The Listening Tube with Bob Woodley--Robert Choi of The Choi Report on Libertarianism, sex education in Iowa

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This is the listening tube.

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Well, hello. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley. If I sound a little different, it's because my lovely wife is redecorating my studio. On this episode, I'll chat with Robert Choi of the Choi Report about libertarianism.

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But first, not the headlines.

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There's been a battle going on now for almost three years about what books can be included in Iowa school libraries. Senate File 496 was signed into law in 2023 by Republican Governor Kim Reynolds, but has been in litigation ever since. A number of entities sued the state to repeal the law, including several book publishers. The law puts very strict measures on what books can show or describe of sex acts. The law even has a reference to the definition of a sex act, which just happens to be Iowa Code Section 702.17. Hmm. I'm going to look that up.

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He's gonna look it up. He's really gonna do it. The truth!

SPEAKER_02 1:32

You can't handle the truth.17 in any Iowa textbook. It starts off by confirming you can't have sex all by yourself. So anyone who hasn't tried yet, don't even bother. Iowa law said so. The law says you need at least two people, but more is okay. Then comes the list of stuff to try. Penetration of the penis into the vagina or anus. Now, the very law that references the definition of sex act prohibits that part of the definition from being included in any textbook used in Iowa schools. But they can look up the law and read it. In other words, they'll never learn what their penises and vaginas are for. And that's a real shame. But this Iowa law defining a sex act gets more adventurous as you read it. It goes on to include contact between a person's mouth and genitalia or penis. Then describing the use of hands and fingers in contact with genitalia or penis.

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And if that wasn't enough.

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Then it goes on to describe using artificial sex organs or substitutes. Oh, and remember when I said that the law requires two people to have a sex act? As it turns out, you can still have sex with yourself, but it's not a sex act under Iowa law unless you're doing it under the direction of another person. So you still need two people, even if one of them is just watching and telling you what to do. This definition is literally a beginner's guide to what to try next. And any kid can read it, just not in an Iowa textbook. But this isn't about sex acts. It's about how sex education is taught in Iowa schools. When I was a kid in Pennsylvania, we had sex education classes, but it was actually a part of health class. And we did learn about sex without sex acts being shown to us or described to us. Ironically, my teacher's name was Mr. Peters. He was an old man and had been a professional football player for the Green Bay Packers back when they still wore leather helmets. It was all guys in the class, as health classes were gender exclusive. So sometimes old Chuck's language would include words you didn't find in the textbook. I do recall having a biology book that had a photograph of the inside of a vagina. That wasn't sexy at all. But it seems that the writers of today's textbooks don't know how to make one about reproduction without breaking Iowa law. Or they just don't want to. Making different textbooks for different states would be a cumbersome and costly task for the publishers of textbooks. Keeping track of state laws and definitions would require a staff of legal professionals that they probably already have, since the publishers are part of the lawsuit against Senate File 496. A story in Iowa Capitol Dispatch quotes a lawyer for the publishers as calling the law a statewide one-size-fits-all statute that eliminates discretion by school librarians. I would point out that the state does have discretion over the education system. And nobody really gave the school librarian ultimate authority on what books are available to the students. That's normally the job of the school board, not the school librarian. In order to gain sympathy for their cause, the publishers and other groups keep calling these laws book bans. Just because a book isn't available at school doesn't mean it's not available anywhere. There are no banned books in the United States of America. There are, however, age-appropriate topics and a child's right and privilege to just be a kid. Some lawyers are even calling the law a violation of free speech. Hardly. Besides, there are plenty of ways for kids today to be subjected to descriptions and depictions of sex acts. In hindsight, I don't think Mr. Peter's class helped me understand sex at all. Having it was the real lesson. And I wish I would have had Iowa Code section 702.17 to guide me.

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My guest today is Robert Choi. Robert is the founder of the Choi Report, and he's also a former CIA officer as well as a consultant on governmental outcomes. He's also a libertarian, and that's where we begin our conversation. Robert, you're a self-described libertarian. Now, when I think of a libertarian, I think of someone who wants as little government as is necessary. How do you describe libertarianism?

