Russ Roberts interviews Thomas Leonard

Self-recommending. I could choose almost any paragraph to excerpt. Here is one:

Darwinism, with its kind of material explanation for evolution, for human evolution, seems to imply that the idea of having inalienable natural rights invested in you by a Creator–the language that you find in the Declaration of Independence–Darwin seems to suggest that’s just kind of a nice fiction.

He is trying to explain how the progressives in general, and economists in particular, came to downplay individual rights.

I put Leonard’s book at number 2 on my books of the year for 2016. I wrote an essay about it earlier this year.

1 thought on “Russ Roberts interviews Thomas Leonard

  1. “. . . the idea of having inalienable natural rights invested in you by a Creator–the language that you find in the Declaration of Independence–Darwin seems to suggest that’s just kind of a nice fiction.”

    However, the “idea” that one’s “creation” (hence existence) “vests” one with obligations does seem more empirically “factual.” That all “inalienable natural rights” require concomitant obligations (usually of others) for their exercise or expression seems to support that view.

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