Since the 80s, he has consistently been one of the world's elite players. He has won numerous super tournaments, including the 2009 World Cup. He was also the challenger for the World Championship in 2012. As chess gets younger, he's still one of the force to fear. I'm very honoured to have with me legendary Grandmaster Boris Kelfin. Hi Boris. Thank you for your kind words. Boris, welcome to the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival. I know you played in Arrow Float, but this is your first real true open with no rating cut off in a very long time. Yes, yes. I'm happy to be here because it's a tournament with a good name, with a good tradition. Everybody who played here praises it. It's a great location, great weather and very strong tournament, extremely strong. Getting stronger and stronger year by year. Absolutely. Now, you have had a phenomenal chess career, but you keep going with the same passion. What's your secret? Yes, the passion is a secret. When you love what you do, you do it day by day. So even today, you work on chess every day? Yes, yes. We might say, okay, there are some exceptions, but normally, yes. Normally, I try to work as much as possible. Right, now I watched your amazing award-winning documentary, album 61. You must watch it if you haven't already. It was very clear that as a child, you were very loved and you had very indulgent parents. Was that ever a pressure on you? No, no, no. I was really privileged that my parents never put pressure on me. They really supported me but never put pressure. And I think it gave me a lot of... Let me focus on chess without being pressured on result, on the process itself, I mean. On studying chess, playing chess, enjoying it, because I never felt pressure. I knew that, okay, I win or I lose. I'm the same person. And I think that hasn't changed over time. Even today, every sports person needs that one parent who really pushes them into the game. Yes, but the secret is not to over-push because we see many cases in chess and other sports and when parents want to become famous themselves or get their own career, their own money through the children, it ruins the mentality of sportsmen and puts a stop at a certain moment in my opinion. So if you were to advise the parents of today's young kids, it would be to encourage them but not to put too much pressure. Yes, yes, yes, to encourage but not to put pressure because pressure kills. We can have an example of Magnus Carlsen. You can see that, okay, everyone can see how his family supports him but it's clear that they put no pressure whatsoever. They're there for every tournament? Yes, for every tournament just to make him happy, not to like to press him. Right, now if we were to say divide a pre-2012 World Championship Boris and a post-World Championship Boris, where are you in your mind space, in your personal space? How would you differentiate these two bosses? It's a good question, it's a good question. No, I think I had a really great moment. I managed to get to the World Championship and it gives me motivation to work hard because I have an idea that hopefully I can do it again. Okay, a lot of young contenders, but still, you know, 98, all the public crossed me out and in 2012 I played this match. So nothing is against that I will be able to do it again. Of course it's extremely difficult but it gives extra motivation, this memory of this great match. It was a great fight. Yes, yes, I think I did my best because also before the match if you ask everyone they would say, okay, Boris would be crushed whatsoever. And I played an equal match, I was leading, okay, I had some, even tie-break I think I played, tie-break I would say I played better, but okay, I didn't manage to do it, but I did my best, that's what counts. Undoubtedly, and now out of all your numerous chess successes and victories, what for you has been truly the most special one? No, I think World Championship is definitely the most special for each player because of childhood, especially nowadays you have many tournaments, rating, importance of rating grows, but when I was growing up World Championship was like the peak of Korea, ultimate goal, and I remember as a child I watched the Karpov-Korchny matches and then Karpov-Kasparov and then it imprinted in my head. So I was always dreaming to play this match. Inspired. Inspired, it gave me inspiration because you know when I saw that World Championship cycle started I had already, you know, like double motivation and I always succeeded better than in tournaments. Right, now to get to that level it almost seems that from your very childhood you have to have like a single-minded dedication and discipline and I think you're an example of that. Looking back, would you have done anything differently because of course sacrifices are also involved? Well, if I would do differently it wouldn't be me. It would be a different person. But of course each young player who inspires have to decide for himself. I wish to all of them to find the best solution for themselves and go forward. So everyone has to decide for themselves? Yeah, no one can decide for you. No one needs your parents, needs your trainer, needs a public. You have to know if you are ready for it if you are ready to accept setbacks if you are ready to accept losses which are, well, all this would bounce away. Yes, and all this will come along the way. There is no escaping back. No escape, no escape. Everyone, everyone have to go through it if you're strong enough for it or not. And everyone have to decide for himself. What do you think for you personally is the one thing that you have learned or evolved to love about the game that you still struggle with after all this time? Well, what I struggle I can tell what I struggle the compromise, the compromise. You know, if I do very well, if I do very bad, you know, to find this balance, to minimize the losses, it's really difficult for me because each game I want to do my utmost and when I'm in bad condition it backfires. I find it's difficult mentally to accept that sometimes you have to minimize the damage. So even after all these years, a bad day in office still affects you a lot? Yes, yes, it affects strongly. And what about, what do you love about the game after all these years that keeps you going? I think it's unlimited possibilities. You know, even now when there's computers, there's theory developing so well, there's so many information available. Each day you discover something new, some new beautiful things. Okay, you open any study, let's say, and you see the inner beauty of the game, some great study or some great game, you see some inner beauty of the game, inner logic of the game. So chess is always evolving? Yes. Right, and now you came from, you're from a time of a very different chess era where there were no computers actually. And you're one of the few successful transitional players who have been able to be at the top with the computers coming in. How is this transition for you? I think I was lucky in this way because the players who have been a bit older, they couldn't get through these transitions as they couldn't learn computer. When computer came, my brain was flexible enough to accept it, even so I was not happy. And to learn how to deal with all this data, with engines, how to use it in my advantage rather than let this information, let's say, hijack me, yeah? Do you prefer the earlier times when chess was a little more romantic and less about the computer engines, or do you think that there's more positive that has come with the computers? Well, you should accept negative and positive. I think it's not very productive to regret about something, but I think it's a good idea to think how you can use computers to find something new and use it for advantage of chess to see the positive side. Let's say, due to this, computers became so active, you can see that players all over the world have more possibilities. When I was young, okay, if you were in some remote place, you had much less chance to learn something, to play something, only outstanding talents could break through, like Vishy, for example. But normally it was like Europe, yeah? And maybe States, yeah? A few countries. But nowadays you can see that in every country if the player has talent and determination, he can break through. I really enjoy this idea. So maybe it's this, the fact that you embrace the change that makes you one of the successful transitional players, because if you struggle with it, like you said, you are not going to be able to survive the competitiveness then. Yes, yes, I think you're right. So chess is getting younger, and one can call your colleagues like Vishy, Kramnik, there is top level of the Swidla, who are still at the very, very top. Now when you see each other play against the younger generation, do you secretly vouch for each other and want the person to win? Well, very likely, very likely, more often than not. More often than not, okay, because it gives you extra motivation also from personal point of view. Let's say Ivan Chuk played brilliant right now. In Doha? In Doha and before in European Club Cup. They're okay, we are almost the same age. It gives you feelings that you are also capable to do it. Vishy plays brilliantly. Where do you really feel the effects or the challenge of growing, let's say, wiser, and older, like in what part of the game do you feel the effects? The young players we face now, they're brought up on different basis. And sometimes you manage to get your knowledge and your advantage, but also they learn things much quicker. We have to admit they learn much quicker. They switch from opening to opening much quicker from idea to idea. I mean the best players we see now. And this is the challenge, because probably I can see things even deeper than them, I hope, but they switch much quicker and they recover, no motivation. It's not a problem. Not a problem, but problem is to recover after game and to go to next day. After a tough game I do believe that if you are younger you recover quicker. If in my age one needs to make much more effort to recover, to focus on this. And this is a thing I'm working on Right. And now Boris, you're known to be a player with a universal style. Someone who loves and can play brilliantly in pretty much any sort of position. But for you personally, what do you think is your biggest strength? What kind of chess do you enjoy the most? Well, I enjoy good chess. Basically I don't have this big preference. What I enjoy is to play good chess and you know the chess with the idea. You know that I do believe that chess game has to be played with sub-ideas. Every move is an idea. Every move is an idea. It's Tigrad Petrosov, the Diteswell champion. He taught me when I was a kid that you should think about each move even in Blitz game. So it deeply imprinted in my mentality. So never play without a plan or an idea. Never make a move without an idea. Right. That's some great advice now. Where is this coming to your personal life? You're a family man. You have two kids. You have a beautiful wife, Maya. But to be in this level, you have to have complete dedication and no distractions. So how do you balance that? It's not easy, but basically I manage because when children are in kindergarten or in school I have time to work and also when they come back I work for a certain time and then I spend my time with them which is also very good emotionally. It helps you to recharge your emotional balance because if focused only on studying chess it's not good. When you play with children or talk with them or tell them some stories it's really very good. Keep you real. Keep you real. And now they're waiting for stories how I met monkeys in Gibraltar. I told them I'll be back with these stories and they're waiting for it. So they're more excited to hear your stories than to know about what might have happened in a game. Yes, in a game they wish me the best but stories about monkeys and animals I told them a story recently how I met monkeys on the street of New Delhi. Near the parliament. Yes, we have a lot of them in Delhi. They're really excited. Right. Or how I met an elephant when I played in Sanginagar. Yes. I was actually there as a very young child watching you all play and that was one of the most inspirational moments for me. Oh, you see, really? Yes, I was there. Really? I do believe because I do believe that it really inspires if you see some big players playing in a young life it inspires you. It inspired me. When I saw in my city I saw Tal and Geller and Jan Kasparov and Jan Yusupov playing that inspired me immensely. And you have inspired a whole generation as well now Boris. Now of course it's clear that to be at the top you require a lot of hard work. But as a human what do you think are the qualities that one has to possess the human traits to make it to the top? It's a really good question. I think one has to be able to admit mistakes because if you repeat the same mistake you'll go nowhere. You have to have work in ethics. High work in ethics. And you have to be flexible. If you just work on calculation it won't do well. If you work just on end games it won't do well. If you work just on openings it won't do well. You have to find balance and to think what's the most productive way to work and what is the most useful thing in a certain moment. But that is true from a chess point of view but as a person it's common belief that someone has to possess this toughness of character and it's almost like this killing instinct. Do you think it's almost important to be a slightly mean person and not care about emotion so much to make it to the top? It's possible but also I studied it because it's also a very interesting question what is the motivation of the players because different players have different motivation. Like me I have motivation to improve myself to get rid of the weaknesses and depending on your motivation type of your motivation you develop different qualities and different character. That actually brings me to my final question Boris that how do you think that chess has evolved certain characters in you what traits in your personality do you owe to your attachment and addiction to this game? How has chess evolved you? It's a very good question. You know Alexander Alakhan said thanks to chess I developed my character and basically you could say that I could become maybe tough I could become but it is said the way both flexible because I very types I learned the lessons that if I do things which I do it leads nowhere. I have to admit it and to change and to do a bit differently so maybe ability to analyze your own experience but in other way to stick to your values. Right, very well said it was amazing to have this conversation with you Boris you continue to inspire all of us and best of luck for the tournament. Thank you very much. Thank you Boris.


Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Sitting in for Aaron Powell is Jason Kuznicki, a research fellow at the Cato Institute and the editor of Cato Unbound. Our guest today is Tim Sandofer. Tim is the principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation and the author of three Cato books. The three Cato books being The Cornerstone of Liberty, Property Rights in the 21st Century, The Right to Earn a Living and his newest book, The Conscience of the Constitution, The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Tim. Thanks for having me. So, Tim, for the first question I think is, what is the conscience of the Constitution? The conscience of the Constitution is the classical liberal political philosophy articulated in the Declaration of Independence. It's the principle that people are basically free and use that freedom to create a government in order to protect their freedom, but that when government is destructive to their rights, they have the right to alter that government. And the reason that that's important is that that reversed in many ways the political philosophy underlying monarchies and today's dictatorships, which holds that individuals are not basically free, that government creates their freedom and that the presumption is against individual freedom. So, I think the conscience of the Constitution is the principle that we are all born with equal freedom. Now, if I could just be a bit of a devil's advocate here. It's sometimes said that, well, the Constitution is operative law in the United States. The Declaration is not. So, if you're arguing in front of the Supreme Court, it's great to cite the Constitution. You want to be able to do that in defense of your argument. But if you cite the Declaration of Independence, they're not going to be on board with that and they're not going to wait it at all in the same way. They might say, well, yeah, that's nice, but that's not how we decide things here. What would you say to that? Well, it is true that it would normally be bad advice to tell a lawyer to cite the Declaration in an argument in the Supreme Court. But I think that's as a result of generations of bad jurisprudence and bad political philosophy. However, the Declaration has played a role in court decisions very recently. In fact, a good example is, Troxel v. Granville was a case in 2000 involving the law that said that parents had to allow visitation rights to grandparents, even if they didn't want to. So, if you and your wife broke up and you had the kids and her parents wanted to visit the kids, you couldn't stop them. And the Supreme Court struck that down as unconstitutional. Justice Thomas, with the majority holding it unconstitutional, and Justice Scalia dissenting saying he thought it was constitutional, and Scalia says, although I think that one has a natural right to direct the upbringing of one's children, that isn't protected by the Constitution. And the argument was whether that is part of the liberty protected under the Declaration or a more recent example in Gruder v. Bollinger, the big race preferences case, Justice Thomas wrote this wonderful dissenting opinion saying he thought that it's unconstitutional for the government to treat people differently based on race. And his dissenting opinion consists of like, I think it's five parts, six parts actually. Part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, and then there's two or three sentences at the end separated by three asterisks. And at the top it says, Justice Thomas wrote a dissent with which Justice Scalia agrees as to parts one, two, three, four, and five. He didn't join the last two sentences, and the reason why is because those are the sentences in which Thomas quotes from the Declaration of Independence. So those are just some minor examples, but there's a more recent, another example in which I can't remember the name of the case off the top of my head, but the dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens says, you know, when we talk about the liberty in the 14th Amendment, I would think that it means not just the rights that are specified in the Constitution, but also the liberty that is referred to in the Declaration of Independence. So I do think it plays a role, but more importantly, first of all, it is part of our law. It appears in the United States Code. It's in Volume 1, Chapter 1 of the Statutes at Large. Do we date our political institutions from 1776 because of it? I mean, it has at least some legal role to play, and I think that the other role that it has that's been neglected is it should play a role in setting the framework for understanding the Constitution. So to walk us back a bit and fill anyone in who maybe forgets eighth grade civics class, the Declaration of Independence, how would you describe it as a legal and philosophical document, and what theory is it based on? Well, as a legal document, the Declaration of Independence is a constitution of the United States. What I mean by that is it constitutes us as a people. It declares that we are no longer Englishmen. A lot of people like to say that the American Founding Fathers were asserting the rights of Englishmen against the British Crown. Well, they had done that, and what they did on July 4th, 1776, was they said, we're no longer Englishmen. These are now the rights of all mankind that we're referring to. And so as a constitutional document, it declares the United States separate from Great Britain and creates the United States as a corporate entity, and it creates them unitedly. This is an important point. It does not say that the states are independent of one another. It says these United colonies are free and independent states, and they are independent unitedly. So it creates the American nation as a legal document. It's a philosophical document. It's a statement of plain vanilla Lockean principles drawn from the Second Treatise on Civil Government by John Locke. And late in life, Jefferson was approached about this. Somebody said, well, you're wording is like word for word from Locke. Did you just plagiarize John Locke? And Jefferson said, it wasn't my job to come up with any new principles. It was my job to articulate the principles that everybody believed at that time. And that's what I did. And he says I didn't turn to any books. I didn't have to because we all agreed on these principles. And that's what I came up with. And then going forward to the Constitution, well, actually, let's go forward to the sort of beginning late part of the 18th century for jurisprudence. We had a guy named Blackstone become very central to the law. And in the book, you talk about how that is a little bit misleading. So we have decoration in the Constitution, and then a lot of formulation of American law has a lot of references to Blackstone. And we still do it today. So who was Blackstone and what was wrong with that in light of the thesis that you're talking about here? William Blackstone was an English judge and legal scholar and professor of law at Oxford. And in the 1760s, he published a series of four books called The Commentaries on the Common Law. And in these books, he just tried to express what English law was in general on various topics. And he wrote in a very clear and readable style. It's even very, it's still readable today, very, very accessible. And as a result, it became very popular, especially in the United States. And it became kind of the book to go to for lawyers who were studying. Well, the problem with that is that Blackstone disagreed with Locke on certain important philosophical principles. By name, he rejects Locke's views. And Blackstone believed that government is inherently sovereign. It has certain basic powers. And he called this supreme, irresistible, absolute authority to do everything that is not naturally impossible. He said, this power is somewhere in every government, somewhere. And what Jefferson and others had a problem with was they said, well, no, the Declaration of Independence says we have individual rights and government's sovereignty is limited by those individual rights. It has no authority to intrude on those rights. And so the founders had a complex relationship with Blackstone. He was becoming more popular among the young law students. But Jefferson was really worried about this. And his last letter to James Madison, Jefferson says, you know, the younger, the kids today are reading Blackstone. That's a real problem. James Wilson from the Constitution Convention, he said the same thing. So they rejected this idea of absolute unlimited sovereignty and held to the idea that government is sovereign only within the boundaries of individual rights. So, well, Blackstone's idea of a omni sovereign state, a state that enjoys all the powers of sovereignty, is maybe not so popular today. I would say there is another view of sovereignty, which is shared by many of the folks on the left, which is that democratic majorities enjoy more or less that type of sovereignty. And I'd like to ask you about that, because my sense is that one of the key themes of your book is this tension between democratic sovereignty as a theory and the idea that individuals have inalienable rights that even majorities will do wrongly if they transgress on. And I'd like to ask you to illuminate on that a little bit. Yeah, so what happened with Blackstone was that he was adopted by certain thinkers in the United States and endorsed, especially by Southern defenders of slavery. And they said, okay, the powers, the absolute power that Blackstone speaks of used to belong to parliament. But when we declared independence from Great Britain, those powers were inherited by the state governments. And so now the state governments have supreme irresistible absolute authority to do everything that's not naturally impossible. And they may have written individual rights into their state constitutions, but those are just privileges that the government can override if it wants to. And of course, some of that authority was given away to the federal government at the Constitutional Convention, but for the most part, states are sovereign and have this supreme irresistible power. So it's a democracy version of William Blackstone's view of sovereignty. And that became very popular in the years leading up to the Civil War. It's interesting, there's some of these really amazing court decisions from Supreme Courts of States during the 1850s. I talk about one in particular in the book called Sharpless versus Mayor of Philadelphia, where the Pennsylvania Supreme Court endorsed this Blackstonian vision of absolute government authority. But there was another decision just a few years before that called Billings versus Hall in California in which rejected that view and said no, state governments do have a lot of power, but they don't have the power to intrude on natural rights even if their constitutions don't provide those kinds of protections, the law will still protect those rights. And that tension between those two viewpoints I think lays the foundation for what ultimately became the division of the Civil War. So that's a perfect getting up to the Civil War because you have a lot of interesting things to say about the Civil War in the book. And libertarians often have some pretty big conversations about the Civil War. You