This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 18th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

When the Little Sisters of the Poor this week earned their small victory against mandates built into

Obamacare, that was just one of potentially

thousands of conflicts between religious liberty and government power.

Jay Richards is executive editor of the Stream and professor at the Catholic University of America, we spoke this week.

I think it's startling or maybe even bothersome or at least causes some dissonance to hear people

say this phrase, which is religious liberty and economic liberty

are not just closely related but in some cases they are the same thing. Yes.

And you're Catholic?

I'm Catholic, yeah.

I'm a Quaker.

And there are, you know, substantial implications for religious liberty

when the government decides that some measure of economic

liberty has to be curtailed for the greater good whatever that is.

So how do you look at that?

I think it's exactly right.

I mean, even just at a common sense level, I mean, if the government is telling you

what job you have to get, how much you have to pay your employees,

how much you have to by law be paid,

ends up essentially dictating a lot of your really basic decisions.

And at some point, I think, just common sensibly that's going to begin to infringe on your religious

freedom as well as your economic freedom. A couple of years ago I started doing research on

...