Dr. Michel Accad, a physician influenced by Austrian economics, says Austrian insights are essential to a proper understanding of health, which mainstream medicine cannot coherently define. Plus: why we don't need medical licensing.

Show notes for Ep. 651

How about that: fascism has a definition after all, and isn't just a term for whatever people happen to dislike. In his new book, Paul Gottfried traces the meaning of the word and how it's been used over the years as a polemical device in ideological battles.

Show notes for Ep. 650

Liberalism portrays itself as the ideology of liberty and liberation, as neutral between competing views of the good, and as the position all right-thinking people should adopt. None of this is true, but it is all brutally enforced. Jim Kalb and I discuss the true nature of liberalism in today's episode.

Show notes for Ep. 649

Entrepreneur Ryan Daniel Moran recently caused a splash on Facebook with a video showing how much he -- a member of the hated 1% -- was paying in taxes. Hint: it's a lot. And of course the haters, who feel entitled to Ryan's money, were out in force.

My Supporting Listeners insisted I get this guy for the show. Today's the day!

Show notes for ep. 648

What would cause the leading cancer doctor in the world to fly across the country to the funeral of a boy of 8? That's part of today's story.

Past guest Roger McCaffrey discusses the terrible ordeal his family endured when they discovered their 4 1/2-year-old son, John, had CML, a stem-cell cancer. The story involves not only a family's anguish, but also a miracle drug, insurance companies, politics, and the FDA.

My guest today has had tremendous success as a debater and recently debated a university socialist group. As an Australian, John Hajek also lets us in on what's happening at Australian universities. It's almost enough to make you feel good about American campuses.

Show notes for Ep. 646

The standard narrative runs like this: Ngo Dinh Diem was the corrupt and oppressive president of South Vietnam whose removal (which wound up taking the form of assassination) the Kennedy Administration had no choice but to endorse. On top of everything else, Diem's administration was dominated by Roman Catholics in a predominantly Buddhist country, and his outrageous oppression of Buddhists was another reason he had to go.

I myself believed all this, and even taught it in the classroom. According to our guest, it's bunk.

Show notes for episode 645

So much of what's been tried in order to help developing countries has backfired that it's long past time to reexamine the whole question. A brand new documentary, called Poverty, Inc., is gaining plaudits across the ideological spectrum. I talk to director, producer, and writer Michael Matheson Miller today.

Show notes for Ep. 644

If there's one thing our university system is devoted to, it's "diversity." Our universities can boast faculty members who look very different from one another and who come from different places -- but they more or less think the same. Aren't ideas a teensy bit important, too? We discuss why universities have so little interest in intellectual diversity.

Show notes for Ep. 643

We are supposed to believe that the network of organizations promoting a particular view of Israel and the U.S. relationship with that country doesn't exist, and that anyone who says it does is a crank and a hater. Yet it's precisely the network of organizations that would call such a person a hater that we're talking about in the first pace. Grant Smith joins me for a rational discussion of this inexplicably sensitive issue.

Show notes for Ep. 642