have a view of the Civil War based on certain thinkers. Frederick Douglass I know is one that you bring up that says that slavery was a warrant to the Constitution at the beginning, even despite the concessions of it. Would you elaborate a little bit on that? Yeah, so in their view slavery was something like you might say it was a social institution. It wasn't created by the government. In fact, Southern political leaders were quite emphatic that slavery had not been created by positive law. And so it was more like you might say the institution of polygamy or not in a moral sense, but what I mean is that that was a social institution and the political state then came into being with that institution already in place. And so to them, they thought that the Constitution made accommodations for this existing institution but that in the long run, the Constitution's protections were ultimately incompatible with slavery. Now some of these anti-slavery thinkers, particularly Lysander Spooner and Joel Tiffany, they said slavery is just already unconstitutional and their reasoning was the declaration says one people, it doesn't distinguish between white and black. So all people in the United States must be part of the people of the United States, which Spooner said must have freed the slaves right then. They must have been free already. And then the Constitution says we the people of the United States and he says, and in fact, if you look blacks in some states could vote for delegates to the ratification conventions for the Constitution in 1787 and 88. So if they are people, then they are protected by the due process clause and other clauses of the Constitution and no state may intrude on their rights because the Constitution says in Article IV that you are entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states when you go from one state to another. Now, the problem with the original Constitution, of course, is that it didn't define citizenship. So the Constitution refers to citizenship but it never explains what that means. So it says, for instance, the president must be a natural born citizen. Representatives have to be citizens of the United States. The privileges and immunities clause protects the rights of citizenship but until the 14th Amendment was ratified, states gave you your citizenship and then you were a citizen of the United States through that. Well, the problem with that was in some states free blacks could become citizens and in other states they couldn't. So you had situations like the police act of South Carolina which said that all black sailors on ships landing in ports in Charleston or in South Carolina had to be put in jail at the ship captain's expense. Upon arrival and if, until the ship left and if the captain failed to pay the bills for his imprisonment, then the sailor would be sold into permanent slavery. Well, now a black man could become a citizen of Massachusetts and thereby a citizen of the United States and Massachusetts had a lot of sailors then as well as now and a sailor could very well land at a port in South Carolina and now he's being imprisoned for committing no crime in violation of the privileges or immunities clause. So you have this real problem about citizenship that leads up to the Civil War and the anti-slavery constitutionalists said, federal citizenship comes first, your rights belong to your federal citizenship and at least free black people and possibly even slaves are citizens of the United States and therefore entitled to these protections. Now, you know, these guys disagreed amongst themselves. Lysander Spooner was probably the most radical. Other people like John Quincy Adams were more conservative, but even they said, for instance, the Missouri crisis of 1820, Missouri wants to get into the union. It proposes a state constitution that allows it to exclude free blacks from its borders. And John Quincy says, well, this violates the privileges and immunities clause, you can't do that. And they worked out this meaningless compromise, of course, where Henry Clay negotiated this thing where they included in the admission law, they said, well, okay, but we will, Missouri must promise to interpret that clause of its constitution, not to violate the federal constitution. What does that mean? Nobody knows, right? So it put off the conflict. And anyway, so the anti-slavery constitutional theory, they do disagree amongst themselves, but they had certain broad principles, and that is federal citizenship first, that includes individual rights and no state may justly intrude on those rights. And they tried at first in courts and in Congress to advance this interpretation of the constitution and ultimately it turned out they had to amend the constitution. And that's the 14th Amendment. Now, when the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are ratified, we see the death of the idea that the states have the kind of unlimited Blackstonian sovereignty that some people said that they had before. And whether they had it before or not as immaterial, it's gone now, we all agree with that. But the beast rears its head again in the progressive era with the idea of the federal government now holding more or less that type of sovereignty as opposed to the idea that it has a limited amount of power. So what happens in this next stage of the story? Well, one of the interesting things about constitutional law and really about all legal interpretation is the question of when does something become unconstitutional? So let's take, for example, Lawrence versus Texas, the recent decision in which the Supreme Court said that states can't criminalize same-sex sexual conduct in private. The question is, well, when did it become unconstitutional? And the answer is it was always unconstitutional, right? And yet it continued to go on because there was no case to address the question and the states were prohibiting this kind of conduct and so forth and there were debates about its constitutionality going on. Then the court interprets the constitution and says it was always unconstitutional for states to intrude in this way. So with the 14th Amendment, the question isn't did the authors of the 14th Amendment changed the constitution to eliminate the Blackstonian vision of sovereignty. It's more accurate to say what they did was they made clear that that had never been correct and that the states were never sovereign in that sense and if there was any question about it, this amendment would settle it. And the way it does that is, among other things, it strips states of the last vestiges of sovereignty by defining citizenship and defining it at the federal level. So states have no say in who their own citizens are. That decision is made for them by the constitution and you're a citizen of the state wherein you reside, whether the state likes it or not. So it was more of a clarifying than a changing amendment. Unfortunately, it didn't really clarify things enough for some people and so the very first Supreme Court case to interpret the amendment was the Slaughterhouse cases of 1873 and what the court does there is it totally ignores the deeper ratification, the meaning of the ratification of the 14th Amendment and it endorses the obsolete state's rights view of the constitution and it says, was it the purpose of the 14th Amendment to say that the federal government will protect civil rights even against state authority? Why, that can't possibly be the way because it's never been that way before. Well, I also recall that the decision all but said that such a view would entail way too much work for the courts and to me, this can't possibly be the proper way to interpret the constitution. If it means that the courts have to do a lot of work to achieve justice, well, isn't that their job? It really ought to be and not only that but there was another case I mentioned in the end notes actually a California state court case that interpreted the privileges or immunities clause only three years before Slaughterhouse and it says if it was the purpose of the 14th Amendment to provide federal protection for civil rights then we would regard such a law just like we would regard a law apparently legalizing murder. So there was real political hostility to what the Republican party had accomplished with the ratification of the 14th Amendment. There was a lot of what you would be appropriately called reactionary conservative opposition to what had been done to the constitution and it took the form in 1877 of abandoning the freed slaves by abandoning reconstruction and in the Supreme Court it took the form of the Slaughterhouse cases and other cases that followed in the years that came after that. There was of course the famous Cruickshank case which involved a race riot. The Colfax riot, yeah. The Colfax massacre. Which is a fascinating story. And that was a question about whether the 14th Amendment protected the civil rights against state power and the Supreme Court said, well, we already said Slaughterhouse cases we already said no, so no. Interestingly, the Colfax massacre occurred on the very same day that the Slaughterhouse cases was announced on April 13th, 1873. So the 14th Amendment, if we look at it in the proper way in your interpretation, does it, would it be fair to say it brings back in the principles of the declaration, back into the constitution, back to the states, applying to the states, what they always weren't allowed to do in the first place. But this time we're just, now we really mean it this time and creates a floor below which the states can't go that was there before because the declaration, would you say the floor was there before? I absolutely it was. And there had, of course, the constitution was ambiguous in some ways. And one of the big ones, one of the big ambiguities was what role does the Bill of Rights have with regard to state governments? There was the famous Case Baron versus Baltimore in which John Marshall said that the Bill of Rights only applies to the federal government. And you know, that is a very plausible reading of the Bill of Rights. Everybody knew it was written in order to protect people against the federal government. And you know, it was added to the federal constitution, not the state constitution, made a lot of sense. And of course the First Amendment is explicitly applied only to the federal government because it refers to Congress. So Marshall says it doesn't apply to the states. But you know, not all of the amendments say Congress. They say no person shall be deprived. You know, and it doesn't say by what government, right? And so a group of people disagreed with Baron versus Baltimore. Professor Achille Lamar calls them the Baron Contrarians. And they played a large role in the anti-slavery political thinking that led up to the Civil War. And so one of the roles of the 14th Amendment was to clarify that point, to make clear that from now on the guarantees of the federal constitution shall apply at the state level also. So interesting, the fact that the Bill of Rights though, people would say, some people would say, well the Bill of Rights is what gives me these rights that I have against the government in a certain way. And it was applied to the federal government. The states had their own bills of rights. If someone says that the Bill of Rights, you know, when they walk in they say, I have the freedom of speech because the Bill of Rights. What's wrong with saying that? Yeah, well that's exactly, so the Bill of Rights only declares these principles. It doesn't create these rights. And it doesn't purport to create these rights. The language itself of the Bill of Rights uses terms like, no person shall be deprived or this right shall not be abridged. It doesn't say we shall extend this right or people shall have this right. So the Bill of Rights itself. Which is how you would use it for like a voting right. Yeah. Because that's what you use for voting rights. We shall extend the right to vote to win. I'm not exactly sure about that. Well actually, that is a bit difficult because the way that voting rights are is that the Bill of Rights, the way that voting rights are extended to women, I'm going to get the exact language here, but it is... Using the Kato Pocket Constitution. Yeah, using the Kato Pocket Constitution. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. So it doesn't actually say we have created this right for women. It says that it shall not be abridged on account of sex, which means no one will have this as the reason that they are denied to vote. There's a special history there though, because for one thing, women could vote in some states at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. And that right was then taken away in a reactionary movement in the 1790s and 1800s. And there were women who argued before the ratification of that amendment, there were women who argued that the Constitution never says that the right to vote shall be limited on the basis of sex or extends it only to men. And so many of them argued that against the 15th amendment because the 15th amendment was the first time that there was any constitutional acknowledgement of a state's authority to discriminate on the basis of sex when it came to voting rights. So they were doing in miniature what the anti-slavery constitutionalists had already done with regard to slavery. They were saying the Constitution already prohibits the government from depriving us of a right to vote that is created in the Constitution. And so with the ratification of the 19th amendment, they again clarified that. Now, there's an interesting follow-up to that, which is the 19th amendment doesn't just guarantee the right to vote. Akhil Amar's new book, The America's Unwritten Constitution, has a marvelous chapter on this issue. What else does the 19th amendment do? And he argues that the 19th amendment should be read as a broader protection for equality for the rights of women. Well, the problem was that Amar leaves out the case that stands for this proposition, and that's one of my favorite Supreme Court cases, Adkins versus Children's Hospital, a 1932 decision in which the Supreme Court struck down a minimum wage law here in Washington, D.C. that applied only to women. Interestingly enough, it was brought by a woman who had lost her job because she was an elevator operator fired over her. A woman named Willie Lyons, who worked at a hospital here in D.C. And she liked her job, but she made less than the minimum wage. Now, of course, the minimum wage in this case only applied to women. So what did these businesses do? They all fired all the women and hired men because they were cheaper, so she lost her job, and she was viewed. And there was an earlier case called Mueller versus Oregon that said that the government could pass minimum wage legislation for women only because women were dumber and weaker. Delicate, yeah. And they needed the government to protect them. I mean, it's astonishing. Interesting. Yeah, that's also the first Brandeis briefcase. That's right. Where Louis Brandeis, you know, great champion supposedly of liberal causes, filed the first brief where you just dump on the court a ton of sociological data supporting your interpretation of the law and this was just a huge brief that was full of all these studies about how women are caught. So are weak, and they need special care and their bones are brittle or anything else like that. Right. And what Justice Sutherland then says 30 years later in Adkins, he says, okay, maybe that was right then, but with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, we now have said that women are equal to men and they are equal citizens, and therefore, under the due process laws of the 14th Amendment, they cannot be deprived of liberty arbitrarily and they don't need the government to be looking over their shoulder telling them how to live their lives. And because that law, that case involves economic liberty, that's why Professor Omar leaves it out of his book when it makes the strongest case for the argument that he's trying to make. Yeah. And it's an anti-minimum wage case. Now, not to be too pedantic here, but you might very easily read the 5th and the 14th Amendments in their guarantee of rights for persons and say, hey, this isn't gender-specific. Right. Obviously, it was intended with the 14th Amendment to be general with respect to race, but if it was intended to be specific with regard to gender, why wasn't it written that way? The words men and women were very well known then. Right. Man and woman were known in the law. Right. But that's not what the text says. It says person. Was this an intentional or unintentional error? Was this an assumption? And what role does the implicit assumption make in the role of our constitutional interpretation? It strikes me this is very, very important because we will look at a document like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution and say, look, these are written in general terms when, yes, the authors of the documents may have written in those general terms, but clearly when they were enacted and when they were immediately acted upon, they were not acted upon in general terms. They were taken to mean that women are not civilly equal to men and not going to be equal citizens and, of course, that there would be racial discrimination as well. Well, I was going to say if you were to take your question and substitute for women, substitute blacks for women, that is exactly the issue in Dred Scott. And what the anti-slavery constitutionalists did was exactly what you said. They said, they looked at the Constitution, they said this makes no distinction based on race. So slavery, which consists in large part of depriving people of liberty without due process of law, therefore must be unconstitutional. Now, in our view, in our days, typically we look back at that and we say what a ridiculous argument to make. Slavery was pervasive in society and you can't possibly say that it was already unconstitutional before the 13th Amendment was written and yet, in fact, we are surrounded all the time by unconstitutional activity that we only later say, you know what, that was always unconstitutional. Exactly. And so, I don't think it's that radical to begin with and remember that the arguments on the other side were no less radical. The pro-slavery constitutionalists, for instance, John C. Calhoun, argued that there was in fact no such thing as an American nation. There was no such thing as federal citizenship. There was no American political society. There was only a treaty between sovereign states, which in fact is the exact opposite of what the Constitution actually says. But that is no less radical a position. Now, again, these were extreme positions, although, you know, Justice Curtis in his dissent in Dred Scott, he does make a large number of these arguments, but they were radical enough that they required amendment to the Constitution. But as far as women are concerned, absolutely. What Susan B. Anthony and her colleagues were doing was arguing that the Constitution does not discriminate on the basis of sex and only when the 15th amendment comes along. Does it imply that states are allowed to discriminate against women when it comes to voting rights? I want to go back a little bit to the Bill of Rights because we have a good sort of rights thrust going here and also on enumerated or enumerated rights. We talk about the Bill of Rights and the original non-inclusion of it in the Constitution as it was released from the convention on September 17, 1787 and people are often surprised that the Bill of Rights was sort of a later code of sale. They say, and that's usually the first thing people think of when they think of the Constitution is often the first amendment. Why did they so blatantly forget a Bill of Rights? Well, they didn't forget it. They were afraid that stating a Bill of Rights would imply that rights not listed were not protected by the Constitution. So, Jefferson gets a copy of the Constitution. He was in France at the time. He gets a copy of the brand-new Constitution before it had been ratified and he writes to Madison. He says, look, there's a couple things I don't like. First, I don't like that the president can be perpetually re-elected. I think it should be two terms only. And secondly, I think there should be a Bill of Rights. And Madison writes back and says, the problem is if you say people have the right to one thing, that kind of implies they don't have a right to another thing. So if you say they have the right to freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom of religion, then clever lawyers are going to say that that means you don't have the right to things not listed. You don't have a right to their foot through sprinklers on a hot summer day. And so what we need to do is if we're going to write a Bill of Rights, we need to write it in such a way as to not imply that. And Madison became persuaded that he could do that. And the way to do it was the Ninth Amendment that says the enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people. And that's why the positivist interpretation of the Constitution- That way, what's that? Define positivist. That means that if there is, if the right is not listed, it's not a right. It says that, I mean, positivism means that law is what we say it is. And so if there is no right listed, then it's not a right. And the reason why that is the wrong interpretation of the Constitution is because the Ninth Amendment says that's the wrong way to read the Constitution. And that's- And it was a very reasonable fear at the time, historically speaking, when you look at grants of right that had been made before. So if you consider, say, the Edict of Nantes in France, this was a very, very limited grant of religious liberty to one particular persuasion of Protestants. You couldn't just pick your own religion. You couldn't make up a new one. You were restricted to certain places and times, and you're not allowed to build new houses of worship. You just have to keep with the ones that you have, etc, etc. There were so many strings attached and it was very clear that the Edict of Nantes could be revoked at any time and eventually it was. And obviously this is the sort of charter that they would not have wanted because then well, then of course what eventually did happen would happen, which is that people would come along and construe the Bill of Rights to be a limited grant of rights and not one that was simply trying to spell out some small share of a much larger sphere of rights that can't in fact be fully enumerated by anyone. And now you know, my friend Clark Neely who just wrote a book called Terms of Engagement that's about the question of judicial activism and judicial restraint. He was at an event not long ago where he asked a prominent positivist judge named J. Harvey Wilkinson and he asked him, well, suppose that the Constitution were amended to say unenumerated rights, the right to run barefoot through sprinklers and so forth, shall be protected by the courts when cases of that nature come before the court.  