 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. So over the last year, after we've wrapped each episode of Free Thoughts, we've asked guests to tell us a bit about something that's been influential on their intellectual development. Many have listed books, teachers, thinkers. So for our end of the year episode, we've put them together for you to enjoy. I'm Peter Van Dorn, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of the Quarterly Publication Regulation. The economist whose work has interested me most over time has nothing to do with what I do. It has nothing to do with modern micro or regulation or anything of the sort. His name is Ovner Grief and he teaches economic history at Stanford, but he's a game theorist. What he's done is taken the tools of modern game theory and applied them to what I think of its fundamental questions of economic history. For example, he's written an article way back in the JPE in the 80s that was on why were Christians first to use contracts to try to govern long-distance trade and why were Muslims did not use that? Why did Muslims not use legal mechanisms to try to deal with trade and why did Christians? And then how did that differential choice lead to very different patterns in economic development? If you go back 600, 700 years ago, Muslim areas were at the top, Islamic areas were at the top of the heap and Christian areas were not. And then subsequent economic history has been the opposite. And Grief said, it's because the Florence and the Medici and trade and banking and all of that stuff. So how did that happen? Well, way back then you just had horses and you put stuff on the horses and then three and a half months later or on ships, it ended up someplace very far and you had to trust everybody to work it all out and so that you didn't lose your stuff for your money. And he said, that was the real problem. And then he works through the development of law by Christian traders and the medieval trade fairs that flourished in the Enziatic League and how did that all come about? So anyway, I mean, and he's written a number of, anyway, he's an economic historian but he has some game theoretic component to his work. And so whenever he writes an article, I just read it because I go, oh, wow. A, it's an interesting question. And B, this is a thoughtful way to look at it and it combines, I call it talky game theory. In other words, it's not the Caltech just pure math and you can't follow the proof. This is a literate person who more humanistically trained people can follow what he's up to and you kind of read his stuff and you go, wow, this is an innovative smart person working on problem. And for me, at its best, what academia is about is that, which is smart people coming up with the answers to very important questions and anyway, so that's the first name that comes to mind. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Nolan-Brown, I'm a staff editor with Reason Magazine. One of the biggest influences to my becoming a libertarian is not necessarily any particular thinker or author but was coming to an Institute for Humane Studies seminar here in DC and at that time I was introduced to the Cato Institute and to Reason Magazine and Reason Magazine writers and Cato Institute writers as much as any other thinkers really actually influenced my becoming a libertarian or recognizing myself as a libertarian. Mark Collapri here who runs the financial regulatory area here at Cato. I will note spent seven years on Capitol Hill trying to reform Frannie and Freddie as well and spent a little bit of time actually inside FHA running some of the business there as well as working in a number of trade associations around town. So spent the last 20 years for better or for worse monitoring mortgage markets, housing markets and mortgage finance policy. There are a number of people I'd certainly point to, you know, Peter Wallace and his co-author Ed Pinto at AEI have done a tremendous amount of work on the housing goals. Now I think there's some errors in it but I think there are also some a lot of things that you have to be an essential part of reading for the crisis. Ed Olson at UVA is probably the best author on rental housing which we didn't cover at all. So if you want to learn all about public housing Ed Olson is the man to go to and learn from. John Wyker over at the Hudson Institute is certainly one of the better urban economists. A ruler of good writers and urban economics, Ed Glazer is probably doing some of the best work today in urban economy and housing markets began a whole lot of work in mortgage markets that are all worth looking at. I'm Scott Bullock. I'm senior attorney with the Institute for Justice. I've of course been influenced by a number of the great libertarian classics and those have been very important books to me throughout my entire life. A book however that probably a lot of libertarians are not familiar with is a book called The Omni Americans by a writer called Albert Murray who just recently passed away when he was in his late 90s. Albert Murray had a fascinating life. He was born in the deep south, lived in Harlem for most of his life, wrote a lot of books about culture and about music. Duke Ellington once called him the most unsquare person he had ever met and he had a lot of very interesting things to say about America, about the Constitution, and also about the nature of art as well. Even though his perspective was quite different from somebody's like Ayn Rand's, they actually had a significant amount of overlap in the focus on the individual as a heroic being. His book The Omni Americans is a collection of essays that touches on a wide range of topics. Some of them more dated from the early 1970s but one that says a lot about the meaning of America and how we can form a common cultural consensus about issues drawing from the great diversity of American culture. It's really a fun read and I'd recommend it to that book and many other books that Albert Murray has written. I'm Alan Dickerson, legal director of the Center for Competitive Politics and one of my base influences was Aristotle's politics where Aristotle talks about the fact that a city is those who live there and not the sort of stone structure and that when men and women come together to form organizations, they're obviously doing it because they see some public good in doing so and I have always taken to heart that sort of very hopeful message about the instincts and rationales when people form organizations. Hi, I'm Peter Suderman and I'm a senior editor at Reason Magazine and one of the biggest influences on me as a writer and just sort of in terms of thinking about the way the world works or could work is the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. I started reading Isaac Asimov books when I was eight years old. I got the Caves of Steel for Christmas one year. It's a robot mystery novel basically set in the far future and Isaac Asimov said basically that he wanted to write an Agatha Christie book