I'm John Baxter with Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution.

His book is The Dying Citizen.

Who administers the state?

Victor devotes a good deal of attention to the unelected,

sometimes known as the administrative state.

It's also a way of thinking about people who are beyond correction

because they are empowered by the executive branch or the judiciary branch

or sometimes by Congress.

Victor, the unelected are everywhere all around us.

You had so many examples, but the one I celebrate is the raisin industry.

Your 120-acre farm in the Central Valley. As of 1983, you were farming raisins. But did I know

that there is something called the Raisin Administration Committee? What is that? And what does it mean about being the unelected?

It's a Depression-era relic to set prices for raisins. And the way it works is you don't own

the great vines on your own property if they produce raisins. And most varieties, they're single varieties.

So if you have a raisin variety grape, then the government owns it.

What that means is when you cut the grapes and you put them on the ground

and you dry them on paper trays or now they do it on the vine,

and you collect them, you stack them in your yard yard and you truck them to a processor that washes and stems them.

But the government says they own those raisins and they will arbitrarily decide what percentage

will be sold in the United States.

They call that free tonnage. And then reserve tonnage will be kept

off the American market. And that means it can be given away as food for peace, or it can

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