This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 27th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. New House Speaker Mike Johnson has some items in

his background that could recommend him to libertarians.

To name a few, he appears more serious than previous House leadership about constraining spending

and debt, and is pledge to decentralize the process of lawmaking in that chamber.

So what should libertarians expect?

Cato's Alex Norasta comments.

So the first thing that I learned about new House Speaker Johnson of Louisiana is that he was the

chairman of the Republican Study Committee and at least on some economic

issues that seems fairly promising.

It does.

His chair, when he was chair the Republican study committee,

they produce some interesting work on health care especially, that quotes extensively Cato's Michael Cannon.

Mixed bag and some of that works. Some of it is pretty good from the Republican

Study Committee. Some of it's okay, some of it's not so good.

but what's pretty clear I think from looking at the corpus of statements and work that has

been produced under Mike Johnson, you can tell that he's probably

the wonkiest and most interested in policy of a speaker we've had since Paul Ryan.

And on economic issues, pretty good on most of that.

He has said, at least on his public facing web page, and of course we have to take this with a grain

assault because these people are elected to their offices.

He said very nice things about trade, about engagement with the world, about using trade

...