but in the future and that's kind of what it is. But what was so great about Asimov was that he had an incredible clarity of thought and was able to—clarity of thought that he was able to express in his writing and he was someone who really believed that we could think our way through our problems, that we could figure things out. He was a rationalist, a humanist, he was actually the president of the Humanist Society at one point and he was someone who believed that humans are good enough, smart enough, great enough to figure stuff out on their own. Not perfect but good enough and smart enough and this sort of sensibility that we can actually—that things are knowable and that we can figure out the world was really important especially when combined with the other part of him which was that in addition to being a rationalist, he was a futuristic dreamer and he could sort of dream about how the world would become a better place and a more interesting place and he did as a writer what he was so great at was explaining how the world is. He wrote a lot of science books but also how the world could be and what problems might arise and how we might fix them. This is what he always did in his robot novels and his short stories was he would work from some scientific principle and then he would notice that the principle or the system would have some loophole in it, some flaw and then it was up to his usually scientist or detective heroes to figure out what that loophole was, how to work through that. Asimov has been a really huge influence on me as a writer for the clarity of his writing, for the volume of his writing. He published something like 500 books in his lifetime and also for his wonderful ability to just sort of dream of a world in which people have figured things out even more than we already have and keep doing so and are likely to keep doing so. I'm Kevin Glass, director of policy and outreach at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity and my thing of influence is Isaiah Berlin and basically anything by Isaiah Berlin. I first read Two Concepts of Liberty which is his classic positive liberty versus negative liberty essay that a lot of people know and understand even if they haven't actually read the essay but I got to know him more because I had a professor in college say his libertarianism is derived from his pluralism rather than flowing in the opposite direction and so I got to reading a little bit more about pluralism and specifically his version of it and it's something that I think that description is accurate that libertarianism is derived from a moral philosophy first and it really kind of shaped me and it's basically people have different values, they want to live their lives in different ways and both your philosophy and your government should reflect that. This is Jim Otteson. I'm a teaching professor of political economy at Wake Forest University where I also direct the Center for the Study of Capitalism and I wanted to mention a book that I would recommend to listeners and readers who might not have heard of this book or if they've heard of it maybe haven't read it or read it a long time ago and the book is called Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. This is a book that had a profound influence on me. Victor Frankl was a Nazi concentration camp survivor and the book talks about not only his story as his boyhood story and then his travails and in trying to survive in a concentration camp and then ultimately finding his way out of it but the really inspirational part and the profound part of that book I think is his claim that finding meaning in life is really something that is up to each of us. It's up to me. I don't get meaning from my life by looking to other people to give it to me. Instead if I'm going to find meaning in my life it has to be in something that pulls from my own identity as a person, who I am, the kinds of things I can do and even in very difficult circumstances including the extraordinarily difficult circumstances of something like as extreme as a concentration camp. It's possible, he argues anyway, for a person to find meaning and to generate a life that at the end of it can be seen as having been worth living. I would recommend and commend that book as one that can help put into perspective the difficulties that each of us faces in our lives today. Hi, this is Tim Carney, political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at AEI. When I was a 23-year-old reporter my editor Terry Jeffery called me into his office to give me an assignment and he said, there's a government agency I just found out about. It's called the Export-Import Bank. I found out what it does and why it exists and I said, why, did they do something bad and he said, I'm sure they did. Any time you have government power and the pursuit of profit intersecting like this, you're sure to find corruption, do a little digging. So I did a little digging, I found out some of what this government agency does and for 12 years since then I've been writing about it. Well, I'm Dan Eichelsen. I'm director of the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies here at the Cato Institute and I have to say that in the 15 years that I've been here, what I've found to be most influencing the direction or the thrust of what I'm doing is Frederick Bastiat and his recognition that there are things that are seen and those things which are not seen, and that was popularized of course by Haslett in the 20th century, that notion that people are going to focus on the obvious and not think deeply or think in the long term has resonated with me and I'm beginning to realize that this is something that needs to be expanded upon and all of our analyses, we've got to focus on the secondary effects. We have to train people or encourage people to look at the total impact of policy and not to be swayed by fast-talking policy makers and politicians about the benefits of some expedient policy. So I would recommend everybody read Bastiat and internalize what he has to say. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for tax reform. The writer in the literature that's probably most affected me has been Hernando DeSoto's writing on property rights. The other path, the mystery of capital, all of these make the case that what underpins America's success and other societies that have been successful is property rights and this is what we did right at the end of World War II when we occupied Japan and left and it was successful because we established property rights and exactly what didn't happen in Iraq and what didn't happen in Afghanistan and hasn't happened in many other countries and where we have the Arab Spring of the 60 plus people who burned themselves many to death but who burned themselves all had been expropriated. Not one of them did so complaining they didn't get to go to church often enough. They were all people that had land or their business expropriated and that's what had driven them to extreme action and that's what didn't get fixed after the Arab Spring said, hey, we had elections. That's not why they were burning themselves. They hadn't been having elections for years and years and years but the property rights were being violated so the importance of property rights to developing a free and open society and how it structured America and we were learning as we went west we had better and better at property rights. Why do we have energy in the rest of the world doesn't because people, individuals own the oil and natural gas and sand and rock and gold underneath their country if the king owns it, if the state owns it, if the sovereign owns it and anybody finds it all it means is they dig a hole in your backyard and you get nothing out of it so you don't tell anybody about it you're certainly not excited about it and you don't go looking for it and so I think it's a low taxes immigration and property rights are what made the United States more successful the rest of the world and gave us a couple hundred year run where we outpaced the rest of the world and we've gotten behind on taxes where we're not the low tax country certainly on the way we treat businesses on immigration rather than discussion about whether we should you know turn into one of those countries that doesn't want to grow and prosper and thirdly on property rights mostly we just don't get it I mean people don't understand that's the secret sauce that makes it work if you want Egypt to work don't write them a three billion dollar check help them establish property rights and there's I think it's seven trillion dollars in dead capital that Fernando de Soto's idea that just is land that somebody's living on used but they can't borrow against it they can't sell it they you know they did it's tough to build effectively on it because you don't have title to it whereas we don't have that problem in most places in the United States I'm Pete Becky professor of economics at George Mason University I'm the author of a book called living economics when I wrote living economics the title of that book has three different meanings that I try to communicate to people the first one is that living economics is that economics is a living body of scientific thought the second one is that a living body of thought is deeply rooted in its classical traditions and then the third one is that if you get the lessons of economics you can't help but live economics by it being a 24-7 occupation rather than just something you do as a daily job you can't stop thinking about the puzzles of the world why some nations are rich other nations are poor why some nations that were poor became rich why some nations that were rich you know become poor and and so you you know the and the issues that are associated with that so economics becomes something that you think about all the time so that's the meaning of the title of that book but a large part of that comes from my reading of Ludwig von Mises who I consider to be the greatest economist that's ever ever lived and and I just want to do you two readings one of them is from the beginning of his book human action and the other one is from the very last page of human action and on page seven of human action Mises is sums up his position about economics as a living body of thought he says the following he says it's customary for many people to blame economics for being backward now it is quite obvious that our economic theory is not perfect there is no such thing as perfection in human knowledge nor for that matter in any other human endeavor omniscience is denied to man the most elaborate theory that seems to satisfy completely our thirst for knowledge may one day be amended or supplanted by a new theory science does not give us absolute and final certainty it gives us assurances within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought a scientific system is but one way station and an endlessly progressing search for knowledge it is necessarily affected by the insufficiency is inherent in every human effort but to acknowledge these facts does not mean that present-day economics is backward it merely means that economics is a living thing and to live implies both imperfection and change this is I take as the motto of my book in the sense that I see Mises as offering economic science is an open invitation to inquiry economics is this golden key that unlocks the mysteries of the universe and our job as economic educators is to share that key with as many people as we possibly can and the stakes of sharing that key are extremely high so you turn to the very last page of human actions so that was on page 7 on page 881 after this consistent and persistent application of economic reasoning to all walks of life Mises sums up his ideas and says the following the body of economic and knowledge is essential element in the structure of human civilization it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and all the moral intellectual technological and therapeutic achievements of the last centuries have been built it rests with men whether they will make the proper use of the rich treasure with which this knowledge provides them or whether they will leave it unused but if they fail to take advantage excuse me if they fail to take the best advantage of it and disregard the teachings and warnings they will not annul economics they will stamp out society and the human race the stakes are very very high in this battle of economic education so economics is the most entertaining subject out there but it's also the most vital and important subject out there and the goal of the economic educator in my mind is to make sure that they communicate clearly and forcefully the teachings of economics and that's a very worthy vocation I'm Steve Horowitz Charles a Dana professor of economics at St. Lawrence University I want to talk about a person and a book who have influenced me in my thinking and and what's interesting about them is that I came across them at roughly the same time the book would be Friedrich Hayek's law legislation and liberty particularly the second volume of that it's a trilogy the second volume of that has a chapter in there where Hayek talks about the what he calls the Cadillaxie and Cadillaxie is Hayek's word for the idea of the market as this sort of nexus of exchange and undesigned order and that when I first I can recall first reading that chapter and having one of those moments where you were you all of a sudden all of the ways in which you've thought about how markets work and about how we talk about markets and about the idea of of where how people get remunerated markets and what the justice of that is and all these questions that we think are so important all of a sudden someone has just sort of peeled away the the the the the rapper and you see it in a very different way than before and this notion that he really emphasizes in there that in the market economy people are are rewarded not for their merit not for their skill in a pure sense of the word