Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is December 18, 2024, and my guest is economist Mike Munger of Duke University.

This is Mike's 49th appearance on the program. He was last year in September, talking about Bruno Leone.

Our topic for today is the Constitution, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency,

with the expectation of what we led by Elon Musk and Bivik Ramoswami,

and I'm sure we're going to get into many other things along the way.

I want to remind listeners to go to eContoc.org and vote for your favorite episodes of 2024.

Mike, I want to start with an observation about the current moment in America and see if you agree.

You and I, historically at least, are what might be called classical liberals.

At times we have called ourselves libertarians.

I've moved in various ways, I think, to what is closer to a conservative. And I'll

confess that while much of my life has been tilting at the windmills of government intervention

in the economy, I find myself less passionate about those issues. And careful listeners will

have noticed this trend over the years on Econ Talk. You and I have discussed this some in our

conversation about crony

capitalism and in other episodes. And I've also confessed that despite the rising size of

government over our lifetime, things are pretty good in America, at least in terms of material

well-being and so on for a large portion of the population. But, you know, somewhere deep down, I still have a deep skepticism of centralized power,

...