This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 23rd, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When government creates seemingly simple and straightforward tasks for would-be entrepreneurs, what are now rights can be slowly transformed

into privileges.

Timothy Sandifers author of The Permission Society, how the ruling class turns our freedoms

into privileges and what we can do about it.

We spoke this week.

Give me an example of how the government takes freedom and turns it into a privilege.

Oh, there's so many ways. There's so many aspects. freedom and turns it into a privilege.

Oh, there's so many ways.

There's so many aspects of our lives

where we have to ask the government for permission

to do something, whether it be to build a house

or start a business or hire people or own a gun or contribute to a political

candidate we support and so forth.

One of the most shocking examples of it is when it comes to medicine. What is a prescription?

A prescription is a government license allowing you to possess a medicine, right?

So when you talk about how the government restricts access to medicines that could save people's lives,

you're talking about how the permit system, the permission society restricts people's ability

to access medicines that could help them.

So the government has an elaborate process for evaluating medicines for safety and efficacy, and

this can take a very long time and cost a lot of money and people who have

...