This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When the government intervenes in the economy, is it all downhill from there

are we inexorably hurled down the road to serfdom.

Dan Boudreau, a professor of economics at George Mason University and adjunct scholar,

the Cato Institute says no.

In a recent article in the Freeman, he argues it's the very robustness and resilience to

interventions that makes the marketplace so remarkable. There is concern, I think,

among a lot of people who worry about government intervention that the feedback loops that exist

when you have somebody who's managed to metaphorically

a tap to the wallets of taxpayers or to you know people's productive energies

that that feedback loop is going to grow larger and larger and

and well we just we can't possibly let this camel get his nose under the tent, lest we all be living in servitude the end.

Yeah, I think it's a naive argument. Of course it's made often and I was more sympathetic to it

myself years ago but then you just observe what's going on and we've had a lot of

government intrusion into the economy nearly all of which I disapprove of, and I have no

doubt that this intrusion has made the economy poorer, has made us less free, but it is a mistake

to argue that the slightest bit of intrusion, or even a fair amount of intrusion

is necessarily puts us on an irreversible trek toward servitude.

Let's face it, Americans today are just not as, we're nowhere close to being as

enslaved and as burdened as were people of the Soviet Union or in Hitler's Germany.

Or half of the population of the United States

...