SPEAKER_00 8:02

That's a great question. And I think that in the rise of political rhetoric in today's world, there's a lot of talk about democratic socialism and also a generalized, polarized um conversation in the public. And unfortunately, that has crowded out the space of political discussion for libertarians. And, you know, I people know me as a libertarian with conservative leanings, and you know, I I generally, you know, it does, I don't still feel strongly about any one label, but I think that, you know, the unfortunate part of libertarianism being talked about less or being crowded out in the political space is really the impact it has on people who are like me constitutional realists. You know, I believe in maximum individual freedom, as you as you mentioned, minimal government interference. And that's because the government is uh very bad at management, and we have hundreds of years of data on that. And I want the state to do fewer things, but I want that I want it to do it really well, and what the constitution provides for, and no more. Where I part ways, although you know, there are ways in which I part ways with libertarianism, and that's on national security and borders. Uh, I think that a nation that can't defend itself or defines its membership uh as free isn't going to be a protected one. Um, and I think that freedom requires a strong perimeter and government operation uh in that theater. So, you know, I'm libertarian on economics, I'm a realist on security, and I want government uh, you know, out of my wallet and off my back, but I also want it to be involved in protecting our borders, protecting our national sovereignty. And, you know, I always ask two things when it comes to you know libertarianism, and that's you know, do people really understand what that is? And you know, what is its impact on society and the problems that we're looking at? Uh, just and those are the same two questions questions I ask of any other political ideology or leaning. What I'm really what I prioritize is whether or not there's empirical evidence to support political rhetoric. And, you know, it's Milton Friedman, who's a Nobel Prize-winning economist, once said uh, there is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program. And they continue to last in programs, government programs, whether they work or not, they continue to last, they outlive the uh policymakers, and they continue on no matter it's their costs or their impact. And that's something that has to stop. And it's not only about, you know, what shrinking the size of government, it's really about eliminating the parts of government and the actions of government and the policies of government that don't work. So that's that's what I think about when I think about libertarianism. It's really about efficiency and uh making things smarter, making things better in terms of the government.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

As a constitutional realist, can you give me any examples of some things that perhaps we we are being held to as far as laws or regulations are concerned that are not backed up by the constitution?

