Russell Muirhead joins us to discuss the difference between conspiracism and conspiracy theory and how it has influence modern political discussions. Classic conspiracy theory insists that things are not what they seem and gathers evidence—especially facts ominously withheld by official sources—to tease out secret machinations. The new conspiracism is different. There is no demand for evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of shadowy plotters. Dispensing with the burd...
May 24, 2019•46 min
Tyler Cowen joins us to discuss his new book; Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero . Throughout the conversation, Trevor and Aaron ask Tyler about crony capitalism, how Trump engages with big businesses, and the role of CEO’s. Cowen believes that big businesses are actually given a pretty unfair reputation as they create much more value than they are given credit for. Why is big business coming under heavier fire recently? How big is “big business”? Do CEO’s cheat more or less th...
May 17, 2019•43 min
Eric Mack joins our show again to talk about common objections to libertarianism by dissecting John Rawls view of libertarianism. Many people have reservations about libertarianism because they see it as lacking compassion, but in the long-run people who are on the lowest rung of society do better in a free market system. Some others argue that there isn’t enough substance to libertarianism to live your life in that way, but Eric Mack consistently challenges that point of view throughout the epi...
May 10, 2019•52 min
Now that Endgame has been released, we invited Jacob T. Levy to discuss the series as a whole. We talk about how it is possible to analyze the movies through a political lens, but it is important to remember that the message of many of these movies is metaphorical. Is Tony Stark a war monger? What does the Avengers series say about coercion and the abuse of power? What does society look like under the conditions of radical human ability? How should society function with extreme inequalities? Do ...
May 03, 2019•52 min
Has the United States been a force for liberty around the world? Should it be? And if so, how? To answer these questions, Christopher A. Preble, in his new book, traces the history of U.S. foreign policy from the American Founding to the present, examining the ideas that have animated it, asking whether America’s policy choices have made the world safer and freer, and considering the impact of those choices on freedom at home. Preble explains the need to question the assumptions that drive Ameri...
Apr 26, 2019•50 min
Jason Kuznicki joins us again to discuss the problem of political authority. His new book, Technology and the End of Authority: What is Government For? , examines the relationship between the state and technology over time. Technological developments may make the state more or less necessary over time, which is a consideration that is relatively new in the history of political philosophy, but increasingly important. What is the state? What is a nation? What is the difference between ‘the state’ ...
Apr 19, 2019•54 min
No matter how often we debate America’s role in the world, we are not throwing around original ideas. This debate resurfaces each time we decide whether or not to intervene in a foreign country. It was the main discussion amongst Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Randolph Hearst who favored imperial expansion while other notable intellectuals; Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie valued restraint. Stephen Kinzer joins us today to discuss how this original debate unfolded. What is mani...
Apr 12, 2019•50 min
Joshua Childress joins us today to explain why his growing dissatisfaction of his Customs Border Patrol work led him to resign. He thought he was joining a line of work that was deterring violent actors from entering the United States, but he quickly realized that the people he encountered on the border on a daily basis were not threatening and weren’t fitting the narrative he had been told. What is it like to be a Customs Border Patrol (CBP) agent? How do you train and prepare to become a CBP a...
Apr 05, 2019•49 min
Throughout the history of America, we have used a variety of methods to tax the income of the public. Prior to the World War II only a fraction of the population actually made enough money to reach a taxable threshold. However, during and after the war, that threshold was lowered so much that about 90% of the population qualified for taxes to be automatically deducted from their paycheck. With that being said, there was also more deduction opportunities than their are today to avoid a large tax ...
Mar 29, 2019•47 min
James Madison would have turned 268 on March 16, 2019 so we dedicated a whole episode to him! Even though Madison was not a great president (be sure to check out our upcoming profile of him as part of our Everything Wrong with the President’s Serie s), he was a great American. He was skeptical about who he trusted, which made him ever-cautious of who to create alliances with. Also, he would be disappointed to learn that war has become a permanent backdrop to the conduct of federal affairs. Is im...
