This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 21st, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Regime uncertainty is broadly the difficulty in believing that the law is the law.

For businesses and individuals individuals such uncertainty makes it

harder to plan for the economy it can be disastrous. Robert Higgs is a senior fellow

in political economy at the Independent institute and author of the classic

Crisis in Leviathan along with many other books.

We spoke earlier this week about regime uncertainty past and present.

In a very general sense, what can we say about economic interventions and their costs and benefits?

Well I think we can say that there's always a presumption that the free market will allow a process to take place which produces the

greatest net benefits for the public in general.

And that doesn't mean that there's any kind of perfection about that process.

It simply means that so-called imperfections that the economists might identify in it

are imperfections relative to a kind of ideal or a blackboard model of how an economy would best operate, but that

blackboard model is not the same thing as the real world.

So when it's used as the rationale for government intervention,

very often those interventions do nothing more than make the market process itself operate more poorly in the service of consumers in general and the general public.

Interventions, at least within the United States until very recently broadly had the

approval of Congress that was you had the president and Congress agreeing

on something and then it was carried out. In more recent years this president with

respect to where he drops bombs and when with respect to having a law become effective specifically Obamacare has largely ignored

law what is that what does that mean specifically? Well I think the the tendency toward a greater

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