This is the Kator Dilly Podcast for Friday, July 7, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Democracy and Chains by Duke University's Nancy McClain is a book that points to the premises

of the Public Choice School as morally deficient.

And at the center of a conspiracy to destroy democracy, McLean puts Public Choice founder,

Nobel Laureate, and Cato Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow, James Buchanan.

Public Choice Scholar Michael Munger, also of Duke University, discusses the book.

About 10 years ago you wrote a piece in which you suggested and not happily that at some point

essential truth and you'll unpack that for us would replace facts even in academia. What do you mean by that?

It was a piece that I published in Public Choice, came out in January 2008, so almost 10 years ago.

And the main analysis was the event surrounding Dan Rather and CBS News exposing the letters

that showed that George W Bush had failed to make his

what he was required to show up when he was required for Army forgive me, his Air Force obligations in Alabama.

And it turned out, as you may recall, that the letter apparently was forged because it was in proportional font which didn't exist

because it would have been an IBM Selectric typewriter and it had footnotes that were the wrong shape and size.

And when Dan Rather and CBS News was confronted with this, they all, their response

was, yes, but we would defend the essential truth of the story. That is the essential truth meaning we all know that George W Bush was a

shirker didn't show up when he would have been drafted and was just trying to avoid the Vietnam War and these details about the facts that you're bringing up.

Who cares about that?

And I said, I'm worried about this and in fact Stephen Colbert famously coined a word truthiness it was the

word of the day once on his show and in it he he paraphrased Dan rather there's an essential truth that's more important than the

actual facts and I suppose that that's okay for a Twitter post but you realize

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