With a human population larger than any point in history, we are consuming more natural resources than at any point in history. So, how can we ever expect to maintain this pace without running out of resources? As it turns out, the people who seriously sound these alarm bells are forgetting one thing. Throughout history, bigger problems have produced bigger solutions. Had those initial problems never arisen, neither would have the solutions. As noted scholar Julian Simon put it, “We need our problems. In some fundamental way we need bigger and better problems. That’s not to say we should run out and create any problems because we manage to create problems pretty well, but we do need our problems. If problems didn’t arise, if population hadn’t grown so that people ran short of food, if we still had 10 million people on earth as we had perhaps 10,000 years ago when people were still living an average of 30 years or less at birth we wouldn’t have had this fancy lunch that you and I had today. But instead we’d be out chasing rabbits and digging roots.” Listen to the rest of his practical thoughts on how population and economics influence each other in the latest episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast, Julian Simon.

What is liberalism? What is conservatism? The divide between the two opposing ideologies has widened recently, but why? It may have to do with the two sides not only believing that they are right, but believing they have the duty to impose their views on the other half. We’ve moved from an era from which politics and religion were separate. Now, we are walking the border of politics becoming religion. Will that shift result in a culture war, or are we already there? As theologian Dr. Kenneth Craycraft Sr. puts political ideology in terms of religion, “The problem is that instead of having one, however lowest common denominator it might be; one moral vision toward which we can all agree despite our vast differences politically, religiously. We have at least two major ones and perhaps a lot more and both claiming toleration; one claiming it, one wanting to be tolerated in one sense, one claiming to be the tolerant one, and neither getting along very well.” So, is a culture war looming, or is it already here? Hear the debate between Craycraft and his colleagues in the latest episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast, Culture War.

Humans are irrational beings. Choices differ from person to person, and even from lab experiments to the real world. So, with all that differentiation, how can economists expect to understand how market forces will impact the decisions that individuals make? It turns out that most individuals go about making decisions the same way, but the results of these decisions vary wildly. Nobel laureate Gary Becker attempts to explain how that process works, “To me, maximizing utility simply means the following: that consumers can order all the opportunities they have available to them…possible choices. They can order them so they prefer some more than others, so they can rank them. And that they have limited resources. They have limited incomes of wealth, time, whatever it may be. And that they attempt to choose that possibility… that combination of goods and so on that is ranked the highest consistent with their limited resources. Now I think this is a testable theory.” Understanding and predicting those priorities, though, is a different story. Find out why with Nobel economists Gary Becker and Ronal Coase in the latest episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast, Consumer Behavior.

The vast majority of people agree that we should be doing what we can to help protect the environment, but are we doing it the right way? Regulations may be based in science, but they’re created by bureaucrats with only one singular focus. Whose job is it to look at the impact of these regulations on a larger scale? And is the situation being presented in a way to intentionally scare the public? Dr. Walter Williams would say so, as well as professor of environmental science Dr. Fred Singer, “We have in the federal government, agencies that look at things from a fairly narrow point of view. You have a person, let’s say in the Environmental Protection Agency, whose job it is to look at chemicals…and he just worries about chemicals. He doesn’t worry about whether these funds would better be spent on, let’s say, vaccinations for children to protect them from diseases or on better health care or whatever. But you’re absolutely right, there’s no overall view of comparing these risks that we experience in our daily lives to make sure that the monies we’ve spent are properly allocated.” Join these two esteemed thinkers for their perspectives on the issues in the latest episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast, High Cost of Bad Science.

The Federal Reserve was originally created to bring stability to our financial and monetary system. However, despite multiple failures, it has widely escaped criticism. There is a myth that the Fed is there to protect us. But upon closer inspection, does it? If you ask Nobel laureate Dr. James Buchanan, the answer is clear, “The Fed more or less just inherited this legacy of being a monopoly in control of a monetary institution. It’s not a constitutional body. It has never been explicitly examined legislatively. And yet it gets away with all this without any criticism because the criticism is always on the congress or the president… They don’t concentrate on where the problem really originates. And certainly we now know from the economic histories that have been written about the 30s that the Great Depression of the ’30s was basically caused by the Federal Reserve’s failure to shore up the monetary system. And we know the great inflation in the ’70s was caused by that. We know the recession and slow recovery from ’89 forward was caused by that. And yet, how does the Fed insulate itself from public criticism? That’s a mystery.” Find out more behind this lack of criticism from Buchanan and Dr. David Fand in the latest episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, countries in the Eastern Bloc were faced with a huge challenge. They needed to take their socialist societies and convert them into capitalist ones. How did they change a country where most property was state-owned into something that was based on private property? Each country handled it differently and the results are not surprising. Despite these challenges in the early 90’s, Milton Friedman remained optimistic, “The hopeful thing about this is that the inefficiency of the former system is so great that the new system can make great progress even though they have very inefficient sectors. Like the television sector or like some of these other sectors, it’s not a case where you squeeze the last drop out. That isn’t the problem. The problem is you’ve got a system which has been producing about a third as a much or maybe a quarter as much as the system is really capable of producing.” Hear the difficulties and the immediate effects of these swift policy changes from Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, Tom Hazlett, and Robert Ebel in the latest episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast, Privatization Trends.

