 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Katherine Mangu Ward, the managing editor of Reason Magazine. Before that she was a reporter at the Weekly Standard and a researcher for the New York Times op-ed page. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Katherine. Thank you for having me. A while back, people started talking about the libertarian moment. I haven't heard it recently. Maybe Donald Trump has sucked all the air out of the room. We can get to that later. But people were talking about there being a libertarian moment. There were front-page articles in the New York Times and all this stuff. Is this a libertarian moment? Was there a libertarian moment? Can we expect there to be a libertarian moment? All three in 20 seconds or less, please. So I think I'm contractually obligated to say that, yes, we are experiencing a libertarian moment. The libertarian moment is now. A libertarian moment maybe is always, at least in part, because that term was actually coined by my bosses at Reason Magazine, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie. They sort of laid out the terms of this thing, which has taken on a lot of different meanings, but includes this idea that younger people are more libertarian and so are going to force both mainstream parties or perhaps general American political sentiment in a more libertarian direction. Also, that there are sort of a few things happening in the public consciousness stuff that libertarians had been saying for a long time, which were not getting traction for a long time. Here I'm talking about drug legalization, particularly marijuana legalization, which had started happening out west all of a sudden in this way that I think Jacob Solom, who's been covering the drug war and drugs for us for decades, he was like, oh my God, I can't believe it's coming true. And also gay marriage, awareness of concerns about sort of police brutality and overweening power on the part of law enforcement, privacy. And I think that's real. I think the libertarian moment did happen, is happening. It is hard to have a libertarian moment and also have an electoral politics moment. And I think right now we are just getting sucked into the darkness of electoral politics for a little while. And I don't anticipate. Tell me, tell me you'll be over soon, please. I would be lying to you. Is what you described though really a libertarian moment, because the things that you described that we're having successes on, I guess could be spun as young people tend to be more left than right and maybe the left is just waking up to the things it should have cared about for a long time anyway. Like, you know, we should actually be worrying about the drug war because it fits with our leftist principles to end it and we should be worrying about gay marriage. But is there the stuff where we disagree with the left or at least the left as it likes to think of itself, although this tends to fall down in practice. Is there a libertarian moment in those areas as well, the free markets and the deregulation and the getting, you know, the government's boot off the neck of entrepreneurs and so on? No, I don't think we're having an economic libertarian moment. But I do think it understates what's actually going on to just say, oh, the left kind of woke up to these natural concurrences of our views. Not least because it really is true that a lot of this stuff was considered completely crack headed 10 years ago or 20 years ago, right? This is not just something that was always part of the portfolio of the left, but they just didn't really emphasize it the way that economic liberty has always been part of a portfolio of the right. But when it comes down to brass tacks, they tend to kind of weasel on it. This was like, shh, you're embarrassing yourselves. Stop talking about legalizing drugs, you crazy, crazy libertarians. And then we woke up one morning and we were legalizing drugs. And I think that's different. And I think that's why we use this kind of phrasing of it's a moment. It was a sort of aha rather than just a shifting of the priorities. You think about someone like Bill Clinton and you get someone who signed Don't Ask, Don't Tell and a bunch of ramped up the drug war not even 20 years ago. And then you're right. They just flip around. It is interesting. But at the same time, the left is the kind of, the left is the kind of organization, that's the wrong organization, mentality that once is okay with you smoking marijuana, but not with smoking cigarettes indoors. So you have to go outside this, which is an interesting tension, which makes it very not libertarian. It's just this one thing that they seem to like. And I do think we're having an anti-libertarian moment in terms of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of association. I think we're losing ground on all of those, all of those fronts. And of course, I recommend to everyone, if they haven't read it yet, the great article by Greg Lukyanov and Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic about the coddling of the American mind that talks about the ways that this is happening on campuses where you can no longer say things that make people feel sad. And that's a really, that's a really troubling development. It should be for libertarians, should be for everyone. But I think it is absolutely true that there's always push, pull on this stuff, that there are places where libertarians are losing ground with the left and the right. But there's been some actual tangible policy changes, which I'm for everyone willing to chalk up in a victory column. How much of this is age-based and just demographic space? So we've known for a long time that young people were, say, far more supportive of gay rights, gay marriage than older people. And so as older people age out and as younger people take over political offices, we're going to get the issues that have been popular with them for some time. And I guess I asked this because if it's the case that this is the ideas of the young taking a more prominent place in American politics, then yay, we're getting gay marriage and yay, we're moving in the direction of legalized drugs