This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 9th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Across a wide range of issues, people who don't feel good unless they're negatively impacting the lives of others have become

empowered to bring down the hammer of the state on the annoyances others cause.

Antony Davies is co-author of cooperation and coercion, how busy bodies became busy bullies,

and what that means for economics and politics.

We spoke in July.

Aside from the wars that involved, to paraphrase a former Defense Secretary,

kinetic military action, what are the wars that the United States has undertaken domestically?

Domestically, the war on poverty. the United States has undertaken domestically.

Domestically the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on crime, and now we have the new

war on COVID following hot on the heels of the war on terror. We like to call these the

wars on nouns. There's no clear enemy and so the enemy becomes in effect the people. The war on poverty becomes a war on poor people.

The war on terror becomes a war on citizens.

And it leaves you in an unfortunate state

where I think much of the friction

between the citizenry and the police in this country comes about because of these

wars on nouns. We pass these laws, we make things mandatory, we make them illegal, in which there's no victim.

Think about the war on drugs.

And yes, you can imagine victims when it comes to knocking over the liquor store so I can get money to feed my drug habit.

That's a different thing. That's theft. It's not burglary. It's not it's not to drugs.

But what happens is when you start

...