This is the Libertarian Podcasts 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

here at the Hoover Institution. He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at

NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

And Richard, we found out last night that the State of the Union is strong

as it was President Biden's first State of the Union address and that is of course how every state of

the union ends. Now understandably the president led with the Russian

invasion of Ukraine and I want to ask you about two things here. We're a week

into worldwide reactions and Keith still hasn't fallen,

although many warn that it still probably will. I'd like to know what kind of new

reactions you'd like to see from the United States and European allies.

And then really quickly, you mentioned in your column

that the United States shouldn't renounce in advance

the use of force, but we've already mentioned

or already declared that US soldiers won't be on the ground and we won't be imposing a no-fly zone with any of our aircraft.

So can you explain a little further which you mean by not pronouncing that?

Yeah, I mean, one of the problems that you have, and we talked about this abstractly on one of our previous shows, is if you look to the sort of classical liberal theory of what it means to use force, what you discover is that when you're treaty bound as we are not because

Ukraine is not in NATO yet I may never be you're not bound to help people but you're always entitled to help people and when you're

entitled to help people there's nothing about the theory which tells you how you ought to help. In some cases it's real easy, like for example if you get rid of all the

ridiculous restrictions which would never been put into place in initially on the production

and an international transmission of oil,

what you could do is essentially starve the Russians

...