Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton, and today's episode went differently than I anticipated.

I've had today's guest, Scott Klug on the show a couple of times previously. I very much like him. I think we've got pretty similar political bearings and I love talking to him. And so I thought when I brought up incentive problems in Washington, members of Congress making buckets of money lobbying after they leave office,

deep-pocketed political donors purchasing votes from senators, and representatives with

insider knowledge, buying individual stocks. I thought Scott would get angry with me, flip over a

table, and then we would enjoy a wonky, technocratic conversation about

how to Rube Goldberg our way to neutering feckless politicians. Instead, Scott responds to a lot of

the problems that I bring up by saying, it's not actually a problem. The thing that I assume is a big glaring conflict of

interest or an invitation for bribery isn't. It's an interesting episode from the perspective

of a former member of Congress and lobbyist right here on The Political Orphanage.

My guest today is Scott Klug.

He is a former congressman from Wisconsin.

He is the host of the Lost in the Middle America's Political Orphans podcast.

He's also on Substack and just a guy I very much enjoy talking to and a frequent or at least repeat guest on the program. Scott, good to see you.

Yeah, thanks for that. Well, we dwindling libertarians need to hang out together, so I'm glad to be back on.

Yeah, I'm going to say both classical liberals and moderates are not in a, are not in an upswing

moment in American history. Because I view myself as temperamentally moderate,

by which I mean, I want to build coalitions with people, I could be wrong about stuff,

I'm willing to compromise. And I generally assume other people have good intentions. We're

arguing about methodology, not whether they're an evil shit bag. That's me as a temperamental

moderate. Then classically liberal,

you know, peace, prosperity, pluralism, individual rights, skepticism of government. I don't think either of those are really great, great positions to be in at present. Yeah. I mean, I think

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