Free Thoughts

We know income inequality exists, that some people are very rich and others very poor. And this bothers quite a lot of us. Aren’t we right to be concerned about this? Isn’t there something wrong when some people have access to far more resources than others? Brink Lindsey is vice president for research at the Cato Institute and is the author of Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Sma...

Why is political rhetoric so harsh? Arnold Kling joins us for a discussion on his book, The Three Languages of Politics . Kling says that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians all use different languages to justify their beliefs, and that this results in political polarization. Why is political rhetoric so harsh? Is there too much over-simplification in political rhetoric? Are libertarians...

Everyone seems to be talking about Bitcoin these days. But just what is Bitcoin—and what are cryptocurrencies in general? How do they work? Are they money? Will we all be sending and receiving payments in Bitcoin in the near future? Trevor and Aaron sat down with Timothy B. Lee to try to answer these questions. Lee is a senior editor at Vox where he covers technology. Previously he was a technolog...

Immigration is one of the biggest policy issues of our time, and millennials are well positioned to play a leading role in its reform. Alex Nowrasteh returns to the show to answer student questions about the philosophy of free immigration at the 2014 International Students for Liberty Conference. This episode was taped in front of a live audience on February 15, 2014. Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...

Today we tend to think of justice in social terms, but in the time of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, the virtue of justice was thought to be an individual characteristic. Mark LeBar elaborates on what that meant for their society and what it might mean for us today while providing a solid introduction to virtue ethics. LeBar is professor of philosophy at Ohio University whose areas of specializat...

Does the death penalty make us safer? Should the state be given the ultimate power to decide matters of life and death? Given the data on innocents that have been sentenced to die, how skeptical of the death penalty should we be? Ben Jones joins Aaron Powell and Trevor Burrus to help answer these questions. Jones is a campaign strategist for Equal Justice USA (EJUSA) and works in support of Conser...

Can’t we just come up with a system that gives people as much health care as each of them needs? Is it the government’s responsibility to do that? Can the government do that? What about the market—what would a free market in health care look like? Would it look anything like the system we have now? Michael Cannon joins Aaron and Trevor to help answer these questions. Cannon is the Cato Institute’s...

Ilya Somin joins Aaron and Trevor for a discussion on political ignorance, which is the idea that the majority of the electorate doesn’t have enough information to make fully-informed political decisions, with the understanding that for most people this ignorance is perfectly rational. The idea of democracy is that the citizens should decide how they’re governed and what policies their government...

Timothy Sandefur joins Trevor Burrus and Jason Kuznicki for a conversation about America’s founding documents: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. Which is the Constitution’s primary value: liberty or democracy? Is it enough to tell lawmakers to just “go back to the Constitution” when Constitutional interpretation varies so wildly? What does the Constitution...

Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie have noted an emerging group of people who, having been accustomed to a panoply of choice in every other aspect of their lives, are abandoning America’s two-party system in droves. Is this growing movement of independents a cause for optimism among libertarians? Are we in for a better, more libertarian era than ever before? Or should we be skeptical of this kind of op...

Tom Palmer joins Aaron and Trevor for a discussion on the two most common philosophical justifications for libertarianism. Typically we think of justifications for libertarianism as falling into one of two kinds of categories: consequentialism and rights-based. Are these two justifications necessarily at odds with each other? Tom G. Palmer is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, director of the...

This week we’re discussing a relatively unknown essay by Auberon Herbert called “The Ethics of Dynamite,” wherein Herbert compares the coercive political force of the state (the majority) to the coercive, terroristic use of force by the dynamiter (the minority), a 19-century reference to violent anarchist sects. Herbert points out that the means of the state and those of the dynamiter really do no...

David D’Amato joins Aaron and Trevor for a conversation about the idea of voluntary socialism through the lens of the individualist anarchists of the 19th century. They discuss the life and philosophy of Benjamin Tucker, Voltairine de Cleyre, and others, and explain how the definitions of socialism and capitalism have changed over the years. David S. D’Amato is an attorney and a Senior Fellow and...

This week Aaron and Trevor talk about the tendency of the political process to group people into warring “tribes” when they otherwise wouldn’t. Trevor explains why this is so bad for society and offers several examples and solutions. Who decides what aspects of our lives can become politicized and which ones can’t? How are things distributed in a fully politicized world? What can we do about this...

Patrick J. Michaels, the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, joins Aaron and Trevor for a discussion about bias in science and how scientific findings affects public policy. The idea that science isn’t biased—or generally isn’t biased—is pretty widely held. But is that true? Is there something about science that makes it less susceptible to bias than other fields...

Jason Kuznicki, a research fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of Cato Unbound, joins Aaron and Trevor to discuss historicism: the idea that historical forces work to determine the ideas and values of individuals, and that as a result, historical trends have a direction or purpose to them. To understand a person or event in history, you need to look at their historical context. That’s not so c...

David Boaz, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute, sits down with Aaron and Trevor to talk generally about the libertarian philosophy, and answer the following questions: Is there one set of ideas called libertarianism, or is it more a collection of different schools of thought? If the latter, what binds them together? How long has libertarianism been around? And if libertarianism is...

What does it mean to say that something is a market failure and that public policy ought to fix it? Can the government actually provide these goods? How often do these situations occur? What does economics have to say about these public goods problems? Van Doren explains several key economic concepts, including the economist’s definition of a public good, Pareto optimality, and Cosean bargaining....

Alex Nowrasteh joins Aaron and Trevor to talk about immigration. Immigration policy provokes much debate, anger, and often some pretty ugly politics. But immigration isn’t just a matter of policy, of what effects immigrants have on America’s economic outlook—immigration raises important moral issues as well, because it impacts basic human rights. Nowrasteh is the immigration policy analyst at the...

Aaron and Trevor tackle a few listener questions in this episode, including the perennial classics: Who will build the roads? Who will “control” the corporations? Is there a libertarian position on abortion? What would a libertarian society look like? What about child labor laws? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jason Brennan joins Aaron and Trevor for a discussion about political obligation. Conventional wisdom holds that governments make laws and their citizens have a duty to obey them. Most people think that’s so obvious that we don’t even really need to discuss it. But is it? Governments certainly want us to obey them, but what sort of arguments are there for why we should? Brennan is Assistant Profes...

James Stacey Taylor joins Aaron and Trevor to discuss what society thinks is okay to buy and sell. Buying and selling some things—like books, cars, or houses—strikes us as fine. But even the thought of trading money for things like love or organs makes many people uncomfortable or even angry. Taylor is an Associate Professor at the College of New Jersey and the author of  Stakes and Kidneys: Why m...

Matt Zwolinski joins Aaron and Trevor for a look at the plight of poor people and how concern for the least well-off relates to libertarian thinking. Libertarians are often branded as being anti-poor and are frequently criticized for espousing a philosophy that only benefits the rich and privileged. But is that true? Zwolinski teaches philosophy at the University of San Diego, founded the Bleeding...

Julian Sanchez joins Trevor and Aaron for a discussion on the political philosophy of Robert Nozick. Nozick’s 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a classic of modern philosophy. In it, he argues that the rights we all have as human beings dramatically limit what the state’s allowed to do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Samples joins Aaron and Trevor in looking at the relationship between money and political speech. Campaign finance is a perennial issue, but much of the argument about it rests on often unexamined assumptions. Is money speech? If it is, can we still restrict its role in politics? If it isn’t, what’s its relation to political speech? What does it mean to say elections can be corrupted by too m...