This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 16, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The U.S. Britain and France attacked Syria with airstrikes over the weekend over a suspected chemical

weapons attack. The strikes show that the pull of the do-something crowd in Washington, D.C. is not

one this president could resist despite his claims

that the president does need congressional permission for these strikes and

that striking Syria is both expensive and pointless. Emma Ashford Research

Fellow at the Cato Institute comments.

What is the bias to action in Washington, D.C. and how do we see it typically expressed?

Well, so all humans have a bias to action.

This is something that psychologists have actually noted.

So if you were faced with a choice of doing something or doing nothing,

you're likely to do something partly because you make it feel better.

Think about taking a different route so that you're driving rather than getting stuck in

traffic or a goalkeeper in a penalty shootout that dives rather than necessarily standing still.

But when we talk about sort of policy and particularly foreign policy,

there's a real biased action here in Washington, D.C.

towards doing something, even if we don't know that what we're doing on the

foreign policy front will actually yield better outcomes.

All right. Yeah, well that's true of all policy really in a lot of ways. I mean

Terrence Keeley talks about that for nutritional guidelines.

We talk about it for changes to the tax code and things like that. But this is a president who, in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and many times on the campaign trail in 2016 argued

that this particular kind of bombing campaign in this particular

...