Is the future of the GOP more libertarian, nationalist, or, somehow, both?

Joining us today is Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur, author, and former presidential candidate. He's been making a hard pitch for what he's called a "libertarian-nationalist alliance" for the past several months. He was at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention where he tried to convince libertarians to vote Republican. Reason's Zach Weissmueller also saw Ramaswamy at the Republican National Convention, where he was trying to convince MAGA supporters to be more libertarian. Reason's Stephanie Slade saw him make his case for "national libertarianism" at the National Conservatism Conference. That event was also attended by vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who has a different vision for the conservative movement. Those dueling visions are the subject of today's episode.

Note: This episode is plagued by technical issues due to a software malfunction. With the exception of an approximately nine-minute section (which is marked in the episode), the full conversation is intact.

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

1. Vivek Ramaswamy's full talk at the National Conservatism Conference
2. J.D. Vance's full talk at the National Conservatism Conference
3. "Vivek Ramaswamy Debuts 'National Libertarianism' at NatCon 4," by Stephanie Slade
4. Vivek Ramaswamy: Don't "replace the left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state."
5. "What I Learned From Paleoism," by Llewellyn Rockwell

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Vivek Ramaswamy: Is There a Libertarian-Nationalist Alliance? appeared first on Reason.com.

David Boaz, longtime executive vice president at the Cato Institute, died this week at age 70 in hospice after a battle with cancer.

Boaz was born in Kentucky in 1953 to a political family, with members holding the offices of prosecutor, congressman, and judge. He was thus the type "staying up to watch the New Hampshire primary when I was 10 years old," as he said in a 1998 interview for my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

In the early to mid-1970s, Boaz was a young conservative activist, working on conservative papers at Vanderbilt University, where he was a student from 1971 to 1975. After graduation, he worked with Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), in whose national office he served in various capacities from 1975 to 1978, including editing its magazine, New Guard.

In the 1970s, he recalls, YAF saw themselves as not merely College Republicans but were instead "organized around a set of ideas." When he started with YAF he already thought of himself as a libertarian but saw libertarianism "as a brand of conservatism. But during my tenure at YAF, as I got to know people in the libertarian movement, I came to believe that conservatives and libertarians were not the same thing and it became uncomfortable for me to work in the YAF office."

Now fully understanding libertarianism as something distinct from right-wing conservatism, "I badgered Ed Crane to find me a job and take me away from all this." Boaz had met him when Crane was representing the Libertarian Party (L.P.) at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the mid-'70s and kept in touch with him when Crane was running Cato from San Francisco from 1977 to 1981. Via his relationship with Crane, Boaz became one of two staffers on Ed Clark's campaign for governor of California in 1978, which earned over 5 percent of the popular vote. (Clark was officially an independent because of ballot access requirements but was a member of the L.P. and ran with L.P. branding.)

Boaz then worked with the now-defunct Council for a Competitive Economy (CCE) from 1978 to 1980, which he described as "a free market group of businessmen opposed not only to regulations and taxes but to subsidies and tariffs…in effect it was to be a business front group for the libertarian movement." He left CCE to work on Ed Clark's 1980 L.P. presidential campaign, where Boaz wrote, commissioned, and edited campaign issue papers as well as the chapters written by the various ghosts for Clark's official campaign book. Boaz also did speech writing and road work with Clark.

The campaign Boaz worked on earned slightly over 1 percent, 920,000 total votes—records for the L.P. that were not beaten until Gary Johnson's 2012 run (in raw votes) and 2016 run (in percentages). "The Clark campaign was organized around getting ideas across in a way that is not outside the bounds of what was politically plausible," Boaz reminisced in a 2022 interview. "When John Anderson got in [the 1980 presidential race as an independent], we recognized he was going to provide a more prominent third-party choice, maybe taking away our socially liberal, fiscally conservative, well-educated vote, and he ended up getting 6 percent. We just barely got 1 percent. And although we said, 'This is unprecedented, blah blah,' in fact we were very disappointed."

Boaz began working at the Cato Institute when it moved to D.C. in 1981, where he became executive vice president and stayed until his retirement in 2023. He was Cato's leading editorial voice for decades, setting the tone for what was among the most well-financed and widely distributed institutional voices for libertarian advocacy. Cato, with Boaz's guidance, provided a stream of measured, bourgeois outreach policy radicalism intended to appeal to a wide-ranging audience of normal Americans, not just those marinated in specifically libertarian movement heroes, styles, and concerns.

Boaz was, for example, an early voice getting drug legalization taken seriously in citadels of American cultural power with a forward-thinking 1988 New York Times op-ed that concluded presciently: "We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this war—billions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedom—is too high."

