This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 7th, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

When we engage in debate, we should be charitable to our opponents. We should, as the saying goes, seek first to understand.

Cato adjunct scholar Arnold Kling argues that while conservatives and progressives often caricature

libertarians, caricatures go both ways.

Jason Brennan recently had an event here at the Cato Institute on his new book

Libertarianism, What Everyone Needs to Know, and he made a particular point of talking

about making assumptions about how people feel about certain ideas when they advocate a reduced role for government when it comes to pursuing

some sort of policy like reducing poverty for example or making sure that young people

get the educations that will allow them to thrive in the economy and you take that

a little bit further and talk about the idea that, well look,

being charitable with the people that you are debating benefits the debate.

And I think a lot of people would agree with that.

Yes, and ironically, when I looked at Jason Brennan's book,

a lot of his focus is on the uncharitable way in which other people treat libertarians.

And this is absolutely true.

The progressives will say, you know, libertarians want people to starve.

Conservatives will say libertarians just want to undermine, they don't realize they're going to undermine our civilization.

It was just a piece by Paul Rahay saying that because

that the fundamental cause of our lack of libertarianism today or the fundamental

threat to liberty ultimately comes to the can be traced to the sexual revolution

of the 1960s that we now have so many single women who become dependent and so on.

And so you can blame libertarians for loss of liberty that way. But I think ironically Brennan is guilty of the same thing

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