Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org where you can

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Today is July 12, 2013, and my guest is Michael Lind, the co-founder of the New America Foundation,

and the policy director of the Economic Growth Program there. He's the author of numerous

books of history, political journalism, fiction, poetry, and children's literature. His

latest book is Land of Promise, an economic history of the United States. Michael, welcome

to Econ Talk. Thank you for having me. We're going to talk today about two articles you've

written recently, and we may get into other things as well, but the two articles one was on

Libertarianism, the other was on Economics, and they've created a bit of a firestorm on the

web. Let's start with Libertarianism. You asked the rhetorical question, if Libertarianism

is so great, why hasn't it been tried before? Is that a fair assessment of your argument,

and if so, can you elaborate? Well, it is a fair assessment, and it was inspired by a conversation

I had at a party where most of the crowd was Libertarian, where I asked a Libertarian economist,

who shall remain unnamed, why are there no countries of which you guys approve,

because all that he or other Libertarian thinkers can provide are examples of countries with

particular policies they like, so they like Chile's Pinochet era Social Security privatization,

they like Swiss banking laws, but they can't point to an actual country which is largely Libertarian,

and most if not all of its policies, it doesn't have to be exclusively Libertarian, but there

...