YouSaid · the spoken record

Charles Murray

lines on the record: 109
first: 2020-10-28
most recent: 2020-10-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The last one One of the things about going back to reread. Is that I have friends of mine who write books that say they hate it. Say, oh, I could have written this better. I got to say, I go back and I reread my books and I say, This is really great. Okay, here is the last paragraph of given accomplishment. A story is told about the medieval stone masons who carved the gargoyles that adorn the great Gothic cathedrals. Sometimes their creations were positioned high upon the cathedral, hidden behind cornices or otherwise blocked from view, invisible from any vantage point in the crowd. They sculpted these gargoyles as carefully as any of the others, even knowing that once the cathedral was completed and the scaffolding was taken down, their work would remain forever unseen by any human eye. It was said that they carved for the eye of God.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you can convey that, the number of people who will hire you like this instantly is very high. But not only that, look, I've had lots of research assistants over the, well, they aren't research assistants. I gave up on using those a long time ago. But I have had some administrative assistance. And they're doing mostly very simple things. and a couple of them stand out enormously. And the simple reason they stand out is that if they are asked to do something, it happens. That's really simple. And unless you've hired people and had co-workers or people working for you, you don't realize how rare it is to find somebody who will do it. You know, the Nike slogan, just do it. I know exactly where that comes from. Don't tell me about the storms at sea. Don't tell me about the traffic. Don't tell me about your dog being sick. Just get it done.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I wanted was some sort of in the course of the questions, some sort of sense that they weren't just making it up, they weren't saying it to make me happy, but they just cannot rest if there is an imperfection in something they're supposed to do. They just, they can't stand not doing a good job on the thing. Some hint that they won't even roll their eyes if you said, oh, we're all going to work till 10 o'clock tonight because we got to get this thing out, that they will jump in on that. It is so hard to find someone who says I am going to work my ass off if you hire me.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess that you're just going to have to take it on trust. Because I felt exactly the same way. When I was twenty years old and I was thinking, gee, how will I? Get ahead. Am I going to go work for a company and sort of hope that somebody will notice me? And I really... Can't overemphasize the degree to which, if you look at it from that point of view, it just looks like. The luck of the And if you look at it from my end of it now, which is you're hiring people, or I used to hire people. Want something really simple. I used to when I used to interview people to hire back in the late 1970s a long time ago, but I was looking for a hint that they were anal compulsive.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why are the young people who are looking for, how are they frustrated? Are they not able to get jobs where they They can do”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one of deeper and deeper moral insight. That's my argument. And you will never have a less painful lesson in how you evolve moral insight than by watching that movie again and again.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then all at once you start to realize the degree to which this guy, who initially reacted by saying, well, if I'm immortal and I'm going to have the same, I will eat whatever I want to eat, I will have whatever kind of sex I want to do. There's no consequences to anything I do. And that is deeply unsatisfying to him to the point that he tries to commit suicide. And then you start to see the ways in which he is changing. and is very gradual, it's very subtle, and you will see more the third time than you saw the second, more the fourth, and you saw the third. You are watching this guide transform from a jerk Into a good human being, good in the Aristotelian sense of being good. And it's done without preaching. But the evolution he goes through is”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For people who've never seen ground hog day, it's kind of hard to explain, but let's assume we're talking people that have watched Brown Hog Day. If you watch, and let's say you watched it once. I imagine that your impression if you watched it once was mine. It was funny. There was great chemistry between annec McDowell and Bill Murray. It was rom-com with a happy ending. Really enjoyed it. If you go back and watch it a second time, you start to see the ways in which his character changes over the movie that are more subtle than you realize at the beginning, and the things that were just mostly funny at the beginning begin to take on a different cast, such as when Bill Murray tries to commit suicide by every known means and fails because he wakes up the next morning. Well, it was funny.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I gotta tell you, I don't pay much attention to day-to-day politics. So people would tell me that Andrew Yang had a proposal for basic income, and I really should learn about it. And I was busy with other things. So I don't know much about what he said. So I'm probably, for example, I did not listen to a word of the debate last week between Biden and Trump, the degree to which I isolate myself from politics is hard to exaggerate.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Characteristics. When you look at the police and the unions and the rest of it in small cities have completely different characteristics.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I make the argument, which I'm more and more convinced of, that This divide between daily life and The big cities and Austin is a big city in this regard. But Chicago and Dallas and Houston and Los Angeles are even more like this. It is just so different. All of your relationships are way different if you are dealing with a plumber in New York City. you're dealing with a plumber in a town of 15,000 people. The ways in which the problems of daily life are utterly different in big cities and small cities and towns. Think is behind an awful lot of the political polarization that's taken place. The people in the big cities look at problems of public unions. They look at the problems of the police. They look at these, and they have one set of...”