This week we are joined by Flemming Rose, the editor who defended Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s printing of 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in 2005. We talk about the tradition of religious satire in the Western world, the importance of free speech to pluralistic societies, and the dangers of censorship—even self-imposed censorship—on those societies. Show Notes and Further Reading Flemming Rose’s book, The Tyranny of Silence (2014), has a new paperback edition coming out this year. In ...
Jan 08, 2016•58 min
The podcast guests we had in 2015 share some of their greatest intellectual influences and give book recommendations. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jan 01, 2016•1 hr 16 min
What’s it like running for elected office in New Zealand on a free market, limited government platform? How did the economic liberalization of New Zealand in the 1980s happen? What are the contemporary political issues of the day in New Zealand? Show Notes and Further Reading New Zealand consistently outranks the United States in the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic Freedom of the World report . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Dec 25, 2015•51 min
Does Star Wars have a distinct political viewpoint that we can tease out? Would the Rebel Alliance be considered a terrorist organization? How would we know if a rebellion was justified? Is the Star Wars story libertarian? Show Notes and Further Reading The original trilogy of Star Wars movies and the prequel trilogy of the late 90s/early 2000s will be joined by Star Wars: The Force Awakens on the day this podcast is released. Trevor mentions Somin’s work on political ignorance; for a more in-de...
Dec 18, 2015•54 min
How did the effort to foil American terror plots change after 9/11? How are terrorists deterred from their goals? John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart join us this week to talk about why our government needs to think realistically about combating terrorism. Show Notes and Further Reading Mueller and Stewart’s new book on how our post-9/11 government ends up chasing incredible terrorist threats, Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism (2015). Mueller mentions a 2010 comedy movie about British jihad...
Dec 11, 2015•58 min
If you started from scratch and wanted to build a government that preserved the free choices of its citizens as much as possible, and used force only in circumstances where it provided net benefits to all concerned parties, how would you do it? How long would its powers remain limited? Richard A. Epstein joins us this week to discuss classical liberal statecraft, state cartels vs. private monopolies, inequality, and more. Show Notes and Further Reading We highly recommend reading all of Epstein’...
Dec 04, 2015•1 hr 5 min
Matt Ridley joins us this week to discuss his latest book, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (2015). In it, he theorizes that much of the order we see in the natural world and in human culture and society is the result of unplanned, bottom-up, emergent evolution. Is there a way to introduce these evolutionary pressures to government? Is there a bias to thinking that the world operates by design, from the top down? Does this bias have an origin in our evolutionary psychology? Is i...
Nov 27, 2015•42 min
The economic historian and economist Robert Higgs joins us to talk about his new book, Taking a Stand: Reflections on Life, Liberty, and the Economy (2015). Show Notes and Further Reading Higgs’s classic work on how government has grown, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987). We also talk about Higgs’s Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American economy 1865-1914 (1977). Higgs mentions a few books by C. Wright Mills: The Power Elite (1956) and T...
Nov 20, 2015•1 hr 3 min
The celebrated science fiction franchise Star Trek is well known for incorporating broad discussions of philosophy and ethical conundrums into its episodes and movies. Timothy Sandefur joins us to talk about how the series deals with some of these big questions. How does Star Trek: The Original Series reflect the way people thought about politics, justice, and human rights in the wake of the second World War? How does the series change over time? The Prime Directive: is it moral? What was its pu...
Nov 13, 2015•58 min
Roy A. Childs, Jr. was an essayist, lecturer, and critic. He first came to prominence in the libertarian movement with his 1969 “Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” and he quickly established himself as a major thinker within the libertarian tradition. George H. Smith talks about Roy’s ideas and personality as well as the people that influenced Roy’s thinking and the people that Roy in turn influenced during his lifetime. Show Notes and Further Reading Anarchism & Justice is a collection of Childs’s e...
