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Bill Glod joins us on this week’s episode of Free Thoughts for a discussion on so-called libertarian paternalism.
What is libertarian paternalism? Is paternalism without coercion even possible? Does it work? Can we trust those who are in charge of creating good “choice architecture” to be better at their jobs than any typical bureaucrat? How do we know what someone’s “true preferences” are? And don’t these sort of “nudges” strip people of their agency?
Show Notes and Further Reading
Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (book)
Bill Glod, The Limits of Libertarian Paternalism (interview with Glen Whitman)
Slippery Slopes and the New Paternalism (Cato Unbound Series)
Bill Glod is Senior Editor for Libertarianism.org. He has devoted his career to defending individual liberty and building scholarly networks. Alongside respected philosophy journals, his work criticizing paternalism in government was published in his 2020 Routledge book Why It’s OK to Make Bad Choices. Bill has a PhD in philosophy from Tulane University, where he had the fortune of two great classical liberal mentors, Eric Mack and Jerry Gaus.
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.