Best of Cato Daily Podcast: The Libertarian Mind
Cato Daily Podcast
Cato Institute
4.6 • 949 Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Caleb O. Brown hosted the Cato Daily Podcast for nearly 18 years, producing well over 4000 episodes. He has gone on to head Kentucky’s Bluegrass Institute. This is one among the best episodes produced in his tenure, selected by the host and listeners.
Libertarianism — the philosophy of personal and economic freedom — has deep roots in Western civilization and in American history, and it’s growing stronger. Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz talks about the renewed appetite for smaller government and more freedom.
The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom by David Boaz
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is longtime Cato Daily podcast host, Caleb Brown. After thousands of episodes over nearly 18 years, |
| 0:05.7 | I've moved on from the Cato Daily podcast, but in the interim, I, along with some of you, have |
| 0:11.1 | selected some favorites. I hope they resonate with our current moment and continue to spark the desire |
| 0:16.9 | to defend liberty. Thank you for listening. This is the Cato Daily podcast for Tuesday, February 10th, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown. After two |
| 0:26.2 | devastating wars, chronic deficits, massive debt, continued surveillance of Americans, and the |
| 0:31.8 | decades-long disastrous drug war, Americans are disillusioned with prevailing political thinking. |
| 0:38.0 | In his new book, The Libertarian Mind, the Cato Institute's David Bowes, presents his argument |
| 0:42.3 | on behalf of libertarianism, the philosophy of personal and economic freedom. |
| 0:47.8 | What are we going to learn from the libertarian mind that we don't learn, haven't learned from your previous book? |
| 0:56.3 | Well, first, 99.9% of Americans didn't learn anything from my previous book because they didn't buy it. |
| 1:02.6 | So the first start is 99% of the audience is still there. |
| 1:06.1 | And so what I think you learn fundamentally from the book is the basic libertarian ideas in areas like law, economics, the history of libertarian thought, individualism and pluralism, how big government works. |
| 1:22.6 | It's kind of an applied public choice chapter. |
| 1:27.0 | And those chapters are much the same as they were before. But in this new |
| 1:32.9 | book, I am talking a lot more about Bush and Obama and a little bit about the Tea Party and |
| 1:38.9 | Occupy Wall Street. I've added a good bit on America's libertarian heritage as described by leading political scientists. |
| 1:46.9 | And then I get into more current issues like terrorism, inequality, over-criminalization, cronyism, and the vast wealth of Washington. |
| 1:55.6 | Put into perspective this idea of a libertarian moment and why it may or may not be here? |
| 2:04.3 | I think you could say that in 2008, the American people rejected the extreme social |
| 2:09.2 | conservatism and neocon foreign policy of the Republicans. In 2014, they rejected big |
| 2:17.0 | government, big spending liberalism of the Democrats, |
| 2:19.6 | and now they're looking for a new public philosophy that deals with both of those problems. |
... |
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