This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 29th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When it comes to policy reform, politicians themselves have a pretty poor record.

In Illinois, with its famed governor's mansion to prison pipeline.

Matt Paprocki of the Illinois Policy Institute wants to train candidates.

Is that a good idea?

We spoke last month about the group's plans to train candidates that, if nothing else, will challenge otherwise safe incumbents.

We at think tanks like to talk about policy. We have a lot of energy invested into a specific

set of policies that we want adopted and when we hand our beautiful policy children over to politicians, they rip them to shreds and rearrange them and in some cases mangle them, in some cases, alter them to the point that they don't do the thing that everybody agrees

that we wanted the policy to do. So what does that mean to your effort to try to get people to actually jump into politics.

So let me start by saying the problem we have in Illinois,

and quite frankly the problem that we have in this country is that we talk an awful lot about choice and the importance of the democracy

but oftentimes especially major cities we don't have that choice.

Let me tell you a story first.

This weekend I was in a hotel here in Orlando

and with my kids.

And I wake up in the morning and I go downstairs to get a newspaper and I asked them I said do you have a local newspaper here?

I said now we just have the New York Times right and you know not that I'm saying

disparaging the New York Times, I read the New York Times,

but what I like doing on vacation is I like going and reading what's happening in local news.

Like what is happening in the lives of people who live in Orlando because that is very different for me who lives in Chicago.

And I walked away and I was frustrated. I didn't I didn't care about what was happening nationally. I cared about what was happening here.

...