Free Thoughts

Our producer, Tess Terrible, interviews Aaron and Trevor for Free Thoughts’s 200th episode. How did Free Thoughts get started, and what have we learned along the way? Show Notes and Further Reading We’d like to thank Russ Roberts and his EconTalk podcast for providing some of the inspiration for this show, as well as all of our listeners. We hope you’ve enjoyed the show so far and look forward to...

John Glaser joins us to talk about a policy shift that would save money and make the United States safer: closing some or all of America’s 800 overseas military bases. Where are these bases concentrated? Why does the military think they’re necessary? Would the world be a more dangerous place if the US wasn’t a global hegemon? Show Notes and Further Reading If you’re interested in this topic we enc...

Bill Emmott joins us this week to talk about his new book,  The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea  (2017). Is the West in decline and if so, can we do anything about it? Is more inequality part of what’s causing this decline? Why aren’t Western economies aren’t as dynamic as they used to be? Show Notes and Further Reading Trevor mentions these previous...

Sam Bowman joins us this week to talk about political trends in the United Kingdom and in Europe more broadly. What’s a neoliberal, and how is that different from American libertarianism? What kinds of reforms are needed in European politics? Is there a connection between Brexit and Donald Trump’s election? What does a Trump presidency mean for the U.K.? Show Notes and Further Reading Here’s the A...

William Irwin joins us for a discussion about the novel Fight Club  by Chuck Palahniuk and the movie it inspired. Are consumer choices authentic choices? Where does Tyler Durden go wrong in his thinking? Show Notes and Further Reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) is a novel that’s well-worth reading if you haven’t yet. Here’s a link to the David Fincher movie (1999) starring Brad Pitt, Edwa...

Emily Ekins has identified five different types of voters that elected Donald J. Trump the 45th President of the United States. Do these groups represent a big shift in American politics? In this episode we also discuss polling methodology and analysis. How reliable are public opinion polls and voter surveys? Show Notes and Further Reading Here is the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group Ekins partici...

Kevin Vallier joins us to talk about his Arguments for Liberty chapter on the ethical system of John Rawls. Does Rawls have value for libertarians? Show Notes and Further Reading You can read Vallier’s Arguments for Liberty chapter in full here: “ A Rawlsian Case for Libertarianism ” Arguments for Liberty  is  available here as a free .pdf and in Kindle and e-Book formats . It’s also  available in...

Deirdre McCloskey has a few suggestions that she hopes will make libertarians more humane and empathetic. What sort of rhetorical tactics should libertarians use? In this episode, we also talk about the “slow socialism” of the New Left, inequality, whether an affluent liberal society sows the seeds of its own demise, and McCloskey’s personal ideological journey from “Joan Baez-style” Marxism to li...

Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski think that anything you’re allowed to do for free, you should be able to do for money. That means things like buying and selling kidneys, children, sex, grades; even waiting in line. Are they right? What should you be able to buy and sell? What does it mean to pay someone for something? Show Notes and Further Reading Brennan and Jaworski’s book is  Markets without...

Shon Hopwood joins us this week to tell about his journey from bank robber to federal prisoner to U.S. Supreme Court practitioner and Georgetown law professor. What’s it like in federal prison? How did Hopwood become a jailhouse lawyer? If people do in fact “age out” of criminal activity, then what should our prison system look like? Show Notes and Further Reading Hopwood’s book is  Law Man: My St...

Robert Luddy joins us this week to talk about his ventures as the founder of several successful private schools in and around Raleigh, North Carolina. Could private education supplant public schooling? Show Notes and Further Reading Thales Academy , Franklin Academy , St. Thomas More Academy Here’s a short video from Reason.tv’s Jim Epstein featuring Luddy and his work . Other Free Thoughts episod...

Jacob T. Levy says that the collapse of trust in institutional norms is what’s responsible for a new era of Trump-style authoritarian, “closed-society” populist politics here in America and around the globe. What explains the Trump phenomenon? How did we get President Trump? Just an electoral appetite for “shaking things up,” or is it something deeper? How does Trump think? How does he make decisi...

