Ash Sarkar

speaker

218 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Ash Sarkar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Munk Debates Podcast · Be it Resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

How free are we really in liberal societies?

I would say not free at all.

Let me see, by a show of hands, who here has seen the cost of their housing go up in the last 18 months?

They have it.

Liberalism has failed.

I can imagine how I might be caricatured during this debate, but I imagine there are a lot of people here who describe themselves as liberals who believe many of the same things that I do.

You believe, like me, in freedom of conscience.

You believe, like me, in due process.

And maybe you believe in slaying the giants of racism, homophobia, ableism, and sexism.

You want to avert the climate crisis.

So do I. But hopefully, over the next 90 minutes, what we're going to show you is that the liberalism as espoused by these two gentlemen over here on my right, both literally and politically, is that that form of liberalism not only fails to advance those most dearly held values, it actively imperils them.

So what are these big questions that liberalism supposedly answers?

Well, of course, the mac daddy of political questions for the classical liberals of the 18th century was freedom, the freedom to live without arbitrary constraints in a system that balances your freedoms against the rights of others.

But if all we did was debate about Hume and Locke and Bentham and all the rest of it, I think it would be kind of boring.

So alongside freedom, I would like us to consider inequality and climate change, the two biggest questions of our time.

So let's start with inequality.

My friend George here was very relaxed about economic inequality, but I'm not.

Because here's the thing about unequal societies.

They are also unfree societies.

To maintain the distinction between those who have and those who have nothing, it takes the violent, coercive power of the state.

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