Free Thoughts

Why are Americans so fascinated with our third President? What did Jefferson’s contemporaries think of him? Robert McDonald joins us this week to talk about the life and ideas of Thomas Jefferson. Show Notes and Further Reading McDonald’s book is Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time (2016) . There is a conception that politics was more civil at the turn of the 19th century;...

Was the success of the Star Wars franchise inevitable? What does Star Wars have to teach us about politics, revolution, and constitutional interpretation? Cass R. Sunstein explores the critical and financial success of the Star Wars movies. Show Notes and Further Reading Cass R. Sunstein, The World According to Star Wars (2016) This is a previous Free Thoughts podcast with Ilya Somin on the politi...

If the Constitution were interpreted according to its original meaning, how libertarian would that Constitution be? How do we decide what the original meaning of the Constitution is? Randy E. Barnett explains why popular sovereignty resides in individuals rather than in any notion of “the will of the people.” What would America look like if judges interpreted the Constitution according to the orig...

What are historians to make of the paradox of American government? On one hand, Americans claim to value freedom from government interference in their lives, but on the other, Americans have also clamored for government interventions that have done everything from redistributing wealth to imposing a particular set of views on marriage, abortion, and religion. Gary Gerstle gives a chronological his...

What is free market existentialism? Why have adherents of existentialism so often chosen Marxism as their political philosophy? William Irwin joins us this week to discuss his book,  The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism without Consumerism  (2015) . What purpose or meaning can we give life, if we start from a place where we take as a given that there is no inherent or divine purpose to life?...

Families seem structured almost entirely opposite to how we think about market economies. Do theories about human behavior in markets hold up when looking at family interactions? Steven Horwitz joins us to talk about his new book,  Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions . What did F. A. Hayek have to say about evolving social institutions? What is the...

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a foundational utilitarian philosopher, as well as one of the foremost thinkers in the classical liberal tradition. John Samples and Matthew Feeney join us for a discussion on the theory of liberty Mill articulates in his book  On Liberty . We focus on how Mill thinks of liberty in relation to others and to the state, how utilitarianism influenced his thinking, and...

How did everything get so crazy in American politics? Are political renegades like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders the new norm? Are political machines, pork-barrel spending, logrolling, and professional politicians necessary for our democracy to work? Are they necessary for political coordination and cooperation? What does Rauch mean by “political realism”? Show Notes and Further Readi...

There seems to be a movement towards more student censorship on college campuses these days, but the source might be surprising: other students. Trigger warnings? Safe spaces? Microaggressions? Are college students more offended these days than they used to be? Robby Soave joins us for a discussion about the state of free speech in American higher education. Show Notes and Further Reading You can...

What’s the “MIT” approach to economics, and what’s wrong with it? Is economics a hard science? What is an economic model? What are some of the problems with thinking of the world this way? Arnold Kling claims that the economy isn’t like one big machine with a single purpose that can be fine tuned and regulated by experts. In this week’s episode, he presents an alternate way of thinking about econo...

What is a Stingray? How does it work? Is it a good idea to make police wear body cameras? Should officers be able to turn these cameras off? What about the privacy of the civilians being recorded? Should law enforcement agencies have access to drone technology? Where do we have a reasonable expectation of privacy? Matthew Feeney and Adam Bates join us this week to discuss new technologies availabl...

After giving a broad overview of the philosophical underpinnings of governments last week , Roger Pilon joins us again to discuss the U.S. Constitution in particular and how the Constitution has been interpreted over the years. Pilon recounts the original signing of the Constitution and the adoption of the Bill of Rights, how post-Civil War constitutional amendments fundamentally altered the struc...

How are constitutions adopted? Did the Founders get it right? What is originalism and why do constitutional interpretations matter when studying founding texts? By what standards do we judge a theory of constitutional interpretation to be correct? Roger Pilon joins us this week for a discussion about originalism and the U.S. Constitution. This episode is continued in a followup episode about how t...

What is the “Statrix”? How does government warp our perception of the world around us? How does it disproportionately affect the poor? Trevor Burrus talks about the “Statrix,” a portmanteau of the state and the concept of an artificial world made popular in the 1999 action/sci-fi movie The Matrix .   Show Notes and Further Reading Trevor mentions the recent spate of track problems and fires that h...

How can parents have more say in how their children are educated? What’s the difference between different approaches to school choice, like vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax credits? Do we know these work? Jason Bedrick joins us this week to make the case for school choice. Show Notes and Further Reading Here’s an earlier episode of Free Thoughts with Neal McCluskey on the history of p...

For most of human history, most people lived in abject poverty and cultural and technological stagnation. Only in the past 200 years or so has humankind seen a flourishing of new ideas that has led to our current state of relative health, wealth, safety, and happiness. Deirdre McCloskey says the difference lies in the power of market institutions and a burgeoning respect for those that participate...

Socrates could have had his friend Crito pay a bribe to get him out of prison and escape his death sentence, but he didn’t. Why? Do we always have a duty to obey the law? Brian Wilson from  Combat and Classics  joins us this week to continue our discussion on the last days of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates’ life, as told by his student Plato. Show Notes and Further Reading Combat and Class...

What counts as a conspiracy theory? Why do people have a natural tendency to see intent and design, even when there is none? Are there any conspiracy theories particularly prevalent among libertarians? Daniel Bier of The Skeptical Libertarian joins us this week to talk about belief in conspiracy theories as a social phenomenon and the damage they can do to the perception of libertarianism and the...

What was the U.S. government’s original motivation behind drug prohibition? How has the way we view addiction changed over time? What happens when a country—or a state—decriminalizes drugs? What about hard drugs? Show Notes and Further Reading Chasing the Scream is available here , along with all of Hari’s interviews and notes used in writing the book. Hari mentions Jeffrey Miron’s work on the eco...

What kind of person was Adam Smith? How does Smith’s theory of morality compare to other philosophers’ theories? What did economics look like before Smith? Paul Mueller discusses Adam Smith’s life and ideas, explains Smith’s “invisible hand” and “impartial spectator” analogies, and talks about the marginal revolution that occured in economics 100 years after Smith’s death. Show Notes and Further R...

What’s the best way to teach the principles of economics and individual liberty to people? Is having ‘good character’ a timeless virtue? Lawrence W. Reed joins us this week to discuss his work at the Foundation for Economic Education and FEE’s history in the worldwide free market movement. He also shares a few stories about ‘Real Heroes’ of liberty. Show Notes and Further Reading The Foundation fo...

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 begin a discussion on the second part of The Ethics of Liberty . What is Rothbard’s universal ethic? According to Rothbard, how can property originally be justly acquired? What would ownership...

What is it about British philosopher David Hume that makes him so popular? What was Hume’s attitude towards politics? Thomas W. Merrill joins us this week to talk about Hume’s thought and his skeptical, empirical attitude. Show Notes and Further Reading Merrill’s book, David Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment (2015) is available from Cambridge University Press. The Philosophy Bites podcast ask...

The contemporary British, Canadian, and American political systems come from the same democratic root, but have very different ways of separating and balancing power. How does the American presidential system compare to the parliamentary system? Does the government we have today function anything like the government the Founding Fathers envisioned? Frank H. Buckley joins Trevor Burrus this week fo...

This week we discuss the history of conspiracy theories in America with Jesse Walker. What counts as a conspiracy theory? What are the different kinds of conspiracy theories? Are there any theories that have turned out to be true? How do these theories fade in and out of our national consciousness? Are there any uniquely libertarian conspiracy theories? Is there a way to recognize a conspiracy the...