Free Thoughts

The American criminal justice is a truly a mess. Cops are too violent, the punishments are too punitive, and we imprison more people than any other country in the world. However, violent crime in the U.S. is very centralized in certain metro areas. Is the Unites States one of the most violent countries in the Western World? Why did the U.S. militarize our police force? Are police in the U.S. more...

Matthew Feeney and John Samples join the show today to talk about how private companies are moderated their vast social networks. Recently, Facebook announced its' new Oversight Board and Cato Institute's very own, John Samples, is one of the members. The Board will effectively take final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed from Facebook and Instagram. Ar...

When you list successful government censorship campaigns, like the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Comstock laws, the censorship of right-wing radio in the 1960s should be right up there in the pantheon of the most egregious acts of government censorship in American history. Paul Matzko, author of  The Radio Right , talks about this and more throughout the episode. How has our mainstream medi...

Beyond boosting economic growth and raising our living standards, evasive entrepreneurialism can play an important role in constraining unaccountable governmental activities that often fail to reflect common sense or the consent of the governed. What moves the needle for progress? How has the sharing economy exposed grotesque regulatory barriers? Could this be a moment of freedom and liberation, o...

For too long history was just the study of great men, but with the rise of intellectual history we have focused more on how people have changed their ideas over time. In another sense, studying history is about studying the struggle for power. The host of Portraits of Liberty, Paul Meany, joins the show to highlight historical thinkers who may not have been strictly libertarian, but argued for a f...

Ryan Bourne and Diego Zuluaga come back to the show to talk about how fiscal and monetary policy are changing drastically to respond to COVID-19. We are operating in a world of radical uncertainty. We are still unsure of how many people have been infected by the novel coronavirus. Every uncertainty affects how the stock market responds. However, it is reasonable to expect the American economy to b...

Kevin Currie-Knight comes back to the show to discuss different methods of homeschooling and how parents are handling the education of their children during the coronavirus pandemic. Many homeschooling families recognize that children learn when the children are guiding the learning, but that cannot happen when a school is sending home material. The more choice kids have in their learning, the bet...

Radu Uszkai joins the show today to talk about if the case against intellectual property can be strengthened by appealing to the work of F.A. Hayek. Intellectual property is deeply rooted in our understanding of our own creativity. Intellectual property rights and copyright actually emerge as a result of creative revolutions. The copyright story of Mickey Mouse is probably the best-known. Througho...

Matt Ridley joins the show today to talk about his new book,  How Innovation Works . Ridley describes innovation as the main event of the modern age. But innovation is still very hard for us as a society to wrap our heads around because it doesn’t just appear on its’ own. Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a...

Americans are far less likely to trust their institutions, and each other, today compared to decades past. This collapse in social and political trust arguably fuels our increasingly ferocious ideological conflicts and hardened partisanship. What’s the basis for people to trust each other? How do you measure social trust? What is reflective equilibrium? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for m...

Stephanie Slade joins the show to talk about her new cover story for Reason Magazine; Against the New Nationalism. Her piece starts by noting how Richard Lowry, the author of The Case for Nationalism , argues that there is no real difference between nationalism and patriotism. We discuss how conservative nationalists argue that we lost sight of how to be a moral people, and we need the government...

While we practice social-distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, Aaron and Trevor remind us that there’s something about politics itself that is harmful to us and makes us worse people. If you think the political debate is rancorous now, just imagine what it’ll be like when it determines even more of our lives, as we become more and more connected. What effect does politics have on our lives?...

Julia Maskivker believes not only that we should vote, but that we must vote. Even when confronted with two unappealing candidates, or with ballot propositions whose effects we will barely feel, or with the fact that our single vote might never tip an election, we must vote. Do we have a duty to vote or do we have a duty instead to vote well? What is the purpose of voting? What is voter fatigue? H...

Democracy can be a good thing, but if forced into places and situations where it fits poorly, like a Thanksgiving dinner, then maybe we should rethink its limits. We discuss the nature and purpose of democracy and whether democratic politics is an end in itself or whether democracy exists for a purpose with Robert Talisse. Is it possible to have too much democracy? Does too much democracy damage t...

Entrepreneurs disrupt industries and throw equilibria out of whack, but where would the modern world be without entrepreneurs? The economics of innovation is particularly important to understand at a time when more politicians on both the right and the left are calling for industrial policy. Such proposals raise the question can and should entrepreneurship and innovation be planned? Arthur Diamond...

Over a century ago most Americans gave birth and died at home, with minimal medical intervention. But today, most Americans today begin and end their lives in hospitals. Over time policies have forced people away from community-based providers, like birth centers, and toward more costly care in fully-equipped hospitals. Lauren K. Hall joins the show today to talk about the medicalization of birth...

What is human nature? It’s a question that’s intrigued philosophers for as long as there’s been philosophy. It’s also where quite a lot of political philosophy begins, imagining how our nature would have us live in a world before government. How and why do humans cooperate? Why do we interact with people at all? Is there an issue with freedom of assembly? What kind of society is good for us to liv...

George Selgin and Diego Zuluaga are back on the show today to talk about the potential of bitcoin. Throughout the conversation they discuss how bitcoin has had it’s up and downs, but this fluctuation does not indicate whether bitcoin is a successful alternative money. How old is Bitcoin? Does the price of Bitcoin tell us anything meaningful? Is Bitcoin a meaningful money alternative? Where is Bitc...

Bobby Duffy draws on his research into public perception across more than forty countries, offering a sweeping account of the stubborn problem of human delusion: how society breeds it, why it will never go away, and what our misperceptions say about what we really believe. How do we consume information differently now than we did in the 1950’s? How do we gain knowledge about the world around us? W...

Yuval Levin argues that we do not need to tear down our current institutions and restart from nothing, but it is definitely a time to re-commit to make our institutions trustworthy once again. And by institutions he means from the military to church groups and everything in between. He argues that we can then use these trustworthy institutions to provide the form and structure we need to really be...

There are many contentious areas in science because groups are looking for universal truths that validate their preconceived beliefs. Peter Van Doren comes back to the show today to talk about the role of science in the policy world. We look to scientists to conduct research that may better inform our policy decisions, but at the same time we have to make sure the science is trustworthy. How shoul...

Scientific research is the time-honored key to objective knowledge. In the past it was funded pluralistically, but today certain portions of the market for knowledge are dominated by a single buyer, namely the government. This is especially true in the research fields that impinge on the regulatory sphere, such as pollution and climate change. What’s wrong with science today? What sciences can you...

The political left seems to think that wealth inequality undermines democracy. There are many reasons why this fear is incorrect. The political views of the wealthy are not homogeneous, and on many issues, they track the views of the rest of the population. Many political leaders consider wealth inequality to be a major economic and social problem. Ryan Bourne and Chris Edwards join the show to ta...

Jacob Sullum goes beyond the debate on legalization or the proper way to win the “war on drugs,” to the heart of a social and individual defense of using drugs. He believes that the conventional understanding of addiction, portrayed as a kind of chemical slavery in which the user’s values and wishes do not matter, is also fundamentally misleading. How does someone defend heroin use? Is alcohol mor...

Christopher Preble and John Glaser talk about how Donald Trump’s rise in the Republican primaries and eventually to the presidency represented an astonishing break with the foreign policy consensus that had prevailed from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. And they detail this more extensively in their book, Fuel to the Fire: How Trump Made America’s Broken Foreign Policy Even Worse , which is a compre...