Nov 06, 2015•59 min
Rules in society don’t always come from government: they’re all around us. For example, think about how rules governing families, colleges, companies, homeowners associations, and sports organizations work. In this week’s episode, Edward Peter Stringham makes the case for “private governance” and says that rules that don’t come from government tend to work better and be more fair than rules imposed by governments. Show Notes and Further Reading Stringham’s new book, Private Governance: Creating ...
Oct 30, 2015•1 hr 5 min
America has a history of allying with bad actors to effect change in other countries. Our little-known historical relationships with dictatorial regimes in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, and Zaire are proof of that. What are the benefits and drawbacks of allying ourselves with certain regional factions over others? Is American foreign policy hypocritical when we ally ourselves with authoritarian or otherwise despotic regimes? When did this tendency to become intertwined with bad act...
Oct 23, 2015•41 min
Murray Rothbard wrote The Ethics of Liberty in 1982 as a full moral theory of the ethical considerations libertarianism requires and what these considerations would prevent the state from doing. This week we’re analyzing the philosophical framework he lays out in the first part of Ethics . We talk about the difference between natural law and positive law, the is-ought problem, Rothbard’s views on utilitarianism, and what Rothbard thought the task of political philosophy was. What is the purpose ...
Oct 16, 2015•50 min
“Your hero economists are my hero economists.” We talk about a variety of topics on this episode, including cultural conservativism and libertarianism, whether libertarians are more at home on the right or left, Goldberg’s 2009 book, Liberal Fascism , and the rise of outsider candidates on the political right and what they may (or may not) be signalling about the preferences of the electorate. Show Notes and Further Reading Goldberg’s books, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War ...
Oct 09, 2015•58 min
We discuss the growth and maturity of the modern environmental movement from Rachel Carson to Paul Ehrlich and Naomi Klein. From overpopulation and pollution to pesticide use, mass animal extinctions and peak oil to global cooling and global warming (now climate change) and genetically modified food, there seems to be no shortage of potential catastrophes for us to fret over. Is humanity truly perpetually poised on the brink of destruction? Or are the solutions these environmental millenarians p...
Oct 02, 2015•59 min
Why is the internet community—and now, John Oliver—so irate about the state of the Internet? Berin Szoka says the debate over “net neutrality” stopped being about neutrality years ago, and has become a debate over something else entirely, with nothing less than the very nature of the Internet at stake. With the Federal Communications Commission’s ruling earlier this year, are we going to see a less dynamic, less innovative, less consumer-friendly Internet? Show Notes and Further Reading TechFree...
Sep 25, 2015•1 hr 3 min
In a new survey of over 4,000 young Americans, Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox have found that only 19% of respondents indicated that one of their future goals was to become a political leader. Why are these young people not interested in running for office? Will they change their mind later in life? Show Notes and Further Reading Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox’s 2015 book on this phenomenon, Running from Office: Why Young Americans are Turned Off to Politics . The New Books in Po...
Sep 18, 2015•51 min
As a society, are we as tolerant as we could be? As we should be? Andrew Jason Cohen gives his definition of toleration and we discuss the harm principle as elaborated by John Stuart Mill and the implications of various alternatives to it. Show Notes and Further Reading Cohen’s 2104 book on the subject, Toleration , part of Polity Press’s “Key Concepts” series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Sep 11, 2015•56 min
Is this a libertarian moment? Was there a libertarian moment? Can we expect there to be a libertarian moment? Yes to all three, says Reason managing editor Katherine Mangu-Ward. We also discuss whether younger people are becoming more libertarian, why libertarianism always seems to be associated with the political right, and whether libertarianism depends on technological growth. Show Notes and Further Reading This New York Times column by Robert Draper that first called attention to the “libert...
Sep 03, 2015•52 min
This week we’re joined by Christopher A. Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. We ask whether there exists a single libertarian foreign policy that all libertarians would agree with; talk about the idea that war powers, resolutions, and laws passed during wartime don’t recede in times of peace; give a quick rundown of American military history; and discuss the rise of a permanent private industry supplying the military. When should the United States...
