This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Monday, September 13, 2010.

I'm Kila Brown.

What rules must we adopt for a functioning and free society?

Peter J. Betke is a professor of economics at George Mason University and deputy director

of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy.

He recently discussed many of the aspects of political economy at Cato University on Capitol Hill.

I guess you guys probably have talked about the founding fathers some here, right?

And if you think about what it is that the founding fathers

are doing with the fundamental puzzles,

so there's two fundamental puzzles

in the Federalist papers.

The first one is Alexander Hamilton and Federalist number one.

And he says to the audience, right, to the independent journal, right?

He says to the audience, he says, look, it's our generation that has to answer the

question, are a people forever held for their constitutions based on reflection

and choice or accident and force? It's up to us to prove that you can have a constitution based on reflection and choice.

So that's the first puzzle.

All right?

So can we in fact have those things?

Or do we just have to have whatever evolved evolved and we got to live with it?

The second puzzle is Madison.

And where Madison comes in and he says, look, here's the fundamental paradox of governance.

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