And Judge Wilkinson since he said no. Well, so it's not a question of whether... That's what the Ninth Amendment actually says. And it's very puzzling to me also to watch people try to reason their way out of the Ninth Amendment because I like to say everyone actually believes in the Ninth Amendment to some degree, it's just a question of what other rights they think that people have. So for example, I don't think anyone believes that you have no right to breathe the air. I don't think anyone believes that you have no right to travel. Virtually everyone will say yes, you have a right to travel in the United States, maybe there might have to be some restrictions in cases of emergency, maybe you have to follow traffic laws, that's fine, but you in principle have a right to go from one place to the other within the United States without being stopped. That's something that is not anywhere else in the Constitution if it's anywhere, it is in the Ninth Amendment and I think properly so. The right to travel is an absolutely great example. Yeah, because of Slaughterhouse. And because it's not listed in the Constitution and yet it is taken as one of the bedrock ideas of what freedom means and the courts have always protected it and the reason why is they say the 14th Amendment protects liberty. What do you mean by liberty? Well, let's look at Blackstone or Cook or the ancient and modern legal scholars and Blackstone says, liberty includes the freedom from bodily restraint and traveling wherever you want to. That's the most basic meaning of liberty and they say, okay, well, the 14th Amendment protects liberty. Blackstone says, liberty includes freedom from restraint. Therefore, freedom of restraint is protected by the Constitution. That's how we protect unenumerated rights. Now, I find it ironic that we talk about unenumerated rights because liberty is an enumerated right. The Constitution says you have the right to liberty and it's protected by the Constitution. That's why that's the subtitle of my book. So, when we interpret the term liberty in today's world, what we do is exactly the same thing. We say, okay, it protects liberty. What do we mean by liberty? And then we look in the legal scholarship. We have these kinds of philosophical debates, historical analysis and so forth and we protect liberty that way. So, yeah, you brought up J. Harvey Wilkinson which I think is a good way to segue with this point into a question of how, therefore, do you as a libertarian and other libertarians tend to view this role of enforcing the Constitution versus what J. Harvey Wilkinson would view and where's the tension there? As I see it, Judge Wilkinson is the final collapse of positivism. I mean, Wilkinson's book is basically saying there is no such thing as political theory. I mean, as constitutional theory. The thesis of his book is that everybody is wrong. There is no validity to any interpretation of the Constitution period and there cannot be. And the reason why he says is because for there to be an interpretation, a theory of the Constitution would intrude on our inalienable right to self-government. That's what he says. It's the only time in his book. That's the only right we have. It's the only right he refers to. It's to go and vote in elections. It's right. It appears before administrative committees. Exactly. And it's not only a right but an inalienable right. And what's ironic about that is that the founders never believed there was any such thing as an inalienable right to self-government. There was no right of government whatsoever. There's no right to government. The government is a permission. We give government the authority, the power to govern us. But it's not a right. That's the whole point of being anti-monarchical. Yeah. But it's again, it's the only right that Judge Wilkinson recognizes. And therefore he naturally comes to the conclusion that any kind of individual right must conflict with that. And he follows in a line of positivists who have said the same thing. From the left and the right. That's right. And I think mostly from the right. Judge Bork, for example, says he criticizes Marbury versus Madison because he is basically anti-judicial review at all. He thinks that the courts should not be in the business of enforcing the Constitution by striking down laws that the legislature... Now that's very hard for me to understand as a position intellectually because I've read the Federalist papers and it's very clear that the proponents of the Constitution imagined that the courts would be doing this. Alexander Hamilton talks about how the courts will do this. And so it's very difficult for me to see how anyone could have been taken by surprise at this. It was a clear implication of the text. Marbury versus Madison explains how it is such a clear implication of the text and given that it was talked about beforehand you made a deal. You made a bargain. I was well understood at the time. It was practiced by state courts already at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. Federalist 78 explains it very clearly. And the Constitution's text does require it because it says, laws made in pursuance of this Constitution shall be the supreme law of the land. Which means there are some laws out there that are not in pursuance of the Constitution and that are therefore not the supreme law of the land. And every branch has the duty to obey the Constitution. So there you go. So the view here of extreme deference to democratic majorities is it that they're absolute democracy fetishists? Are they afraid of something? Well one blurs into the other. I always think that the conservative started being afraid of that if you let us do it, then someone else might do it wrong. And therefore no one should do it. My sense is that people who take the extreme position of democracy over liberty are making possibly the very most respectable and the nicest possible form of the argument at baculum. I have a stick and my greater force is what will carry the issue. That's not a legitimate argument in logic and the argument that there is a majority that wants to do something politically is not necessarily a legitimate one in politics either. I was at an event some years ago where a speaker was a prominent law professor who's very anti natural rights and in the end I said well now you have this choice to make between democracy as your value and liberty as your value and you choose democracy why? You've told us already that there is no validity to moral propositions. There's no such thing as rights. It's all just how you feel. When you say that people have freedom of speech all that means is that you like the idea that they should be able to speak. It's purely an emotional preference. You have no intellectual basis for that. That's what you've said. So why do you choose democracy? And his answer was I just do. It's just as arbitrary as any other choice. Well then why not choose dictatorship? So we're out there though. We're looking for these rights and you've discussed how in the book you discuss the doctrine of substantive due process which has been called I mean obviously oxymoronic phrase by some people very looked down upon by justice Scalia for example but something has something to do with unenumerated rights but you defend it. Yes. In fact they've called it all sorts of names. It seems like there's a competition to come up with the nastiest way of referring to the theory of substantive due process. So what is the theory first? The theory of substantive due process is the idea that the due process clause which says you cannot be deprived of liberty without due process of law. The idea is that this clause prohibits the government from doing certain things to you regardless of how it does them to you. Some people read that clause as meaning that the government owes you a hearing or a trial before it takes away your life, liberty or property but the theory of substantive due process is the idea that the constitution prohibits the government from arbitrarily depriving you of life, liberty or property at all and so procedural due process then is only one small component of the substantive due process. It's because the government cannot arbitrarily deprive you of liberty that it then has to give you a trial or a hearing or something like that and this came under fire beginning really in the 1930s 1940s. In fact the very phrase substantive due process didn't exist before the 1940s. Before then it was just due process of law. Did someone invent it to try and make it sound ridiculous? Exactly and it reaches back to Magna Carta. If you look at the English common law decisions from before the American founding, first of all all of those decisions protect unenumerated rights because the rights were unenumerated because there's no written constitution in England and they did so under the law of the land clause of Magna Carta. The law of the land clause says the government cannot deprive you of liberty or property except by the law of the land and then the question is what does law of the land mean? Not just statutes and legislation. It means general principles. It means in a lawful way and that means not arbitrarily, not because the government just wants to, not because the majority has decided to take your freedom away. There has to be some justification for its restrictions on your liberty or taking of your private property and that was the argument that Daniel Webster made in his epical oral argument in the Dartmouth College case of 1819. Yeah, the one that went on for 10 hours or something like that. Yes and it's a master piece and it was studied for generations by law students who of course don't study it today and it was quoted over and over again by the Supreme Court itself saying this is what substantive due process means. Well, you look at Robert Bork, he says that the first substantive due process case was Dred Scott in the 1850s. Another untruth from Judge Bork. Substantive due process is correct because we are promised not just any process but a process of law. Is the red queen's trial of Alice in Alice in Wonderland a trial? Of course it's not a trial because when we talk about trial we mean a fair process whereby an adjudication follows based on reasons that arise from the evidence. In the same way an arbitrary assertion of government power isn't a law because it's just ipsy-dixit as they say in Latin. It's just because I say so. And so the due process clause prohibits the government from taking any of our rights away simply as an act of force. My favorite is there's an 8th circuit, actually on whether the government can force you to cut your hair. Really? No, it's public schools. And the court says that it cannot force you to cut your hair just arbitrarily.  