skill but for their creation of value and that we can't predict the pattern of incomes and we can't control the pattern of incomes because it is this ongoing evolutionary processes that's based on people's attempting to guess what other people want and the way it's the whole discussion in that chapter 10 of the trilogy about the way in which markets do this is just every paragraph has something in it where you want to go wow that's that's that's what that's that changes the way I think about something and for me reading that chapter I have the I have the original copy of the book with my notations in it when I was still making notes in pen which I don't do anymore but going back to I probably read it I read it in graduate school and I'm like there's all these little stars and stuff in there right where I can't have the words to put in the margin about how it's making me think so that book but I read that book at the same time as I said I was in graduate school and I had the opportunity in graduate school to work with professor George Mason at the time Don LaVoy. Don unfortunately passed away in 2001 at the age of 50 a year younger than I am now which is somewhat distressing but Don was an amazing person he was a scholar he wrote two books that every libertarian should read especially his national economic planning what is left which you can find online I believe at Cato also his rivalry in central planning book which is sort of the more scholarly version both of those are arguments about the limits of economic planning and how markets work and they're fantastic pieces especially the national economic planning book was a was Don's attempt to reach out to the left and talk to them about why they shouldn't be planners by their own by their own values and Don was also a tremendous teacher and had enormous patience with graduate students Don also was ahead of his time in the classroom I believe Don LaVoy was the first human being I ever heard use the word hypertext and this would have been in the late 80s early 90s before anyone was really talking about this and Don could see right then this idea of being able to click through a document to other documents and to leave for students to collaborate on a document and leave comments he was doing this stuff in the 90s on the most primitive of technology with lotus notes and things like that so Don wasn't a was a creative teacher who who understood the application of his intellectual ideas about knowledge and collaboration and sharing and the importance of accessing other people's knowledge and recognize how it worked in the classroom and so much of my career as an economist and now as a public intellectual I think is has been about pushing forward the ideas and values that that Don had and I think it's a shame that Don didn't live to see where the libertarian intellectual movement where things like Students for Liberty and all of these organizations have gone today because he would have been just thrilled beyond belief and and he would have adored the directions that that things have gone in the growth and in some ways intellectual success as we've had and so you know I hope that me and Don's other students are are continuing that legacy into the 21st century my name is Bruce Benson I'm a in an economist a professor at Florida State University and my main focus in my research is on the interplay between law and the economy and in this context I have been very interested in looking at the development of law and legal institutions and one of the really significant influences in my thinking about this process is provided by Hayek's law legislation liberty especially the it's that's a three-volume set of books all of them quite small the first volume is just tremendous it is a provides a picture of evolving law and in the processes through which law can evolve rather than the sort of static way we think of law today as just being there and all these institutions are there we can think about law and how it came about and its different sources and the emphasis he puts on sort of discovered law as opposed to designed law is is crucial I think for people to understand the legal process he of course recognizes as we all do that governments today try to design law they create law and they impose it from the top down but that typically causes all sorts of additional problems as people try to circumvent those designed rules on the other hand law that is discovered as individuals interact or perhaps as judges are looking for ways to resolve disputes is generally applies to those individuals involved perhaps in the dispute and it only spreads if it's good law and is accepted by others the the designed law is imposed on everyone and whereas discovered law is a slower process of finding the best rules and developing a consistent set of rules that makes sense as opposed to the sort of random designing of rules to do all sorts of different things and then you end up with lots of inconsistencies and conflicts between rules and so on so that's been a real important influence on my thinking actually when I was writing my book the enterprise of law one of the first reviewers of early volume was Randy Barnett and he had one of the points he made in his review was that my discussion sounds very Hayekian he said but you don't cite Hayek where's Hayek and my response was you know who's Hayek my graduate program in economics never talked about Hayek and so I started reading Hayek and it was just an eye-opener in particularly law legislation liberty but of course his his wonderful article on on how prices work and knowledge in society and so on it just was a tremendous learning experience for me I always thank Randy for that insight I'm Dan Mitchell I'm a senior fellow here at the Cato Institute probably the most formative book from my younger years which were quite a long time ago back in the late 1970s was written by Bill Simon who was Gerald Ford secretary of the Treasury he wrote the book I believe in 1978 so of course Jimmy Carter was in the White House and and he was a free agent at least politically at the time and a time for truth the reason it influenced me it's the first time I ever found a publication that in some sort of comprehensive way made the case for smaller government a less intrusive less destructive tax system and and for sort of an unfocused mind like mine I had sort of gotten interested in public policy because of the Reagan challenge against Gerald Ford in 1976 Bill Simon's book enabled me to have a more coherent world view and enabled me to sort of put the pieces together you such as I was at the time I'm sure there were lots of holes in my thinking there probably still are now but Bill Simon's book I remember reading it more than once because I said wow this really all makes sense to me my name is Andrew I Cohen I'm an associate professor of philosophy at Georgia State University in Atlanta and I also direct the Jean beer balloon felt center for ethics there we were to think about one important inspiration