Free Thoughts

This week we are joined by Flemming Rose, the editor who defended Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s printing of 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in 2005. We talk about the tradition of religious satire in the Western world, the importance of free speech to pluralistic societies, and the dangers of censorship—even self-imposed censorship—on those societies.Show Notes and Further ReadingFlemming Rose’s book, The Tyranny of Silence (2014), has a new paperback edition coming out this year. In the book he provides a personal account of an event that has shaped the debate about what it means to be a citizen in a democracy and how to coexist in a world that is increasingly multicultural, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The podcast guests we had in 2015 share some of their greatest intellectual influences and give book recommendations. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What’s it like running for elected office in New Zealand on a free market, limited government platform? How did the economic liberalization of New Zealand in the 1980s happen? What are the contemporary political issues of the day in New Zealand?Show Notes and Further ReadingNew Zealand consistently outranks the United States in the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic Freedom of the World report.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Does Star Wars have a distinct political viewpoint that we can tease out? Would the Rebel Alliance be considered a terrorist organization? How would we know if a rebellion was justified? Is the Star Wars story libertarian?Show Notes and Further ReadingThe original trilogy of Star Wars movies and the prequel trilogy of the late 90s/early 2000s will be joined by Star Wars: The Force Awakens on the day this podcast is released.Trevor mentions Somin’s work on political ignorance; for a more in-depth study, listeners may want to read his book on the matter: Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (2013), or read the Cato Unbound series on democracy and political ignorance.Listeners may also enjoy the podcast we did earlier this year with Timothy Sandefur on the politics of Star Trek.Ilya Somin was also a guest in a KosmosOnline podcast about Star Trek.Somin frequently mentions the animated TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and

How did the effort to foil American terror plots change after 9/11? How are terrorists deterred from their goals?John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart join us this week to talk about why our government needs to think realistically about combating terrorism. Show Notes and Further ReadingMueller and Stewart’s new book on how our post-9/11 government ends up chasing incredible terrorist threats, Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism (2015).Mueller mentions a 2010 comedy movie about British jihadists, Four Lions. Mueller also mentions a book of student papers that he edits that follows post-9/11 terror cases in America, Terrorism Since 9/11: The American Cases (2015).Garrett Graff’s The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War (2012) is a good overview of how the FBI currently responds to terror threats. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you started from scratch and wanted to build a government that preserved the free choices of its citizens as much as possible, and used force only in circumstances where it provided net benefits to all concerned parties, how would you do it? How long would its powers remain limited?Richard A. Epstein joins us this week to discuss classical liberal statecraft, state cartels vs. private monopolies, inequality, and more.Show Notes and Further ReadingWe highly recommend reading all of Epstein’s books; start with Simple Rules for a Complex World, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, and The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government.Here’s a video lecture Libertarianism.org produced on Simple Rules for a Complex World. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Matt Ridley joins us this week to discuss his latest book, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (2015). In it, he theorizes that much of the order we see in the natural world and in human culture and society is the result of unplanned, bottom-up, emergent evolution.Is there a way to introduce these evolutionary pressures to government?Is there a bias to thinking that the world operates by design, from the top down? Does this bias have an origin in our evolutionary psychology? Is it reflected in how we view history?Show Notes and Further ReadingRidley’s newest book, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (2015).Ridley’s bestselling book is an optimistic look at progress and economic history: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2011).Also from Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation (1998).Libertarianism.org has a video from 1983 of professor and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek talking about cultural evolution and the origins of trad

The economic historian and economist Robert Higgs joins us to talk about his new book, Taking a Stand: Reflections on Life, Liberty, and the Economy (2015).Show Notes and Further ReadingHiggs’s classic work on how government has grown, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987).We also talk about Higgs’s Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American economy 1865-1914 (1977).Higgs mentions a few books by C. Wright Mills: The Power Elite (1956) and The Sociological Imagination (1959). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The celebrated science fiction franchise Star Trek is well known for incorporating broad discussions of philosophy and ethical conundrums into its episodes and movies. Timothy Sandefur joins us to talk about how the series deals with some of these big questions.How does Star Trek: The Original Series reflect the way people thought about politics, justice, and human rights in the wake of the second World War? How does the series change over time? The Prime Directive: is it moral? What was its purpose in the original series if Captain Kirk violated it half the time?Show Notes and Further ReadingSandefur’s original article “The Politics of Star Trek” appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.Star Trek: The Original Series episodes referenced in this podcast episode:“The Way to Eden”“The Conscience of the King”“The Apple”“Spock’s Brain”“Arena”“Plato’s Stepchildren”“Space Seed” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Roy A. Childs, Jr. was an essayist, lecturer, and critic. He first came to prominence in the libertarian movement with his 1969 “Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” and he quickly established himself as a major thinker within the libertarian tradition.George H. Smith talks about Roy’s ideas and personality as well as the people that influenced Roy’s thinking and the people that Roy in turn influenced during his lifetime.Show Notes and Further ReadingAnarchism & Justice is a collection of Childs’s essays on moral philosophy and the role of the state.Here is Smith’s five-part introduction to Anarchism & Justice.Here is the text of Childs’s “Open Letter to Ayn Rand.”Smith mentions Childs’s essay “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism.” It is available here in four parts.Here’s Childs giving a lecture on the ethics of liberty at a Cato summer seminar in 1983.Here’s an audio clip of Childs giving a fiery speech to open the Libertarian Party’s 1979 Presidential Nominating Convention.This is a link to all of L

