This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 14, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown. In many ways, states and localities have turned their police

into tax collectors.

The nature of policing has been changed.

So says Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform.

He discussed the wages of turning cops into revenues at the Cato Institute's conference on

policing held earlier this month. I think it's very important that center

right folks focus on the criminal justice issue.

I know I didn't.

I spent an awful lot of time focused on those things

the government shouldn't be doing at all and saying let's get them to do less of that and kind of ignored

the list of things the government should do, punishing crime, keeping the Canadians

on their side of the border, you know, the military is trying enough to do that. the

military is strong enough to do that.

Assuming that the Pentagon was doing that all

in a reasonable way and the prisons and the courts were all being run not like the Department of Motor

Vehicles but like McDonald's or Uber and perhaps we were wrong in that assessment

that we should not be surprised that when you put the government in charge of something, particularly when you hand them guns at the same time, that perhaps it's not being done for the consumers benefit, but rather for the government itself.

And on the crime issue and the policing issue,

we've all seen some of the outrages of five six that they're not sure how many federal crimes exist

several hundred thousand regulations that can be imposed on people,

and can send you to prison if you violate them

...