Christie Davies -'The Right and Duty to Tell Politically Incorrect Jokes'

Author of Jokes and their Relation to Society, The Mirth of Nations and The Right to Joke, Christie Davies is Professor Emeritus of Sociology. His research concentrates on the comparative and historical study of humour and morality, in which latter field he has published The Strange Death Of Moral Britain. He argues here that we have not only the right to tell politically incorrect jokes that may offend all manner of sensibilities, but often a duty to do so as well.

Recorded at Christ Church, University of Oxford, on 21st October 2009

Eric Mack - 'A Defence of Natural Rights'

Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University, Eric Mack is a leading classical liberal political philosopher, with special interests in the foundations of moral rights and property rights. He frequently publishes on these and other topics, and has edited for Liberty Fund two libertarian classics - Auberon Herbert's The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays, and Herbert Spencer's The Man Versus the State. He has recently completed a new biography and critical exposition of the work of John Locke and is widely regarded as an authority on natural rights. Here he speaks about the moral foundations of natural rights, drawing on the work of Locke amongst others, and defends the right to acquire and retain property without interference.

The Q&A, which follows this discussion and concentrates more on property rights specifically, will be uploaded in the near future.

Petition against Green Protectionism

Question: What do privileged aristocrats, economic nationalists, agricultural special interests and environmentalist doomsayers all have in common?

Answer: they all reject international trade and voluntary exchange as the primary means of tackling the major problems facing humanity, despite the extraordinary miracles that have resulted from the freeing of trade barriers.

As the most recent of these - the push for environmentally-justified reductions on imports, the efforts to 'keep trade local', and consume only locally-grown produce - rears its ugly head, the Freedom to Trade campaign, which assembled a coalition of economists to oppose the spectre of protectionism in response to the financial crisis, is again coordinating a petition to reject the misanthropic case against free trade:

"We call upon the World’s leaders to resist calls for green protectionism. Trade enables specialisation, which results in the development of new technologies and leads to the creation of wealth. In the past two decades, trade has enabled over a billion people to escape poverty. Trade is the most powerful weapon in humanity’s armoury to fight poverty and environmental ills, including climate change. Trade restrictions are not desirable, nor are they an effective means of addressing climate change."

Click here to sign.

Kenneth Minogue -'How Political Idealism Threatens Our Civilization'

Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the London School of Economics, Kenneth Minogue is a well known conservative political thinker. An avowed opponent of rationalism in politics, his 1985 book Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology dissects and refutes the dominant ideological strains of the first part of the 20th century - fascism and communism - whilst his earlier work The Liberal Mind discusses the characteristics and deficiencies of liberalism, in both its modern and classical variants. He is presently a director of the Centre for Policy Studies and a trustee of Civitas, and a former Chairman of the Bruges Group. Here he discusses the threat posed by political idealism to civilization as a spontaneously emergent phenomenon.

Nigel Farage MEP -'Too Much Government: Westminster and Brussels'

Nigel Farage MEP -'Too Much Government: Westminster and Brussels' from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.

Leader of the UK Independence Party until 2009, Nigel Farage is a Member of the European Parliament for South East England and one of Britain's best known Eurosceptics. First elected to the EU Parliament in 1999, then re-elected in 2004 and 2009, where UKIP beat Labour and the Liberal Democrats into second place, he is a vocal advocate of British withdrawal from the European Union and limited government within the UK. He announced in September his intention to fight for a seat in the UK parliament at the next general election over the issue of MP expenses, challenging the newly-elected Conservative speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, in his Buckinghamshire seat. Here he speaks about the growth of the state in recent years and the most effective means of rolling back government intervention at a European and national level.

A Modest Case for Sacking the State

The society welcomed back Tom G Palmer, Vice President of the Cato Institute, last week, to speak on the case for 'sacking the state' in place of voluntary, spontaneous systems of law. The talk traced the emergence of the state, from nomadic bands, through medieval duchies and up to the present day, examining its common features and popular justifications.

The Q & A session afterwards was highly eclectic, including discussion of immigration and the case for abolishing border controls, Islam & freedom, the war on drugs, private law enforcement, and free trade.

The video of Dr Palmer's previous lecture to the society (entitled 'Liberty as the Remedy to Poverty: Socialism as a Cause'), can be found here. He has also recently published an edited collection of his essays, entitled Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History and Practice, which which defends libertarianism from its critics, and ably sets out, with one eye on history, the case for individual freedom and property rights.

Postscript (28/10/09): Tom emailed shortly afterwards to correct an error with statistics that he mentioned concerning the comparative income of the poorest in free and unfree economies. According to the latest edition of the Fraser Institute's annual Economic Freedom of the World report, the average income of the lowest decile of the population in the most free economies is $9,105, in contrast to $896 in the least free.

The Birth of the Database State: Planned Parenthood or Accident?

Guy Herbert, General Secretary of NO2ID, was the society's first guest speaker this term. He discussed the ideology behind the database state, explaining it as the product of two distinct trends: a maternal, 'enabling' view of the state, which wants to empower people, and a paternal, authoritarian tool of social control. He presented a persuasive case that their convergence in recent years on surveillance and monitoring as a means of advancing both causes is a worrying trend that should be resisted by civil libertarians.