The Curious Task

Alex speaks with Camden Hutchison about the nuances of freedom of expression laws in Canada and the United States, and the ways in which immature understandings of free speech can obfuscate the public discourse surrounding this fundamental right in North American law and politics.    Episode Notes   Freedom of Expression: Values and Harms - Camden Hutchison https://albertalawreview.com/index.php/ALR/article/view/2733    Guide to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Including Freedom of Expression) https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-rights-protected/guide-canadian-charter-rights-freedoms.html    Guide to The Constitution (Including the First Amendment)  https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-government/the-constitution/#:~:text=The%20First%20Amendment%20provides%20that,the%20right%20to%20bear%20arms    Overview of Bill C-19 (Including Division 21 criminalizing various forms of Holocaust denial) https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/trans/bm-mb/other-autre/c19/remarks-remarques.html   

Alex speaks with Pete Boettke about the relevancy of Friedrich Hayek in the contemporary context, what it means to be a "Hayekian" and the curious tale of how Hayek came to be the focus of his latest book "F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy" Episode Notes Pete’s book “F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy“ https://a.co/d/ah7SpwW  Hayek on The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-hayek/  Introduction to Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” https://mises.org/library/road-serfdom-0  Murray Rothbard’s “Man, Economy and State” retrospective https://fee.org/articles/rothbards-man-economy-and-state-at-50/  Milton Friedman’s “Free To Choose” https://www.proglocode.unam.mx/sites/proglocode.unam.mx/files/docencia/Milton%20y%20Rose%20Friedman%20-%20Free%20to%20Choose.pdf  Hayek “Prices and Production” https://mises.org/library/prices-and-production-and-other-works  Introduction to economics of Lucas https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Lucas.html  Steve Horowitz on Hayek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5dR0zgC1ZI  Herbert Dreyfuss “What Computers Can’t Do” https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262540674/what-computers-still-cant-do/  Horowitz quote on Hayek “we have to learn to live in two worlds at once” https://www.jstor.org/stable/41560288  Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit” https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3643985.html  Kenneth Boulding “After Samuelson, Who Needs Adam Smith?” https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-abstract/3/2/225/12381/After-Samuelson-Who-Needs-Adam-Smith“The Extended Present” (concept) https://medium.com/extended-present/about  The “Grapes vs. Cucumbers as pay for Monkeys” experiment (youtube video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg  The Constitution of Liberty - Hayek https://www.mises.at/static/literatur/Buch/hayek-the-constitution-of-liberty.pdf  Chandran Kukathas’ Liberal Archipelago https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-liberal-archipelago-9780199219209?cc=ca&lang=en&  Kind vs. Wicked learning environments. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/experience-studio/202007/experience-kind-vs-wicked   

Alex speaks with Darwynn Deyo about the many ways in which occupational licensing can in fact reduce efficiency in the workforce, make it harder for people to cross borders, and ultimately reduce economic mobility for already disadvantaged groups.    Episode Notes and Further Reading:   License To Work: A National Study of Burdens from Occupational Licensing (2022) https://ij.org/report/license-to-work-3/    Policy Brief: Licensing Barriers for Women in the Workforce - Dr. Darwyyn Deyo (2022) https://csorwvu.com/policy-brief-licensing-barriers-for-women-in-the-workforce/    Policy Brief: Survey of Universal Licensing Reforms in the United States - Dr. Darwyyn Deyo (2022) https://csorwvu.com/policy-brief-survey-of-universal-licensing-reforms-in-the-united-states/    Testing Licensing and Consumer Satisfaction for Beauty Services in the United States in Grease or Grit?: International Case Studies of Occupational Licensing and Its Effects on Efficiency and Quality - Darwyyn Deyo (2022)   Have license, will travel: Measuring the effects of universal licensing recognition on mobility - Darwyyn Deyo & Alicia Plemmons (2022)   Occupational Licensing: Improving Access to Regulatory Information - Morris M. Kleiner & Edward J. Timmons (2020)   Licensing massage therapists in the name of crime: the case of Harper v Lindsay - Darwyyn Deyo, Blake Hoarty, Conor Norris and Edward Timmons (2020)   Effects of Occupational Licensing and Unions on Labour Market Earnings in Canada - Tingting Zhang (2019)   Guild-Ridden Labor Markets: The Curious Case of Occupational Licensing - Morris M. Kleiner (2015)   