and that's all good. But it's also potentially terrifying specifically for this coddling of the American mind stuff and this assault on free speech. Because yeah, if the young people are taking over America, then how institutionalized do trigger warnings become in our regulatory policy and so on and so forth? Yeah, I do think it's mostly demographic and God knows the Cato Institute has been foremost in finding any libertarian tendencies anywhere in the youth using any numbers that they possibly can, which is a pursuit that I absolutely endorse because sometimes you just have to fake it till you make it. But I think the idea that young people are just kind of going to do what they're going to do and that their views are particularly if you think of millennials, which like I apologize for saying that word out loud since that makes every conversation like 10% dumber. It makes Aaron particularly cringe, so he's happy you apologize for that. Yeah, we can say as much bad stuff about millennials as anything nice. I'm happy to say nice things about millennials, but they're getting kind of old, right? I mean, millennials are having kids, they're growing up and so I think it's going to be interesting to see how their views change. One thing that I do think is heartening that gets mentioned much less is millennials are not as hostile to capitalism as the generation before and to business. They are hostile to big business, but frankly, so am I when it, you know, collaborates with government and becomes crony capitalism. The idea of selling out is not something that millennials worry about. That's a real Gen X thing. It's a real boomer thing. Millennials, the whole point is to sell out the whole point is to grow your beard and grow your organic coffee beans and then sell them to everyone who wants to buy them. And I think that's really heartening because anybody who thinks about ways that they might be growing an enterprise is immediately and always going to run up against the wall of the state and is immediately and always going to say, at least in my area, at least as it impacts me, government isn't doing a good job. And God knows that does not translate into becoming a doctrinaire libertarian. If it did, everyone would be a libertarian always. And frankly, there are days when I don't understand why everyone isn't a libertarian always because whenever people run up against the state with regard to the thing that they want to do, it's always bad. But at the very least, I think the kind of small business, mid-sized business and not just the sort of mom and pop, but also the I want to scale my business. That moment where you really come in contact with the market and you really understand how capital works, that's a goal for a lot of millennials. It's not an accident or something you have to grapple with. That's the point. I think when Matt Welch and Nick were on the show, Matt had some comment about if you want to sell $10 pickles, organic $10 pickles out of a truck. And that's what the millennials want to do. And they even want to buy $10 pickles, amazingly enough. Now, you mentioned about people not being libertarian, befuddling you. Why are you a libertarian? To quote a book out there, it usually begins with Iron Rand. And in my case, that is absolutely true. I sort of wish I had a less clichéd story to share, but I absolutely don't. I was 15 years old. I read The Fountainhead. I was really, really awful for a song. I was just going to ask you, did you become an intonable? Oh, my goodness. I would not have wanted to be around me. I mean, I think I like actually called people second handers to their face on the regular when I was 15. I luckily went to college where the campus debating society at the Freshman Bazaar would set up a front group called the Objectivist Study Group at Yale, which was not really a real group. It was just a way to get kids like me, who had read Iron Rand and probably nothing else and were really into it and immediately get them to read other philosophy that was better and to talk about it. That's a public service. It was a public service, and this was a sort of fusionist style debating society that had libertarians and traditionalist conservatives. And I do think of myself as coming out of the kind of like Frank Meyer fusionist tradition. So, you know, we can talk about that a little bit, you know, the sort of can the libertarians and the right still be friends question, which is always everyone's favorite. But I absolutely came at it from a philosophical point of view. I absolutely came at it from a, you know, from the point of view of sort of letting creative people do their own thing free from restrictions. And, you know, one reason that reason is such a great home for me is because a lot of what we do isn't just saying, it's like the government is too big. We also say, isn't it amazing all this stuff that people are constantly doing in the private sector that makes our lives freer and better and more fun. So, given what you said about the differences in the views towards business of millennials and Gen Xers, who we were all concerned about selling out, do you think that Rand does appeal or will appeal more to young people now than she would have 20 years ago or something? If they're more likely to see business as a positive. You know, I'm a little bit torn on that. On one hand, I do think that it's pretty easy to make the case that sometimes you look around and it really does look like Atlas shrugged is happening in real life. I mean, when we were having those train crashes a little bit ago, Twitter noticed that convergence. At the same time, I think Rand herself, particularly in the Fountainhead, is pretty skeptical about the ability of markets to reward true merit, right? Like Howard Rourke is a starving artist, essentially. And so I think there's a kind of tension there about whether the message that she's saying, sending of this kind of like self-actualization and creativity. I mean, I think that appeals to young people regardless. I will say I've been interviewing interns for reason for many years now. And it used to be 80 percent of the interns either said Iron Rand or the road to serfdom