Where's the enumerated right? There are religious groups that do not cut their hair for religious reasons. Sure. I imagine they might have a free exercise case there, but not everyone would, certainly. I'm not a Sikh and the Sikhs are the ones who do not cut their hair for religious reasons. So maybe that would be a problem for me, but not for them. And that raises the question of why should it in fact be that way? Should those rights not be equal? Well, yeah, that does raise the question. But I do want to go back to Tim or somebody with the justification that we can come back and maybe what Jason's question was of because you're even asking for justification, that seems to raise it to some level, right? If you just, you have to justify it. Even if it's something you have to justify. Because we presume that all people are free and the government can only take freedom away for some good reason. And the government are not like your parents who can tell you, because I said so, Ipsy Dixit, all the time, right? And then also it seems like you're saying that the term law in these contexts of due process of law, law of the land clause of the Manta Carta is actually a term of art in a way that maybe we've forgotten that law is a term of art, right? It describes a specific type of going about doing that. That's right, it incorporates substantive values. It doesn't mean just whatever the legislature says it means. And we know that that must be true because if that were true, then the clause would be meaningless. It would mean that the legislature could pass a law taking away your freedom and then when you say, well this violates my due process, right? They would say no, because we passed a law to take away your freedom. You know? And that would be question begging. So we know it can't mean that. And then when you look at the legal history you see that the phrase comes from Magna Carta and all of those common law cases that were written at the time and that is a far stronger protection. It has a far stronger basis in the constitutional history than the notion that due process of law just means whatever the legislature says it means. If that's what law means then why have a constitution at all? Yeah. I don't know why they just have a dictatorship with force. Yeah. Now, some of this sits very badly with one particular footnote. The Caroline Products footnote 4. Which I would like you to talk about a little bit because I think it's a very instructive bit of jurisprudence that causes a lot of things to make sense about how rights are interpreted and how we arrived at where we are now that probably all libertarians ought to know a bit about. Yes. That's true. But it was also somewhat misunderstood by some libertarians and that is a lot of people think that what happened was that the Supreme Court, the famous switch in time that saved nine, they think that well in 1937 the Supreme Court just woke up and changed the constitution. Or at least Owen Roberts did. Yeah. And this was a sudden shift that was based on their fear of the court packing plan in 1936 and ever since then everything's been different. Well, it's not quite as simple as that. And we know that because in 1934, three years before the so-called switch in time, the Supreme Court decided Nebia versus New York and Blaisdell versus building and savings and loan corporation. And in both of those cases the court strongly reduced, I mean sharply reduced protections for economic liberty and set the stage, I mean created the so-called rational basis test in the Nebia case. Which watered down constitutional protections for freedom of contract and private property rights. And then the switch in time in 1937 came after that. Now what I think a better way of interpreting what really happened in the 30s.  W.H. Auden called it the low dishonest decade. Yeah, I mean I think maybe like some random decade in the 8th century would be pretty cat too but I'll go with that. But I guarantee you more people were killed in the 1930s. That's true. And what happened, so that is a blink of an eye in the history of the law but it wasn't just 1937. What happened was that the court reduced protections for individual liberty dramatically in 1934 and then in 1938 in the Caroling products case it said okay look some rights will get stronger protection and it listed those rights for the most part in that footnote 4. And at the same time the rights that it particularly focuses on in that footnote are rights that can be reconstrued in a democratic way. These are rights like speech and the right to vote and things like that that have a role to play in democracy. So the court is not only saying it'll protect these rights more than it said a few years ago in the Nebia case but it's saying that we're going to protect rights that are important for the democratic process as opposed to individual rights. Also what the court did is it reconstructed the concept of individual rights in terms of how it serves democracy and ever since then the idea has been that individual rights are protected in order to serve democracy as opposed to the democracy exists to protect individual rights. I think it's also worth filling us in on what the actual issue was in Caroling products and why they didn't want to protect this. Well Caroling products was a case about an economic liberty case about the restriction on what you could put into certain dairy products. It was a product itself. Which sounds disgusting. It was skim milk that was then added, there was different types of other fat added back into them so you could use fish oil or something like that which you would refatten up the milk by using it. And what the court said was we're going to presume economic restrictions to be constitutional unless proven otherwise. And it had already said that in the Nebia case so that really wasn't all that new. A little footnote, our friend Josh Blackman has done some research and found that the Caroling products company actually ended up winning its case in the 1970s. Decades later it finally had that loss dropped down. Millnut is what it's called that's a fascinating story by itself even fascinating too which I think is relevant to the cronyism we talk about now is if you look at the history of the filled milk act of 1923 is what it actually is called when they decided to pass this the dairy industry sat down and looked Congress in the face and said this filled milk is hurting a vital national industry and that vital national industry was dairy. And so they went up to Congress, looked him in the face and said pass this crony capitalism law and the filled milk industry had said had these points which were very valid and which was that filled milk is used by poor people more because you don't have to refrigerate it and refrigerators are fairly common and it's cheaper so they made a leak, the dairy companies made a legal, a viable product that was not a health risk based on crony capitalism and then when the court was asked to look at this law they did it and I think it's relevant to a lot of stuff that's happening now and the kind of vision that the Libertarian Constitution would have that you can stop crony capitalism but not entirely but you could do a lot by having a Libertarian Constitution I'd like to ask two questions from the standpoint of someone who is a defender of this modern democracy based approach to rights. The first is what do you actually have against democracy? Do you believe that democracy is wrong in some sense? Do you believe that it is dangerous? Do you believe that perhaps a small group of knowledgeable aristocrats or of particularly ideologically sympathetic people should be running the government? Is that really what you want? And second what is the danger of asking majorities to protect rights?  It's very unlikely I've heard this from progressives it's very unlikely that democratic majorities are going to oppress minorities here it just doesn't happen anymore so relax about this Well at first I was going to say that I would use your second question to answer your first which is that I'm not so much anti-democracy but I'm very much against making it into a fetish or saying that democracy is the source of all political good which is what we're propagandized to every day in this country we're told that democracy is the source of our political greatness and all this sort of thing spreading democracy not true democracy is good in so far as it fits within the spectrum of political goods and so democracy is a useful tool to protect individual rights that's what Madison says in the Federalist and he makes that argument about what modern progressives often say that if you have a balance of interests that none of them can gang up on a minority and beat them up and take away their things of course that wasn't even true in Madison's day witnessed the glaring fact of American life at the time which was slavery so it is entirely possible and we see everyday majorities ganging up and violating the rights of individuals it's done on a minute by minute basis in this country I'm just it astonishes me that we express so much worry about courts violating the Constitution or exceeding their authority as if they are the ones out there taking away our freedom when it is legislatures violating the Constitution every minute of every day in every state and at the federal level taking away liberty after liberty after liberty harming people and getting away with it in on the theory that democracy somehow justifies it so my problem is with democracy being elevated above liberty as the constitutional value the Constitution says that liberty is a blessing it does not say that about democracy the word doesn't appear in the declaration of independence or the Constitution founders were rightly suspicious of democracy and they tried to create a system of checks and balances to restrain democracy to get its benefits while preventing its harms and we fiddled with the system so much that we have a lot of its harms coming back on us so we are running out of time but we each have one parting question for you and my question is if you could add one amendment to the US Constitution on a single subject what would that amendment be I'm reminded my father always says that he would like to amend the Constitution to say breaking the law is illegal but I think a good amendment would be and we mean it because I don't think that the Constitution needs that much amending I think that the Constitution needs to be followed and the problem with the modern legal interpretation the so-called living Constitution is that it in fact is a dead Constitution it's a Constitution with all sorts of dead spots in it we now have a Constitution where the public use restriction on the power of eminent domain is basically meaningless another example of cronyism too yeah exactly and I think so I would say I don't think that the Constitution needs that much amending I do think there are some things in the Constitution I disagree with I don't believe in intellectual property rights for example and so the patent clause troubles me it's clearly constitutional but I don't think it's justifiable so there are some things I might tinker with restoring state legislative power over using senators I think could be beneficial although it also has some downsides that we sometimes overlook so I might do some tinkering but no I don't think that the Constitution needs radical amendment so