Boaz wrote what remains the best one-volume discussion of libertarian philosophy and practice for an outward-facing audience, one that while not losing track of practical policy issues also provided a tight, welcoming sense of the philosophical reasons behind libertarian beliefs in avoiding violence as much as possible to settle social or political disputes, published as Libertarianism: A Primer in 1997.

Boaz's book rooted its explanatory style in the American founding, cooperation, personal responsibility, charity, and uncoerced civil society in all its glories. He explained the necessity and purpose of property, profits, entrepreneurship, and how liberty is conducive to an economically healthy and wealthy society, and how government interferes with the growth-producing properties of the system of natural liberty. He discusses the nature and excesses of government in practice and applies libertarian perspectives to many specific policy issues: health care, poverty, the budget, crime, education, even "family values." Boaz's book is thorough, even-toned, erudite, and thoughtful and intended for mass persuasion, not the sour delights of freaking out the normies with your radicalism.

Meeting Boaz in 1991 when I was an intern at Cato (and later an employee until 1994) was bracing to this wet-behind-the-ears young libertarian who arose from a more raffish, perhaps less civilized branch of activism. As a supervisor and colleague, Boaz was a civilized adult, stylish, nearly suave, but was patient nonetheless with wilder young libertarians, of whom he'd dealt with many.

His very institutional continuity—though it was barely two decades long at that point—was influential in a quiet way to the younger crew. It imbued a sense that one needn't frantically demand instant victory, no matter how morally imperative the cause of freedom was. Boaz's calm sense of historical sweep both as a living person and in his capacious knowledge of the history of classical liberal ideas was an antidote to both despair and opportunism for the young libertarians he worked with.

His edited anthology The Libertarian Reader: Classic & Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman—which came out accompanying his primer in 1997—was a compact proof of libertarianism's rich, long tradition, showing how it was in many ways the core animating principle of the American Founding and to a large extent the entire Enlightenment and everything good, just, and rich about the whole Western tradition. The anthology featured the best of libertarian heroes both old and modern, such as Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Constant from previous centuries and Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises from the 20th, as well as providing even wider context with more ancient sources ranging from the Bible to Lao Tzu. He also placed the libertarian tradition rightly as core to the fights for liberation for women and blacks, with entries from Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Angelina and Sarah Grimké.

Asked in 1998 why he chose a career pushing often unpopular and derided ideas up a huge cultural and political hill, Boaz told me: "I think it's satisfying and fun. I believe strongly in these values and at some level I believe it's right to devote your life to fighting for these values, though particularly if you're a libertarian you can't say it's morally obligatory to be fighting for these values—but it does feel right, and at some other level more than just being right, it is fun, it's what I want to do.

"I like intellectual combat, polishing arguments, and I also hate people who want to use force against other people, so a part of it is I am motivated to try to fight these people. I wake up listening to NPR every morning and my partner says, 'Why do you want to wake up angry every morning?' In the first place, I need to know what's going on in the world, and in the second place, dammit, I want to know what these people are up to! It's an outrage what they're up to and I don't want them to get away with it. I want to fight." For decades, at the forefront of the mainstream spread of libertarian attitudes, ideas, and notions, David Boaz did.

The post David Boaz, RIP appeared first on Reason.com.

Enlarge / Daniel Dennett, a leading philosopher with provocative takes on consciousness, free will, and AI, has died at 82. (credit: Alonso Nichols/Tufts University)

World-renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will among other mind-bending subjects, died today at the age of 82.

(Full disclosure: This loss is personal. Dennett was our friend and a colleague of my spouse, Sean Carroll. Sean and I have many fond memories of shared meals and stimulating conversations on an enormous range of topics with Dan over the years. He was a true original and will be greatly missed.)

Stunned reactions to Dennett's unexpected passing began proliferating on social media shortly after the news broke. "Wrenching news. He's been a great friend and incredible inspiration for me throughout my career," the Santa Fe Institute's Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, wrote on X. "I will miss him enormously."

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I've always been partial to the Stoic philosophers. Something about their approach to life has always resonated with me:

"The Stoic virtues of Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Wisdom offer a timeless roadmap to living a life of purpose and integrity. These virtues are not mere abstract ideals but practical principles that guide our actions, decisions, and character. — Read the rest

The post Some of my favorite quotes from Stoic philosophers appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, by Andy Clark, Pantheon Books, 304 pages, $30

For René Descartes, minds were essentially thinking (or feeling) things. For the founding fathers of behaviorism, minds were identical with behaviors—talking, habits, dispositions to act in one way or another. More recently, minds have been imagined as a kind of computer: the software running on the hardware of the brain.

For Andy Clark, a cognitive scientist and philosopher at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, minds are first and foremost prediction machines. "Instead of constantly expending large amounts of energy on processing incoming sensory signals," he writes in The Experience Machine, "the bulk of what the brain does is learn and maintain a model of body and world." Our mind/brain is "a kind of constantly running simulation of the world around us—or at least, the world as it matters to us."