SPEAKER_00 12:03

That's a great question. And you know, I I think we look at you know national sovereignty and security, and this debate about federal immigration policies is on top of the uh top of my mind. Uh because and you have a lot of uh proponents, especially on the left, who talk about eliminating DHS, eliminating ICE, and certainly their support in Congress for defunding it and keeping it defunded or you know, regulating it further. It's such a confusing thing for me in terms of whether or not that's a smart idea. Uh, one of the things that the constitution provides for and says pretty much is the most important thing that this country can do is to protect its sovereignty. And if you look at the way the federal government functions, it is a constitutional republic with elected leaders, uh, with democratically elected leaders who then become our representatives. And that sounds very basic, but a lot of people, particularly on the left, forget that. And when President Trump was elected into office, he was elected into office with a mandate, and that mandate included reforming and strengthening immigration enforcement in this country. And that mandate uh that was given to President Trump by the electorate is now being carried out through the bureaucracy and administration of those policies in the government, particularly through agencies like ICE. And calling out ICE or taking away people's paychecks at ICE has absolutely no effect on the functioning of the government in terms of the fact that this is a democratically sanctioned process where the elected leader has provided a policy decision to the agency that has to carry it out. So it doesn't make any sense to criticize or take away funding from the agency that's just functioning the way it was designed to function. Now, if you want to talk about the broader conversation of what do we do when the electorate changed their minds, uh, they can change their minds and register that through the next election cycle. And that's really how to handle that kind of issue. It's not really about, you know, taking aim at and targeting a singular agency which doesn't have the authority or the wherewithal in and of itself to do anything about the president's directives. And I think that, you know, the administrative state itself, agencies not only like ICE, but talk you talk about EPA, FDA, FTC, government is very acronym happy. Uh, these agencies they write rules that function as laws sometimes, but the constitution says Congress legislates those laws. So courts no longer defer to agencies to interpret their own power. They they look to, as a result of that decision, they look to the legislative mandate or the person or the executive mandate. And so that's very misguided, but it's very full of political rhetoric. So, you know, you have these demonstrations, you have people in the streets, you have people getting arrested, people challenging federal authority, and you know, uh throwing things at federal law enforcement during these protests, and it's just absolutely nonsensical, makes no misnop. It stretches into another issue, uh, and that's one of civil asset forfeiture. You know, the government can seize your property uh before you're convicted of anything, and it sort of inverts the Fifth Amendment's provision, which says that citizens should not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process. So when you look at things like, you know, when the eminent domain, when you look at things like uh, you know, arrests in certain states, uh particularly here in the region uh that where I live in the Northeast, uh, the government can, before any condition conviction takes place, seize all of your assets. And unfortunately, sometimes that's politicized. So uh I think if you if you look at overall the constitutional framework for what we do and what we should do as a nation, I think it's important to remember that there are five things that the constitution provides for. And it's the first one being national sovereignty and security, which means foreign policy, treaties, military policy making in terms of directing federal agencies and agencies of the executive branch. The second is rule of law, and the third is protecting individual rights, including property rights, but also free speech. The fourth is property commerce in the context of the economy, so trade, monetary policy, and regulate the regulations concerning the commerce clause between states. And the fifth is, as it says right there in the constitution, general welfare and the public and public life. So we're talking about infrastructure, public health, and things that promote the general welfare, as it says in the constitution, which has the broad scope. But I think that uh all of these are interrelated and that the government should do only those things which strictly fall under one of these five categories. Unfortunately, we have expanded to include under the banner of promote the general welfare, what we call the social welfare system, which I think you know overreaches. And I've actually beyond its constitutional overreach, it's also caused counterproductive impacts on society, which nobody predicted.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

When you look at the American government today, what parts of it, if any, do you think we could eliminate?

