In November of 2016, I had the opportunity to interview George Mason economist Bryan Caplan about his book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. It’s a book I not only enjoyed, but one I’ve been assigning in my economic policy class for years. Recently, Caplan came out with a new…
Subscribe: iTunes | PocketCasts | Overcast | Stitcher | RSS Mike talks with Susan Jacoby, an independent scholar specializing in the history of reason, atheism, secularism, and religious liberty. She’s the bestselling author of 12 books, including Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and The Age of American Unreason, which just came out in a new, updated edition titled The Age of American…
Subscribe: iTunes | PocketCasts | Overcast | Stitcher | RSS This week, disaster struck The Politics Guys. Well, okay, maybe not disaster exactly, but a truly nasty flu bug felled Trey late in the week. We’d planned to have Trey run the show along with a special more far left than Mike guest co-host, but that all fell apart when Trey’s thermometer hit…
The immigration plan released by the Trump administration this week provides legal status and a path to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers. Of course, any immigration proposal that has the support of hard-liners Stephen Miller and Tom Cotton is going to contain some pretty tough provisions, as this one does. There are plenty of things…
Subscribe: iTunes | PocketCasts | Overcast | Stitcher | RSS Mike talks with University of Maryland sociology professor Dana R. Fisher about her research on activism and protests, the Women’s March, who protests and why, whether protests can drive real political change, differences between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, and lots more. Follow Dr. Fisher on Twitter Show Links The Women’s…
This week, I got a call from the nursing supervisor at my mom’s assisted living community. She told me that my mom needed to have a minor outpatient procedure performed, and asked if I wanted to take her. I did, which was how I spent most of my Friday morning. In thinking about the experience,…
This week’s show starts off with the story everyone’s been talking about – the government shutdown. Mike and Jay largely stay away from the blame game consuming most of the media, and try to focus on why both parties did what they did and the role President Trumps leadership (or lack thereof) played. Next, Mike…
Subscribe: iTunes | PocketCasts | Overcast | Stitcher | RSS In this listener mail episode (really more of a listener mail, Facebook, Twitter, and politicsguys.com site comment episode) Mike and Jay respond to listener comments concerning: Why Republicans like Jay aren’t nearly as respectful of facts as Democrats are (Jay disagrees, as you might expect.) Why The Politics Guys isn’t more diverse, and…
Subscribe: iTunes | PocketCasts | Overcast | Stitcher | RSS Mike’s back with his second food politics episode. This time, he reads his post on the politics of farm labor , getting into who works on America’s farms (mostly immigrants), how willing Americans are to do farm labor (not very, for understandable reasons), why nearly half of all farm labor is done by undocumented…
Putting Faces to Voices When I teach online classes, one of the first things I do is post a picture of myself so that students can see who’s teaching them and to try to make more of a connection. Strangely, in the over two years we’ve been doing The Politics Guys, I’ve yet to do…