This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown.

I've moved on to head the Kentucky's Bluegrass Institute,

but I wanted to leave listeners with some favorite episodes over the last nearly 18 years of my hosting tenure.

I tried to pick episodes that are relevant to our current moment.

Thank you for listening.

This is the Cater Daily podcast for Sunday, October 8th, 2023. I'm Caleb Brown. How far has

government moved from democratic accountability? It's a big question, and it doesn't just

implicate the feds. State governments, too, have drifted away from putting elected leaders and their

direct appointees in charge of writing the rules under which you and I must plan our lives.

Daniel Dew of the Pacific Legal Foundation says not all hope is lost.

We spoke in Chicago in August.

It's weird to hear people talk about the moves of the U.S. Supreme Court of late

with respect to the administrative state. And to hear people on the left attack the Supreme

Court and view them and say, this is, you know, this is against democracy what they're doing.

Like, so West Virginia VEPA would have been a prime example of that, where the Supreme Court essentially said that when you're dealing with major questions, that they need to be in the hands of elected people.

And it's very strange because the attack on the left, in some ways, are trying to view that

decision as anti-democratic.

And it's a weird sort of paradox because, yeah, the Supreme Court is itself not really a democratic institution, except that they vote on things.

It's not a direct product of democracy the way legislation, how a legislation is supposed to emerge.

Yet we have these big agencies that are

avowedly not democratic that otherwise would be making these very big decisions. Yeah, it seems like

today democracy equates with, are you doing something that I like? Not whether it's actually democratic in the, you know,

...