Should You Teach A Course on Libertarianism?
In this Kosmos Podcast, Dr. Ben Powell, associate professor of economics at Suffolk University and Senior Economist at the Beacon Hill Institute, shares some lessons learned from his first semester teaching a course on Libertarianism. You can find the syllabus ot the course in our Syllabus Bank.
Jeanne Hoffman: Welcome to this Kosmos Online Podcast, I am Jeanne Hoffman. Today my cast is Dr. Ben Powell, associate professor of economics at Suffolk University and Senior Economist at the Beacon Hill Institute. Dr. Powell is here to talk about a course he teaches at Suffolk on libertarianism. Welcome Dr. Powell and thanks for being on our podcast.
Ben Powell: Good to be with you Jeanne I am happy to talk about it.
JH: So how long have you been teaching this course on libertarianism?
BP: Well since you are catching me at the end of the semester, about 3 months. This is the first time I have actually taught this course. At Suffolk University where I am we have these interdisciplinary freshman seminars and you can propose them on just about anything, I mean people teach courses on things like the Beatles even and I proposed one last year to do it on libertarianism so this is the first time I have done it.
JH: Well, what kinds of students take the class?
BP: Well the one thing they all have in common is that they are freshman, but other than that it is fairly diverse I’d say about a third of the class were economics majors who mostly selected it I think because they saw that an economist was teaching the course, but then they are coming from computer science, biology, other humanities it varies. I was unsure of how interested in libertarianism they would all be at, it turns out there was quite a spectrum. On the first day of class I gave them, not as a graded assignment or anything, but just for my informational purposes I gave them Bryan Caplan's Libertarian Purity Test, which is a lot better in my opinion than the world's shortest political quiz because it was a much better job at separating how hard core you are into libertarian beliefs and there was quite a range from very hard core libertarians in the class that people who were very much statists. I think the class averaged with somewhere in the 40s on that test which Bryan classifies I think on his summary results as if “you have libertarian leanings, explore them,” so I guess that would be the average student in the class.
JH: Okay and what did you end up covering in this course?
BP: Well what I started off with and it was particularly advantageous teaching here in Boston for this was after defining what libertarianism was in comparison to liberalism and conservatism we started with going into the history of the American Revolution and how libertarianism is consistent in many ways with the classical liberal origins of the American Revolution and comparing it to early documents from Locke and Cato’s letters to the Declaration of Independence and writings in the federalist papers here in the United States and relating those founding documents of the United States to libertarian beliefs to kind of teach the students how our country was founded with a lot of these ideas in mind and then may be we have strayed from them as what we were setting up for. So that was the very first part of the class and we traced that up through the time of the civil war and the tension between slavery and libertarian ideals and then contrasting that of course with the civil war in one aspect getting rid of the last great blight on libertarianism in the United States founding of slavery but at the same time squashing the principle of self determination through secession. But after we set up that the course became fairly topical so we went through and just looked at different current political debates in the United States and what libertarianism would have to say about them and we took libertarianism both on consequentialist grounds and on rights grounds to these different issues so we explored things like equality, generally the market order, the role of government in business and then concrete issues like social security and retirement benefits, marriage laws both heterosexual and homosexual, abortion, business cycles, guns, immigration, foreign policy and war, environmental issues so a whole host of things like that. Then as we wrapped it up, the last third of the course we started pushing into more difficult problems for libertarianism and more hard core ideas so we started thinking about things that people typically think of as public goods that the government must provide and looking at ways that they might be privately provided better. So at the simplest level things like streets, but looking at inherent problems with constitutions and constraining governments, democracy and the inherent flaws in that and then looking at things like well if we peeled out police how could more policing be privately provided, how about courts of law itself and ultimately ended up the last week of the discourse discussing what role if any for governmentand the tradeoffs between limited government libertarianism and anarcho libertarianism. So we really covered the whole range of issues in the course.
JH: What are you hoping students to takeaway from the class?
BP: Well first and foremost it is just an understanding of what libertarian principles are and how to apply them to concrete issues. I think that was the most important thing for them to takeaway. On a secondary level how this is very much consistent with the ideals of the American founding and how we have kind of gone away from them here today. In terms of applying at the concrete issues one of the fun things I had them do in the course is one of the assignments a couple of times throughout the semester they had to watch Judge Napolitano’s Freedom Watch shown on TV and try to analyze an issue that came up on that show and discuss how the Judge’s take on it is or is not consistent with libertarianism and then contrast that with watching CNN or MSNBC or another news station reporting on the same story and see how the libertarian take differs from what you are getting out of the main stream news or doesn’t in some cases. So that gave them a lot of good practice and kind of contrasting libertarian views with others and alternately just an appreciation of the value of liberty and what it can do for bringing benefits to society.
JH: How have the students responded to those ideas?