in my career and my thinking I would trace it back to a very influential social studies teacher that I had when I was in high school was a fellow named Anthony Panino and he would begin all of his classes with something that he called the freedom unit and in the freedom unit he would introduce people to a whole bunch of ideas particularly sort of philosophical approach to thinking about what freedom might mean and what the proper role of government might be and one of the important themes that came out of that unit which went on for quite a bit was the notion that freedom is potentially best understood as independence Panino would always wrap up his freedom units by having students do a book report and I recall the first time I studied with him he had people read a book by I ran called anthem and I remember reading that being very impressed with the picture of the power of individuality and understanding how it is that people can relate to one another in a way that might allow them to rethink current norms and that opened me to a whole new way of thinking whole philosophical way of thinking and after that I went on to the study of academic philosophy and this opened the door to a whole new field for me I began to become exposed to more mainstream and rigorous philosophers when I went to college and later to graduate school and there I began to read people such as Aristotle and Robert Nozick and John Locke all of these people were very influential and profound in helping me to rethink how it is that I understand the individual role in society and the proper scope of state power. This is Mike Munger I'm the director of the philosophy politics and economics program at Duke University my PhD is in economics but I've been teaching in political science programs now for 30 years person who influenced me most particularly recently is James Buchanan who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986 and is one of the founders of the public choice movement Buchanan always famously said that there are three elements to public choice there's methodological individualism where we look partly in philosophical terms because people have autonomy but also just as a matter of practicality people in act individually they make individual choices so we start with individuals then the second is those individuals are more or less the same in terms of their motivation their moral capacity regardless of whether they're acting at the supermarket or in the voting booth that's called behavioral symmetry the third and people lose sight of this but it was very important for Buchanan's thought the third is politics as exchange and that is groups of us acting together can be better off than any individual could be acting alone there are many social cooperative activities that require us to be able to write binding contracts where people are coerced if they feel to live up after giving consent to the terms of that agreement and I think Buchanan's particular genius was to recognize that there are non-market institutions we can call them political but they need not be the state so private clubs non-profit organizations all of the rich capestry that gives us society that's a kind of third element something that's different from market institutions but different from the coercive institutions of the state where coercant coercion takes place without consent so understanding and trying to extend Jim Buchanan's insights has been as occupied much of the last 10 years of my scholarly activity Michael Tanner senior fellow at the Cato Institute I would say that the book really got me thinking most was actually Charles Murray's losing ground and it did it for two reasons one was it exposed me to a very different way of thinking about welfare not that people were somehow taking advantage of the program or that they were welfare queens or anything like that but that they were reacting to natural incentives within the program the poor people weren't lazy but they weren't stupid and essentially they simply reacted to the incentives like everyone else and second I think more than any other book it taught me the value of hard science is applied to social policy that is said that it wasn't just about politics or emotion or things like that that you actually could apply scientific methods to these things and deal with the numbers and logic and come to a conclusion and that made me that that really helped get me into the whole public policy arena my name is John Goodman I'm president of the Goodman Institute for public policy research which is a think tank I've been very involved in health policy for many many years and I'm often called the father of health savings accounts health economics is a particular interest to me but the one book that most influenced how I think about public policy was Milton Friedman's capitalism and freedom and it was in that book that I really began to appreciate the economic way of thinking because as Milton Friedman works his way through economic problems public education health care he's always talking about these problems using the language of economics he thinks like an economist and he talks about occupational licensing whether we need to regulate who can be a doctor and who shouldn't and makes a very obvious point well look if we're worried that people be practicing medicine who don't have the skills a government that doesn't need to go out there and regulate the market government just needs to certify people so if if a surgeon is a skilled surgeon the governments can say so but then we're free to ignore the government's advice because the government isn't always right that was a very insightful way to analyze the whole subject of occupational licensing as Friedman pointed out the licensing boards tend to be controlled by the professions being licensed and so therefore they function like a cartel agent to increase the incomes of people they're supposed to be regulating at the public expense so Friedman who I knew personally by the way influenced me a great deal he taught me how to think like an economist and a lot that I learned from Milton Friedman I've applied to an area that he really didn't think that much about and that is health care I'm Christopher Prebble vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute two recent books that I've read that I have used in the class that I teach on foreign policy that I recommend to others the first is Frida Karya's book the post American world it's actually been in two versions so the new one is called post American World 2.0 and I think Frida Karya has a very important subtle understanding of both the limits and the the extent of American power and he does appreciate both right this is a man who came to the United States from India as a young adult and just has enormous respect and appreciation for this country and all that it's done but he also has I think a somewhat removed sense of our limitations and how sometimes when we act abroad how it's interpreted elsewhere and I think it's a it's an excellent