SPEAKER_00 18:27

That's a um it's a it's a topical conversation, uh, and one that you know Doge has brought up in recent times. And I wrote an article on my um site, uh the TroyReport.com, that talks about the fact that there are almost three million civilian employees in the federal government today, and that's not including um, you know, active duty soldiers. Uh, and that's way too many. And not only does it not only does it cost too much, but the impact that agencies have that uh that are so expansive is is really unclear. At the same time, uh the federal spending overall is dominated by transfer program. So what that means is uh you know, these social welfare policies and programs, including Social Security, they account for over, I believe, a third of total federal outlays. Uh, that includes Medicare and other income support programs, which, if you include those, they add hundreds of billions more actually in what the government spends annually. The tax code itself uh in this country functions as a delivery system for other people's benefits, meaning transferring cash and in-kind benefits from one uh set of the population, taxpayers, to another set of the uh uh of the population. And uh those expenditures based on you know government transfers exceed $2 trillion a year. So each of these mechanisms that are required to administer all this moving of money from one person to the next that require administrative oversight, verification, auditing, compliance, and this is a massive federal system that we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to maintain. And really, its only function is to give money, take away money from one person and give it to the next. You know, the internal logic of administration is also really nonsensical. When they measure success in these programs, these transfer programs, social welfare in general, they look at, for example, participation levels, disbursement amounts, compliance rates, and those become the dominant indicators of success. But you know, if any rational person thinks about this for half a second, they're not measuring anything important. They're just measuring things, they're just looking at numbers go up and down, and they don't have any meaning. And they don't capture whether the underlying policy goals of social mobility, economic mobility, making people more successful, setting them up for success, all of these um presumed policy reasons and intentions, they they don't directly capture whether they're having those impacts or not. So what you get then is this feedback loop where government expansion can occur without clear resolution of the problems the programs were designed to address in the first place. So see these expansive administrative systems they tend to optimize themselves for sustaining themselves rather than improving their own performance or meeting policy objectives. And that's how the structure. Structure is actually designed. And this is why government programs very rarely end. They get bigger budgets. But, you know, to answer your question, I think that the Department of Education, uh, we need to really explore that as a candidate for an agency that we can eliminate. First of all, it doesn't have any constitutional authority, uh, in the sense that, you know, it doesn't provide for the government financing education in the way that it does it today, at least. And education has always been a state function. And, you know, when it was created in 1979, you have to realize that we had survived as a country and probably thrived in many ways before the Department of Education was ever created. We survived 200 years without it. And since it was created, it has cost, you know, in the range of $80 billion a year. And not only has student outcomes not improved, but they've gotten worse. And they're among the worst in the world. So there's a not that's a it's a good example of how empirical reality doesn't match the policy rhetoric uh for its support, its uh sustainment, and for its rival. And the other thing we have to look at is uh, you know, the Department of Energy. Uh, besides, you know, outside of its nuclear regulatory function, it was originally created to reduce foreign oil dependence. But, you know, we are now one of the largest producers of oil in the world. So mission accomplished, you know, the the nuclear uh aspect of nuclear regulatory aspect of the Department of Energy can shift to the to the Department of War, Department of Defense. And that the Department of Energy is not something that you know we really need anymore because its objective was met, which is rare, but I think it's you know, uh when an objective is met, there's no reason to sustain that agency or that policy anymore and spend all the money that we do and all the people that it employs. And also uh the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Bureau, it's absolutely a symbolic agency. It makes no meaningful difference, and its existence is already being challenged in court and being considered, but you know, it doesn't do anything and it doesn't have any impact. And if you look at the numbers, any rational person would really be able to determine that. But not only are some aspects of the government things that we should look at closing or eliminating, but I know that we need to radically downsize, maybe as a first step, other agencies as well. So one of them is the housing and urban development. Over 60 years, the HUD has uh spent trillions of dollars on urban issues. And across the country, urban poverty and decline persists. Not only has it persisted, but it's gotten worse. So the uh the and this is a this is related to other issues that I've written about on the TroyReport.com. And uh housing is a zoning issue, it's a regulation and zoning issue, and it's not a funding problem. There's plenty of developers willing to build more supply, but the lack of supply, which is why prices go up, is caused by policies uh and regulations of government, um, including HUD. So that's one that we need to radically downsize. It's one of the other examples, as I said, as I said, you know, when I started talking about this, where it's just an agency that exists to transfer money, to take it from one person, to give it to the next. Uh, and we spend you know billions of dollars on that every year. I also wrote an article about the foreign aid apparatus and what a complete disaster that is in terms of empirical results. If you look at Haiti, uh 60% of the aid that uh the USAID money sent to Haiti went to uh a handful of belt work, beltweight contractors, and it wasn't aid, it was administrative rent. So these billions of dollars were being paid to sustain the apparatus of administrators and contractors that whose job it is to make sure that the policy stays alive and that the funds stay alive, but very little aid actually went to the people of Haiti to fix anything for infrastructure, for health, for water, very little, uh very little portion of that aid uh went to that. And that happens all around the world, uh, as I documented in that article. So I think that what the Trump administration has done in terms of drastically reducing foreign aid is the right step because it's not a constitutional necessity, it's not provided for. And the whole argument of the left and progressives that it helps to promote world peace or you know, allies in the region, that's absolutely not true uh in terms of the empirical realities. Uh, and lastly, I'll say this is not, you know, probably at the top of the list, but there's something called the Federal Register, and there's 90,000 pages of regulations uh it produces a year, and that's not a department worth saving. It just produces interpretations of uh regulations that nobody reads, but still costs the government every year in terms of its headcount, in terms of its cost. So, overall, I think whether it's Doge or some initiative or program uh or legislation, even that's similar to Doge, I don't think that's a radical idea at all. It's it's actually a necessary idea. Anything that really interprets the Constitution how it's supposed to uh be read is a radical idea in Washington. And the founders gave us a very specific, lean document, and it's so successful because of its elegance and and brevity. So everything that we've built on top of it in the last 60 years needs to justify itself or it needs to go. That's the sort of the bottom line.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