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, two things. At the local level, a lot of these unions behave differently than they do at the national level, or I should say in small cities and towns they behave differently. So let's take the public schools, for example, and the teachers union. The teachers unions are incredibly destructive in big cities in terms of the ways in which they protect themselves at the expense of the students. In Valley Elementary School, six miles from here where my kids went to elementary school, I think the teachers are members of a union, but they don't behave that way. They behave as teachers have traditionally behaved, and they are nurturing and very concerned about the children. So a lot of the de facto evils of public unions are concentrated in big cities. But that's true of so many other things. I think it's also in one of the final chapters by the people that I'm”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You take all of these things, even ones which are in the sectors like crime which are the subject of so much angst and so forth. Probably technology over time is going to make the central government powerful presence less important rather than more.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, policing, which is such a big deal now with the Black Lives Matter thing, in many ways policing is being transformed by technology. And so is our vulnerability to crime so that you're much more invulnerable to property crime than you used to be. And the police with the body cameras and so forth, do we expose terrible behavior on the part of the police? Sometimes, yeah, we do. That's a good thing in terms of a deterrent effect in the future. And it's also much a way that you need far fewer governmental oversights if you have more transparency without the government oversight. And an awful lot of the transparency on policing is coming not from anything the government is doing to oversee the police. It's the public overseeing the police with video cameras.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can have some people who will take a guaranteed basic income, which I've written a book in favor of, and they will use it to live their lives off the backs of their fellow citizens, but by that time, the backs of their fellow citizens won't feel the burden anymore. And we already have a lot of people behaving that way anyway. And so who cares? Either to free up the rest of us from all of this stuff we have to put up with public policy. In terms of other kinds of technological changes, however,”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea that we need this vast elaborate bureaucratic apparatus to, let's say, deal with poverty. It's really silly I mean for a long time a lot of us have been saying look you just took the money and gave out the money you get rid of poverty and it's a lot easier but but we've never been at a point of national wealth where it is so obviously idiotic that we are using this complex machinery so I think that time will come that that wealth wealth will be enough that we can afford free riders”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The driving thing is increasing wealth. One of the things that makes you wonder about the importance of public policy is if you plot per capita GDP in constant dollars over the last century. It basically goes up like this, and you can see the depression of 1929, but it's a little tiny blip in terms of this longer-term curve. You take a look at 2008. It's a little blip. So, unless you have Policy of Stalinist stupidity, of Soviet stupidity. Presumably we're going to continue to get richer and it might be lower growth rates than we've had before. But even if you have a growth rate of 1 or 2%, From the base we have now, you're still getting richer reasonably rapidly. At some point when the Per capita GDP is one hundred thousand dollars per person.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Place the answer I gave you before. Donald Trump came along a few months after the book came out. Now, even if Donald Trump hadn't come along, The fact is not that many people Read books like that. You would have to have Couple of people who read the book that have big bucks and would start a trial funds all on their own. Actually, if you had one guy, I mean, suppose that a Jeff Bezos decided this was something to try, you have a variety of people in this country who are so wealthy, they can undertake significant innovations like this all on their own. They don't have to get a bunch of other donors, but it would have to be that kind of effect, I think. Has to be somebody else who is as crazy about the idea as I am, but who has lots more money than I have that person yet?”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Room in which the beach sand is being kept with poison, that kind of you have no idea if you have not been directly involved in this how picky so many of these regulations are. And they don't have a halo effect. They cannot stand the light of day.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A halo effect I mean the purpose of the regulation is to protect the environment or an endangered species. It's very hard to get if you are resisting regulations that people say will create dirty air if you resist those regulations. It's going to be a public relations disaster Be amazed how many don't have that halo effect. I give some examples in the book. About getting fined for not having a sign saying poison on a storage place of beach sand. And the reason is this is a brickmaking factory that in some conditions under some grinding operations, beach sand can produce a I can't remember what respiratory problem. So you're supposed to label?”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, I raised this with my own dentist and he said yes dentists are subject to all kinds of pickyun things. My dentist had once been fined because he had inadequately instructed his staff in the use of the fire extinguishers in the office. And he paid a fine. So you have the dental's legal fund and he contributes $100 a year to it and in return for that there are a set of specified regulations that you can just go ahead and ignore and we'll defend you if the government comes after you on those. Each of the little dentist office would have a lot of incentive to be part of that. The same could go for physicians other small companies. There could be lots of different organizational groups that would have an interest in combining because together they could pose a response. To the government that no individual dentist could.