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Aaron, Trevor, and David Boaz answer listener questions including the classic: “If libertarianism is so great, where are all the libertarian countries?”
Aaron Powell and Trevor Burrus tackle listener questions in this episode, including a few perennial classics: If libertarianism is so great, where are all the libertarian countries? Why can’t libertarians, conservatives, and liberals all come together to “make it work” in Washington? How can access to education be guaranteed if the American education system is privatized? And what happens to people who “fall through the cracks” in a libertarian society without a government-provided social safety net?
Aaron and Trevor are also joined by David Boaz, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute.
Show Notes and Further Reading
David Boaz, Libertarianism: A Primer (book)
Salon, “The question libertarians just can’t answer” (article)
The Guardian, “YA dystopias teach children to submit to the free market, not fight authority” (article)
Harvey Silverglate, Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (book)
Jon Osborne, Miss Liberty’s Guide to Film and Video (book)
Ira Levin, This Perfect Day (book)
Terry Gilliam, Brazil (movie)
Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters (movie)
Joss Whedon, Serenity (movie)
Over more than four decades as vice president for public policy and executive vice president, David Boaz played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement. He was the author of The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom and the editor of The Libertarian Reader. He passed away in 2024.
Aaron Powell founded Libertarianism.org. He is now the host of (Re)Imagining Liberty, a podcast about the case for radical freedom.
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.