book and I've and I've recommended it and I guess I've used it in my class for a number of years another book that is just out by Ian Bremmer called superpower is the book that I'm now using in my class now that the Zikari book is now it's a little dated and Bremmer does I think a truly commendable job of spelling out three different archetypes of US foreign policy different vision for how the United States should conduct itself overseas abroad etc and these are quite distinct and he makes a very good case for each of them on their own terms the pros and the cons but at the end of the day he weighs weighs in and ultimately comes down on the side of what he calls independent America with some caveats but basically arguing that the United States and the world would be better off if the United States did somewhat less encouraged others to do somewhat more and become more focused on improving ourselves here at home and a bit less focused on trying to nation build abroad it's a it's a quick read it's he's an excellent writer and I think would be of interest to people who do not follow foreign policy issues on a day-to-day basis I'm Catherine Maggie Ward managing editor of Reason Magazine and one of the most influential cultural products that I've ever consumed was presented to me in my my public school my government school dare I call it when I was in middle school which was the John Stossel special in which he utters his trademark line could greed be good and you know it's easy to sort of laugh at the simplicity of that idea but as someone who had very recently encountered iron rand and who otherwise had almost no exposure to economics or really philosophy of any kind it was fascinating to have this TV wheeled in and a VHS tape put into it and to have this mustachioed man of mystery tell me that something that I had always been told was bad could actually be a kind of a virtue so I'm gonna make the perhaps overthought case for John Stossel classroom specials hi I'm Andrew Jason Cohen associate professor of philosophy at Georgia State University and currently visiting professor of ethics at the business school at Georgetown University so I've been asked to talk about influential thinkers or figures very difficult question because there are so many of them and I'm fortunate that I had some time to think about it first and I'm not gonna narrow it down to one I'm gonna narrow it down to one teacher and one historical thinker the historical thinker for me should be the obvious choice of John Stewart mill because I take the harm principle from him and I've been working on using the harm principle as the main or only normative principle of toleration mill is a liberal in the classical sense although he also sits at a juncture in history where things get pushed further than previous classical liberals I think would have liked so he's moving away in some ways from John Stewart mill on the other hand he's also a great economist with some exceptions but I think very very important thinker historically speaking I think perhaps the most important political philosopher of the 19th century certainly the only the only competition really is Karl Marx who of course I think was wrong about far more so that's that's the philosopher or theorist that I would name and then I'll name one teacher in my time at at Emory University as an undergrad my first major was economics and I was very fortunate that E.G. West was visiting at Emory for a while and I took a class from him on the history of economic thought and that was really important to me he was also very interesting thinker and it was great to take the class from him but it was really important juncture for me because it got me to see that what I really enjoyed about economics was the theoretical side of it not the mathematical side that has become the dominant view of economics and once I realized that I realized I should really move more into studying philosophy directly so I think that was really important for my development I'm Matt Zulinski I'm a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego and I work in in political philosophy and with a specific recent interest in the intellectual history of libertarianism I've been writing a book with my colleague John Tomasi which attempts to trace the origin of libertarian thought back as far as we can go and our our finding is that libertarianism as a kind of distinct political ideology really sprung into existence around the middle of the 19th century in Britain in France it's a much older doctrine than many people think a lot of people associate libertarianism with iron Rand and Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard these kind of mid 20th century American thinkers and and those are all really important figures and they've they've all had a profound influence on me but reading some of these 19th century libertarians has has really opened my eyes to just how how common certain common themes keep cropping up again and again in the libertarian intellectual tradition and and just how beautifully and forcefully they were sometimes expressed at a relatively early stage one of the things that I'm most happy to have read in the course of researching this book is Herbert Spencer's 1851 book social statics which in many ways is probably the first systematic libertarian treatise by which I mean it's a book that sets forward a kind of master libertarian principle one basic moral principle that we can then apply to all the different problems of government and society and then kind of works through those problems and shows how that principle applies what insights it gives us and what direction it points us to in terms of future reform so Herbert Spencer's basic principle was the law of equal freedom which says that basically everybody ought to have as much freedom as is compatible with a similar freedom for others it's a fairly straightforward principle at least on first glance and then he goes through a whole range of issues and talks about what that entails and you get some really surprising conclusions really radical and surprisingly progressive conclusions from that principle so for instance there's a chapter in the book on the rights of children where Spencer makes the case that essentially children should have all the same rights as adults that we don't have any good grounds for withholding the rights of freedom of movement rights of freedom of contract even political rights from children that we would extend to adults the same is true of women there's a chapter in the book on the rights of women where Spencer decries the kind of patriarchal nature of English society and really the world at the time and not just in a political sense either right it's not just that he thinks that it's wrong for governments to deny women the kind of political rights that they afford to men the right to own property the right to vote but even in a kind of broader social sense right Spencer makes the case in that chapter that within the family relationships ought to