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the big corporations don't have much incentive to do it. The big incorporations like Regulatory state. They can afford it and they have the competitive advantage they talked about earlier. So I'll tell you the kind of place it would work is in the professions like dentists.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when they're done, he says, Oh, well, you didn't do the work correctly, I'm just going to pay you three-quarters of what the contract says. And when they say we're going to fight this, Trump would say, you fight this and we will keep you in court forever. And he made good on it. And so he actually could make that into a business model whereby he could systematically underpay his subcontractor because he had established the threat that makes it not worth their while. Now, why people still did subcontracting work with him? I don't know. That's another question. But the fact is you can just a credible threat of litigation in defense of against the regulatory state could have an enormous impact.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so when he said to the subcontractors that he stiffs, You know about this practice of Donald Trump's, but when he had subcontractors, you know, who were supposed to do the plumbing or whatever in one of the buildings.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can set things in motion, which will cause an enormous amount of work just to deal with the process that you've set in motion. And that's what the lawyers would be doing for the Madison Fund. The lawyers of the Madison Fund would be saying, you know what? We're just going to take this intricate legal system that you have developed and we are going to exploit it. Not with an eye to getting justice, but with an eye to making life difficult for you. And guess what? We can do that. So you're dealing with individual human beings who are given a choice. Do I want to pursue this? She'll maybe I'd pick on an easier target, and a lot of her just going to pick an easier target. If they know they're willing. By the way, here's what Donald Trump has shown us Donald Trump got a reputation for litigative anything.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say that you have knowingly violated a regulation. They've come and they want to fine you for it and you say, okay, we're going to fight that. You are not fighting the entire federal government. You're fighting the local office of that government agency, which has maybe, what, 10, 20 people in it max. And you have bureaucrats who are not that eager to get deluged with a lot of work. that they can avoid. And you are saying to a specific bureaucrat who wants to bring you to book for this violation, okay, how do you feel about spending 100 hours, 150 hours this next month dealing with all the stuff I'm going to load on to you? Because one of the things about the regulatory state, which is you can, you don't have to prove things, you just have to.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's much easier than people think because you just take a look at the budget of, let's say, the regulatory agency for workplaces. I'm blocking on the name of it right now. They're responsible for regulating every workplace in the country and enforcing regulations on, and you're talking about thousands of regulations, and they don't have that many inspectors. So you will have companies that won't get inspected, particularly small companies won't get inspected for years at a time. And at the level of they have taken on so much regulatory responsibility that there's no way that they can staff up to respond to that. And when you appeal.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the regulatory agency has said in its regulation in cases where there is any doubt whatsoever. In other words, the court is not going to try to second-guess the regulators. Well I sympathize with the notion that the courts should not try to become expert in these very arcane issues that a lot of regulations involve, but there should be some modification of that whereby if the administration of this regulation is clearly obviously idiotic. Translating that into some more acceptable legal language, the court ought to be able to overthrow regulations without having to get into the minutiae of all the technical things that led to Chevron deference. Well, if that were overturned, You would basically be doing that's putting a rain on the regulatory state, which it has not experienced for the last 23 years at least.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wish I knew what the story was with regard to deregulation. I've heard people say that there have really been some quite significant things that have been done. I've also heard that actually there's more smoke than fire there. But are we better off with regard to regulatory regime than we were four years ago? The answer is probably yes. Six to three majority on the Supreme Court. Does that make it conceivable that That the court would modify what's called chevron deference. And sorry to introduce the legal jargon, but chevron deference comes from a case involving the chevron company. And the Supreme Court held then, and by the way, Anthony Scalia was. In favor of this, the government, the Supreme Court has said that the court should defer”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing. What happened is there were some people who were interested in starting one. But remember the book came out I think in twenty fourteen or fifteen And it hadn't been out very long until we were in the 2016 election cycle. And all of this kind of stuff, just nobody was paying any attention at all to it anymore.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To run against the milieu in a big way. The milieu is really strong and there's really hostile to the kinds of things that I think, and you probably think right now. Sit back and wait for things to be less hostile, I guess is what I would do. I don't have time Sit back and wait for things to get less hostile.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess at this point I'd hunker down to the and wait for the storm to pass You're 20 years old, so you're going to be hunkering down for a while, anyway, just as a matter of biographical necessity in the sense of, I certainly hope you don't hit your peak at the age of 23 or 24. That would be a disaster. But suppose I were thirty years old, thirty five years old, and interested in being engaged in this sort of thing. I think I just accept that probably not much that I want to do is going to be possible to do for a while. And You could possibly do something like you could join a think tank, you could run for office at local levels. Campaigning on your principles and probably get elected. You're not going to be in a position.