Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.

You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.

Our email address is mail at econTalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.

Today is September 17th, 2025, and my guest is political scientist Anthony Gill of the University

of Washington. This is Tony's third appearance on the program. He was last here in November of 2017,

talking about tipping. Our topic for today is shampoo, something I really have no interest in,

but actually we're going to talk about something much deeper and profound, and I'm pretty sure

you, the listeners, will find it as interesting as I did when I read an essay of Tony's in the

Library of Economics and Liberty, which hosts eCont Talk, and we will put that essay up online.

Tony, welcome back to Econ Talk.

Thanks. I'm glad to be here. And I love shampoo. I used it this morning.

Who know?

So you open your essay with a very simple question, and it seems to have a very simple answer,

and you suggest that simple answer is wrong. The question is, who or what enforces property

rights in America, say? And what's the simple answer? Well, the answer is obvious. It's the government, because the government writes these rules.

These rules are put into books.

The books are put into the deep recesses of libraries, and everybody can go see the rules

of these property rights, right?

And that's obvious.

When I ask that of my students, they automatically turn to the answer, the government defines property rights.

...