This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown. After thousands of episodes over nearly 18 years,

I've moved on from the Cato Daily podcast, but in the interim, I, along with some of you,

have selected some favorites. I hope they resonate with our current moment and continue to spark

the desire to defend liberty. Thank you for listening. This is the Cato Daily podcast for Wednesday, May 13th, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown. What if all it

took to render vast chunks of federal regulation unenforceable with some civil disobedience

and some generous people with vision? Charles Murray believes it's both possible and promising.

He discusses his proposal in the new book, By the People, rebuilding liberty without permission. We spoke last

month. Going through the first portion of your book, it seems like a pretty bad story. And if this

were an adventure about halfway through, I'd be wondering, well, how are these people going to get out of this?

So how did our Constitution get broken in the way that you describe?

Well, let me just outline first what this first part of the book is trying to do.

I think the title of the first part is coming to terms with where we are, because a lot of

people who are libertarians and for that matter conservatives think, gee, if only we get nine

good justices in the Supreme Court, or even five, or only we got a big enough margin in the House

of Representatives and Senate and so forth. And I'm saying in the first five chapters, forget about it. If you're talking about better policy in education or welfare or something, sure, you can get there with those assets. But if you're talking about rolling back the power of government, you can't get there from here with the normal political process. And the Constitution is exactly

illustrative of that. So in the 1930s, the Constitution was still very close to intact.

There had been, you know, tweaks at the edges, but the enumerated powers were still a live

issue. You could only do what the enumerated powers said.

The Commerce Clause still meant an ordinary interpretation of the Commerce Clause.

And over a period of just five years from 1937 to six years to 43, you had about half a dozen key cases where they cannot be reversed. Because once you said,

oh, Congress may spend on the general welfare and is not limited by the enumerated powers,

you have had since then the expansion of the federal government that the Supreme Court cannot

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