Alex speaks with Fiona Harrigan about the state of immigration in the United States and elsewhere, and the ways in which "outsiders" make "insiders" better off - both instrumentally and categorically.  Episode Notes: The Government Is Turning Border Surveillance on Everyday Americans by Fiona Harrigan https://reason.com/2023/03/28/the-government-is-turning-border-surveillance-on-everyday-americans/   Cutting Legal Immigration Won’t Help Low‐​Skilled American Workers By Alex Nowrasteh https://www.cato.org/blog/cutting-legal-immigration-wont-help-low-skilled-american-workers  NFAP study on Immigrant-founded startups https://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Immigrant-Entrepreneurs-and-Billion-Dollar-Companies.DAY-OF-RELEASE.2022.pdf  “Title 42 has ended. Here’s what it did, and how US immigration policy is changing” by Colleen Long https://apnews.com/article/immigration-biden-border-title-42-mexico-asylum-be4e0b15b27adb9bede87b9bbefb798d 

What's the harm in dreaming big? Significant, James Harrigan believes. Alex and James discuss the many ways in which Utopian theory has led to disaster in practice - From Plato to Lenin and into the present day.  Episode Notes: Keynes on Eugenics, Race, and Population Control https://mises.org/wire/keynes-eugenics-race-and-population-control  Phillip W. Magness, James R. Harrigan; John Maynard Keynes, H. G. Wells, and a Problematic Utopia. History of Political Economy 1 April 2020; 52 (2): 211–238. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-8173298 Plato’s Republic - Ethics and Politics https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/  Thomas Moore’s Utopia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(book)  “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design” - F.A. Hayek

Daniel Weinstock makes the case for lowering the voting age and extending the right to vote to teens who have much more in common with the general voting public than we may think. Episode Notes: Daniel Weinstock - “What’s So Funny about Voting Rights for Children?”, in Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, vol. 18, no. 2 (2021), pp. 751 – 771. https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2021/09/Weinstock.pdf  Kant’s views on voting rights and the “underclasses” https://academic.oup.com/book/4831/chapter-abstract/147152492?redirectedFrom=fulltext  Rousseau on “the general will” and deliberation, the force of the better argument. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/#PoliPhil  John Stewart Mill on weighted votes and plural voting https://www.jstor.org/stable/26220010  “Votes for children! Why we should lower the voting age to six” by David Runciman https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/16/reconstruction-after-covid-votes-for-children-age-six-david-runciman   

Alex speaks with Professor Jacob Levy about the concept of neutrality within the history of liberalism and how many historical thinkers have approached the subject within that tradition.  Episode Notes: Michael Oakeshott on “adverbial rules” https://lawliberty.org/forum/michael-oakeshott-on-the-rule-of-law-and-the-liberal-order/  John Locke’s religious beliefs https://rb.gy/1yg43  Heresy of Americanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanism_(heresy)  Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues Thesis https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/bv_selection.pdf  Ronald Dworkin “Liberalism” https://www.scribd.com/document/313373358/Ronald-Dworkin-Liberalism#  Stephanie Slade, "Must Libertarians Care About More Than the State?" https://reason.com/2022/03/19/two-libertarianisms/  Alexis De Toqueville’s concerns about the rising liberal democratic order https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2018/08/09/de-tocqueville-and-the-french-exception  John Stuart Mill “On Liberty” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty 

Alex speaks with Aurelian Craiutu about the importance of moderation when it comes to virtue, political discourse, and the balancing of extremes in a world full of radicals.    Episode Notes:    Aurelian Craiutu - Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals https://a.co/d/1LVcadG Aurelian Craiutu - Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes  https://a.co/d/6cVwv5F  Thomas Osborne - Moderation as Government: Montesquieu and the Divisibility of Power  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10848770.2023.2172780  The Golden Mean in Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy)  The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence Paperback by Balthasar Gracian https://a.co/d/hgyXcYG  The 48 Laws of Power Paperback by Robert Greene   https://a.co/d/96ifKoz  A Propensity to Self-Subversion by Albert O. Hirschman https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674715585 

Alex speaks with Jason Kuznicki about the societal tendency towards stagnation - and away from liberalism - and its roots in some of the earliest human civilizations.  References 1. “Technology and the End of Authority: What Is Government For?” by Jason Kuznicki Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Technology-End-Authority-What-Government/dp/3319486918  2. Jason’s previous episode “What Is Government For?” on The Curious Task  Link: https://thecurioustask.podbean.com/e/ep-12-jason-kuznicki-%e2%80%94-what-is-government-for/  3. “The Domus Mindset: The Origins of Civilization, the Ruling Class, and Why It’s so Hard to Think About Freedom” by Jason Kuznicki Link: https://pacification.substack.com/p/the-domus-mindset  4. “The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress” by Virginia Postrel Link: https://www.amazon.ca/Future-Its-Enemies-Creativity-Enterprise/dp/0684862697

Alex speaks with Monica Guzman about the need for curiosity as a remedy for the increasing polarization in American discourse and her recent book on the subject "I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times" Monica's book: https://a.co/d/j6xKME7