This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 20th,

2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

On Liberty provides a valuable framework to help us all understand how liberals think about important

questions. For this, the birthday of John Stewart Mill, I sat down with Paul Meenie of Libertarianism.

org to discuss the powerful impact of Mill's work and the

relationships that were so key to the development of Mill's ideas. Paul I wanted to talk about this with you because I feel like we are entering a time and maybe we've been here for some time where a lot of different groups in particular

conservatives, people who call themselves conservatives and from a different angle people on the left are

broadly abandoning liberalism which is to say a lot of the values that undergird what you and I celebrate

as the things that make society good and make a lot of the progress that we see possible are being abandoned, maybe not by the

getable middle, but definitely on different sides of the political spectrum. And so talking about this on Liberty,

John Stewart Mill, I think is a good prophylactic against a lot of these forces that might like to attack some of the

foundations of liberal thinking. So if you don't mind, characterize broadly what do readers get when they take a look at on liberty?

So the first time someone's going to read on liberty all the way through,

they're going to walk away from it with Mills very solid defense of freedom of speech.

And a lot of scholars and people focus upon Mills' defense of freedom of speech and that's what makes

all of on liberty. But I think that in this current climate where left-wing people and right-wing

people are saying liberalism doesn't give a way of living, a mode of life, it's empty, it's

valueless. I think that Mill actually talks a lot about the values that

liberals should have alongside freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is just one

part of the larger puzzle of having a liberal free society. And so beyond just talking about the importance of freedom of speech,

Mill talks about the importance of diversity, eccentricity, individuality, all these different things that he values really

importantly and what he's saying is that freedom of speech is a way all these different things that he values really importantly.

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