Mar 22, 2019•47 min
Jonathan Blanks returns to our show to discuss how different versions of liberty were promoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X during the Civil Rights Movement. Malcolm X was very weary of trusting authority, which is seen as a favorable trait by libertarians. The discussion then shifts to whether or not racism has improved since the Civil Rights Movement and how that affects how we view law enforcement. How is Malcolm X portrayed to the American public? Is the American government hypoc...
Mar 15, 2019•48 min
Tim Carney joins us to discuss the premise of his book; how the decline of the American dream it is not purely the result of economics as the left claims, but the collapse of the institutions that made us successful, including (but not limited to): marriage, church, and civic life. While the well-educated and wealthy elites still enjoy strong communities, most blue-collar Americans lack strong communities and institutions that bind them to their neighbors. Why is Donald Trump’s innaguration spee...
Mar 08, 2019•45 min
Revisiting the root of our ideas in freedom and liberty, Eric Mack argues that everyone has a claim to liberty because it represents the possibility to live a valuable life. With that being said, people believe in varying degrees of liberty, even libertarians. Mack believes that libertarians encompass a wide spectrum of thought ranging from classical liberal to anarchists. What is libertarianism? What are the fundamental principles of justice? What is a political good? Are anarchists libertarian...
Mar 01, 2019•56 min
Lenore Skenazy let her son ride the metro by himself at the age of nine after studying the map with him in order to prepare. Unbeknownst to her, this caused great unrest and scrutiny from a variety of parenting groups, so much so that she decided to write a book and start a project on letting your kid grow to be self-reliant. Should children ride the NYC subway by themselves? When did children stop having unsupervised and unstructured time? What did ‘strange danger’ do to change the way we paren...
Feb 22, 2019•47 min
Drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes are legal activities, but politicians use the law in order to discourage people from doing these things that may seen as poor for your health. This is inconsistent with John Stuart Mill’s famous principle that people should be free in the sense that they should be able to do whatever they like as long as they are not harming others. What is paternalism? Should we take care of those who do not know any better for themselves? Are there different types of pat...
Feb 15, 2019•43 min
In Candice Delma’s book A Duty to Resist she highlights a theory of resisting injustice as a duty in of itself. This specific duty could require breaking the law. She also defends uncivil disobedience and where it is limited in feasibility. Throughout this episode she makes us question how far we should go in order to fight an injustice. Delmas argues that the duty of justice, the principle of fairness, the Samaritan duty, and political association impose responsibility to resist under condition...
Feb 08, 2019•53 min
As the American “foodie” culture grows, it will clash more and more with previously established USDA and FDA rules and regulations since they typically promote uniformity. The USDA has taken it upon themselves to enforce standards of identity laws which allows them to basically enforce cosmetic standards. These laws encourage farmers to produce foods that are uniform and look gorgeous, but neither of these measurements have anything to do with the quality or taste of the product. Throughout hist...
Feb 01, 2019•44 min
As more states aim to legalize marijuana, whether it be for recreation or medicinal purposes, there is an on-going talk debate about if public policy should determine what pleasures are okay to indulge in and which ones are not. Jeff Miron joins us today to discuss drug prohibition actually hurts the naive drug user the most. Are drugs an economic good? What is the economic logic of prohibition? How much does drug prohibition cost? Did alcohol use go down during prohibition? Are drug companies t...
Jan 25, 2019•41 min
Peter Van Doren argues that consumers correctly consider fuel costs when making vehicle-buying decisions. However, CAFE standards cannot be justified as correcting some sort of consumer failure to appreciate fuel savings. The idea that CAFE reduces carbon emissions is slightly more reasonable, but it is a very indirect, inefficient and regressive method. For these reasons, it is difficult to not side with Trumps’ negative view of CAFE. What is CAFE? How does regulation affect markets? How did Ri...
Jan 18, 2019•50 min
Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve had a long-standing policy of maintaining a minimal footprint on the credit system. According to Selgin, the Fed use to be a “lean and mean” player in the credit system. However, on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis they made some changes to decades’ old policies that they believed would aid the financial instability of the country at the time. In retrospect, we can now deeply analyze where the Federal Reserve misstepped. What is the Fed...