Let's let's try to review if I can remember correctly, then. Now, as you said, the president did cut back U.S. aid considerably, and I agree with you there. The um Consumer Protection Agency, you say, is is useless. They don't really do anything. HUD is kind of a wash, but it it has failed in many ways. And personally, I don't think it's the government's job to build houses anyway. And then we have uh the Department of Enter Energy, which you say mission accomplished, so we can get rid of that, and the Department of Education, which I'll be honest with you, Robert. I graduated from high school in 1980, the final class to graduate before the Department of Education became a thing. And uh I I often thank my lucky stars that I got out of high school before we had a department of education at the federal level. So uh those are all very interesting things to look at, and certainly there's a lot of uh our government that we could probably do without. And I I thank you for for giving us that uh that outline of it. Now, not all of us are libertarians, many of us are Republicans, many of us are Democrats, a growing number of us are independents, along with some lesser-known political parties. So you mentioned one before, the uh social democrats, you got the Green Party. But if we were all libertarian, would the country be a rudderless vessel without any direction?

SPEAKER_00 30:10

Um you know, I I I don't think I don't think so, because you know, the one thing that if you if you look at the Constitution and the ideas of limited government, the one thing that is paramount is is is private property. And private property includes your individual self. And um if we look at the track record of this country, and I'm a fan of American exceptionalism, I think that uh and and history you know um supports this, there's been no other country or civilization or society in all of world history, human history, uh, that has matched the um level of success in the amount of time that we have been able to reach uh as a country. And uh, you know, you start from the state of nature, which is anarchy. Everybody is born into poverty in terms of you know, the state of nature, and you know, humans are born poor, and they have been uh throughout history. And it's only because of this notion of individual liberty, the idea of a marketplace, that it has allowed us to flourish in the way that uh we have in this country. I think that beyond American exceptionalism, what we have to remember is we're not we the government's job uh is not to provide for equal probability of success. When you hear economists like uh Joseph Stiglitz, you have you hear columnists like Nicholas Christoph and other economists talk about disparity and inequality in civilization. What they forget, what they actually are arguing for if you look at the theories uh in their writings, is increasing the probability that someone is going to be a success uh in the world, and particularly in the US. So uh that's impossible. That's a that's something that has never existed in human history, parity of pro parity of success, parity of outcomes, uh that has never existed in human civilization. So they uh not to mention the idea of the idea that disparity in one person and the next is something that's necessarily reflective of some kind of injustice is also wrong. The people experience disparity and poverty and you know, circumstances of life that are not ideal for all sorts of reasons. Could be geography, could be um the areas in which you live, access to education, cultural habits that are passed down for your mother and your father and your grandparents and generations before. And all of that is you know something called uh human capital. Whether or not one person uses human capital is not the government's job to regulate. That is an individual choice. And so what we have to do as a society is to protect an individual's ability to uh use their human capital in the way that benefits them the most. And when you begin to start to social engineer that, as many of these economists try to do with social welfare programs, uh not only does, as we have have we seen in this country, but also elsewhere in the world, that it Britain being a good example, Western other countries in Western Europe, Germany, uh, not only do they not help, but they actually make things worse. And if you you know read things like the Moynihan report, you can see how, uh, and this is something that I also study and research, you know, when you create a what I call a vertical dependency on government through handouts, you destroy groups, a group's uh culture and individual agency. And we see this in Black families, Latino families, other minority families who are participating in social welfare programs that are handouts. More often than not, they are single-parent homes and they have been for generations. And it wasn't always that way prior to the invention of social welfare. Um, you know, they have declining health outcomes, they have declining education outcomes. There's all sorts of correlates to, you know, uh handouts that are byproducts of legislation that uh was enacted. Um but I mentioned that because those programs, they are deleterious and take away from people's agency, individual agency, their private property rights, their agency to use their human capital in the ways that best fit them. Uh, and not the least of which you can't have equal outcomes because people have different preferences. You know, they they're not everybody's not interested in the same thing. So if you try to give them, you can't give somebody an education. They have to take initiative to educate themselves or in things that they're interested in and in ways that you know uh that benefit them based on their specific constraints and circumstances, where they're born, what kind of generation, what kind of family they're from, uh, what generational habits they've uh been passed down from one to the other. I mean, if you look at Germans and Asians and overseas Chinese, they have very particular generational habits and talents that have been passed down from one generation to another. And if you whether you look at the Jewish diaspora, uh, you know, whether it's finance and jewelry making or Germans and beer making and engineering, uh, and or the Chinese and all sorts of economic activities, especially in Southeast Asia, there are particular talents and human capital that are passed down. And they take it upon themselves, based on their agency and choice, uh, to make the best out of those situations and circumstances, even when they're the minority. And despite discrimination, sometimes it's codified discrimination. Chinese, Germans, Jews, even Irish have been discriminated against uh by native populations all around the world, but they've been able to excel. Um, so all that to say is, you know, it's very important for libertarians to protect uh the idea of private property rights and individual freedom, but not necessarily equality of outcomes or uh the provision of government programs to increase the pop the somebody's probability of success, uh, which are two different things. You know, like I was saying, you can provide opportunity, whether it's through public libraries, which I do support, whether it's through schools and whether they're charter schools or or schools in the communities uh that are run by the state and provided for, you know, you can provide those opportunities and human capital through whether it's generations, whether it's uh uh education, but you can't make somebody take advantage of them and you can't control how somebody takes advantage of them. And if you look at how wealth and success is generated in this country, and unfortunately, we don't look at that uh as often as we should or as as much as we should. We look at how we should redistribute other people's successes uh more than we look at how to generate success. But if you look at success, it's always generated by a very specific combination of individual choice and human capital that's applied. And I think the libertarians, uh the ideas of libertarianism can support uh maximizing those freedoms and taking advantage of human capital and protecting that idea uh more than any others, in fact. And I think you know the ideas of progressivism in terms of lower in terms of capital P progressives uh in this country have there's very little evidence empirically to support those successes. And in fact, there's a lot of evidence to to the contrary.

