This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 20, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Economists and columnist Paul Krugman says there are no libertarians.

Cato Research Fellow Emily Eekin says that's just flat wrong.

There are millions of Americans who hold socially liberal, fiscally conservative views.

What they don't do as much as traditional liberals and conservatives, she says, is engaged politically.

When Paul Krugman argues that effectively there are no libertarians.

As best as you can tell, what does he mean by that?

Well, I mean, in his latest article last week in the New York Times,

he argued that most Americans are either just traditional

conservatives or traditional liberals meaning they're

economically and socially conservative or economically and

socially liberal and little else.

However, that doesn't actually seem to be true when you look at the data.

So Paul Krugman isn't describing groups of people who say, I am a liberal and I am a conservative when he talks

about where these groups of people align themselves.

Paul Krugman tends to think that regular Americans line up pretty well with the Democratic

and Republican parties.

He thinks that people are either socially and economically liberal or socially and economically

conservative.

The problem is he doesn't actually cite any data to back this up.

And as it turns out, he's not right.

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