Sean Carroll

So the superficially sensible thing is the claim that there are communities that are different from each other and they have their values, and let's just let them each individually decide what their values are and maybe enforce those values within the communities.

And the liberal wants to come along and say, no, individuals need to have rights no matter what the community is saying.

Well, that does bring up the sort of critique of liberalism from maybe it's more economic or maybe it's more from the left, but the idea that you're letting individuals do their thing and doing their thing might be living in poverty or just failing in their lives and that liberalism does not provide... It talks a lot about freedom and liberty, but not about freedom from want or things like that.

It does raise questions about the relationship between liberalism as a political philosophy and economics, which is sort of mostly welfare state capitalism as I understand it.

But to what extent are the ideals of liberalism being distorted by economic inequality, by the fact that we have a lot of people who are not very well off and a lot of people who are super duper better than well off?

And you already mentioned the rule of law and its importance.

And it's not just political influence that comes with money, but apparently, at least these days, almost complete impunity when it comes to obeying laws or not.

Right, right.

That sounds like a harder thing to fix.

I don't know.

So is there some general principle, you think, that a functioning liberal society will have safeguards against too much economic inequality?

Yeah.

I did half seriously, not even less than half seriously, almost jokingly, but provocatively on Twitter years ago.

I said, what if we just had a system where if you wanted to run for office and hold an office in the federal government of the United States, you had to literally give up all of your wealth to

And if you left office, you would get like some payout, a few million dollars to start yourself again.

And that would prevent the incentive that we have now of people going into office to cash in or to exert.

But remarkably to me, I guess I'm naive in some ways, that was one of my least popular tweets ever.

People hated the idea.

They were absolutely outraged like, oh, no one would ever run for office because I guess they think of the only people who should run for office are already wealthy somehow.

Yeah.