Free Thoughts

Dr. Frank of The Mr. T Experience joins us this week to talk about the politics of punk rock. What is punk rebelling against? Is it inherently political?

Why do anti-authoritarian, counter-cultural movements so often reject free markets and libertarianism?

Show Notes and Further Reading

The Mr. T Experience on Spotify, iTunes, and Amazon Music.

Dr. Frank’s young adult novels are King Dork (2006), Andromeda Klein (2009), and King Dork Approximately (2014).

The song in this episode’s outro is “Institutionalized Misogyny” by The Mr. T Experience from the album Yesterday Rules (2004). Used with permission.

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Charles J. Sykes joins us this week for a discussion on the origins of the populist, pro-Trump Right.

What happened to the conservative intellectual infrastructure that was so robust in William F. Buckley, Jr.’s time? Why does it seem like politics now is more about attitude and tribal loyalty than ideas and discourse? How do groups like the Tea Party and media personalities like Ann Coulter fit into this narrative?

Sykes’s new book is How the Right Lost Its Mind (2017).

Libertarianism and Trump, Free Thoughts Episode.

“Should Twitter Ban Donald Trump?” is Really a Question About Government Legitimacy, written by Aaron Ross Powell

Trump’s Assault on America’s Institutions, Free Thoughts Episode

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Elizabeth Anderson joins us to talk about her new book, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It).

How has the nature of employment changed throughout history? Is the typical American workplace a dictatorship? Do we need a worker’s bill of rights?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Anderson’s book is available here.

Here’s our previous episode with Prof. Anderson, on egalitarianism and the distribution of resources in a society.

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Brock Cusick joins us this week to talk about the decentralized blockchain technology that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies run on, and about bitcoin itself: how does bitcoin work? What makes it valuable?

Why is there a finite amount of bitcoin? What happens when all of the bitcoin is mined? What’s next for cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology? Will the government step in to regulate this? Can it?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Back in 2014 we invited Timothy Lee on the show to give us a primer on bitcoin. If you bought a single bitcoin the day this episode was released, that bitcoin is worth $6,734.66 more today (as of 11/9/17)!

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Peter Van Doren joins us once more on the podcast, this time for a discussion on Richard Thaler’s work in behavioral economics.

What’s the difference between behavioral economics and more traditional neoclassical economics? Is the goal of behavioral economics really to implement consumer preferences? Are “nudges” paternalistic and insulting, or do they merely—as behavioral economists would say—create default conditions to correct the influence of cognative biases that stop people from doing what they actually want to do anyway?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Listeners may be interested in our other Free Thoughts episodes with Peter Van Doren.

Van Doren mentions this debate in Regulation between Jonathan Gruber and W. Kip Viscusi.

This Crazy Mouse Won’t Leave Me Alone by Dan Deacon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

Shootin Stars by Aero Chord feat. DDARK provided by NoCopyrightSounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTF5xgT-pm8

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Jeffrey A. Singer joins us this week to talk about the ongoing opioid overdose epidemic in the United States. Why are there so many opioid users in the US?

Specifically, what kinds of drugs are we talking about, fentanyl? Oxycontin? Is the overdose death problem a direct result of doctors over-prescribing opiates to patients for pain management?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Here’s a Cato briefing event that features Singer: “A ‘Modern Plague’? How the Federal Government Should Address the Opioid Crisis.”

”Misdiagnosing the Opioid Crisis”; this article appeared in Inside Sources on September 27, 2017.

Trevor mentions Jacob Sullum’s book Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (2004).

Listeners may also be interested in our Free Thoughts episode with Johann Hari, “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.”

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David Schoenbrod shares five specific tricks that politicians from both parties use to avoid public accountability. Is Washington more broken than people think?

How can we more properly align our elected representatives’ incentives to keep them accountable? Does Congress have the willpower to change the rules of the game?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Schoenbrod’s newest book is DC Confidential: Inside the Five Tricks of Washington (2017), and here is the book’s website.

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Richard E. Wagner joins us for a discussion on life and thought of James M. Buchanan, who was one of the founders of public choice theory.

Show Notes and Further Reading

Wagner’s latest book is James M. Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy: A Rational Reconstruction (2017).

A good portion of what we discuss in this episode deals with Nancy MacLean’s account of Buchanan in Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017).

Aaron mentions this article by Lee Fang in The Intercept, “Sphere of Influence: How American Libertarians Are Remaking Latin American Politics.” 

Buchanan and Gordon Tullock co-wrote The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962), considered one of the landmark works of public choice theory.

Our other podcast episode with Wagner gives a pretty good introduction to public choice theory, but listeners may also be interested in this episode on the same topic.

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Michael Malice joins us to give a primer on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. What’s North Korea like? Do the people there really believe the popular legends we’ve heard about the Kim family?

Which is Kim Jong-un: a spoiled heir to a political dynasty, a paranoid lunatic with a big gun and 25 million hostages, or a coldly rational devious mastermind? Perhaps some combination of all three?

Show Notes and Further Reading

For more insight on how North Koreans and the Kim family see the world, we highly recommend Malice’s book, Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il (2014).

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