SPEAKER_02 38:53

So what we're talking about then is the difference between equality and equity, if I'm if I'm following you correctly.

SPEAKER_00 39:02

Yeah, it's it's different, it's it's the difference of equality as an opportunity, uh, in terms of sure, you know, it's everybody has the same access to education for the most part in this country, but how that happens and what we define as equality can be problematic. So, for example, there's something called the Gini Index, which is all which I've also written about, and it measures the state of equality in the world. And it blows my mind that journalists, academics, intellectuals, government officials all cite and use research from the Gini Index. But if you look at what the Gini Index is, it's really just an artificial, straight line of perfect equality that everything is measured against. So they measure socioeconomic status, they measure demographics, they measure all sorts of things against this perfect line of equality that doesn't exist and has never existed in human history. And then when they see that people's incomes, people's standard of living, people's cost of living are not all the same according to this perfect line of equality. It's literally just a they put a straight line of a 90-degree angle line on their regressions, and they say, oh, the world is in trouble because you know, everything, there's nothing in the world that matches this perfect line of equality. So that's artificial equality that has never existed and never will exist, in fact, because that's really what you're looking. Well, it's just it's a unicorn. So when I say equality, I'm not talking about that equality. I'm talking about equality of access and making sure that everybody has the opportunity to exercise their human capital and their individual liberty in a way that maximizes the quality of life for them and their particular constraints.

SPEAKER_02 41:09

Thank you to Robert Choi of the Choi Report for sharing his insight with us. You can follow Robert at Choyreport.com. I appreciate Robert spending some time with you and me in the listening tube. The listening tube is written and produced by yours truly, copyright 2026. Shout out to some new places checking in, Boardman, Oregon, Fort Worth, Texas, and Springfield, Massachusetts. Thank you for putting your ear to the listening tube. I'm your host, Bob Woodley, for Thou Ad Infinitum.