This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 8th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

That strange oxymoron, Libertarian Paternalism aims to nudge us in the right direction

to take actions that might generally be accepted as beneficial to us as individuals

But are nonetheless not chosen as often as some people might like.

But drawing that all-important line between Libertarian paternalism and plain old-fashioned coercive

paternalism, Ilea Soman, an assistant professor of law at George Mason University

and a Cato Institute adjunct scholar offers his thoughts.

Well, traditional paternalism simply says you don't necessarily know what's best for you.

And so the government or some other outside entity is going to tell you you can't do this even if you want to

for instance you can't smoke or you can't drink or any number of other things.

Now some scholars most of whom are not themselves libertarians have recently developed this notion of

libertarian paternalism where instead of saying you can't do this at all or

you're completely forbidden or completely forbidden to do it we're just saying we're going to set a different default rule. So for instance,

if we think one kind of pension plan is generally better than others, what we'll do is

we'll automatically presume that you want to enroll in the better one unless you yourself

act affirmatively to change it.

Or similarly, they might impose a waiting period

before buying, say, a gun to make sure

that you've thought carefully about the fact that you really do want to buy one

and you're not just buying without a frustration or you know on a whim or something like that and

might endanger yourself unnecessarily and so the idea they say is they're not closing off choices, rather they're

...