BP: For the most part favorably. It was a great discussion, at no time was it ever that they had to conform to those beliefs or have them themselves. Everything we did in the course testing wise or whatever was just to make sure that you understood what the positions were and not whether you personally chose them, but that being said, when you spend a lot of time in exploring these things and you find out freedom works people tend to be more become more sympathetic to it so over the course of the semester we have lots of discussion and people from all over political spectrum on one issue to the next with them necessarily an unifying theme for them sometimes starting to see the consistency in a libertarian position I think. For fun and kind of my own interest I gave that same libertarian purity test at the end of the semester, again ungraded just for informational purposes to see what happened, and the average student improved I think increased their amount of libertarianism above 29 points I think it was. So a significant improvement and that brought you up into the, I think how Bryan Caplan describes that score on this test is around 70 or something like that, says “you are probably self consciously libertarian enough for your friends to ask you to stop talking about it.” So there was definitely at least in the short run some movement among the oppositions as they saw issues that they hadn’t considered before how freedom might work in those situations.
JH: The news assignments you talked about sounds pretty unique having them watch two different news shows. How did they respond to those types of assignments?
BP: Pretty well and what they ended up doing I think most being college students on campus it was easier for them to download clips from the news on the internet than it was to sit and watch the show. So I think most of them trolled through looking at various most of those news shows were 5 or at most 10 minute clips on a story. Until they found one that was an issue that they were particularly interested in and then they analyzed that one and contrasted that. They seemed to react well to it. It gave them the freedom to kind of self select areas that they were interested in.
JH: If you teach this course again is there anything you would want to do differently next time?
BP: I think I liked the overall structure, I really like starting at with the American Revolution and ending it with versions of hard core libertarianism which by the way it was a nice advantage teaching in Boston to be the first part of it because my office is right directly on the freedom trail here so we took a walking tour of that while discussing the ideas one time and if I was going to change something, I guess it might be some of the middle part of the class and just which policy issues that we hit and that will be just be more according to what the popular topics of the day are that might interest students. So in thinking about like the books that I used for the course, two of them are very happy with them would use again are Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty and David Boaz, the reader that he put together the Libertarian Reader because it has excepts from Mises, Hayek, Nozick, Locke, Cato's letters, Spooner just about anything you could want so it was a nice collection to be able to draw off of. The other two books I had used were Jeff Miron's Libertarianism A to Z and Jacob Huebert's Libertarianism Today and both of those were more topical I don’t know if would use them again it would depend on what particular policy topical issues I want to cover. But they worked well for this semester anyway.
JH: Could you tell me a little bit more about that freedom trail walking tour you did, that sounds really interesting?
BP: Yeah it was a typical tourist thing that people do in Boston actually it is a trail that brings you though many of the sites of the beginning of the American Revolution in Boston whether it is past Sam Adams, John Hancock and James Otis grave's to Paul Revere's house and the Old North Church or to the site of the Boston massacre and lots of other places in between, or the Old South Meeting House where they launched the Boston tea party from. What I did is we hired a professional tour guide that is for normal tour groups but I called them and made sure that one that was a historian rather an entertainer as some of them are to do the walk and describe the events that were going on and how it related to the ideas of the day. So that was kind of a fun tour for me as well to learn little facts that I might not have known otherwise.
JH: Oh cool. Do you have any advice for other professors who might want to teach a similar course at another University?
BP: Yeah the basic advice is do it- it is fun. I mean I always make an effort in my economics class as well. Things that I might be interested in talking about might be selected because of my ideology. I make a distinction when I am teaching to just be strictly means-ends in economics class rather than discussing ethical or political beliefs and such. In this course it was really fun since it was interdisciplinary and particularly targeted at being about libertarianism. To be able to mix my beliefs about political ethics along with the consequentialism and economics so it was just a great fun doing it and I ran it as a class discussion with them so I would just throw out questions to get it going and push them to explore the various positions, it was a great deal of fun and I hope to do it again so if others have similar preferences I would certainly encourage you to do it and of course you tailor it to the aspects of libertarianism that you are interested in and it is a great good, it is a consumption good as well as a productive good for you.
JH: From the perspective of an economist teaching interdisciplinary course did you have any difficulties engaging the students who weren’t from your own discipline?
BP: No, not at all so I managed to do the whole thing without ever drawing even a supply and demand diagram on the blackboard and they were times when a bit of shorthand might have made something simpler but there was no necessary need to. I mean in a lot of ways we were discussing big-think philosophical issues as well so economics certainly informed the whole lot of our discussion but I think the average student and there barely would recognize or would know it as economics if they never had a course in it before and I imagine a philosopher who knows a little bit about economics would be able to do the course in a similar way.
JH: Well thanks so much for joining us Dr. Powell.
BP: Alright well, thank you Jeanne it was fun.
JH: And for more information on Dr. Powell's course and other liberty friendly courses visit KosmosOnline.org that is K-O-S-M-O-S online.org providing career advice and intellectual resources for academics and this is Jeanne Hoffman, signing off.