or something like that. When asked how they became libertarians and now everyone says Ron Paul. And I do not know what to make of that. But nobody comes into my, you know, nobody comes into my intern interview process anymore and says, I read Iron Rand and that's why I'm a libertarian. What kind of libertarian would you call yourself now? You kind of mentioned the fusionist. Are you still in the Randian-ish type of thing? Yeah, I definitely don't consider myself an objectivist or a Randian now. But I am not as scornful of her as some of her former acolytes tend to be. I guess I think of myself as a big tent libertarian. You know, I sort of anybody who wants to be in my club, I want to have them. And that includes people who have other agendas that I might not get on board with. But if they want to buddy up with me on on an issue, I'm happy to have them in my heart because because I'm, I don't know, an absolutist or something. I think of myself as an anarchist, but I also think that doesn't matter. I, you know, the point is gradual change. The point is sort of the current American and world political scene. And on that front, you know, I'll have anybody who wants to sell $10 pickles. Come join the party. $10 pickles. If, so if sticking on the topic, young people, if they're as pro-market, say, maybe not big business, but pro-markets and they're big into the civil liberties that we libertarians have been championing for so long. Why, I mean, even outside of just like on salon.com, why do people say so many mean things about us? I mean, it seems like, you know, like libertarianism, I get that there's, you know, we're a threat to the political establishment. And so if you want to see traditional Republicans or Democrats ring, then you need to paint libertarians as these vile creatures that no one should have anything to do with. But, you know, there does seem to be this like visceral dislike for self-identified libertarians among large swaths of young people in particular. So what's, you know, they ought to agree with us, right? You know, that's pretty much how I start my day every day. They ought to agree with us. What can I do? You know, I'm going to actually make this a Jonathan Hyde themed podcast, because I think he has a really good insight. This is, you know, this is a, someone who's done a lot of work on political personality, and he particularly talks about how people have a bunch of different core values that build, that sort of sum up to be their political personality. And that in the course of his work, he discovered that most of the standard measures of these things, which include things like care versus harm, right? So sort of a utilitarian calculus or loyalty or, you know, that kind of thing, that something that was missing was actually the thing that captures libertarians, which is people who just value liberty for its own sake. And so he actually added to his kind of slate of testing a bunch of ways to get at that idea. And I think maybe the answer, maybe the answer to your question is just that if your political personality doesn't include this component, this thing where you just think it's good to be free and you think it's good for other people to be free, that that's a very hard thing to convey. And another interesting sort of finding of Hyde's research is that people on the right tend to have multiple values. They tend to have, you know, three or four of this slate of values, whereas people on the left are very, very focused on this care harm value. Does it hurt people or does it help people? And as a result, people on the right have an easier time envisioning, imagining and kind of modeling the worldview of the left. If you ask them what would a person on the left say about these 10 things, they're pretty good at guessing. Whereas on the right, whereas when you flip it, if you ask people on the left to say, what does a right-winger think about these things? They're like, I don't know, it just seems crazy. You know, they can't put it together. They just hate brown people, right? Yeah, exactly. And so I think with libertarians, it's the same thing where we're asking people to take yet another leap of kind of imagination to move even further from their comfort zone about what they think is important in order to get what we think is important. And maybe that's, maybe that's an unbridgeable gap. Maybe there's just only so many of us that have that thing built into our brains. Does it mean then that we could benefit from figuring out how to talk about libertarianism in a way that aligns more with that care harm foundation? Because, I mean, we, you know, this is, this is a building full of economists who by and large, their argument for a free society, for free markets is it benefits people. It's good for people. It, it limits harm to people. Um, and that, and we also argue all the time that empowering the government is a good way to harm all sorts of people in really horrific ways. So should we lay off the liberty talk and instead say, we care about these things too, but here's a better way to get there. Yes. And Heit says that he's, doesn't call himself a libertarian, but is very sympathetic to libertarians, certainly much more so than many of his, uh, professional brethren. And he absolutely says that he says, listen, care harm is something that almost everybody, that's at least a component of their, of their political philosophy of their political personality. Um, so that is, to some extent, a universal language. The trouble that I found in trying to practice that policy is that people don't actually believe you. And I don't know what to make of that. Like when I say, I believe the things I believe because I think they would help more poor people, people on the left like roll their eyes and laugh. I don't, I think I'm a nice person. I think I'm, I seem pretty sincere and yet, uh, even I have trouble getting through on that front with a conscious effort. So there's still some barrier there. Um, and I don't quite know how to overcome the sincere, sincerity barrier, but yes, uh, making the argument over and over in a sincere way in different language saying, uh, the policies that libertarians