The Big Questions with Big John

The One Freedom Americans Keep Trying to Destroy

Americans say they believe in free speech. Then the speech gets ugly, offensive, dangerous, politically inconvenient, or useful to the other side. In this episode of Big Questions with Big John, Jonathan Rauch joins Big John to discuss why free speech is so difficult to defend, why universities lost sight of truth-seeking, why government censorship […]

The Richest Society In History Is Miserable

We built the most productive civilization in human history. We’re also the most anxious, the most isolated, and the least trusting of any generation on record. Brink Lindsey spent two decades at the Cato Institute defending the system that built this world. Now he argues that the wealth machine stopped delivering what it was always […]

The Supreme Court Case They Lied About for 120 years

What if one of the most hated Supreme Court cases in American legal history was not the villain you were taught it was? David Bernstein, constitutional scholar at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School, joins Big John to challenge the accepted story of Lochner v. New York, the rise of judicial activism accusations, the administrative […]

Why the Libertarian Party Should Never Compromise

The Libertarian Party has a strategy problem, and Jacob Hornberger says it’s destroying the movement from within. Hornberger is the founder of the Future of Freedom Foundation, a former U.S. Senate candidate, and a Libertarian presidential contender. He’s spent three decades making the uncompromising intellectual case for individual liberty — and he’s not interested in […]

$36 Trillion and Nobody Is Talking About It

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist and trained economist who has spent two decades mapping the fault lines where money, policy, and institutional failure collide. With the national debt crossing $36 trillion and expert credibility at a generational low, this conversation is overdue. Chapters:00:00 The $36 Trillion Question01:15 From NYC Socialist to Libertarian Economist06:06 […]