Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org where you can

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Today is March 12, 2014, and my guest is Stephen Tellus, author and professor of political science

at Johns Hopkins University. Steve, welcome to Econ Talk. Thanks for inviting me. Our topic for

today is a recent article you wrote for National Affairs titled Clujocracy in America. It's an

indictment of a particular set of problems that we have with governance in America and our political

system. What is Cluj and why do you consider America a Clujocracy? So a Cluj is a term that comes

from computer programming and the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as an ill assorted collection

of part, assembled to fill a particular purpose, a clumsy but temporarily effective solution

to a particular fault or problem. It's hard not to see that definition is describing lots of what

government today does. A lot of what government today does is an effort in the absence of being

able to get rid of a lot of stuff we've already got to simply add new things on top of what we

already have and therefore try to make what we're doing now consistent with what we've done before.

The Affordable Care Act, which I supported and still grudgingly support now, is a pretty good

example of that. We had Medicaid and Medicare and employer health care plans and all that,

you know, an S-chip and all that other stuff and then we added a bunch of new stuff on top of that

in the Affordable Care Act because in part because it was so hard to tear up all the stuff that

we already had and making all those pieces somehow fit together is complex for government to do,

right? A lot of what the problems we've had with the exchanges are the results of trying to

...