Free Thoughts

Mustafa Akyol joins us this week to talk about Islam. Is there a Muslim case for liberty? How has Islam traditionally treated the principles of political liberalism? Show Notes and Further Reading Akyol’s book is Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (2013). He also mentions this op-ed he wrote in the Feb. 13th, 2017 edition of the  New York Times , “ What Jesus Can Teach Today’s Musli...

Wolf von Laer joins us this week to talk about the movement for liberty on college campuses around the world. What are the biggest challenges to liberty for today’s university students? How difficult is it to communicate ideas on college campuses? Show Notes and Further Reading Listeners may be interested in our Free Thoughts episodes with Robby Soave and Greg Lukianoff on First Amendment rights o...

Jeremy McLellan joins us this week to talk about his brand of politics and comedy. Does humor have a place in changing people’s political beliefs? You can find McLellan’s comedy on Twitter and Facebook . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Nowrasteh joins us this week to talk about immigration in the wake of Donald Trump’s contentious executive order on the subject. Is immigration always good for a country? In this episode, we discuss economic arguments for and against immigration, the rate at which immigrants culturally and politically assimilate in the United States, and the real odds of a successful terrorist attack carried...

Brink Lindsey joins us this week to talk about his idea for an alliance between liberals and libertarians in the age of Trump-style conservative populism. Where did the idea for liberaltarianism come from? How will Donald Trump’s presidency affect libertarians’ relationship with liberals and progressives? Show Notes and Further Reading Here’s Brink Lindsey’s Vox article, “ Liberals and libertarian...

Gene Healy joins us for a special Inauguration Day episode of Free Thoughts. We assess Barack Obama’s legacy as President of the United States and think about what we might expect in the coming years from President Trump. What will Obama’s presidential legacy be? How will recent expansions of executive power under Obama affect the actions of a Donald Trump administration? How hawkish has Obama’s f...

Peter Van Doren joins us this week for a discussion on how wages are determined in a market economy. Is there a correlation between a worker’s productivity and the value they provide for society? Why has CEO pay increased so much lately? Should the government have a role in fixing unequal or unfair wages? Show Notes and Further Reading Van Doren mentions this blog post by Robert Lawrence on the ga...

Jason Kuznicki joins us to discuss his chapter on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in our newest book, Arguments for Liberty. What’s Kant’s conception of the good, and what kind of government follows from that? Who was Immanuel Kant and what were his moral and political theories? What does Kant’s categorical imperative tell us about how to live a good life? How do we get from the categorical impera...

David Boaz joins us to recap 2016. Did we just have the worst year ever in American politics? Show Notes and Further Reading Here’s our Free Thoughts episode on Donald Trump with Ben Domenech, recorded after Trump won the Republican primary but before he won the general election. Boaz mentions the current issue of Cato Policy Report, which features an article by Tom Palmer on the new resurgence of...

George Selgin joins us for a discussion about the gold standard. How did America get off the gold standard, and is there any chance of the country returning to it? Would it be a good idea to revive the standard? Why gold in particular and not any other commodity? Is gold less valuable as money than in other applications, like electronics manufacturing? Show Notes and Further Reading Trevor asks wh...

Timothy Sandefur joins us this week to talk about his new book, The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It . What’s the difference between a society where people are free to do whatever they please and one where they must first get permission from the government to do things like owning land, building a house, or starting a business?...

Kevin Currie-Knight joins us this week to discuss why we can’t seem to change the way we educate schoolchildren. Is there one best way to educate kids? Where did our current system—splitting kids up by age, dividing knowledge up into subjects, having teachers stand at the front of the room and give lectures, testing knowledge with exams, summer holidays, etc.—come from? Why does education still lo...

Johan Norberg joins Trevor this week to talk about the notion of progress and gives us all a few reasons to look forward to the future. Why is there a systemic bias towards pessimism when hard data shows the world is getting better and better every day? Show Notes and Further Reading Norberg’s newest book is  Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (2016). Listeners may also enjoy Matt...

