This is CBS I In The World. I'm John Bachelworth, my colleague Professor Richard Epstein of the Hoover

Institution, a senior fellow, as well as teaching law at NYU in the University of Chicago, writing

and defining ideas in praise of the now departed John Racian, who led Hoover for many years,

including the time I learned from Richard's autobiography, the time that Richard joined

the Hoover Institution. John Racian was a quiet figure to my experience at Hoover. I've

been broadcasting with Hoover Fellows for most of this century. And I've always found

it extremely elucidating. And in no way did I have to go through an apparatus to get permission.

You send an email to the Hoover Fellow and you get a response, I can or I can't. And

then we go on air. John Racian quietly made all this possible. Richard, your memory of John

Racian. Well, John Racian was an extraordinary man and you actually hit something, which is

John actually had a serious ideology about what organizations ought to run. And if I had

to say where it began, he was a pretty astute observer of political life. He was never an

original thinker. That was never his forte. But he sort of understood the way institutions

work. And he really cared about doing it. And so his general view about the world that

law is that decentralized decisions made by private institution as opposed to collective

decisions made by government agencies is going to get you more information, more diversity,

more rapid responses than everything else. There is movement inside various institutions,

much of it inspired by Charles Koch and the Koch Foundation to sort of bring the same general

principles of decentralization that I talked about with respect to a government's relationship

to organization inside the organization. So that what you did is you had an organization

which was decentralized. So a Catholic church, for example, when it runs school districts,

is a decentralized organization. What they do is they give budgets out to various schools,

...