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trump has done, but I would like to think that when Trump is gone, which I assume will happen after this election, could be wrong That you might have people like him who have a synthesis. Of some aspects of the populism that deserve to be part of the synthesis, but a core that goes back to individual freedom and limited government. And the one thing that you can be too dismissive of when you're being a pessimist like me. That you discount the effect that an individual can have. So if you had a Ronald Reagan type of personality or an FDR kind of personality that were holding these views this time, that person could be a successful politician. Problem is you can't manufacture that kind of person. So I don't know if one's going to come along.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And didn't think hard enough about how it feels not to be an economist going through the numbers and saying, hey, it's a win-win, and instead being a carpenter who used to get $19 an hour, and I've been undercut by low-skill marines who are working for $12 an hour with no benefits and no social security and all that. And I'm saying, how would I feel if I were in that situation? I would be angry as could be if I were in that situation. And so I think Tucker has hold of some growth that he has done. Where he has augmented his former positions, which I was very close to, about liberty, with some other truths that need to be taken into account. What's happened is though, you're right, he uses libertarian as an epithet and He has gone too far in defending the indefensible with a lot of the things.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you have Trucker Carlson just could channel his former self, he would have a potential for being a very effective political figure. And by getting in touch with his former self, I'll tell you my reaction as I listen to Tucker, which I don't do very often. But I used to know, you know, I used to know Tucker, not close friends, but admired his work. And sometimes when I have listened to him in recent years, I still agree with him. And he is saying things with passion which needed to be said. And in a way, Tucker has had the same kind of experience I've had, where I've decided I was way too cavalier about low-scale immigration. The economists say, Hey, low scale immigration is a net win win, and they're not taking away jobs from Americans and all the rest of that. And I just bought into that too glib”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I reach my seventy seventh year, no, I'm in my 78th year. A movement that I thought had enormous vitality and potential just ten years ago. Namely, a practical libertarian form. Politics Practical libertarian me, small L libertarian willing. It's Madisonian. I'm really thinking about Madison's conception of the rule of government. Whereas I thought that really had a chance of regathering some strength. I'm an oddball now. All sorts of people on the right now think people like me are We're Were useless. They're going to go beyond that. So basically, if you can give me any reason not to be pessimistic, I will grasp better.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in one sense, that seems to indicate a potential. For the resuscitation of an older way of looking at how American society should function. But The last four years have also been a case where What was formerly known as the right has proved itself to be every bit as authoritarian in its own way as the left is, and just as willing to engage in all sorts of practices which would ordinarily be considered and just antithetical to a conservative perspective in the world, let alone a libertarian perspective in the world. So We are now in a situation where there is way more energy. In the middle class and the working class for radical change than I ever would have suspected existed, I'm not happy about the kind of radical change that they're in favor of to. Basically at this moment in history.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well Unhesitating because I have been so surprised by the last four years. The answer I would have given you in 2012 when I was writing. Coming apart Was that we have reached a modus vivandi? Whereby the elites have established a society that really works just fine for them, but they are passing off enough benefits to the rest that you sort of buy them off. And you aren't going to have any Principled demands for get the government off our back because the Working class, which in the past was so central to this, the strength of the American experiment has essentially been going down the tubes in terms of its own commitment to this way of life. And so I saw in 2012 the antagonism toward the elites that existed even then. I way underestimated the depth of the anger, the breadth of the anger. That produced Trump.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the evil was so great, you could not have this expression of how human beings should be allowed to live in contradiction to this reality of slavery. That was just never going to last forever. But it was kind of amazing it lasted as long as it did so that you had from 1789 when the Constitution was passed to 1937. The federal government was still incredibly highly constrained from interfering with the lives of its citizens. And That's not a bad track record for such an ambitious experiment.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing else remotely like that had happened, and subsequently in subsequent revolutions, including the French Revolution, it didn't happen again. The United States was the only one which had not only a statement of the freedom of people to pursue their own happiness, they set up the government with explicit, tortuous ways of constraining that government from ever. Sliding down the slippery slope into an ordinary authoritarian government. Now, the fact that it lasted two comments about that. Because I know the reaction out there. But they were slaveholders, you had a large chunk of the American population that was enslaved. It was the fatal flaw in the founding, a sort of guaranteed that it would collapse eventually.