Jan 11, 2019•55 min
Everyone has their own moral judgements and in many cases they can be and are misapplied. Jason Brennan explains how his new book When All Else Fails is not a call to resist all governments, but more of an exposure to how we apply our moral judgements unequally. What is the rule of self defense? Is it okay to act in self-defense against a government agent? If your government is illegitimate, is it virtuous to resist? What is the moral parity thesis? What is the difference between authority and l...
Jan 04, 2019•52 min
Human Progress is not linear. The curve of human progress is a jagged one. Many of us are convinced that the world is worse, but as Tupy explains, that is due to one of our many biases. It seems as though our memory of bad events outweighs our memory of all the good we see on a daily basis. For example, what took you 60 minutes of work to buy in 1980 took only 21 minutes of work to buy in 2017. What is the goal of humanprogess.org? Why do we notice bad occurrences throughout our lives more than ...
Dec 28, 2018•55 min
Zywicki starts off by simply explaining what a bank is and what it does. It is surprising how many people don’t actually know what their bank does for them. Early in life you are a borrower in order to buy a house or a car, later in life you become a lender to that same bank. Unfortunately, there has been so much regulation in the American banking system that there is no room for innovation which caused the phase out of mom & pop neighborhood banks. What is a bank? What is Glass-Steagall? Ho...
Dec 21, 2018•50 min
Ryan Bourne joins us today to discuss the intricate hardships that the poor in the United States are experiencing. Some suggest that the United States should raise the national minimum wage, thinking that will solve some issues of the impoverished. Others believe that the poor have different buying and spending habits than the rest of the population. What do poor people spend a majority of their money on? How does regulation of services actually hurt the poor? How does coning affect housing pric...
Dec 14, 2018•53 min
Michael Tanner joins us for a well-rounded conversation about what drives poverty in the U.S. including; felony convictions, lack of education, and housing policies. Tanner claims that in the U.S. there is no rational design behind our welfare programs, and that it is a conglomerate of special interests. The poorest Americans are among the wealthiest in the world, but that doesn’t mean that poverty does not exist in the U.S. How does the right and left vary on their ideas about how to alleviate ...
Dec 07, 2018•48 min
The newest addition to the libertarianism.org editorial staff, Steve Horwitz, joins us to debunk some global myths about economics. We dive into how good economics is about tracing out the patterns of unintended consequences that emerge from the choices individuals make in the face of uncertainty and based on the information and incentives created by the price system. Are people interested in economics? Is economics rooted in individual choice? What was the study of economics prior to 1920? What...
Nov 30, 2018•50 min
Trevor Thrall and Emma Ashford from Power Problems Podcast join us to discuss the nuance differences between isolationists, non-interventionists, and pragmatic realists. When it comes to foreign policy, the way U.S. officials make decisions is largely based off the fact that the United States maintains and all-volunteer military. This military is the most powerful in the world, considering the U.S. spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined. There are many reasons for this, bu...
Nov 23, 2018•45 min
Honorable Jeffrey S. Sutton is a judge for the United States Court of Appeals in the Sixth Circuit. His book 51 Imperfect Solutions is framed around four stories which he uses to illustrate the interplay between state and federal constitutions. The four stories are; school funding, the exclusionary rule, eugenics, and mandatory flag salutes. Sutton believes that many of the state constitutions are actually closer to codes than constitutions. Many states have constitutions that are so long that m...
Nov 16, 2018•54 min
Starting in the 1930’s, the American Medical Association (AMA) reluctantly agreed to accept a health insurance model because they feared the federal government would overreach into the health care sphere. They decided that the best way to protect themselves was to have only the insurers finance health insurance. A huge component of this was that every physician would be paid for each service they provided during a patients’ visit. Essentially, the AMA drove health care costs up by incentivizing ...
Nov 09, 2018•55 min
There tends to be cost overruns when the government undertakes a grand infrastructure project. This is exactly what happened when the government contracted companies to build the railways across the United States in the 19th century. Randal O’Toole stresses that with the introduction of the automobile to America, it allowed everyone to travel. Prior to the automobile boom, only the middle-class & the wealthy could afford to travel via railways. Today, there is a misperceived notion that Euro...
Nov 02, 2018•51 min
