Free Thoughts

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 Reading

Anarchism & 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 Libertarianism.org’s content by or about Childs.

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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 Reading

Stringham’s new book, Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life (2015).

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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 Reading

Ted Galen Carpenter and Malou Innocent’s new book, Perilous Partners: The Benefits and Pitfalls of America’s Alliances with Authoritarian Regimes (2015).

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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 Reading

Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty (1982).

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“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 Reading

Goldberg’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.

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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 Reading

Ronald 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 mentioned in this show. It reads as fantastic science fiction today, though the predictions Ehrlich makes were taken quite seriously when the book was first published. Similarly, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) predicted a world in which it was common for people to die of cancer-related illnesses (caused by pollutants) at the age of 45. The book was instrumental in launching the modern-day environmental movement.

Bailey also mentions an article he wrote in 2009 about the National Academy of Sciences predictions in 1980 of what the world would look like in 2010, “How Green Is Your Crystal Ball?”

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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 Reading

TechFreedom’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.

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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 Reading

Jennifer 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.

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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 Reading

Cohen’s 2104 book on the subject, Toleration, part of Polity Press’s “Key Concepts” series.

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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 Reading

This 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, Snow Crash.

Mangu-Ward’s cover article for the November 2012 issue of Reason, “Your Vote Doesn’t Count”.

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