Free Thoughts

Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie have noted an emerging group of people who, having been accustomed to a panoply of choice in every other aspect of their lives, are abandoning America’s two-party system in droves.

Is this growing movement of independents a cause for optimism among libertarians? Are we in for a better, more libertarian era than ever before? Or should we be skeptical of this kind of optimism, given the growth of the federal government in recent years?

Together Matt and Nick are the authors of the 2011 book, “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics can Fix What’s Wrong with America.”

Show Notes and Further Reading:

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics can Fix What’s Wrong with America

Gallup Poll: Americans Disapprove of Government Surveillance Programs

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Tom Palmer joins Aaron and Trevor for a discussion on the two most common philosophical justifications for libertarianism.

Typically we think of justifications for libertarianism as falling into one of two kinds of categories: consequentialism and rights-based. Are these two justifications necessarily at odds with each other?

Tom G. Palmer is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, director of the Institute’s educational division, Cato University, Vice President for International Programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and General Director of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity.

Show Notes and Further Reading:

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government
Randy Barnett, The Structure of Liberty
Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty
Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Richard Epstein, Simple Rules for a Complex World
    Simple Rules Libertarianism.org lecture video
Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution
George Orwell, Animal Farm

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This week we’re discussing a relatively unknown essay by Auberon Herbert called “The Ethics of Dynamite,” wherein Herbert compares the coercive political force of the state (the majority) to the coercive, terroristic use of force by the dynamiter (the minority), a 19-century reference to violent anarchist sects. Herbert points out that the means of the state and those of the dynamiter really do not differ all that much, and offers his solutions for “unmaking” the coercive nature of each.

Jason Kuznicki is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of Cato Unbound.

Show Notes and Further Reading:

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David D’Amato joins Aaron and Trevor for a conversation about the idea of voluntary socialism through the lens of the individualist anarchists of the 19th century. They discuss the life and philosophy of Benjamin Tucker, Voltairine de Cleyre, and others, and explain how the definitions of socialism and capitalism have changed over the years.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney and a Senior Fellow and Trustee at the Center for a Stateless Society. He earned a JD from New England School of Law and an LLM in Global Law and Technology from Suffolk University Law.

Note: In the show, D’Amato claims that Benjamin Tucker died in the 1920s; he actually passed away in 1939.

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This week Aaron and Trevor talk about the tendency of the political process to group people into warring “tribes” when they otherwise wouldn’t. Trevor explains why this is so bad for society and offers several examples and solutions.

Who decides what aspects of our lives can become politicized and which ones can’t? How are things distributed in a fully politicized world? What can we do about this tendency to politicize contentious issues?

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Patrick J. Michaels, the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, joins Aaron and Trevor for a discussion about bias in science and how scientific findings affects public policy.

The idea that science isn’t biased—or generally isn’t biased—is pretty widely held. But is that true? Is there something about science that makes it less susceptible to bias than other fields of inquiry?

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Jason Kuznicki, a research fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of Cato Unbound, joins Aaron and Trevor to discuss historicism: the idea that historical forces work to determine the ideas and values of individuals, and that as a result, historical trends have a direction or purpose to them.

To understand a person or event in history, you need to look at their historical context. That’s not so crazy all by itself—it’s actually pretty reasonable. But the trouble starts when historicist thinking begins to deny individual agency. Not always—but very often—historicism is at odds with methodological individualism.

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What does it mean to say that something is a market failure and that public policy ought to fix it? Can the government actually provide these goods? How often do these situations occur? What does economics have to say about these public goods problems?

Van Doren explains several key economic concepts, including the economist’s definition of a public good, Pareto optimality, and Cosean bargaining.

Peter Van Doren is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of the quarterly journal Regulation. He is an expert in the regulation of housing, land, energy, the environment, transportation, and labor, and has taught at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton University), the School of Organization and Management (Yale University), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Alex Nowrasteh joins Aaron and Trevor to talk about immigration. Immigration policy provokes much debate, anger, and often some pretty ugly politics. But immigration isn’t just a matter of policy, of what effects immigrants have on America’s economic outlook—immigration raises important moral issues as well, because it impacts basic human rights.

Nowrasteh is the immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle,Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury, Richmond Times-Dispatch,Huffington Post, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and elsewhere. He has appeared on Fox News and numerous television and radio stations across the United States. He received his B.A. in Economics from George Mason University and MSc in Economic History from the London School of Economics.

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