What is free market existentialism? Why have adherents of existentialism so often chosen Marxism as their political philosophy?

William Irwin joins us this week to discuss his book, The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism without Consumerism (2015).

What purpose or meaning can we give life, if we start from a place where we take as a given that there is no inherent or divine purpose to life? Why should libertarians also be existentialists?

Show Notes and Further Reading

William Irwin’s book, The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism without Consumerism (2015) challenges assumptions about morality, natural rights and the role of government using insights from thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Robert Nozick, and F. A. Hayek.

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Families seem structured almost entirely opposite to how we think about market economies. Do theories about human behavior in markets hold up when looking at family interactions?

Steven Horwitz joins us to talk about his new book, Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions.

What did F. A. Hayek have to say about evolving social institutions? What is the definition of a family? How has it changed over time?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Here is Horwitz’s new book, Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions (2015).

Horwitz mentions this humorous scene depicting a feudal marriage in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).

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What’s the “MIT” approach to economics, and what’s wrong with it? Is economics a hard science? What is an economic model? What are some of the problems with thinking of the world this way?

Arnold Kling claims that the economy isn’t like one big machine with a single purpose that can be fine tuned and regulated by experts. In this week’s episode, he presents an alternate way of thinking about economics, one you won’t find being taught in most college classrooms.

Show Notes and Further Reading

Kling’s new book, Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics is available in paperback and as a free .pdf, Kindle, or .epub file.

Kling and Burrus mention one of our recent Free Thoughts episodes with Thomas Leonard on his book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era.

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What is the “Statrix”? How does government warp our perception of the world around us? How does it disproportionately affect the poor?

Trevor Burrus talks about the “Statrix,” a portmanteau of the state and the concept of an artificial world made popular in the 1999 action/sci-fi movie The Matrix. 

Show Notes and Further Reading

Trevor mentions the recent spate of track problems and fires that have been plaguing Washington D.C.’s metro system, which led to the creation of this website, ismetroonfire.com. He also explains this song by the Kingston Trio, which was meant to a protest fare increases on Boston’s public subway system.

Here’s a series of articles by Megan McArdle on Washington D.C.’s streetcar project, written in 2009, 2014, and 2015 (the project was originally slated to be completed in 2006 and is still not fully rolled out today, in 2016).

Trevor also mentions our podcast episode with Randal O’Toole, “Transportation, Land Use, and Freedom,” James Tooley’s book “The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People are Educating Themselves,” and NeuCare, a new way to think about medical care.

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