Aug 28, 2015•54 min
This week Matt Zwolinski joins us to talk about the fascinating life of one of the most radical libertarians of the nineteenth century: the lawyer, abolitionist, political philosopher, and entrepreneur Lysander Spooner, who believed adamantly that we have no obligation to do what the government tells us to do just because the government is telling us to do something. Near the end of his life Spooner wrote a letter to then-president Grover Cleveland. We discuss this letter and it’s implications o...
Aug 21, 2015•59 min
Robert Nozick, in his essay “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” proposed that many highly-educated public intellectuals tend to lean towards collectivism and authoritarianism because they expect society to work best in the way that schools and the academic system (which is the system they are most familiar with) operates. Was Nozick’s theory right? Why do academics, philosophers, journalists, sociologists, and other “wordsmith intellectuals” tend to skew left? Show Notes and Further Readin...
Aug 14, 2015•50 min
Where did the health insurance system as we know it come from? Why are so many people these days getting insurance through their jobs? Why are prices so particularly high in American health care? Is Obamacare working? John C. Goodman notes that what’s critical to understanding the American health care system is that the identity of the party that ends up paying the bill has a huge effect on pricing in the medical marketplace. Show Notes and Further Reading John C. Goodman’s books A Better Choice...
Aug 07, 2015•49 min
With the Greek debt crisis in the news, everyone is asking “Are we the next Greece?” Is our current level of debt sustainable? How about our entitlement programs, like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Michael D. Tanner joins us fresh from the release of his latest book, Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis (2015). Together we discuss whether or not the American government’s profligate spending can be reined in in time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mor...
Jul 31, 2015•52 min
This week Michael C. Munger joins us to talk about voluntary transactions and questions of justice in market pricing. What would everyone agree is truly voluntary? Are disparities in bargaining power coercive? What’s wrong with using the state to address these disparities? What about price gouging situations? What about sweatshops? Show Notes and Further Reading Dr. Munger’s 2010 paper “ Euvoluntary or Not, Exchange is Just ”. Dr. Munger’s 2011 paper “ ‘Euvoluntary Exchange’ and the ‘Difference ...
Jul 24, 2015•48 min
Philosophy is concerned with three basic questions: “What is there?,” “How do I know about it?,” and “What do I do about it?” The three questions correspond to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Our Cato colleague Matthew Feeney joins us this week to talk about philosophy, rhetoric, why people disagree about politics, performative morality, the non-aggression axiom, and more. Show Notes and Further Reading Last week’s Free Thoughts Podcast with Andrew I. Cohen on the intersecti...
Jul 20, 2015•1 hr 7 min
This week Andrew I. Cohen discusses his new book, Philosophy, Ethics, and Public Policy: An Introduction . We talk about philosophy as a careful, methodical approach to thinking about issues. Is philosophy particularly powerful compared to other academic and scientific disciplines? What counts as public policy and how does philosophy influence it? Is it a good idea to “politicize” philosophy? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jul 13, 2015•55 min
This week Jacob T. Levy joins us to discuss his new book, Rationalism, Pluralism and Freedom (2015). Can rationalism and pluralism be reconciled in the liberal tradition? Why not? How much authority is proper for intermediate groups? When does pluralism shift into illiberalism? How can the balance of power between intermediate groups be used to grow the power of a central state? Show Notes and Further Reading Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (book) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more ...
Jul 06, 2015•57 min
What would a privately-administered legal justice system looks like? Bruce L. Benson joins us to give us a hint about what such a system would look like as we discuss his book, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without a State . Is government necessary to provide law and order? How does thinking about the law in economic terms—as a good or service like any other—change how we think about the law? Could you really think of those under the protection of law enforcement as “customers”? How did the law...
Jun 29, 2015•1 hr 2 min
What’s wrong with K-12 education? What about higher education? How can we rebuild American education from the ground up? This week Glenn Harlan Reynolds joins us to talk about his new book, The Education Apocalypse: How It Happened and How to Survive It . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jun 22, 2015•50 min
