This is the Libertarian Podcast.

This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is Professor

Richard Epstein. Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the

at the Hoover Institution. He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU, and he's a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Richard, this week President Biden signed his infrastructure bill into law, which leaves just

a few legislative priorities through the end of the year. The most pressing is the now

1.75 trillion dollar reconciliation spending bill, often called Build Back Better.

It's been criticized for many different reasons, one of which is its 10-year score and cost, which the CBO is about to finish releasing.

But in your column, you focus on a different part and even call it a social infrastructure spending bill.

Can you fill us in on what changes the Build Back Better Bill would make to the power of American

unions as well as the changes within the National Labor Relations Act and how they'd affect the

Fair Standards Labor Act as well.

Okay, look, I mean I think the most important thing to recognize is that in many ways the financial provisions of this particular

statute are less important than the structural changes that are going to be made.

I mean a trillion dollars here or there is a lot of money even when it's spread out over 10 years.

But what happens is when you put the substantive provisions in relationship to unions, they

will have no sunset provisions, but will continue indefinitely until you could get somebody else to

change them again, which will be very, very difficult.

So there are at stake in this particular case, two major statutes, and one of these statutes called the National Labor Relations

Act which was passed in 1935 then known as the Wagner Act which was modified

substantially in 1946 called the Taft Hartley Act and the other is the Fair Labor Standards

...