yeah I've always been partial to the no one can be president who wants to be president and the no air conditioning in federal buildings because if you've ever been in DC in the summer this is the only way I can think of how to get them to not go to work so as the final question we've learned a lot about the true your view of the interpretation of the Constitution and how it is a very very powerful force for Liberty so what is the Libertarian Constitution why is it better and what should we do what how should we use it to make the world better anything that's left of it if we can actually use it I think the Libertarian Constitution is a Constitution that protects individual Liberty against the forces most likely to take that Liberty away and that is legislators presidents and courts and it provides a wonderful system of checks and balances to protect those those rights I think the founding fathers had a vision in mind of a society where the government didn't play a constant role in your life I mean we have a system you asked about amendments we have a system where the interpretation of the commerce clause is so broad that the federal government today dictates to us everything from the thickness of ketchup to the angle at which your office chairs can lean back that is not what the founding fathers intended so now another amendment that occurs to me is an amendment that Milton Friedman proposed which was to say that the right to engage in honest trade shall not be impaired unfortunately the founding fathers thought that that right was so obvious why would anybody take it away and now it's so restricted that we are really killing the golden goose I think rightly understood the Constitution is a glorious Liberty document that was that's a phrase from one of my heroes Frederick Douglass one of the great intellectuals in American history he was asked late in life what he thought about the so-called Negro problem and he said there is no Negro problem the problem is whether the American people have honesty enough bravery enough patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution and I think we libertarians only have to demand that thank you Tim and thank you for listening if you have any questions about this podcast or about anything on libertarianism.org you can find me on twitter at tcburris that is tcburus you can find me on twitter at Jason Kuznicki that is j-a-s-o-n k-u-z-n-i-c-k-i and my twitter feed is at timothy sandiford that's s-a-n-d-e-f-u-r and my blog is at sandiford.typepad.com I'd like to thank Tim for joining us and Jason for filling in Free Thoughts is a podcast project of libertarianism.org in the Cato Institute and it is produced by Evan Banks if you'd like to learn more about libertarianism please visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org


The Marines of 6th Engineer Support Battalion, 4th Marine Logistics Group, joined up with the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs' innovative readiness training program to work on one of the largest projects to date. We're to assist them in developing, you know, 2,600 acres of networks of roadways, camp sites, presidential helipads, deconstruction of the sawmill, and various other tasks. Marines worked with soldiers, sailors, airmen, and guardsmen from various units to complete major construction projects on the Summit Bechtel Family Boy Scout Reserve. Projects included a helicopter pad, a large footbridge, and the deconstruction of a sawmill. The event is a great benefit to the local community and is also a valuable training resource for each of the service members. Project is a unique opportunity for our service members to gain valuable training in their particular field, as well as increase and learn other traits, whether here as you know, a lot of our service members are training outside of their particular MOS into different fields. So it gives them that opportunity to gain a little bit more wisdom and utilize this to benefit our own country, as you will. We're gaining the valuable knowledge and the training they're gaining then brought up. You know, it's not just a road we're building, it's not just a presidential battle, it's not just a summit we're deconstructing, it's the training, it's the value of working together, the cohesion that everybody, you know, learns. When you're out there sweating in 90 plus degree weather together, it makes a bond, I think, as you need. Reporting from Mount Hope, West Virginia, I'm Corporal Michelito.


Hello fellow fragrance lovers. I have another unboxing from notino today and I've been doing so much shopping. I can't even remember what it is. I got So it's gonna be really exciting See what we have in here. Oh nice Paris Hilton Paris Hilton 30 mils and Lollipop amethyst Now this is a blind-wise guys. I was just reading about these and Sierra Revlon Start off with this one So this one was quite cheap because the box they said that the box is damaged and That it wasn't in cellophones. So I was like, yeah, that's fine. So I got it really really cheaply Okay, and then the Paris Hilton one. I was watching a channel called Soky London and She did a video about the Paris Hilton perfumes and I was curious especially for the price I Like the size is nice and small and with amethyst So this one is Lalik amethyst. I'm gonna be honest I got this one because it's purple and I like purple and the bottle looks Amazing Right, let's try these on So I got Paris Hilton Paris Hilton First of all, because I was watching Soky London and she actually did like a Paris Hilton A Paris Hilton whole sorry, I just realized that my nail has smudged Very annoying But and I actually read some good things about her perfumes They're supposed to be quite florally and quite light So I was like, yeah, I'm gonna try it and it was a special offer at Notina. So I got it really dead cheap and When I looked at the notes profile that kind of got me excited because it's got melon It has got melon apple peach frisian mimosa Lily of the valley Jasmine Lily tuberose Musk Ilan Ilan Sandalwood and Okmos. So this is my first Ilan Ilan perfume I haven't tried any perfume that has got Ilan Ilan Neither have I tried any perfume that has got Okmos as the base note, which I'm quite interested To find out about because I've seen what Okmos looks like And I cannot believe that it is something that is used in perfumery. Okay, so because today I was wearing An order toilet Which I only put on in the morning and I didn't get to refresh it and fragrance free So I'm gonna try it on my fingers. So So off the bottle It smells very very fresh and quite light. So apparently this was Paris Hilton's first first ever perfume Now I have to admit that I used to be a bit snobbish when it came to Paris Hilton So I never really took her seriously as a person because of there was that reality TV show that she did Which I didn't watch but her reputation was just of being a celebrity thing, but yeah, it's quite fascinating the process that she's been through but Right, I'm gonna try it on here. Oh This is a really good atomizer. I found that it was quite easy to spray Right It's a very fresh fruity floral scent It's very clean like I've just come out with a shower So for me, this is singing summer is saying Very much that this is summer. So I feel like this actually smells like melon This is I'm definitely getting the melon, but it doesn't feel very strong I have to say just for the one spritz that I have done I can see why this is possibly popular. It smells to me like it's quite inoffensive Because it does smell Pretty much like a lot of other perfumes out there And I'm coming to learn that that is inoffensive and that's because other people are pretty much used to smelling those perfumes So they're less likely to be offended by them whereas when you get something that smells out of the ordinary That might be a little bit Tricky But yeah, it's really lovely Yes, I keep wanting to sniff myself. Okay, and for me, that's a little bit of a good sign as well so I do think that this has got a Potential for being something that I like a lot. So this is Paris Hilton Paris Hilton So it's been a few minutes later about 10 minutes since I sprayed it on It is quite pleasant smelling. I think it's Instantly transporting me to be in an apicnic because of the very strong melon scent I'm not familiar with Ylang Ylang outside of aromatherapy and essential oils But I can't say that I'm picking up a lot of Ylang Ylang But it's lovely. It's got a really nice freshness to it and it's it definitely speaks a summer and picnics and gingham picnic blankets and Biting into a nice crunchy cold Melon, I don't know what the longevity is going to be on me, but I will report back about that Up next is Lalique amethyst Now I got this because I had been wearing a Britney Spears midnight fantasy and I loved midnight fantasy It's a berry perfume but There was just something missing from it for me to me It's not too much like a herbal essence is shampoo And not so much of a perfume so much as it felt like, you know, I just had shampoo Like I just shampooed so I started looking at other Profumes that are considered to be similar to midnight fantasy and they've got similar nose and this one came out So the top nose are black currant blackberry blueberry and mulberry So we've got all of the dark fruits covered as well as big strawberry, which is the same top note for Rihanna's rebel The middle notes are pepper, peony, rose and ilan ilan and then the base notes are musk, woody notes and bourbon vanilla So yeah, I'm going I really like the bottle if I may say this is a very sophisticated looking bottle with the geometric And the embossing that it has over here. I mean for the price that I paid for it I can't believe that this bottle looks so good and it's also purple purple is one of my favorite colors So I'm going to spray it on here. Oh nice atomizer To oh wow Oh powdery I gotta say just first Uh, you know the first blast of it It's not like midnight fantasy It's not sweet like midnight fantasy is like midnight fantasy is super super sweet So the other thing that I'm getting when I put my nose right close to the finger is this um herbalness Like a certain green aromaticiness to it is definitely a grown up Uh It's a grown up scent and like say the midnight fantasy Which I just basically need to stop comparing it to because this is nothing like midnight fantasy. It's very soft. It's a very soft fragrance It doesn't feel like it's got the Tartness I would definitely not call it sweet The musk is very subtle, which I think gives it its softness 10 minutes later 10 minutes later And I can definitely say that this is not a sweet fragrance at all. It makes me feel very mature but I think it's a sort of fragrance that seems to develop and I need to try this on my skin And see how it develops over time for me and see what the dry down Is going to be like in order for me to See where this is going to sit for me But um right off the bat. I feel like this is a very grown up fragrance. It's it's very soft and alluring With a hint of sensuality to it. I definitely got some powderyness Um, there was a berry blast at the beginning, but it is not sweet And I know that because I like sweet fragrances and this is definitely not a sweet fragrance But yeah, I'm a taste from the leak So this one is Revlon Chiara