Richard Vedder joins us this week to discuss what he’s identified as three major problems with the way today’s American higher education system works. Why is higher education so expensive, and how did it become so expensive so quickly? If student aid and loans only aggravate the problem, can anything be done to remedy this? Is going to college more of a status symbol than a necessity these days? H...

Dr. Ryan Neuhofel joins us this week to talk about his practice, NeuCare, which is a very different way to approach primary care medicine in the United States. What is direct primary care? How should health insurance work, and how is it broken in our health care system today? How do primary care doctors currently get paid? Why is managed health care so expensive? Is direct primary care part of wha...

American Indians currently have the highest rates of poverty of any racial group; some reservations have unemployment rates upward of 80 percent. Suicide is the leading cause of death among Indian men, Native American women are two and a half times more likely to be raped than the national average, and gang violence affects Indian youth more than any other group. Why? Naomi Schaefer Riley says the...

The bleak prospect of living in a country governed by one of the major-party presidential candidates seems to bolster arguments against voting. Declining to participate in this year’s deeply unsatisfactory election may signal a preference for “none of the above” while denying personal sanction to the many wrongs and injustices governments mete out in our names. Not voting is a time-saver, too. But...

What are some of the geographical factors throughout history that lead to unequal outcomes? Can we tease out a causal direction for something like cultural dishonesty? Is isolation—cultural, geographic, and otherwise—always bad for a society? How does all of this relate to the ongoing income inequality debate in America? Show Notes and Further Reading Thomas Sowell’s newest book is Wealth, Poverty...

Why have people been so fixated on income inequality lately? Is it really a matter of “the 1%” versus “the 99%”? How do things like occupational licensing, energy use, and regulation tie in to this? How do these things stack the deck against poor people? Show Notes and Further Reading Here are Ryan Young’s two most recent papers on the inequality, which he coauthored along with Iain Murray. “Peopl...

Why does the left seem better at making non-cringeworthy political videos? Does that necessarily have to be the case? John Papola joins us this week to share his background at MTV, Nickelodeon, and Spike TV; his thoughts on the filmmaking process; and why it’s essential to tell character-driven stories. We also discuss Libertarianism.org’s new series,  Freedom on Trial , which was produced by Emer...

How much of a role did media coverage play in Donald Trump winning the Republican primary? Is Trump’s brand of conservative populism and identity politics here to stay? Would a Trump loss in November be an opportunity for libertarians to reshape the philosophy of the American right? Ben Domenech shares his personal theory that explains Donald Trump’s rise to prominence on the political stage. Show...

How much do we know about Confucius? What type of world were the Taoists and early Confucians living in? Were early Confucians pro free-market and pro individualism as we understand the terms today? Roderick T. Long joins us this week for a discussion on the thought of the early Confucians, who were precursors of modern libertarians. Show Notes and Further Reading Long’s new book is Rituals of Fre...

Is an economy like a machine or a tropical rainforest? Is it more like a mechanical device that can be maintained by an exogenous force (government), or is it more like a diverse ecology, one that includes government actors? Richard Wagner joins us this week to discuss his new book, Politics As a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy (2016). Wagner concludes that...

What’s a pretextual police stop? When do police need your consent to a search, and are these searches unconstitutional?  Jonathan Blanks joins us this week to share his findings on how police searches disproportionately affect minorities. Show Notes and Further Reading Jonathan Blanks’s “ Thin Blue Lies: How Pretextual Stops Undermine Police Legitimacy ” appears in Volume 66, Issue 4 of the Case W...

Most Americans believe that democracy is the most just, fair, and equal form of government we’ve come up with thus far. Is that overselling it? Does democracy produce the results we need? Can anything be done about voter ignorance? What is the symbolic value of the right to vote? Is political participation good for us as individuals and as a society? What would a better system look like? Show Note...