be governed by a kind of spirit of equality and that it's wrong for husbands to kind of dominate over their wives and to rule over them as as you know as a tyrannical lord might rule over his subjects so it's interesting to see libertarianism for Spencer sort of coming out of just the narrowly political realm and into the broader broader social realm as well there's really interesting chapter in their property rights there's some great stuff on imperialism again Spencer has a beautifully I think progressive view on on imperialism where he says look just because somebody lives in a different country from you doesn't mean they have any less rights than you and if it's wrong for you to go violently plunder your neighbor it's wrong for you to go violently plunder somebody else living abroad even if you make the claim that it's it's for their own good so I think it's just there's a lot of really neat examples in the book to dig into a lot of different controversies to dig into there's some really kind of heavy hitting philosophy at the beginning where he tries to come up with the argument for the principle of equal freedom several different arguments actually one kind of utilitarian argument another based in moral sentiments so you get you get both the sort of theoretical political philosophy and the applied political philosophy there's a lot of arguments some of which are I guess transparently bad but even the bad arguments are ones that that I I came away from glad having read and learned something from so it's it's underappreciated book Spencer used to be a kind of giant intellectually kind of this massive public intellectual that anybody who had any pretense of of being an intelligent person would be familiar with and then at the beginning part of the 20th century he just sort of dropped off the face of the earth G more accused him of committing the naturalistic fallacy in his ethics and that kind of doomed him with academic philosophers and Richard Hofstadter accused him of being a social Darwinist and and between those two accusations basically everybody stopped reading Spencer turns out neither of those accusations was very well grounded so Spencer starting to enjoy something of a renaissance among among academics now and and I hope that continues he's really worth reading and a lot of this is George H. Smith the co-editor with Maryland more of individualism a reader an anthology of individualist writings that was recently published by libertarianism org previous to that I wrote a book published by Cambridge University Press titled the system of liberty themes in the history of classical liberalism I've been active in the libertarian movement for well since about 1968 or 69 when I was in college and I wanted to say something about the influence of on Rand on my intellectual development now I realize that she's a very famous writer I don't need to really go into her ideas but one thing that's disturbed me a bit in recent years is a sort of disdain toward Rand that is sometimes shown by especially academics whether in philosophy well especially in philosophy and it's true that Rand wasn't an academic philosopher she didn't write with one exception her introduction to objective epistemology didn't write anything really technical in philosophy she was an essayist but there's a grand tradition of philosophical essayists in the history of Western thought Montaigne being one and many others and she was a great writer the way it influenced me was Rand when I first read her probably in my third year in high school she's the one quite apart from her ideas who first got me interested in philosophy she wrote about philosophy was such passion and made it seem so important that it made it important to me before that I was vaguely interested in ideas but not generally just in certain areas and she convinced me that that philosophy really was very important it set sort of the fundamental themes throughout the history of Western civilization and understand philosophy even highly abstract philosophy in many ways is the key to understanding the development of Western civilization that's number one the second thing that interested me and that caught my eye was her intense passion for individual freedom she really believed it and some people will say when she went over the top and her things about altruism and such well be that as it may and that's part of her charm as she she if she was eccentric at times she was an original eccentric she she forged her own path and what the more I learned about Rand the more I had to admire her here was a woman came over from Russia at her early age spoke very little English taught herself English worked in various jobs started writing and at an at a time when the climate was very hostile any free market or libertarian ideas at time when you have all these pro Russia so pro-soviet people running around and she stuck it out and sometimes I've heard people complain you know she was intolerant she was she could get very dogmatic and I'd say you know if she didn't have those qualities she never would have made it she would have been eaten up by that culture and it's a survival of the fittest thing and only a very determined tough and being a woman on top of it if anyone should be a hero and a feminist I ran should be she had all of this against her and she stuck it out and achieved a remarkable career so I just want to tip my hat to I'm Rand I must say I disagree with some of her ideas but I just admire the woman tremendously and I think that people who get highly educated in philosophy should cut her some slack her ideas were basically good and she expressed them in essay form not in technical treatises but she considered herself primarily a novelist but the essay she did write I think are very very good on the whole Fleming Rose author of the Tyranny of Silence how one could soon ignite a global debate and free speech for an editor at the Danish newspaper Julein's Posten well I would say that there are two books that made a huge impression on me when it comes to free speech censorship self-censorship and the things we've been talking about and the one is the memoirs of Alexander Solzhenitsyn a famous Russian writer who received the Nobel Nobel Prize for literature in 1971 1970 1971 he wrote a book called the calf and the oak about his fight with Soviet authorities to get his things published and he he was arrested at the end of the Second World War when he was in the Red Army in 1945 and he spent eight years in a labor camp in in Kazakhstan in Central Asia and and when he came out of jail or labor camp he he had to live in exile and and he started to write and he was teaching in a school and at that time he he anticipated that everything he wrote would never be published in his lifetime so he was in effect writing for eternity and in order to preserve his texts he he he he learned by heart the texts and then he he hit them in his backyard in in the soil and he would he would on a regular basis burn manuscripts and then learn