Something the populist right has done very effectively, I mean, you know, the populist right, the political version of it that I just referred to, but also, you know, the more academically oriented and an economics oriented version of it, something they've done very effectively is to capture the broad idea of individual freedom, right?

So when when the market rules, people are free and relations are, are, to capture the broad idea of individual freedom, right?

So when the market rules, people are free and relations are voluntary, when the welfare functions the state get bigger, when more regulatory structures are put in place,

you know, et cetera, that's collectivism, right?

And individuals become less free.

But the garnish of small-deed democracy that

that kind of rhetoric implies, I think, really obscures the overtly anti-democratic and elitist

conception of society that the rights most influential economic intellectuals had from the very

beginning. So can you talk a bit about the, this specific animus towards

democracy and how that's played a role in all of this since the beginning? Oh, man. I mean,

there's tons to say her. Big question, obviously, yeah. In order to motivate this idea that like a

free market economy is free in the sense that individuals are at most autonomous in a free market and

welfare as prescriptions or whatever you want, however you want to characterize the New Deal,

reduces freedom because it makes people less autonomous in their economic activities.

That requires, in my view, I think the move that's necessary to make it work is

eschewing any notion of power in studying the economy.

And, you know, that means your investigations into how the economy work can't possibly be successful if you're ignoring the force that's most relevant to determining how the economy works.

But that's the move that they make.

So you get lots of scholarship on their part that's like, well, the notion of power is uneconomic, whatever that means. So we don't use, we don't,

like economics as a field, as a discipline, as a methodology, doesn't study that subject

and doesn't include it in its modeling reported economic outcomes because there's something

suspicious about the overall

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