Welcome back to the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church joined as always by the Libertarian Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Richard, I know you just left Chicago, which is in the midst of a contract negotiation with the

Chicago Teachers Union.

It's pretty common around major cities, right?

They sign these agreements every couple years with Teachers Un and it's it's a big deal because it is an enormous amount of money

It's also where a bunch of rules are dictated for how these unions can run I think in normal life

Perioding negotiations like this would depend on

available competition of which I don't think there is any and maybe prior

performance to dictate how a future contract would go but But clearly that's not the case here.

So tell me how the negotiation is proceeding

and what the city might not like about it.

Well, this is a disaster in the making.

The first thing to note about this is it is not a negotiation

between the city, the mayor, Brandon Johnson,

is a former head of the union, a big unit in Ficciato, and the union, which is also pro-union.

The real move is they know between them they can't possibly summon the resources to get the

gigantic raises and other privileges that they want.

So what they do is they march on Springfield, Illinois,

which is equally broke, saying that they're entitled

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