RealClear Radio Hour: Freedom Rising

This week’s RealClear Radio Hour was recorded in Las Vegas at FreedomFest 2016, the trade show for liberty. Steve Horwitz evaluates our current political crackup, Jeffrey Tucker recounts our country’s disturbing affair with sordid science policy, and John Mackey uplifts with conscious capitalism.

Up first is Steven Horwitz, economics professor at St. Lawrence University. He analyzes the presidential candidates’ increasingly fragmented coalitions and suggests why the electorate, and millennials in particular, have become disengaged from the political process. A self-described “bleeding-heart” libertarian, Horwitz reimagines a two-party system of cosmopolitans and populists—the former coalescing around internationalist free trade and the latter being the successor to today’s Trumpism.

In his second RCRH appearance, Jeffrey Tucker, Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education, describes the Progressive Era legacy and its overturning of America’s founding laissez faire tradition at the beginning of the last century. Tucker reveals the shameful history of eugenics and how that supposedly settled “scientific consensus” powered racialist agendas, serving as the precursor to many harmful policies that are still with us today, from immigration restrictions to labor regulations to marriage laws.

Anchoring the show is John Mackey, co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, refuting the historical condemnation of business. Mackey celebrates business’ higher purpose and the fundamental morality of capitalism—or innovationism, as he calls it—explaining how it creates value for all stakeholders, contrary to the failed Marxist theories still promoted by many intellectuals and politicians.

You can hear the discussion by listening to the full show as-aired on iTunes, or you can check out the podcasts hosted on YouTube and SoundCloud. Make sure to check back next week for another episode of RealClear Radio Hour.

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