Free Thoughts

Is economic growth incompatible with a clean planet?

Jerry Taylor is considered to be one of the most widely cited and influential critics of green energy and federal environmental policy.

Is economic growth incompatible with a clean planet? Doesn’t the government already do a good job of regulating pollution? How would markets do better?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Ronald Coase, The Problem of Social Cost (article)

Murray Rothbard, Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution (article)

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We know income inequality exists, that some people are very rich and others very poor. And this bothers quite a lot of us. Aren’t we right to be concerned about this? Isn’t there something wrong when some people have access to far more resources than others?

Brink Lindsey is vice president for research at the Cato Institute and is the author of Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter—and More Unequal (2013).

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Why is political rhetoric so harsh?

Arnold Kling joins us for a discussion on his book, The Three Languages of Politics. Kling says that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians all use different languages to justify their beliefs, and that this results in political polarization.

Why is political rhetoric so harsh? Is there too much over-simplification in political rhetoric? Are libertarians guilty of this as much as anyone?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Arnold Kling, The Three Languages of Politics (e-book)

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (book)

George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (book)

Paul Krugman, Conservatives Are (Mostly) Not Libertarians (column)

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Everyone seems to be talking about Bitcoin these days. But just what is Bitcoin—and what are cryptocurrencies in general? How do they work? Are they money? Will we all be sending and receiving payments in Bitcoin in the near future?

Trevor and Aaron sat down with Timothy B. Lee to try to answer these questions.

Lee is a senior editor at Vox where he covers technology. Previously he was a technology reporter at the Washington Post.

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Immigration is one of the biggest policy issues of our time, and millennials are well positioned to play a leading role in its reform.

Alex Nowrasteh returns to the show to answer student questions about the philosophy of free immigration at the 2014 International Students for Liberty Conference. This episode was taped in front of a live audience on February 15, 2014.

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Today we tend to think of justice in social terms, but in the time of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, the virtue of justice was thought to be an individual characteristic.

Mark LeBar elaborates on what that meant for their society and what it might mean for us today while providing a solid introduction to virtue ethics. LeBar is professor of philosophy at Ohio University whose areas of specialization include moral, social, political and ancient philosophy.

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Does the death penalty make us safer? Should the state be given the ultimate power to decide matters of life and death? Given the data on innocents that have been sentenced to die, how skeptical of the death penalty should we be?

Ben Jones joins Aaron Powell and Trevor Burrus to help answer these questions. Jones is a campaign strategist for Equal Justice USA (EJUSA) and works in support of Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, a project of EJUSA. Jones is also pursuing a Ph.D. in political science at Yale University.

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Can’t we just come up with a system that gives people as much health care as each of them needs? Is it the government’s responsibility to do that? Can the government do that? What about the market—what would a free market in health care look like? Would it look anything like the system we have now?

Michael Cannon joins Aaron and Trevor to help answer these questions. Cannon is the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies.

Show Notes and Further Reading:

Michael F. Cannon, Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It (book)

David Goldhill, Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father—and How We Can Fix It (book)

Michael F. Cannon, 50 Vetoes: How States Can Stop the Obama Health Care Law (white paper)

Gallup Poll: Majority in U.S. Say Healthcare Not Gov’t Responsibility (November 18, 2013)

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Ilya Somin joins Aaron and Trevor for a discussion on political ignorance, which is the idea that the majority of the electorate doesn’t have enough information to make fully-informed political decisions, with the understanding that for most people this ignorance is perfectly rational.

The idea of democracy is that the citizens should decide how they’re governed and what policies their government adopts, and they way they do this is via the ballot box. But what if the voters are too ignorant about what makes good policy—or even about the effects of bad policy—to vote well in the first place?

Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law and is also a regular contributor at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Show Notes and Further Reading:

Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter

     A Libertarianism.org video featuring Prof. Somin explaining political ignorance

     Cato Unbound symposium on political ignorance

Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

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Timothy Sandefur joins Trevor Burrus and Jason Kuznicki for a conversation about America’s founding documents: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.

Which is the Constitution’s primary value: liberty or democracy? Is it enough to tell lawmakers to just “go back to the Constitution” when Constitutional interpretation varies so wildly? What does the Constitution have to say about slavery? Individual rights? Voting rights?

Sandefur is a principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation and the author of the 2014 book The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty. He also heads the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Economic Liberty Project, which protects entrepreneurs against intrusive government regulation.

Show Notes and Further Reading:

Supreme Court Cases

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

Akil Amar, America’s Unwritten Constitution

J. Harvey Wilkinson, Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance

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