Freedom to earn and freedom to spend
In a discussion of migration and state tax policy, Bob Zadek described a movement of states questioning whether to have an income tax at all and considering replacing it with a sales or consumption tax. He framed the appeal in explicitly libertarian terms: a consumption tax is built into the price of a product, so a buyer who chooses to buy has decided the price is worth paying, whereas an income tax punishes earnings. Zadek said the thought of being driven to earn less because he could not keep enough of what he earned would deny him his soul, and that he did not mind paying a high sales tax because he would simply decide not to buy the product. He characterized the movement away from income tax and toward a consumption tax as another healthy result of the freedom to move Where is Everyone Going? (2013).
Guest Travis Brown agreed, noting that personal consumption is up to 70% of US GDP and that taxing personal income taxes the most mobile resource, lessening the ability to save, consume, invest, or share. Zadek added that a study of economic freedom ranks California 48th, New Jersey 49th, and New York 50th overall, with New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Indiana at the top, and observed that states like those led by Governor Perry or Governor Scott in Florida support freedom far more than states like California Where is Everyone Going? (2013).
Freedom as something sacrificed for
Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector, described the market as the place she went with her parents as a child, where she learned to count money, bargain, and trade — lessons she called more important than schoolwork. She said that without the market North Korean society cannot move and people cannot survive, and that the market is the most important thing for North Koreans Yeonmi Park – North Korean Defector: “Juche” Die, Markets Rise (2014).
Asked what she would teach citizens of countries without freedom, Park said that many people who are happy do not really appreciate what they have, while she and other North Koreans had to try very hard and sacrifice a lot for freedom. She said freedom is everything for them — if you have freedom, you have everything and need nothing else — and that people born with freedom do not know how worthy it is. She said she reminds students in Students for Liberty how lucky they are, and that without this freedom life can be much more miserable Yeonmi Park – North Korean Defector: “Juche” Die, Markets Rise (2014).
Park predicted North Korea would change from underneath, that people have lost faith in the government and can see the truth, and that nothing lasts forever. She said the biggest possibility is that it changes like China did — opening its economic system first and changing politically later — and that the government tries to suppress the market but lacks the money or food to stop it, because as markets grow people gain wealth and access to outside information Yeonmi Park – North Korean Defector: “Juche” Die, Markets Rise (2014).
Zadek framed the change in terms of spontaneous order: a top-down managed economy cannot feed its people, as China and the USSR discovered, while an economy driven by spontaneous order means people organize automatically and build markets and systems from the bottom up. He said North Korea is yet another example of what happens when spontaneous order is denied, and that the bizarre trend in America is the opposite — gravitating toward a top-down Washington dictates system as the rest of the world strives for freedom by building from the bottom up Yeonmi Park – North Korean Defector: “Juche” Die, Markets Rise (2014).
Foot voting as political freedom
A 2020 episode featured Professor Ilya Somin of George Mason University discussing his book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. The episode’s description states that Bob and Ilya explored why foot voting — the ability to choose which government to live under by moving — is often a more effective and informed mechanism for political freedom than ballot box voting, and that they discussed the economic and moral implications of internal and international migration as well as regulatory barriers like zoning and occupational licensing that restrict human mobility Foot Voting > Ballot Voting (2020).
Measuring freedom across the states
William Ruger, discussing Freedom in the 50 States, defined freedom traditionally as people not being prevented from ordering their lives, liberty, and property as they see fit, consistent with the equal rights of others — a notion he said hearkens back to the idea that your freedom stops at the tip of someone else’s nose. He said the study uses around 230 different policy variables to capture which states live up to that definition more or less, and that he and Jason Sorens hearken from what they call the virtue libertarian approach, believing a healthy moral ecology is key to supporting a free society, though the study itself makes no moral judgment about how people use their freedom Ranking Freedom in the 50 States (2022).
Jason Sorens explained that the index excludes the death penalty and abortion because it is possible to view either as an exercise of freedom or a protection of freedom, or as an infringement on freedom, and the authors did not want to take a side. The main index includes taxes, regulations, and criminal prohibitions on private behavior like drugs and guns; the appendix offers three indices that include abortion depending on whether the reader is pro-life, moderate pro-choice, or strong pro-choice. Sorens said that while freedom is a little subjective, we can distinguish between freer and less free societies — in the 1970s the United States was freer than the Soviet Union, and today Singapore is freer than North Korea — and that the gaps among US states are significant though not that huge Ranking Freedom in the 50 States (2022).
On polarization, Sorens said the study does not look at affective polarization but at how partisan changes at the state level affect freedom. States that move toward the Republicans subsequently see their economic freedom go up, and states that move toward the Democrats see it go down, but with personal freedom there is no such relationship: more progressive states tend to have more freedom for drugs, marijuana, and a few other things, while more conservative states tend to have more educational freedom, school choice, homeschooling, and freedom to own and carry guns. These cancel out in the index. States near the top for personal freedom tend to be more rural — Nevada, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado — a mix of red and blue, while the bottom includes New York, Texas, New Jersey, Delaware, Hawaii, and Kentucky, states that tend to be more urbanized Ranking Freedom in the 50 States (2022).
Across episodes: freedom as choice and as loss
The excerpts show the same question — what freedom concretely consists of — argued across episodes without a single settled answer. In the 2013 episode, Zadek and Travis Brown located freedom in the choice to earn and spend, and in competition among states over tax policy; in the 2014 episode, Yeonmi Park located it in the market and in what North Koreans sacrifice to obtain it, with Zadek supplying the spontaneous-order frame; in the 2020 episode, Ilya Somin’s foot voting recast the choice of government itself as the mechanism of political freedom; and in the 2022 episode, Ruger and Sorens attempted to measure freedom across states while conceding its partial subjectivity. The later treatment is more self-conscious about definition and measurement than the earlier one, but the excerpts do not show the earlier speakers revising their positions in light of the later ones.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any case, the name of any bill, or the amendment on which any holding turned. They do not give the founding date or full text of any principle beyond the formulations quoted, and they do not resolve the question of how freedom should be defined when the speakers disagree. The 2020 episode is represented only by its description, so Somin’s specific arguments, examples, and any cases he named are not available here. Where an excerpt breaks off mid-sentence, the thought is left unfinished.