post by Bill Gardner
Russ Roberts (@EconTalker) interviews David Schmidtz this week on John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Schmidtz is clearly an excellent teacher with a profound respect for Rawls, despite his own commitment to libertarian views. Roberts does a good job at asking intelligent philosophical layman questions. Which, I can tell you first hand, isn't as easy as it looks.
However, somewhere about half way in, Roberts lays out the standard Hayekian argument against egalitarian policies, that is, that the abandonment of individualism and classical liberalism inevitably leads to socialist oppression and tyranny.
What was peculiar about this, for me, is that David Schmidtz is Canadian. It would seem that if social democratic policies lead to tyranny, Canada would be farther down that road, and I just don't see any evidence of this. Does Schmidtz, or other Canadian libertarians, agree with Roberts about the slippery slope, and if so do they believe that Canada is a kind of proto-tyranny? If not, shouldn't this prompt questions about the slippery slope?
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