I'm John Batscher with Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution.

His book is the dying citizen.

Who administers the state?

Victor devotes a good deal of attention to the unelected,

sometimes known as the administrative state.

It's also a way of thinking about people who are beyond correction because they are empowered by the

executive branch or the judiciary branch or sometimes by Congress.

Victor, the unelected are everywhere all around us. You had so many

examples but the one I celebrate is the raisin industry, your 120 acre farm in

the Central Valley.

As of 1983, you were farming raisins.

But did I know that there is something called the raisin

administration committee? What is that and what does it mean about

being the unelected? It's a depression-era relic to set prices for raisins and the way it works is you don't own the great vines on your own property if they produce raisins and most varieties they're single varieties so if you have a raisin variety grape

then the government owns it what that means is when you cut the grapes and you put

them on the ground and you drive them on paper trays or now they do it on the

vine and you collect them you stack them in your yard and you you truck them to a

processor that washes and stems them but the government says they own those

raisins and they will arbitrarily decide what percentage will be sold in the

United States. They call that free tonnage and then reserve tonnage will be kept off the American market and that means it can be given away as food for peace or it can be given to disaster areas or it can be

given to cattle or can be destroyed. But if you take your raisins and you say,

you know what, they're my raisins I own the property I did the work I am going to stem them and wash them and sell them myself to a super they will find you or put you in jail because you did not take up.

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