To me, that kind of confuses some things, but I wonder what you think and what your thoughts are about this idea of local control.

Yeah, my thoughts are along those same lines because there's something legitimate about having a local government because there is such thing as there are local issues.

There are things that you just can't manage from the federal or state level in terms of – I mean just in certain environments, what – what really counts as a nuisance, right? What should really, in the name of protecting property, what should the neighbors not be allowed to do? Because that becomes an infringement on the rights and the enjoyment of their neighbors to their property.

And there's other things geographically, whether you have a river running through your town or you're a port town or you're...

You're an agricultural area.

And then there are geographic considerations where things come up that you can't legislate, again, nationally or statewide.

So there's certainly legitimate issues.

But sometimes that might be difficult, right? Like when you go into some of these local governments and say you got to restart with your scope, they may not even know where to start with something like that.

Mark Moses, what is participatory budgeting, and why do you hate it so hard?

Well, participatory budgeting is just one of the several tools that, uh, cities will come up with in the face of fi- struggling fiscally.

And I get into these, uh, in various places, just 'cause I characterize them as just total non-solutions that do not get to the point that we need to be addressing or the level we need to be addressing.

And w- what it is is essentially...

And the form can take different constructs, but it's involving your local residents in making decisions about programming various parts of your budget.

And this actually was imported from Brazil.

It actually started in 1989 as a movement to be able to have l- local residents direct where the local money was going.

They've, they've got a stake in this now, and you're gonna be the guy who says no, when you couldn't say no at the front end of any budget conversation.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about that.

Well, um, I play Bill Clark in this, and Bill Clark, uh, w- really, I, it's, he did a lot of things.

But what he really was in many ways was Ronald Reagan's right-hand man.

He was 20 years younger than Ronald Reagan.

Um, and they met initially when Reagan ran for governor.

And, uh, when he became governor he asked, uh, Bill Clark for his help.

He had a l- small law firm at the time.

How did you study that, and how did you come to that?