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The British made progress toward it, so that at the time of the founding you already had a lot of And you had a certain amount of constitutional freedom, even though they had an unwritten constitution, but coming under the common law. But you also had that encumbered with an aristocracy, you had that encumbered with all sorts of class lines and so forth. And the genius of the Americans was that it said that all people should be free to pursue happiness and that all people are capable of pursuing happiness. That was a break with history. No other government had ever been established. On the premise that the individual human being should be allowed to live his life as he sees fit as long as he accords the same freedom to everyone else.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You go 75 and you're fine because on the major highways, 75 is kind of the flow of traffic and those highways were designed for those speeds and they don't stop you. We're violating the law. There's no way the cops can start picking up everybody. And so why not have a regulatory de facto regulatory regime in which we have discouraged the government from enforcing the stupid regulations and encouraged it to focus on Important ones, and I have more specific suggestions for how to do that, but that's the premise for developing the defense funds.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we understand that we are technically in violation of this stupid regulation and that sooner or later you will probably win, you're going to have to invest a lot of resources in this. You're going to have to invest the time of your staff and your lawyers and the rest of that. Do you really want to do that? And I think that you have the potential in this for getting the entire federal government to behave the way that the highway patrol does. Which is, you know. I don't know about the part of the country you live in, Texas. Texas, you can still do lots of things in Texas. But in the part of the country I live in, which is Maryland, the speed limit is 65,000.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For systematic civil disobedience. And the proposition is Government cannot possibly enforce these tens of thousands of regulations that it is piled up. and possibly do it. They can only get away with all that if people voluntarily comply even with idiotic regulations. And so why don't we not comply with idiotic regulations? Let's go ahead and run our business the way it should be run. And then if the government comes after us, we have defense funds, perhaps funded by the profession, perhaps funded by philanthropists, which say to the government, we're going to fight this.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2008 recession. JP Morgan can afford to have 500 lawyers jumping through all the hoops the government wants it to jump through. And in fact, by the way, since I'm mentioning JP Morgan, it is the CEO of Chase who said that it gives us a bigger moat referring to the legislative regulatory legislation. It gives them a better protection against competition. I'm worried about the guy who wants to open up a corner store and can't open up a corner store because of all the regulatory hoops he has to go through. I'm worried about the person who a bureaucrat can come to them and say, oh, you're in violation of such and such. And if you try to fight this, I'll put you out of business because you can't resist the amount of pressure we can bring on you. And so I suggest why not have legal defense funds”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Run their businesses in large part by trying to get a competitive advantage the way a regulation is written or a piece of legislation that's passed whereby the state is providing them with an edge over their competition, just in complete opposition to what? Free market economy is supposed to be like. Then you've got the regulatory burdens which are the main focus of by the people whereby I'm not worried about JP Morgan. And all the regulations that have been foisted on it by the post.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, this is a book that hardly anybody who's listening to us will have read. It's called By the People. And it spends the first four chapters detailing all the ways in which this society is becoming moribund. Terms of the Constitutional Constitution as it existed up until about 1937, of the sclerosis in the federal government. I'll just give A quick sense of how much things have changed. In nineteen sixty hardly any corporations even had an office in Washington, DC. Maybe the airlines did because they were regulated and the trains. But most American corporations, Washington just wasn't important. Now, not only does every corporation have a major presence in Washington, both directly and in employing lawyers and lobbyists and all the rest of that.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Authoritarian than Britain was, but you could still, if you were one of the French intellectuals, be given a lot of personal freedom to go ahead and pursue what you wanted to pursue. And that was true elsewhere in Europe as well Having said that There's got to be a link between the freedom to do what you feel this passion to do and being able to do it. I mean, it's just simply got to be, you've got to have more potential for great human accomplishment when in some ways you have created de facto freedom for people to pursue it. And if you're going to have de facto freedom for a few, this is the point at which I become a good constitutional Mediconian and say the great thing about the United States was the United States said was everybody should have that freedom, not just the people that the state will leave alone.”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been working on human accomplishment. I had to come to grips with the fact that so much basically Liberty as conceived by the founders by Locke and the 18th century tradition is very young. It's very new. And all of this vast array of human accomplishment that I'm writing about came before that. So I had to sort of accept to myself that you don't have to live in a libertarian world in order for great things to happen because they've happened in the past. But I reconcile that to some degree by saying, but the people who accomplished those great things had a lot of de facto liberty. So that they might have been living under an absolute monarchy. In fact, they might have been living in France, which was much more”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand If you start with the stipulated truth that there is a god Then in what sense would that God be time bound?”
2020-10-28 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source