This is the Thursday, March 29 episode of Cato Daily Podcast.

Welcome, I'm Anastasia Yuglova.

Today I'm on the phone with Virginia Pastrell, author of The Future and its enemies

and former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine currently with the Atlantic Monthly.

Virginia wrote one of the response essays to Brian Doherty's lead essay over at Cato Unbound

this month about his new book, Radical for capitalism. In this interview Virginia elaborates

on the details of her argument in her essay. Virginia one of the central

themes of your essay is this tension between deductive logic and empiricism. So where does

libertarianism fit between these two extremes? Well it's really orthogonal to use

a technical term. Libertarianism doesn't fit between those extremes. Those are approaches to analyzing any sort of question or fact about the world,

and there are libertarians who fall along that full spectrum.

So if you want to take the sort of extreme deductivism

that would be associated with Mises or Rothbard.

I don't know what you would say in extreme empiricism.

I don't know exactly who I would associate with that.

Maybe Tyler Cowan lately,

but certainly somebody like Ronald Coz, who I talked about in my essay, who doesn't even

consider himself a Libertarian, even though most people would consider him a significant libertarian intellectual figure,

doesn't consider himself a libertarian because he says he just looks at the facts on the ground.

It's not a matter of sort of deducing what's best for liberty and I'll take

him at his word but he certainly had a big influence on people thinking about questions

of liberty and property rights and institutions.

...