What can nature teach us? It’s a question that mankind has investigated since the beginning of time. We’ve learned so much, but there’s still even more that we don’t know. That’s why people like David Attenborough dedicate their lives to studying the world around us. The lessons that David has learned over the years have filled multiple hours of television programming and even more publications and writings. One particular opinion of his, on the role of zoos in our society, stands out in today’s focus on the ethical treatment of animals. “I think the zoos have two very important functions.  I’m quite sure that they will serve as refuges for species endangered.  And I’m quite sure that you can’t wait until the species is actually on the verge of extinction before you discover how to look after it.  And there is a technology of animal husbandry in zoos which we have to learn and can only learn through experience, and that experience resides in zoos.” Listen to audience members pick the brain of decorated natural historian David Attenborough in this Q&A session in the latest episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast, David Attenborough.

Critics of the free market system often point out that it is an unfair system due to it leaving some with wealth at the expense of oppressing others. What those critics often ignore is that exchanges in this economic structure are voluntary. Each side comes out of the interaction with their desired result. Since the seller is amassing wealth by helping others get the goods and services they need, isn’t that more moral than proposed socialist solutions? When it comes to the relationship between morals and economics, Dr. Walter Williams has this to say, “Unless you believe that there’s a tooth fairy or a Santa Claus giving government the money, the only way the government can give one American citizen one dollar is first through intimidation, threats, and coercion. (To) confiscate it from some other American first. And I’m very sure that when Moses came down with The Commandments, one of them being “thou shall not steal,” it didn’t mean that thou shall not steal unless you had a majority vote. And it probably also meant that you shouldn’t be a recipient of stolen goods. I think that there’s this problem of whether morality is a majoritarian thing.” Join Walter, along with Dr. Karen Vaughn to see how this is viewed within the church in this episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast, Morality of the Free Market.

Government regulation is a force that influences nearly every aspect of our daily lives. The intentions are usually well-meaning. They are created to fix a problem or a perceived market failure. The problem that we run into time and time again is that the fixes usually create another problem, while only putting a temporary patch over the initial problem. The response is usually another patch with the same result. In the words of Nobel laureate George Stigler, “The trouble is that normally the way (advocates) want to solve the problem is to create either a new agency, or a new set of people with a new mandate, with more power and more resources. And my inclination is to say history hasn’t been very kind to that method of dealing with the problem. And I constantly want to see if I can’t build incentives in for private conduct to achieve these social goals. I don’t really know how to go up to OSHA year-in and year-out and say, ‘Be sensible and stick to the important payoffs- and don’t be frivolous; and don’t really worry about trifles.’ You know, that’s an admonition that doesn’t carry any weight or any power. And if somehow built into the bureaucratic system is a love of detail, how do I get rid of it?” Listen to the debate go on between Stigler and consumer advocate Mark Green in the latest episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast.

What is money? For thousands of years currency was tied to a commodity, if the commodity itself wasn’t actually exchanged. Today, that relationship has drastically been altered. Money, as a human institution, has evolved from having a real value to only having a perceived value. Milton Friedman traces it back to one specific date. “It’s seldom that you can date precisely when there’s a major change in a human institution let alone in a monetary institution. But you know it’s an interesting fact that you can date precisely a really drastic change in the character in the monetary system around the world. And you can date it on August 15, 1971. That’s the date on which Richard Nixon finally ended the supposed agreement by the U.S. Government to sell gold for thirty-five dollars an ounce to foreign governments. And that was the final nail in the coffin of the kind of monetary system that had prevailed from the beginning of time so far as you can see.” Hear the effects of that policy shift from Milton Friedman, Robert Hall, and Daniel Gressel in the latest episode of the Free To Choose Media Podcast, Money.