Andrei Illarionov joins us this week to tell us about growing up and studying economics in the Soviet Union, and about the years he spent as an economic policy advisor to Vladimir Putin. What inspired Illarionov to study economics? What was life in the Soviet Union like? What was it like studying economics in a Communist regime? How did prices work in the USSR? How did he first meet Vladimir Putin...

Julian Sanchez joins us this week for a discussion about online privacy in the era of mass data collection. When we’re online, what kind of data are we creating, and who’s watching us? We talk about data mining, ad blockers, the internet of things, developer keys, passwords and fingerprint security, encrypted messaging apps, and more. Further Reading Other Free Thoughts episodes about online priva...

John Pfaff joins us this week to talk about the United States’s unusually high rate of incarceration. How many Americans are in prison or in jail? What did they do to get there? If we have roughly the same crime rate as we did in 1970, but have five times as many people in prison as we did then, what are those extra people in prison for? Show Notes and Further Reading Pfaff’s book is  Locked In: T...

Tyler Cowen joins us this week to talk about the slowing pace of innovation and growth in the United States over the past few decades. Has American society become too complacent? What would a more dynamic society look like? Show Notes and Further Reading Cowen’s book on the subject is The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream (2017). Cowen refers to this study by Enrico...

Elizabeth Nolan Brown joins us this week for a discussion about sex work. What’s the difference between sex trafficking and prostitution? How much sex trafficking is going on in the United States? Show Notes and Further Reading Much of Brown’s work at Reason focuses on sex work, here’s a reverse-chronological list of all the articles she’s written there . We talked in detail about Brown’s Septembe...

Andrew Turner joins us to talk about his experience being stationed at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in 2009 and 2010. What is working at Guantanamo Bay like? Who are the detainees? How did they end up there? Are we ever going to be able to close the facilities there? Show Notes and Further Reading Here’s the Vice News article by Jason Leopold that Turner was interviewed in, “ Guantanamo’s Unt...

Emma Ashford joins us this week to discuss the rise of the Islamic State. How is ISIS different from Al Qaeda and other terror groups? Does it pose an existential threat to the Western world? Where did the Islamic State come from? What do they believe? Is America responsible for ISIS’s rise to power? What’s their end game? How will Trump “deal with” ISIS, and how is that different from Obama’s pol...

Yuval Levin joins us to talk about political nostalgia and American individualism. Why do the political right and left both seem to be stuck yearning for the 1950s and early 60s? Why do baby boomers have such an outsized influence on American culture and politics? Did government work better in the 1950s and 60s? How has the country changed in the last half-century? Show Notes and Further Reading L...

Peter T. Leeson joins us this week to discuss rational choice theory as it applies to self-governance. What happens in the absence of government? We discuss the difference between government and governance, what it means to be stateless, and how anarchy is perceived in the world today. Show Notes and Further Reading Leeson’s book on this topic is Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better T...

Patrick G. Eddington joins us this week to tell us about the history of the Central Intelligence Agency, how the CIA operates, and what the new Wikileaks revelations mean for our privacy online. What does the CIA do, and how does it go about that? How close to reality does Hollywood get when portraying the CIA? What’s the difference between the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA? What have these new revela...

Aaron and Trevor have a discussion about the political authority of the state. Should one obey the government? Is there a compelling reason to? Why does it matter? Show Notes and Further Reading Listeners interested in this topic should check out our episode of Free Thoughts with Michael Huemer on this topic , and this Guide lecture with Jason Brennan . Aaron mentions Socrates’ actions in Plato’s...

Peter Goettler joins us this week to talk about his role at the Cato Institute, Cato’s history of 40 years of advancing liberty, and what’s next for public policy organizations more generally and for Cato specifically. What is a think tank, and what does it do? What does Cato do and how is it different? What’s the difference between being oriented towards politics and being oriented towards ideas...

Peter Van Doren joins us this week to talk about health care economics. We talk about risk aversion, risk neutrality, expected value statements, guaranteed renewable care, the ACA as a health care redistribution program, and health-status insurance. How much should we spend on health care, and how would we know the answer to that question? Show Notes and Further Reading Van Doren mentions “ The Ma...