Free Thoughts

By Libertarianism.orgSociety & Culture News Politics Philosophy

Free Thoughts episodes

December 23, 2016 The Gold Standard Won't Be Coming Back
George Selgin joins us for a discussion about the gold standard. How did America get off the gold standard, and is there any chance of the country returning to it? Would it be a good idea to revive the standard?

Why gold in particular and not any other commodity? Is gold less valuable as money than in other applications, like electronics manufacturing?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Trevor asks whether people in Venezuela have started switching to Bitcoin, since Venezuela’s own currency is falling apart. According to this article from Jim Epstein in next month’s issue of Reason, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
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53 min
December 16, 2016 The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It
Timothy Sandefur joins us this week to talk about his new book, The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It.

What’s the difference between a society where people are free to do whatever they please and one where they must first get permission from the government to do things like owning land, building a house, or starting a business? What’s wrong with these systems of permitting?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Sandefur’s book is The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It (2016).
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50 min
December 09, 2016 Why Schools Haven't Changed in Hundreds of Years
Kevin Currie-Knight joins us this week to discuss why we can’t seem to change the way we educate schoolchildren. Is there one best way to educate kids?

Where did our current system—splitting kids up by age, dividing knowledge up into subjects, having teachers stand at the front of the room and give lectures, testing knowledge with exams, summer holidays, etc.—come from? Why does education still look pretty much like it did hundreds of years ago when everything else in our modern world has changed?

Show Notes and Further Reading
Currie-Knight spoke on a Kansas Policy Institute panel on this topic.
Here’s Currie-Knight’s video series about education, Schooled.

He also mentions The Independent Project (here’s a Huffington Post article about it), High Tech High, and an upcoming documentary about High Tech High called Most Likely To Succeed.
Trevor mentions a lecture (and Free Thoughts episode) he gives called The Statrix.

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54 min
December 02, 2016 Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
Johan Norberg joins Trevor this week to talk about the notion of progress and gives us all a few reasons to look forward to the future.

Why is there a systemic bias towards pessimism when hard data shows the world is getting better and better every day?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Norberg’s newest book is Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (2016).

Listeners may also enjoy Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2011).

To find more statistics that show how the world is always getting better, we recommend checking out another one of Cato’s projects, HumanProgress.org.
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54 min
November 25, 2016 College: Too Costly, Too Little Learning, Too Much Underemployment
Richard Vedder joins us this week to discuss what he’s identified as three major problems with the way today’s American higher education system works.

Why is higher education so expensive, and how did it become so expensive so quickly? If student aid and loans only aggravate the problem, can anything be done to remedy this? Is going to college more of a status symbol than a necessity these days?
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53 min
November 18, 2016 Why Can't You Email Your Doctor?
Dr. Ryan Neuhofel joins us this week to talk about his practice, NeuCare, which is a very different way to approach primary care medicine in the United States.
What is direct primary care? How should health insurance work, and how is it broken in our health care system today? How do primary care doctors currently get paid? Why is managed health care so expensive? Is direct primary care part of what a free market in medicine might look like?
Show Notes and Further Reading

You can find more information about Dr. Neuhofel’s practice at neucare.net.

Our episode on “The Statrix” is what originally prompted Dr. Neuhofel to send us an email.
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53 min
November 11, 2016 The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians
American Indians currently have the highest rates of poverty of any racial group; some reservations have unemployment rates upward of 80 percent. Suicide is the leading cause of death among Indian men, Native American women are two and a half times more likely to be raped than the national average, and gang violence affects Indian youth more than any other group.
Why? Naomi Schaefer Riley says the American government’s current Indian policies are at fault as much as any historic injustice done to them.
What is the federal government’s current relationship with American Indian tribes? What does the day-to-day economic life for people on a reservation look like? How do tribal courts work?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Riley’s book is The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians (2016).
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37 min
November 08, 2016 Bonus Election Day Episode: Should Libertarians Vote?
The bleak prospect of living in a country governed by one of the major-party presidential candidates seems to bolster arguments against voting. Declining to participate in this year’s deeply unsatisfactory election may signal a preference for “none of the above” while denying personal sanction to the many wrongs and injustices governments mete out in our names. Not voting is a time-saver, too.
But non-participation in the vote may be an unwise option. Voting doesn’t just elect a candidate: it may signal to a variety of important audiences what direction the electorate would like the country to take. Perhaps voting is the best option available, even if other candidates and other systems of government would provide more liberty and prosperity. Failing to vote may waste personal power.
Is the best choice to vote one’s conscience, vote strategically, or not vote at all?
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1 hr 8 min
November 04, 2016 Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective
What are some of the geographical factors throughout history that lead to unequal outcomes? Can we tease out a causal direction for something like cultural dishonesty? Is isolation—cultural, geographic, and otherwise—always bad for a society? How does all of this relate to the ongoing income inequality debate in America?
Show Notes and Further Reading

Thomas Sowell’s newest book is Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: Revised and Enlarged Edition (2016).

Sowell mentions J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016).

Freedom on Trial is our new courtroom drama that takes viewers into the heart of the everyday issues that arise when an employer’s desire to hire more employees runs into the barrier of minimum wage laws, and when the government’s plans to “solve” income inequality only makes things worse.
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41 min
October 28, 2016 People, Not Ratios: Why the Debate Over Income Inequality Asks the Wrong Questions
Why have people been so fixated on income inequality lately? Is it really a matter of “the 1%” versus “the 99%”? How do things like occupational licensing, energy use, and regulation tie in to this? How do these things stack the deck against poor people?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Here are Ryan Young’s two most recent papers on the inequality, which he coauthored along with Iain Murray. “People, Not Ratios: Why the Debate over Income Inequality Asks the Wrong Questions” and “The Rising Tide: Answering the Right Questions in the Inequality Debate.”

Freedom on Trial is our new courtroom drama that takes viewers into the heart of the everyday issues that arise when an employer’s desire to hire more employees runs into the barrier of minimum wage laws, and when the government’s plans to “solve” income inequality only makes things worse.

The quote Trevor paraphrases near the beginning of the show was a bit of wisdom from Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

For a closer look at Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, here’s an older episode of Free Thoughts with Scott Winship.
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46 min

About Free Thoughts

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A weekly show about politics and liberty, featuring conversations with top scholars, philosophers, historians, economists, and public policy experts. Hosted by Trevor Burrus.

Hosted on Acast. See…