want are better for everyone and would create better outcomes for everyone. I think is a, is a good strategy. The other thing I would say though is there's, um, you know, there's a lot of merit in putting away the pocket constitution, you know, this idea of sort of the libertarian brandishing the pocket, I was once on a radio show with a local candidate for a libertarian, a local libertarian candidate for office. And on the radio, he got out the pocket constitution and started waving it around. Like for all you guys know, I'm waving a pocket constitution right now, right? Um, but this sort of idea that you're going to win over anyone by saying, here's a fundamental principle. It's in the constitution. It's in my interpretation of the constitution. It's, you know, natural rights. Uh, all of those arguments, I think only get you so far, whereas saying like, let's look at the poor people that were harmed by the state or the people of minority races that were harmed by the state or the women who are harmed by the state. Um, we can do that. We have a great case for that. You have a building full of economists making a great case for that. So let's do it more. I think the thing you have to overcome, which is deeply ingrained, especially among those on the left is that the state is simply what it means to operationalize care that if you care about something, then that means you want the state to do something about it. And so the flip side of that when they hear from libertarians is if you don't want the state to address a particular issue, it simply means you don't care about it. And so when you give these reasons, why no, look, these policies that I prefer actually would help more, it ends up just sounding probably disingenuous. Like you're just trying to cover for your lack of caring. I think the other thing to do in that case is to remind people that the state is also how we operationalize harm, right? I mean, you know, for everyone who says, oh, government is what we do together. Like government is also how we murder our enemies and government is also how we punish the disfavored. And I think this is one reason why reason over the years and Kato, I know as well, this is why we write stories about mistakes and administering the death penalty or why we critically cover aggression abroad because it is a constant reminder that, you know, for every welfare program, there is a military campaign and that, yes, if what you want is to maximize thriving and happiness and people's well-being, you know, the state is not unambiguously a tool for that. You might have already kind of filled this in different ways, but what is the best and most straightforward argument for libertarian? What is the elevator pitch for libertarianism in that? Maybe it was in there, I think it was to some degree, but if you're having to do the elevator pitch. You know, I really, again, I feel like a bit of a corporate shill here, but free minds and free markets is not a bad one. We also say it reason that we are trying to make the world more free, more fair and more fun. So obviously it's something about the letter F deeply appeals to us, but I think the classic formulation of being socially liberal and fiscally conservative is not good. I think there's a temptation to use it. I think it does help people understand at a very basic level, but the concept of social issues I think has broken down hugely. The idea that there's somehow this division between spending or regulation and doing the sex and the drugs is falling apart in the American political discussion. And so I think that often sows more confusion than it clears up. So yeah, I favor something like, you know, that Canadian politician who said, I want gay married couples to be able to defend their marijuana patch with guns. Like that's something that I've said to pretty good effect. Not just because it's funny, but because it also very succinctly conveys what people see as this sort of unusual combination of views, but which is actually, you know, something that on a second or third follow-up question, you can pretty quickly explain how those things are actually all united. Now, what about the worst argument for libertarianism, the one that you wish people would stop making? Just I always have to defend myself against the fact that there are tons of libertarians out there and make horrible arguments and drives me crazy. I think the worst argument for libertarianism is the either stated or implied view that markets reward merit and that the current configuration is just and any takings or reallocation from the current configuration is unjust. Right. So this is a sort of I earned what I earned and it's mine and I get to keep it and I deserve to keep it when in fact we're operating from baseline condition that's incredibly unjust. That's, you know, there's thumbs on every scale and and this idea somehow that the libertarians think that everyone who's rich deserves to be rich and should be rich forever comes out of that kind of argument. This sort of idea of I earned what I got and I get to keep it. And this is also where you get these like, you know, government hands off my Medicare type type signs, which is luckily I think an idiotic minority view but still out there and at least somewhat associated with libertarianism. Every group, libertarians do this but you hear this from people on the left and you'll hear this, I guess not as, I don't hear it quite as much from people on the right but the idea that, you know, the reason the other guy is so his views and the other party's views are as successful as they are is because they're appealing to emotion whereas what we have is, you know, we're so logical and that that doesn't work as well or the variant of it, you know, my political views are too complicated to fit on a bumper sticker and so it doesn't fly as well. And I don't want to fall into the trap of making that argument about libertarianism in part because I think there's a large emotional component to it. I mean, I hold the views I hold because I actually care about what happens to people and when I watch the state do awful things to them, it's awful. But I think one of the problems that