In other words, while people typically imagine the mind taking in information through our senses and then processing that information to create a model of the world that we experience and act upon, Clark reverses the order: Minds create a model of the world, and the senses tell us how to update the model if the world is different from what was predicted. Those predictions make up most of what we experience—but when things don't go as expected, the mind makes corrections to improve the model.

This may seem counterintuitive (and it is), but Clark makes a strong case in a very accessible and engaging book, bringing together a number of recent trends in the sciences of the mind, including the importance of the body to our mental processes (what's called "embodiment") and how our day-to-day cognition extends out into the world through our use of tools. Along the way, he shows how his approach can explain a diverse set of phenomena, including illusions, mood disorders, chronic pain in the absence of tissue damage, and why police mistakenly see weapons where there are none.

***

I should probably note, especially since I am writing in Reason, that the experience machine of Clark's title is unrelated to the famous "experience machine" proposed by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Though Clark does write of mental simulations, he is not invoking Nozick's thought experiment about a machine that can give subjects whatever experiences they like.

Clark has a rather different project. He has been a prolific theorist of the mind for more than three decades, and his new book ties together themes explored in his previous work, often updating and illustrating them with examples from more recent cognitive science research.

For example, Clark's 1998 book Being There argued against a disembodied understanding of mind (as one might get from Descartes). We are not simply minds that happen to have bodies, he argued; we often think through our bodies. Clark extends this argument in The Experience Machine by reviewing recent work on the role of the gut (which includes 500 million neurons of its own), discussing how the microbiome of gut bacteria shows their influence on cognition. With gut bacteria producing 95 percent of the serotonin in our bodies, we should not be surprised that scientists are beginning to trace connections between our digestive system and our moods, dietary preferences, and other mental states.

Similarly, in Clark's 2008 book Supersizing the Mind and in earlier work with philosopher David Chalmers, Clark has moved beyond the body's role in cognition to consider the role played by external tools. Clark and Chalmers' provocative thesis—what they call the parity principle—is that we should consider "as part of the mind" anything that would inarguably be considered mental if it were carried out by the brain. For an example, consider those of us of a certain age who once used our brains to remember a lot of phone numbers but now rely on our smartphones. Clark and Chalmers think we should consider those phones parts of our minds. A mind, they say, extends into those parts of the world that are regularly and reliably accessible to it.

How do the tools that constitute the extended mind connect back to the predictive brain of The Experience Machine? If the core of mentality is developing and maintaining a predictive model of the world, then cognitive tools that are reliably and predictively there for us are an important part of our predictive process. That predictive process, in turn, is what we ought to think of as our minds.

***

At this point, you may be wondering whether being part of our minds means being part of consciousness. Is Clark claiming that my smartphone is somehow constitutive of my conscious experience?

If I have a complaint about this book, it is that it does not give enough attention to these questions of conscious experience. In the sections that explore the extended mind thesis most fully, there is generally little mention of consciousness at all. That said, the book does include an interlude that takes issue with David Chalmers—Clark's extended mind collaborator—and with Chalmers' worries about consciousness.

For Chalmers, the important problem for any theory of the mind is what he calls the "hard problem of consciousness": Why and how does physical activity give rise to conscious experience at all? You could imagine an artificial prediction machine that shows all the outward behaviors that Clark's account calls for, but this prediction machine might lack any conscious experience whatsoever. It would, in Chalmers' terminology, be a "philosophical zombie."

Against these concerns, Clark proposes that the phenomenon of consciousness might instead be best captured by predictive minds making "meta-predictions" about their own predictions. While admitting this part of his story is "highly speculative," Clark gamely proposes that the predictive mind thesis may help unravel the mystery of consciousness too. Alas, his discussion here is too short to be clear about what exactly he is proposing, let alone whether that position is likely to be true.

But that disappointment is short-lived. The rest of The Experience Machine features lively and interesting discussions of how scientists have been grappling with various puzzles about the mind. For example: You probably know that placebos (such as simple sugar pills) can have real effects on the subjects who take them. But were you aware there also exist "honest placebos"—that is, sugar pills given to subjects who are told they're just sugar pills? What's more, these honest placebos can also have real effects on subjects!

Or perhaps you remember one of 2015's biggest social media phenomena, "the dress." When a photo of a dress went viral, some people insisted it was blue and black while others saw white and gold. Clark takes his discussion of this in surprising directions, as when he recounts scientific work relating the colors people saw with their sleeping patterns—e.g., whether they tend to be early risers or night owls.

All these things connect back directly to Clark's proposal that the mind is, at base, a prediction machine, guided by the expectations we have learned. If you are curious what that entails and if you want an accessible tour through recent cognitive science, I predict that you'll find this book illuminating

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