Free Thoughts

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Free Thoughts episodes

August 12, 2016 The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism without Consumerism
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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47 min
August 05, 2016 Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions
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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58 min
July 29, 2016 John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Part 1
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a foundational utilitarian philosopher, as well as one of the foremost thinkers in the classical liberal tradition.

John Samples and Matthew Feeney join us for a discussion on the theory of liberty Mill articulates in his book On Liberty. We focus on how Mill thinks of liberty in relation to others and to the state, how utilitarianism influenced his thinking, and Mill’s defense of freedom of thought and free speech, which was quite radical for his time.

This episode is part one of a series that will be continued at a later date.

Show Notes and Further Reading

The Liberty Fund’s Library of Economics and Liberty has the full text of On Liberty available for free.

When discussing Mill’s views about tolerating divergent opinion, Aaron mentions this previous Free Thoughts podcast with Andrew Jason Cohen on toleration.
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1 hr 3 min
July 22, 2016 How American Politics Went Insane
How did everything get so crazy in American politics? Are political renegades like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders the new norm?

Are political machines, pork-barrel spending, logrolling, and professional politicians necessary for our democracy to work? Are they necessary for political coordination and cooperation? What does Rauch mean by “political realism”?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Rauch’s study on this topic, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy is available as a .pdf or a free ebook.

Rauch also wrote the cover article of the July/August 2016 issue of The Atlantic, “How American Politics Went Insane.”
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47 min
July 15, 2016 Campus Freedom
There seems to be a movement towards more student censorship on college campuses these days, but the source might be surprising: other students. Trigger warnings? Safe spaces? Microaggressions? Are college students more offended these days than they used to be?

Robby Soave joins us for a discussion about the state of free speech in American higher education.

Show Notes and Further Reading

You can read Soave’s articles on this and other topics at Reason.com.

For more on campus censorship, listen to this Free Thoughts episode with Greg Lukianoff, “Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.”
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53 min
July 08, 2016 Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics
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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49 min
July 01, 2016 How New Technology Is Changing Law Enforcement
What is a Stingray? How does it work? Is it a good idea to make police wear body cameras? Should officers be able to turn these cameras off? What about the privacy of the civilians being recorded? Should law enforcement agencies have access to drone technology? Where do we have a reasonable expectation of privacy?

Matthew Feeney and Adam Bates join us this week to discuss new technologies available to law enforcement agencies in America, and the legal implications of these technologies.

Where does a right to privacy apply in these new eras of government data collection? How should we balance police effectiveness and respect for Fourth Amendment privacy rights?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Feeney recently authored a policy analysis on police body cameras, “Watching the Watchmen: Best Practices for Police Body Cameras.”

Feeney also mentions a project our Cato colleague Patrick Eddington is working on: a timeline chronicling the American government’s surveillance activities over the past century.
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54 min
June 24, 2016 The Constitution in Practice: From Liberty to Leviathan
After giving a broad overview of the philosophical underpinnings of governments last week, Roger Pilon joins us again to discuss the U.S. Constitution in particular and how the Constitution has been interpreted over the years.

Pilon recounts the original signing of the Constitution and the adoption of the Bill of Rights, how post-Civil War constitutional amendments fundamentally altered the structure of American federalism, the Slaughter-House Cases of the late-19th century, Lochner v. New York, the New Deal Era, and how judicial interpretations of the General Welfare and Commerce clauses changed over time.

Why was there no Bill of Rights when the Constitution was drafted? Is an originalist view of the constitution a necessarily antiquated one? Shouldn’t government be given enough power to realistically address any new concerns affect the nation as a whole, possibly issues that the Founders couldn’t have thought of?
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1 hr 12 min
June 17, 2016 The Philosophical Foundations of the Constitution
How are constitutions adopted? Did the Founders get it right? What is originalism and why do constitutional interpretations matter when studying founding texts? By what standards do we judge a theory of constitutional interpretation to be correct?

Roger Pilon joins us this week for a discussion about originalism and the U.S. Constitution. This episode is continued in a followup episode about how the Constitution has been interpreted over the years.
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53 min
June 10, 2016 The Statrix: How Government Warps Our Perception of the World
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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57 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.

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