I often encounter is the our solutions aren't clear. There aren't clear lines of causation that we can draw. Like we can say, someone can say like, look here, these people are poor and so what we need to do is set up a program that's going to cut them checks or we need to, you know, these people aren't making enough so we need to raise the minimum wage. We can do something and here's an effect and we libertarians stand off and say, well, first off, no, it's not going to work. And secondly, the right solution is to let markets handle it and how are markets going to handle it through an emergent process. And what's that going to look like? Well, I don't know because it hasn't emerged yet, but I can give you some ideas and it may take a little while and some people may be hurt in the process as well. And we're not going to want programs in place to directly like it starts to be awfully hard to convey. This is something more than just abstract or like sci-fi scenarios. Yeah, I think one place where that really comes into play is this fear about automation and the disappearance of jobs in the technological future. And the libertarian answer there is like spectacularly unsatisfying, right? You say, well, like, do you do a job that could have been imagined 15 years ago? No, like a podcast is not a thing that's even, you know, remotely plausible 20 years ago. It's not on the horizon. Any of the attendant jobs that help create this thing don't exist, but it's it's wildly unsatisfying to say like, well, probably someone will invent the next internet if we just kind of throw the doors open. And I think you absolutely see that in all kinds of ways. Yes, the great weakness of libertarianism is that we have to say the solution is not picking the solution in advance. The solution is letting a lot of people redundantly come up with their own solutions and seeing which solution works. I do think it plays into this idea of libertarians as being cold or recalculating. That's, of course, also the reason that people often say, well, why aren't there more women libertarians? It's because these ladies with the feelings, you know, they just have these feelings and libertarians. Well, we're just above that. And so we can't talk to these ladies with the feelings. When in fact, I think libertarianism is actually particularly the most, I mean, we're Beltway cosmetarians or whatever you want to call us, right? We're a sort of subset of the breed. But the most common kind of libertarianism is actually very emotional. It's it's hands off my gun. It's let me do my own thing. It's leave me alone. It's, you know, screw the cops. It's did you notice the like four layers of censoring that just happened there? I have a dislike of officers of the law enforcement. So I actually do think that libertarianism is and can be emotional, both in its interest in helping people who are the least well off, but also just in its in its most visceral kind of leave me alone form. I don't know quite why this reputation exists, except for perhaps that there is a kind of somewhere in the in the DNA of libertarianism is this kind of benthamite million calculation based utilitarianism, which is I think is an important part of the DNA and can't be denied. And also because there's just so many gosh darn economists hanging around this place. But but I think it's I think it is wrong and inaccurate to suggest that somehow we should be we should be giving up on a certain segment of the population or otherwise sort of seeding ground because, you know, our thing doesn't have the feelings. So what about that? The the women issue? Why I'm sure you have been asked this so many times. Why are there not that many female libertarians? Yeah, I think the first answer is there are a lot more than there used to be. And I think that is partially because libertarianism has moved much more in the direction of of kind of including more versions of libertarianism, right? The the sort of this sort of I am a libertarian because I care about inequality thing is pretty late breaking, frankly. I mean, that just wasn't a point of emphasis in the in the movement or in the literature. And to the extent that that's drawing in more women, maybe, I don't know. But I don't know. I would be happy to clone myself and then just like have a million little Catherine lady libertarians. But I think that at least one explanation is that as long as libertarianism is a thing that exists on the fringes of the American political scene. And again, I'm not saying libertarians are fringy or crazy, but just that there aren't so many of them, it's a it's a it's a minority. Those are men. Those those movements are always men. If you go out to either end of a bell curve on almost anything, men, right? Like serial killer super geniuses. It's all men. And so to the to the extent that libertarianism is still that that it's still somewhere in a long tail. Maybe that's just what's going on. And and as it hopefully moves toward the the the expansive middle of the bell curve, more, more libertarian women will appear. Do you think there's any reason why libertarianism is like any good reason why libertarianism is associated with the right? Is libertarianism of the right or is it of the left? Or is that dichotomy itself false? Yeah, I think there it's mostly just historical reasons. I mean, I mentioned Frank Meyer, who, of course, was a national review in the 50s and 60s, arguing that to confront the menace of communism and socialism that libertarians and conservatives were clearly on the same side, which was essentially the side of markets and personal freedom. That's that's encoded in American libertarianism, the libertarian parties founded in the 70s, where where those were kind of live debates at the same time, though, the libertarian party also when founded in the 70s endorsed gay marriage and abortion on demand and wanted to end the draft. So it's not as if the seeds weren't always there to go either way. I think that. You know, libertarians are kind of the redheaded stepchildren of the American electoral system and and there's always there's always going to be or maybe I don't need to use further to abuse the metaphor