Welcome to The Libertarian.

I am Charles C.W. Cook, and I'm here, of course, with the Libertarian himself, Richard Epstein.

Richard, welcome to your own show.

It's always a pleasure to be on my own show.

Excellent. Well, this is, as usual,

a production of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. And today's topic

is, well, the federal government is running around the Caribbean, blowing up ships, boats, vessels that it accuses of carrying narco-terrorists and drugs.

And there's, of course, a big legal debate around this.

Richard, let's start at the beginning.

What authority under any sort of law,

international law, maritime law, the constitution, statutes passed by Congress,

does the executive branch of the federal government has to preemptively blow up boats that it thinks are carrying what it calls narco terrorists? I don't think it has any authority,

unless you can show that it's an actual invasion or attack on the United States. It's a very

complicated situation because in the original design, you had very much Marcus

of Queensberry rules.

You had Congress deciding and deliberating on declaring a war, and then the president

as commander-in-chief would carry it out.

In those days, the wars were not against strange groups, but against nation. And there

was sort of a very genteel set of rules. It was also a time in which the rules of public international

law, which are very important in these cases, were really quite fixed. There's a common

conception today that international law is a set of random rules followed in some cases and not followed

in others. But if you go back and you start with the great writers in the 17th and 18th century,

...