Thu, 31 August 2017
Today I'm joined by Brent DeRidder of the Liberty Coalition for Disaster Relief and Gret Glyer, creator of the DonorSee philanthropy app, to discuss how private individuals and groups can relieve the suffering associated with this terrible disaster. |
Wed, 30 August 2017
During natural disasters, there's a sudden and intense spike in demand for the existing stock of resources. This puts upward pressure on prices, and this upward pressure has salutary effects (which we'll discuss in this episode). That's not how most people see it. "Price gouging," to the man on the street, involves the unconscionable exploitation of vulnerable people's difficult situations in order to make a quick buck. |
Tue, 29 August 2017
With various websites (not all "white nationalist") seeing various Internet services withdrawn from them, and given that our media and political classes are not exactly known for their ability to make fine distinctions, could ever more sites and groups, more or less innocuous, find themselves subjected to this kind of treatment? Lew Rockwell and I discuss this and a heck of a lot else, including the controversy about libertarians and fascism. |
Mon, 28 August 2017
In this episode I talk to Katie Wells of WellnessMama.com, in a conversation ranging from entrepreneurship to education, homeschooling, history, the Federal Reserve, nullification, and more. |
Fri, 25 August 2017
By popular demand, popular (and iconoclastic) strength trainer Mark Rippetoe joins me to discuss strength training and fitness (and what so many people get wrong), as well as his libertarian views -- and how it all meshes together. |
Thu, 24 August 2017
The "happiness" literature purports to speak about levels of happiness in various countries. Popular journalism then purports to explain why the happiest places are happy -- and it's always because of the state. Is there anything to this research? |
Wed, 23 August 2017
Well, this was bound to happen. Brandon Navom of Software Engineers for Liberty was fired from his job for planning to take part in a free speech rally that had nothing to do with anything other than free speech. Hysterics tweeted at his employer that Navom was a Nazi and got him fired with no severance. He is an ordinary libertarian with no unusual views to speak of. |
Tue, 22 August 2017
The brilliant Scott Horton, a one-man libertarian foreign-policy think tank, joins me to discuss the Trump policy in Afghanistan, the real history of the war, and why the only sensible approach is to get out. |
Mon, 21 August 2017
Peter van Buren returns to the show to discuss his novel Hooper's War, set during World War II. Beneath all the casualty figures and the news reports is something profound and lasting that damages us during war, and the author brings it out even in the context of the "Good War." |
Fri, 18 August 2017
The small country of Liechtenstein is run by Prince Hans-Adam II, who is a friend and correspondent of the libertarian economist and philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe. In today's episode we tell the untold story about this extraordinary place. |
Thu, 17 August 2017
Keith Preston, whose writing I always find interesting and challenging, wrote an excellent overview and analysis of what happened in Charlottesville last weekend. He does the impossible here: this is as dispassionate as it gets. Enjoy. |
Wed, 16 August 2017
In the wake of the events in Charlottesville, Paul Gottfried returns to the show to discuss the present state of the American ideological spectrum, from Antifa to the alt Right. |
Tue, 15 August 2017
Today's episode takes a brief look at economic downturns dating back to the 19th century, and argues that they weren't spontaneous occurrences of the free market. Fun! I delivered this talk at a Mises Institute event in 2009. |
Tue, 15 August 2017
Patrik Schumacher, a prominent architect in London, stunned the architecture world last year when he came out against housing subsidies and state-funded art schools, and in favor of privatizing, parks, streets, and other public areas. Instead of groveling and apologizing, he's sticking to his guns. |
Sun, 13 August 2017
Antony Sammeroff, who co-hosts the Scottish Liberty Podcast, joins me to discuss how he's taken a personal passion and begun to monetize it online. |
Fri, 11 August 2017
Glenn Jacobs, best known as the enormously popular WWE wrestler Kane, is also a Misesian and a fixture of the liberty movement. He's currently running for mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, and he joins us to discuss the campaign. |
Thu, 10 August 2017
As you likely know by now, Google fired James Damore after he wrote an internal memo questioning the assumption that all human differences are due to social conditioning. There is no "libertarian position" on this per se; Google obviously may hire and fire as it pleases. But man was there a lot of libertarian confusion about this. Some said his firing was "the market" speaking. Some called me a "thick" libertarian for being critical of Google. Some appeared to suggest that libertarians aren't allowed to criticize private entities. In this episode I clear up all of these unfortunate (and persistent) confusions. |
Wed, 9 August 2017
Dennis Fusaro, a longtime political consultant and grassroots activist, found himself in a legal battle for over a year because of what he considers the erratic application of unjust laws that curtail freedom of speech. The jury found him not guilty, in what appears to have been a case of jury nullification. |
Tue, 8 August 2017
George Orwell has been a mystery to a great many readers. What did he truly believe? Was he a thoroughgoing socialist yet anti-totalitarian? David Ramsay Steele, author of a new book on Orwell, joins me to get to the bottom of it. |
Mon, 7 August 2017
In this episode I review the history of rights theories in the West from the Middle Ages through the 20th century. Expect to hear about the medieval canonists, the late scholastics, John Locke, Murray Rothbard, and Hans Hoppe, among others. |
Fri, 4 August 2017
You'd think "I want to free you" would be an easy message to sell -- and yet it isn't. Why is that? This episode is the talk I gave at LibertyFest 2014 in Brooklyn, New York. |
Thu, 3 August 2017
Peter van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department, spent a year in Iraq as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams. When you hear what the U.S. government -- which had destroyed much of the country and completely undermined its civil society -- expected him to do, you won't know whether to laugh or cry. To make things worse, the State Department came after him when he released We Meant Well, the book we discuss in this episode. |
Wed, 2 August 2017
Mises Institute president Jeff Deist, who was Ron Paul's last chief of staff, delivered an excellent and well-received talk at the Corax libertarian conference in Malta last week. As usual, though, emotional hypochondria got the better of a small group of left- and establishment libertarians, who are denouncing the speech in hysterical terms. The speech is so commonsensical, and the reaction on the part of this crowd so perverse and bizarre, that I can't let this episode pass. It's part and parcel of the "Ron Paul is a racist" libertarians who have resented Ron and affiliated institutions ever since being left in the dust after 2007. So I'm going to play it for you, followed by my commentary. You need to hear it, so you can see for yourself the lengths such folks will go to in order to pretend to be outraged. |
Tue, 1 August 2017
It somehow became fashionable among young people to wear shirts depicting a murderer. One supposes the same indulgence would not be extended to shirts depicting non-leftist murderers (if such shirts existed, which they don't). Federico Fernandez is behind an effort to take down the statue of Che Guevara in the latter's home town in Argentina, and to spread the truth about the man. We also discuss the ongoing fiasco in Venezuela. |