This is the Libertarian Podcast.

This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is

Professor Richard Epstein. Richard's the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow

here at the Hoover Institution. He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU and he's a senior lecture at the University of Chicago.

And Richard, I wanted to start by informing you that Scott Immigrant, our producer, and I have created a union for libertarian podcast workers having been inspired by President

Biden's executive order from February 4th. Now I kid but when I first read the details of President Biden's executive order,

my reactions were, can he really do that?

And that seems like a big deal.

So do it's a favor and walk us through what's in this executive order.

Sure. What happens is Biden is essentially trying to play up this case for union support.

And there are two avenues in which you could try to do this.

One of them is you could try to pass general legislation that will make it easier for people to unionize by car check or some other device.

You could try to stack the board at the National Labor Relations Act, which is your prerogative, but you could also try to do it through executive order.

And what Biden in this particular circumstance wanted to do was to find a way in which she could

tilt the issuance of government contracts strongly in favor of firms that have union representation.

The topic here is not a small one.

It's estimated that there are some 360 or 70 billion dollars a year in these contracts that are issued

and there's no sign that the number's going to go down. Indeed if one of the another of these

infrastructure bills passed the number will likely get large.

And so then the question is, how is it that you try to do this?

You can't do this under the labor statutes, which essentially call for some degree of neutrality that you have between union and non-union firms,

...