This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 28th, 2019. I'm

Caleb Brown. There's a huge potential audience for the broad strokes of

Libertarian thinking and no, those people don't need to start

with a large stack of books in order to get there.

Jennifer Thompson is Executive Director for the Center for the Study of Liberty, we spoke

about the so-called golden age of conversation, why

answering the big questions about freedom can help address seemingly intractable

social problems. When libertarians try to communicate ideas, so often the problem that arises is that not only do you need to come to the right conclusions about how the world operates and what the response

to how the world operates ought to be.

But you have to have the exact right reasons in a very carefully crafted formula and the formulation of your words must be just so and you must believe it this way and not that way and that seems to be just death for

trying to get ideas, general ideas across and to cultivate sympathy for ideas.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And if you read Brian Doherty's radicals for capitalism very early on,

when he's setting up that book, he quotes Fred Smith from the Competitive Enterprise Institute saying,

if two libertarians agree with each other, they both know the other one sold out, right? And he sort of says,

what we like to do as libertarians is read other people out of the movement.

So it's more important that you fit in the right part of the tent or whatever else.

The people we're trying to reach in the private sector, they're not interested in those kind of,

they're not interested in those kind of distinctions. And in fact fact and when we started the center what we did was go out

talk to a bunch of people in the private sector and say what are you missing in your life?

What kinds of things were you? And what we heard over and over again was people are worried about issues like poverty in their community. They're worried about trade. They're worried about the economy, they're worried about education, and they want to talk

about these things, but they don't want to get in fights with people that they have to work with.

...