Welcome to the Libertarian. I am Charles C.W. Cook. I'm here with the Libertarian himself, Richard Epstein. Richard, welcome to your own show.

It's always nice to be back on my own show.

This is a production of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

All right. So historically, at least in the modern era, the last half century or so,

the Republican Party has been the vehicle for free market ideas. And so far as there is a division in American life,

we have traditionally had the Republicans and their presidents

and their Congress is on one side and the

Democrats on the other on most issues. And yet, in the last few weeks, President Trump has come

out in favor of a trio of ideas that seem to go in the other direction. One is capping interest rates on credit cards to 10%

for a year or more.

Another is preventing any organization corporation

investor group from buying up single family homes.

And another is making it illegal for defense workers

to take dividends. Richard, in any order you like, what's going on here? Why is President Trump

pushing these ideas that would historically have been more closely associated with the other side?

Well, I think the first thing to understand is that Donald Trump is trying to reposition the Republican Party so as to make it populace.

And when you try to make a party populist, what you do is you take aim and establish institutions, establish the fact that they really are greedy and selfish, and then

have to put real strong limitations on them in the name of protecting the marketplace from

predators of one sort or another. If that sounds like a page out of the hymnal of Bernie Sanders,

Elizabeth Warren, and Mandami, it turns out that's exactly what it was. And to give you an example of how this

went back, there's something known as the Durbin Amendment, which was passed around 2006 or

seven. What it did is it tried to put a cap, and it did put a cap on interchange fees with

...