for them. Maybe we're sort of the like abused spouse. You know, it's like people say nice things to us when they're out of power, when they're in the wilderness, Republicans are like, yes, we're going to cut government, it's going to be great. And then when it comes down to it and and, you know, either party comes into power, it's funny how quickly their appreciation for, for instance, executive privilege flares right back up as soon as they have it. So I do think of myself as being something of a right libertarian for those historical reasons, because I do feel like I tend to get a little bit more fair shakes from people on the right than on the left. But maybe that's just a failing of my own rhetoric rather than something deep in the in the political spectrum. Is this shift that people have so they'll they'll claim semi libertarian views when they're out of power. But as soon as they get into power and as soon as they're governing, they very quickly drop those. And so yeah, Republicans are always saying free market things, but their record is not very free market at all. Is that an argument against the truth of libertarianism? I've, you know, in, in a similar sense to the like, if it's so great, why aren't there any libertarian countries that, you know, we, we can make these arguments. Why don't you move to Somalia, man? But when we're sitting here without any power, and we don't, you know, there's no, there's no consequences. Like we can't, we're not going to put these beliefs into practice because you don't have the ability to. We can hold them and we can say how wonderful they are. But once you get there and you're in the thick of it and you have to make these decisions and you actually have to govern the country, it's not that these people are giving up their principles out of a, you know, desire for power, but simply that they see these principles don't actually work and that you have to govern in some other non-libertarian way. Yeah, I think the whole your political philosophy works in theory. It has just, A, never been put into practice or B, was put into practice wrongly thing. That's wrong no matter who's saying it about what, right? It's also true when people say it about communism. I think that there are two ways to read political history and one is to read short-term American political history and say, yes, it's true when people get into power, they reject whatever libertarianism they might have come in with and this, of course, is true about Obama on the drug war, Obama on privacy, Obama on government transparency, you know, Democrats are just as guilty of this as Republicans. That story is a pretty sad one, but I think the overall story of Western political history actually is a story of basically libertarian utopias showing up everywhere all the time. I mean, if you think about what your sort of baseline political expectations were in life 300 years ago, anywhere in the Western world, America today is an unthinkably magical libertarian utopia town. And so it always seems weird to me when people say that. It seems weird to me when people say like none of your ideas are proven. And, you know, of course, there's debate about whether, you know, libertarianism of America as sort of defined sometime in the 70s is the same thing as classical liberalism, which is the same thing as liberalism sort of writ even larger. But if you buy any connection there, if you see any straight line between those ideas, then this is our proof of concept. America in 2015 is our proof of concept. Every time we let people do what they want to do without interference from the state and it all works out really well. That's us winning. That's us being right. Who is the least appreciated libertarian thinker or writer? Or someone who maybe they're not themselves libertarian, but they write things that are relevant or important libertarian should be aware of. I think that I'm going to take refuge in fiction here and say that there are there are an awful lot of novelists out there who who are doing something that is libertarian friendly or interesting to libertarians in the science fiction sphere, certainly including people like you know, speaking of sort of almost unpredictable awesomeness brought to us by the market, Neal Stephenson, right? Who in the early 90s, I think wrote Snow Crash, which predicted the Internet. And that sounds like in the early 90s that thing was coming anyway. Nobody else got anywhere close. And and he did it in a way that many people describe as a dystopia, but was also a sort of what turned out to be a surprisingly clear eyed prediction of the ways that letting commercial players come into many, many parts of our lives. Yes, pop-up ads, like he predicted the horror of pop-up ads, you know, down to that sort of very specific feeling of irritation of having to push them away to do the thing that you want to do. At the same time, this sort of profusion of identities and this profusion of of lifestyles essentially outside of the eye of the state, which happened online, and the ability to connect outside of geographic boundaries for political purposes. That's all in there in a way that is not Pollyanna-ish, but is also sort of fundamentally appealing and certainly appealed to lots of his readers. So I would say stuff like that, you can't, you know, it's not people reading the Road to Serfdom and becoming a libertarian, but who read that book and said, oh, interesting, governments could be de-linked from territory and run by corporations? Right, like that's like little anarchists just popping up in places that they otherwise would not have been. We've mentioned sci-fi a handful of times so far in our, what, 40 minutes so far, and I'm curious about how much libertarianism either depends on technological growth or technological growth enables it and that one of the reasons that it might not have had the mind-share penetration in the past that it seems to be now, especially for the libertarian movement, is that technology is enabling libertarian solutions. So prior to the internet, the notion of non-territorial governments seems, there's just no workable way to talk about it. Or, you