Ep. 1399 Why the Welfare State Is Morally Wrong: A New Approach
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2019
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dan Moller, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland, has just produced an intriguing, and to my mind compelling, new kind of argument against the welfare state. He takes on this issue in particular because it is one of the positions libertarians hold for which they are most demonized. His argument compels us to consider the question of how much we may legitimately shift our own burdens onto others, particularly without their consent.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Tom Woods Show, episode 1399. |
| 0:03.4 | Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. |
| 0:08.0 | Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show. |
| 0:14.2 | All right, all you men out there, there comes a time in your life when you have to ask yourself, |
| 0:18.2 | are you really a Tom Wood Show listener if you're not shaving with the official razor of the Tom Woods show, namely Harry's Razors? |
| 0:25.0 | Redeem your $13 value trial set that comes with everything you need for a close, comfortable shave |
| 0:29.1 | over at harries.com slash Woods. |
| 0:32.4 | Hey, everybody, Tom Woods here. |
| 0:34.4 | I've got a fantastic guest today. |
| 0:36.6 | It's Dan Mahler, who is a professor of philosophy |
| 0:39.1 | at the University of Maryland, holds his PhD in philosophy from Princeton, and he is out with just a |
| 0:45.1 | tremendous new book called Governing Least, a New England libertarianism. It looks at these questions |
| 0:51.9 | in a refreshing new way, and we're going to develop that in the |
| 0:56.1 | course of our conversation. I don't want to give away too much right now, but it's just a great |
| 1:01.1 | book. It's very rare that you come across a book that has something truly original to say about |
| 1:07.3 | the libertarian tradition. We've all more or less heard the basic arguments for it, we think, haven't we? |
| 1:12.2 | And yet, every now and again, somebody like a Michael Humor comes along and helps us to look at it in a refreshing way, a way that might be more convincing to some people. |
| 1:23.5 | Same thing for this book. So I strongly recommend it, and I'm just thrilled to be able to talk to him right now. Dan, welcome to the show. |
| 1:31.2 | Thanks, Thomas. It's great to be here. Just telling folks about your book, what an interesting book. I found out about it by reading Brian Kaplan's glowing review. And I actually began to wonder how it was possible. I hadn't heard about a book of this import and so interesting and significant. |
| 1:46.6 | In a way, it does remind me, even though it's a very different book, of Michael Humor's book, |
| 1:51.5 | The Problem of Political Authority, simply in that it's making a defense of libertarianism from something other than a rights-based approach. |
| 1:59.3 | And in some cases, drawing analogies or just |
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