Rules in society don’t always come from government: they’re all around us. For example, think about how rules governing families, colleges, companies, homeowners associations, and sports organizations work. In this week’s episode, Edward Peter Stringham makes the case for “private governance” and says that rules that don’t come from government tend to work better and be more fair than rules imposed by governments.Show Notes and Further ReadingStringham’s new book, Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life (2015). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

America has a history of allying with bad actors to effect change in other countries. Our little-known historical relationships with dictatorial regimes in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, and Zaire are proof of that. What are the benefits and drawbacks of allying ourselves with certain regional factions over others?Is American foreign policy hypocritical when we ally ourselves with authoritarian or otherwise despotic regimes? When did this tendency to become intertwined with bad actors begin?Show Notes and Further ReadingTed Galen Carpenter and Malou Innocent’s new book, Perilous Partners: The Benefits and Pitfalls of America’s Alliances with Authoritarian Regimes (2015). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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’re analyzing the philosophical framework he lays out in the first part of Ethics. We talk about the difference between natural law and positive law, the is-ought problem, Rothbard’s views on utilitarianism, and what Rothbard thought the task of political philosophy was. What is the purpose of humanity? What is essential to human nature?This discussion is continued in this followup Free Thoughts episode on part two of The Ethics of Liberty. Show Notes and Further ReadingMurray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty (1982). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“Your hero economists are my hero economists.”We talk about a variety of topics on this episode, including cultural conservativism and libertarianism, whether libertarians are more at home on the right or left, Goldberg’s 2009 book, Liberal Fascism, and the rise of outsider candidates on the political right and what they may (or may not) be signalling about the preferences of the electorate.Show Notes and Further ReadingGoldberg’s books, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (2013) and Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change (2009).Charles C. W. Cooke’s new book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future (2015).The History News Network’s Symposium on Liberal Fascism.David Oshinsky’s New York Times review of Liberal Fascism. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We discuss the growth and maturity of the modern environmental movement from Rachel Carson to Paul Ehrlich and Naomi Klein. From overpopulation and pollution to pesticide use, mass animal extinctions and peak oil to global cooling and global warming (now climate change) and genetically modified food, there seems to be no shortage of potential catastrophes for us to fret over. Is humanity truly perpetually poised on the brink of destruction? Or are the solutions these environmental millenarians propose the true threat to our species?Show Notes and Further ReadingRonald Bailey’s new book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century is a must read on this topic.We also recommend Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves and Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture to get a better understanding of the power of markets to allocate resources in increasingly efficient ways.Paul Ehrlich’s 1971 book The Population Bomb is me

Why is the internet community—and now, John Oliver—so irate about the state of the Internet? Berin Szoka says the debate over “net neutrality” stopped being about neutrality years ago, and has become a debate over something else entirely, with nothing less than the very nature of the Internet at stake.With the Federal Communications Commission’s ruling earlier this year, are we going to see a less dynamic, less innovative, less consumer-friendly Internet?Show Notes and Further ReadingTechFreedom’s website is a wealth of information on current issues in technology policy.The Tech Liberation Front group blog is also a good way to keep updated.This Free Thoughts episode is partially about common carrier obligations and how the world of public utilities that we now live in came to be.Berin mentions this post from Dan Rayburn questioning Netflix’s assertion that ISPs were behind apparent service slowdowns last year. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In a new survey of over 4,000 young Americans, Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox have found that only 19% of respondents indicated that one of their future goals was to become a political leader. Why are these young people not interested in running for office? Will they change their mind later in life?Show Notes and Further ReadingJennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox’s 2015 book on this phenomenon, Running from Office: Why Young Americans are Turned Off to Politics.The New Books in Political Science podcast—as its name implies—is a great source of information on current trends in political science. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

As a society, are we as tolerant as we could be? As we should be?Andrew Jason Cohen gives his definition of toleration and we discuss the harm principle as elaborated by John Stuart Mill and the implications of various alternatives to it.Show Notes and Further ReadingCohen’s 2104 book on the subject, Toleration, part of Polity Press’s “Key Concepts” series. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Is this a libertarian moment? Was there a libertarian moment? Can we expect there to be a libertarian moment? Yes to all three, says Reason managing editor Katherine Mangu-Ward. We also discuss whether younger people are becoming more libertarian, why libertarianism always seems to be associated with the political right, and whether libertarianism depends on technological growth.Show Notes and Further ReadingThis New York Times column by Robert Draper that first called attention to the “libertarian moment.”This Hit & Run blog post by Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie, “The Libertarian Moment is Everywhere Around Us (Increasing Social Tolerance Edition)”.Jonathan Haidt’s 2013 book on moral psychology in politics that shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have different intuitions on what is right and wrong, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science-fiction novel predicting the rise of an internet much like the one we know today, Sno

This week we’re joined by Christopher A. Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. We ask whether there exists a single libertarian foreign policy that all libertarians would agree with; talk about the idea that war powers, resolutions, and laws passed during wartime don’t recede in times of peace; give a quick rundown of American military history; and discuss the rise of a permanent private industry supplying the military.When should the United States go to war? When did the American military really start to get massive? How much do we spend on the military today? Relative to recent history? Is the military open to the same kinds of critiques that libertarians make about other government programs?Show Notes and Further ReadingChristopher Preble’s 2014 book, co-editied with John Mueller, A Dangerous World?: Threat Perception and U.S. National Security features a collection of essays examining and questioning the most frequently-referenced dangers to American security