Calabunga dudes, welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm your host for today, Steven Slavinsky,

senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Despite that intro, I'm not a surfer. I'm an economist

who works on economic liberty issues at the state and local level at the Cato Institute.

But today we will be talking about economic liberty and the right to earn a

living, but we're going to start from the perspective of a few people whose entrepreneurial dreams

are getting washed ashore by the gnarly waves of California regulatory bureaucracy.

So let's say, just the table set here, say, imagine you're someone who loves to serve.

Maybe you are inspired by Bodie, Patrick Swayze's character and point break.

And you want to help inspire that love and others too, except, you know, without all the bank robbing and stuff.

So maybe you decide to start a surf instruction school and you charge people to learn how to surf.

But as you discover to your dismay, you run up against the buzzkill, that is California

economic regulation. Now, this actually happened to some people, and there's actually some

pending litigation over it. The decisions that may be handed down in those cases could have ripple

effects beyond just aspiring California surfers. It could actually, in some respects, reorient

how we think about fighting

against overbearing and rights-violating economic regulation, generally speaking. So here to talk with me

today about these issues is Caleb Trotter, as a senior attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation,

and one of my kiddo colleagues, Tommy Berry, who is the director of the Robert Levy Center for Constitutional Studies. One final additional disclosure before we go, not only am I not a surfer. I'm also not a lawyer. As I said, I'm an economist, but Tommy and Caleb are lawyers. And so we'll try to keep this, you know, layman friendly, or at least economist friendly. I promise not to introduce any math if you promise not to introduce too many complex legal

topics.

But I do think there's some important unpacking that needs to be done.

And as my understanding, Caleb, a good way of starting would be to kind of just tell us the

stories of your clients, what sorts of travails they've encountered.

...