know, the Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies like these distributed but still secure systems couldn't have really existed in a meaningful way. Or having rating systems for restaurants and drivers that can overcome regulatory. Right, and personal reputation systems, which I think in another Cory Doctorow is down and out in the Magic Kingdom, Positive Society based on that, that is it the case that maybe the path to libertopia is not through winning over the minds of politicians and getting the right people elected, but just technology making all of these things government does. All these issues moot. We can just move on from them. I do think the path to libertopia and I wish that we would stop saying that phrase because it's terrible, but you guys know what we mean. The path to libertopia absolutely is the private sector broadly understood just overwhelming the public sector. And I think that's happening now. It's been happening for a long time. You know, conservatives and libertarians used to care a lot about privatizing the post office. Remember that thing where people would like really get head up about that? It doesn't matter now because facts and then email and then SMS and then it's now just dumb spending, but it's not a thing that makes our lives worse anymore. And that's not because we won. That we lost that battle, but it doesn't matter that we lost that battle because that battle got surrounded and swallowed up by the market. And I think that's the model for success based on the utter failure of every effort to cut government except for a few sort of beautiful isolated cases that I treasure and hold to my heart and like curl up with at night sometimes and just think happily about like the US immediately post World War Two or New Zealand in the 90s or Canada in the 90s. You know, the fact that I can make a list is already just incredibly disheartening. Like it just doesn't happen very much that we can actually cut government, shrink government. So yes, I think this sort of massive growth of the private sector to swallow up political problems is huge. I would say techno, I wouldn't put the emphasis on technology. I would just put the emphasis on growth on just economic growth. I would say technology is a symptom of massive and ongoing economic growth but that for instance, when we talk about the long threatened overpopulation problem, right? This is a sort of, you know, Paul Ehrlich saying we're all gonna die of famine and it's already too late in the, you know, in the 80s. The battle to feed humanity is over. The battle to feed humanity is over. It's like calm-ish, it's like calm-ish male. Yeah, right. It turns out humanity won but Ehrlich didn't think that at the time. You know, you can cast the way that ended up playing out as a triumph of technology but I think it's much more accurate to just say people got rich and changed their behaviors in ways that were conducive to human flourishing including totally not dying of famines. I kind of don't even want to ask this question but I'm really interested in your opinion and I really hope that six months from now this is all a bad dream but Donald Trump, I just really hope that we, like we can remember Rudy Giuliani who was supposed to be, you know, lock, stock, nominee, Donald Trump. Can we, or do you just want to punt and just, does he not even deserve air time if he's already getting too much so we should just forget about it? I basically want to punt. I mean, I am a person who has very little faith in the American electorate. I do not think like good sense triumphs in the end when it comes to politics but I genuinely believe that America is not gonna be able to like look itself in the face on Wednesday morning after election day if we elect Donald Trump. I just can't see my way clear to that. You know, early, as you mentioned Giuliani, early polling is totally ridiculous. It literally tells you nothing, nothing except for who's gonna be in the next debate, I guess. If I had to spin a story, my story would be that while there will not be some mass awakening by the American public, there will be a moment when opinion makers say enough is enough and decide individually but probably in a sort of title that the new story is no longer the weird ascendance of Donald Trump, the new story is the tragic fall of Donald Trump, at which point that will be the story and that story will become the true story and it will all be over. That's what I'm choosing to believe. I hope that, we got this on the right. Hopefully you're correct, something along those lines. But does Trump's success, at least as of now at the end of August, 2015, represent something of a counter narrative to the libertarian moment? And particularly if this story of economic growth winning the day that economic growth causes changes that the private sector overwhelms the public sector, if all of that's true and as we watch that unfold, one of the things that that brings besides more prosperity and more freedom and more opportunity is deep changes to our way of life. And so the fear that, I mean, to me, what Donald Trump represents is a strain of America that doesn't want to give up the lifestyle that they were accustomed to, the kind of economy that they were accustomed to, the kind of social structures that they were accustomed to. And so we'll fight back tooth and nail against, I mean, they're not blaming it on economic growth, right? They're not blaming it on just increasing libertarianism, they're blaming it on people from Mexico coming across the border and whatever else, and they're wrong to blame it there. But that's my fear, is that the old ways will latch onto government, which government, even if it's, as the private sector overwhelms it, government is gonna fight harder and harder to not be overwhelmed, and we can watch that when third-world countries shut down the internet when there's protests. Is that a legitimate concern? Is there any truth to the idea that that's what Trump represents and we can hope it flames out soon? The version of that that actually gives me more pause is the way that that same sentiment is being realized in the Democratic Party right now in the form of opposition to