And it says a hundred percent strength on it I bought this after reading an article on Fregrantica about 10 Really great budget affordable perfumes because I'm kind of looking at getting affordable perfumes And so I decided to try this again because it was being discounted Because of the damaged box. So I think this cost me six pounds. So I was like, let's go Oh, wow I'm in my days Definitely feminine. Definitely musky So this one you're supposed to have a raspberry neroli begament Lemon middle notes are brazilian rosewood ilang ilang oris jasmine and palmarosa The base nose are opoponax incense, leather, vanilla, seda and masks. It's got a lot going on And you can get it right straight off the bat. So I'm trying it on my skin. Let's try you Oh This speaks power There's a woodiness to it comfort. It runs with like comfort cream like balsam Touches of neroli Of the orange the lemon the citrusiness is coming through It's a very strong woodiness to it. So it's very rich very rich mature I would definitely say that this is a mature fragrance This is five minutes later and I'm reminded of incense sticks the burning of incense sticks The the the orange note at the beginning is completely gone I think that this is definitely Worth trying it's got a lot going on and it's got a lot of Complexities and it seems to be changing. It could be interesting but for For seven for six pounds Um, I'm keen to see where this is going to take me. So that's sierra by revlon These are the three perfumes that I got from notino. These were really super budget perfumes Out of the three so far the one that I sort of kind of liked the most was the paris hilton because of its light melon note It's still got the melon note going and this is 30 minutes later So it was quite lovely this one very lady like very mature soft and alluring Mmm, oh the berry is beginning to come through now Mmm, I need to try this one Yeah, the berry is beginning to come through and then we've got the sierra It's very warm and spicy quite warm and spicy. I think that this would be suitable for winter I'm definitely gonna be trying this and thank you so much for watching I hope that you enjoyed that this hit the subscribe button and follow along with my perfume madness And until I see you again next time guys With another unboxing Bye


And I want to tell you that those fears that you have are 100% valid. They are actually more valid than you think that they are. Young children will consume you in ways that you cannot imagine because you have never done anything this much in your life before, ever, ever, ever. My name is Jay Elizabeth and I have two children and an ex-husband that I received all of them in those titles in the year 2012 and my advice to my younger self is take it slow. Take it as slow as you need to because what's the rush? What is the rush? He moved in prematurely, it was just too much. The advice I would give my past self is to try to be kinder and more respectful to my body. Stop overthinking things and just make it work. Life is going to feel really good for a few years. You're going to land a dream job, you're going to get married, live in a beautiful city, but soon that is all going to change so don't get used to it. You're going to be divorced, you're going to lose that dream job, but just remember to hold on because you're going to smell again. This video is brought to you by, you guessed it, Squarespace.  Squarespace asks you, what do you want to build and how can we make it and your life easier, more bold, more beautiful and more accessible. And if you've got an idea percolating but you're not really quite sure how to bring it to the masses, then try out Squarespace for free. And you can do that with their two-week free trial, no credit cards required, go there, play around, see how easy it is to use their templates to build.   Because that's how you get 10% off the purchase of your website or domain. I thought I would still be married with two kids living in my house with our dog. Living the life and that is exactly not where I'm at and I'm okay with that. I think honestly getting a divorce was one of the best decisions I've made of my life. In a note given to your past self, what advice would you give to your present self? Girl, stop crying. You're going to be fine. Things will work out. You'll love again. Do the work that you need to do to heal and grow and develop and all those things you are going to be fine and you're going to love the life that you live in. Been together for 17 years since high school and we've only actually been married for one year now but we have two kids, 11 and nine, two dogs and it's been a crazy journey but I'm loving it. Girl, you did it. You stopped being an overthinker and look where you at.  Dear Shan Boudram, you have always wanted to get married. You have always been fascinated by the idea of them, heavily influenced by soap operas and Disney movies nonetheless and of course your parents who share a beautiful marriage and the fact that you then became a wedding photographer for years and became hyper obsessed with weddings nonetheless you are now married and this is a relational dynamic that you really really really enjoy and in order to get to a space where you are prepared for this here's what I would like to tell you. Did that make sense? This is basically a letter to my younger self. Dear Shan, I know you have this robust list of what you want in a partner because marriage is very important to you and you have thought critically and analytically about what you were looking for in a future long-term life partner and I want you to take that list and I want you to check it twice and I want you to bring it close to your face and a little closer and a little closer so close that you can't see what color eye you wrote down that you want your husband to have and then smash that list in your face, grab it together, shove it in your mouth, swallow it and shit it out because there's another list that I think that you should focus on and this list I think can save you from a lot of heart ache and a lot of misfires when it comes to trying to push marriage in the wrong relationships and that list is a list of what you want out of yourself, what is going to make you fall in love with you, your dream Shan Boudram list, what qualities, what traits, what lifestyle choices, what values, do you really love in yourself or do you really want to see out of yourself write that down and be fully descriptive and then focus every day on that list and try to find romantic partnerships that inspire that version out of you that not just remind you of that version of yourself but push you to a greater potential than what's even on that paper and that is a truth that I know in some cases can seem narcissistic but something I've discussed openly on this channel is that a good love makes you love yourself more and I don't know if it's supposed to work that way and sometimes I feel guilty for it working that way because I want to have that kind of love for myself regardless of what's happening in the world but to be honest being loved by somebody who shows you sides of yourself that you didn't exercise before I am 35 years old married to a wonderful husband and just had our first baby and he is four months old and a piece of advice that I would give myself 10 years ago would be to continue to work and focus on my career continue to um working yourself because all those tools those resources your career is going to be beneficial to you later on right now we're able to provide for care for our son we're able to have those resources available because we've worked so hard when we were younger while I sleep through the night now my kids don't have those chubby cheeks anymore and so they're five and five years old and six years old now and my husband tweeted the other day that it's the fate of every parent to go from rock star to desperate fan with their kids and right now we are in the rock star phase and they want to be in our bed and they want to sit in our laps and they want to hear everything we're saying and it's not always going to be that way and so I try to remind myself of that I'm married for 21 years I have two children a son age 21 and a daughter 15 years old the advice that I would give present me is to listen more and talk less you're going to learn a lot about your partner and your children when you stop talking well considering I was I guess 23 when I got pregnant and 24 when I had my first child I would say it's probably a bit too young not so much in age but in maturity if I had to say Olivia take a look at yourself what have you done in life what do you want to accomplish in life being a mother at 24 I was not ready for it's not about the age it's more about maturity I've seen 18 year olds that are on a mature level to have children make sure that when you do decide to have a baby that you are emotionally physically mentally spiritually ready and lovingly ready to have that child when it comes to having children what advice would I write to myself whom 10 years ago did not want kids and had no interest in a version of me that had children now even though it is going to be an invasion of all things that you love you are going to receive double the joy on the other side of it so yes it is going to be a sacrifice on your work career but in terms of self-development you will grow rapidly in ways you've never imagined and yes they're annoying and they take up a lot but they give so much and joy they give so much in a sense of purpose for you for where you've come to in your life for who you've come to exist with that your truth will be that it is going to be as hard it's going to be harder than you think it will be but it's going to be so much more worth it and so much more rewarding than you could ever possibly conceive and it gets better every single day and that fact blows your mind so I also want to write this to the version of myself who didn't want to have kids if you choose not to have kids I'm happy for you and I'm excited to see what that version of your life looks like and I champion that choice but coming from the version of you who did choose it double click double tap double pat do the right thing it's amazing shout out to everybody who shared on this video and speaking of sharing if you are somebody who is married and has kids and you have a little letter to write that you want other people to learn from the lessons and learn from your lived experiences please write them in the comment section below if you don't have kids and you are not married what letter do you want to write to your future self what aspirational things about marriage and kids if those are aspirations of yours do you want to you know tell yourself to make sure that you keep in mind when that time comes for you and speaking of the time coming it is time to end this video and before we do we have to give a shout out to the sponsor which is Squarespace and Squarespace is a platform that allows you to be the best most profitable beautiful big you it's an all-in-one platform that brings your big ideas to life I utilize Squarespace for the game of desire which is my book that website for shambudram.com my personal website shared entertainment had a Squarespace website and currently I am building one for 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