them by heart so he and he was always living with the conscience that you know I'm never going to be published you know to to to write and at the same time be of the conviction that what I'm writing is never going to get published while I'm alive and that I have to cover everything up but I have to burn my manuscripts you know every second month and find spaces where I can hit them I mean you really have to you know be stubborn and believe in what you're doing why not just go about your regular life and and teach in school and so so so and and I had a similar experience with Nadia Stamantelstamm the wife of a Russian poet who was who died in labor camp in 1938 and she traveled for decades with with his manuscripts and saved them for history and she wrote a memoir in in the 60s about this and and these two books I mean they they they made a huge impression on me because they showed the importance of words and and how much power and influence the written word can have and and how much people are willing to sacrifice in order to save these words and and and both in the case of Madlustam and St. John it's and I mean they are recognized titans of Russian literature today but very easily everything you know we we may not never have known about them if things maybe have went a little bit different than it actually did I'm Trevor Burris I'm a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies and the managing editor of the Cato Supreme Court review I've done libertarianish stuff for quite a while since I was a teenager and a preteen to some extent and for me the books that really influenced my early thinking and then set me on a path where a bunch of Thomas Sowell books including a conflict divisions the vision of the anointed and his basic economics textbook which is now in its fifth edition and is about four times bigger than it was originally so I read those now and and they're not as important of course as they they were to me then but at the time looking at political debates and not really understanding why the debates were happening or why people were so angry about these issues in such a way and there seem to be so little actual factual evidence there that was mustard I read a book like conflict divisions and suddenly the reality of political debate made a lot of sense the fact that there were certain types of people who viewed the world in one way and there were other people who viewed the world in a different way and that was a way of looking at the background of political beliefs because for me that has always been a huge question of why do people have their political beliefs aside from the facts because it seems like the facts don't really matter as it comes for either side of the political debate there's it always a sort of bias in a worldview question in there and then the question of why certain political beliefs travel together why is it that you can see what someone thinks about environmentalism and probably predict what they think about other things I think this has been an underexplored topic more explored now than it was when Thomas Sowell wrote a conflict divisions and a vision of the anointed helped me look into the what he calls the self congratulations as a basis for public policy which was his thesis that there's a group of people out there who just don't really care about the outcomes of their public policy preferences they care more about how they seem when they promote them so they look moral if they promote a bigger welfare state or if they promote a minimum wage and they seem to not really care about the outcomes of those and the basic economics textbook is one that everyone should read it has the most boring cover and title ever but if you're unfamiliar with economics it is just about the most exciting book if you're of the temperament who you like to punk puncture people's prevailing wisdoms and learn about the basic concept of economics is applied to public policy and get a good toolkit for thinking about public policy in the real world and how it works hi I'm Aaron Powell editor of libertarianism.org a research fellow at the Cato Institute and co-host of free thoughts and as co-host I think I'm going to take exercise my authority to list two influential things the first which is what got me on this long path to where I am today is actually and this is kind of maybe a little cheesy my co-host Trevor Burrus Trevor and I met when I was maybe a sophomore in college we met in a sci-fi literature course and at that time I was I guess not extraordinarily political but my political views ran fairly typical campus left and this being the University of Colorado at Boulder that was pretty left and Trevor and I became friends he argued with me a lot offered a lot of book recommendations and over time brought me around to libertarianism so I wouldn't be here at Cato today if it weren't for those conversations those many days standing in the philosophy section at Barnes and Noble talking far longer than we should have being that both of us had homework so my first influential thing has to be Trevor the second one though the one that is probably the most influential on my thinking today and the way that I approach politics the way that I approach moral issues is a book by the philosopher Rosalind Hearst house called on virtue ethics I stumbled across this book maybe five years ago and virtue ethics it opened virtue ethics up to me this is a moral theory fairly distinct from the the two that are more familiar to most of us the the notion of consequentialism that says it's always right the right thing to do is always that which produces the best consequences and then that the alternative theory of deontology which says morality is a system of rules and your duty is to follow those rules whatever is morally right is that which aligns with the the system of rules and virtue ethics when I encountered it and when coming into it familiar with really those two moral systems was was this enormously fresh and rich idea that said that morality was not so much about what's the right thing to do although that's important but more what kind of person we ought to be and for me it felt far more compelling it felt far more compatible with how I understand human experience it said that morality is ultimately about living a good life and it's about those behaviors and beliefs and traits of character that are conducive to a good life properly understood and it was Hearst house book that made that real for me that filled it in it's a difficult system to get your mind around at first especially if you're mostly familiar with the the tube with the more standard systems of consequentialism and deontology and and Hearst house book while I've come to disagree with some of her conclusions remains the text that that made this real set me on this path that I have found profoundly rich and profoundly rewarding thank you for listening free thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel to learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org