the gig economy, right? So this is something that the Clinton campaign has been broadcasting that even Bernie Sanders is sort of on board with. This idea that the state can and should be a tool to fight this change in the labor market whereby people become contractors and self-employed and pieced together their livelihood rather than being full-time employees of a big company to sort of oversimplify it. It's the same sentiment, it's the same sentiment of there used to be this way that things were, particularly in the labor market, and now those things are changing and we're gonna stand against them. The thing about Trump, right, is that he's just like, ah, we'll just throw all the immigrants out and it'll be solved. Whereas I actually think the Democratic Party's proposal which is very detailed and very serious to make the lives of people of entrepreneurs who wanna promote the gig economy difficult, that's the real threat from that sentiment right now. Again, I think it's very unlikely that Trump will be the nominee, but that sentiment that he is capturing is simultaneously being sort of showcased and capitalized on by the Clinton campaign. So I do see that as something that's not gonna go away. Even though Trump is silly, that real thing is going to be a part of this election cycle and of our politics generally. The super shiny happy way of thinking about the Trump campaign also is to just say, actually people somehow perceive the extent to which the state has a smaller and smaller impact on their lives and so they're willing to be sillier in politics and I think you can make the case that that does has happened more and more, right? I mean, this is the sort of just even Torah is like patient zero of this maybe or maybe it goes back even further but this sort of celebrity politician who we all have fun with for a while who we may or may not actually elect, maybe it's because people actually perceive that politics are lower stakes than they used to be because among other things, we don't have a draft, right? I mean, because we don't have, police services that are utterly unrestrained because I mean, even though there are losses, the general kind of shrinking of the ability of the government to violently interfere in your life maybe makes people more willing to say like, yeah, who cares who's in charge of that thing? Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow? Do you prefer pundits of the, I mean, you can go specific, you can be very specific on that question or do you prefer pundits of the right or pundits of the left? So I will say I don't actually consume a lot of punditry. That's a good answer. Either way but I have always had a weakness for Rachel Maddow. She and I share the default facial expression that makes people think that we are smirking at them. And so I'm sympathetic to her like perma-smirk because I too have one of those. It's like the opposite of resting bitch face. It's the opposite. Well, it's still bitchy though, isn't it? I mean, it's still like, yeah, shut up. You know, it's like that. But I particularly feel in fond of Rachel Maddow because I made a brief cameo on her show on Monday. I had aggregated all of Rand Paul's campaign emails that were in my inbox and I took a screenshot of them and they sound really desperate. They're like, Catherine, this is our last, this is down to the wire. Help, it's our only hope. Has it come to this, Catherine? And there's just a series of like if they were from your ex-boyfriend, you'd be like, oh God. He's gonna kill himself. Yeah, it was really dire. So I just screenshotted those and tweeted like you guys, I'm worried about Rand Paul and Maddow seemed to think that was funny probably for reasons different than I thought it was funny. But I actually, I mean, I find her conclusions almost always wrong and I think that her kind of mode of argumentation tends toward the ad hominem. But I kind of like her style. I like that she at least makes a nod toward empiricism in a way that Rushland never does. So I'm gonna go Maddow. Do you vote? I do not vote. I wrote a cover story for Reason Magazine a few years back on why I don't vote. And it remains my most popular article. It shows up in our top traffic when there's a slow day, like people are still Googling it. I don't vote for a lot of reasons. The main reason is that it doesn't matter if I vote. My vote does not influence the outcome of the election. Your vote does not influence the outcome of the election even if the election is close. Even if the election is 10 votes from the winner and the loser, your one vote would still not influence the outcome of an election and that's just a sheer raw numerical argument. But in the piece, which I encourage you to read by Googling it and bringing it back up in our... We'll put it in the show notes. ...searches, I sort of address a bunch of the other arguments including the don't vote it only encourages the bastards argument, including the if you don't vote you can't complain argument. There's actually a great, I think there's a great weirdness embedded in that argument because if you voted, you consented. And so you can't complain. But if you didn't vote, you didn't participate. And so you can't complain, right? And there's this sort of, it's a sort of, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't problem. I think you should vote in the eventuality that you really, really, really enjoy it. And you should vote in the exact same spirit that you go skydiving or read a book. It's a recreational activity. If you want to go ahead, I'm gonna spend that hour taking a nap. And finally, are you optimistic? I am, I'm very optimistic. Not least because of this process that I see of the sort of private swamping and consuming the public almost everywhere and always in modern American life. I am optimistic because of the sort of vast progress that we have made toward liberty throughout Western political history. And probably because of something in my genes that just makes me a cheerful person. Thank you for listening. If you have any questions, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod. That's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.