who do not say we wanna go and massacre a bunch of people. People that say, “look we just like, we wanna have freedom. We wanna have peace with our neighbors, We want to go and reduce the power of government.”

0:49:01.0 Bryan Caplan: These are people where you can’t trust them to do it, but at least what they’re saying is the kinda thing that you wouldn’t say, if you were just a power-​hungry monster. Right. So yeah, those are the kinds of people to look at. I have a piece that I wrote more recently on Venezuelan Roulette. I just said, Look, most countries in Latin America, where you get a far left leader, don’t become Venezuela. Something like 15% do. And that is a sufficient reason to never vote for such people ever regardless. Alright, and I have a piece I’m going to come up with, called Iranian Roulette, same one. The 15% chance that they’re gonna turn your country into an Islamic theocracy. No way, no how should they ever get anywhere within a 100 miles of the reigns of power. People like that. They’re just too risky.

0:49:48.3 Bryan Caplan: Yes I know, they don’t all turn their countries into horrible murderous theocracies but you can’t tell in advance. So just say no to someone like that. And the people to trust are ones who don’t go and promise the world. People who say, let’s have tolerance, let’s try to go and increase the prosperity of their country. And who did not go and scapegoat the usual targets of foreigners or the rich or minority religions. These are the people where it’s like, alright, well, maybe something good will happen anyway. And otherwise yes, just having a high level of distrust is not just the cynical thing and is also the virtuous thing to do. To say, Look, I’m gonna base my views upon past experience. The best way to judge the future is by the past, in the past, this has worked out very poorly. And I’m going to assume that the future will resemble the past rather than just letting my emotions get ahead of me.

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0:50:46.6 Bryan Caplan: And Trevor, If your readers are wondering, where can they get the book? So the book is an Amazon exclusive. You get the paper back for just $12 which due to rampant inflation is quickly eroding in real price. You can also get the ebook for just $9.99. And the title of the book is How Evil Are Politicians? Essays on Demagoguery. The author is me, Bryan Caplan and this is by the way, part of a whole series of books of my best essays from the last 17 years. So this book is the second of the series, there is another one coming out next month. And in the near term of about two years, all eight should be out. So collect them all.

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0:51:43.5 Trevor Burrus: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts make sure to rate and review us on Apple podcast or in your favourite podcast app. Free thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.