We cover:

·       The rise of authoritarian movements and global threats to liberty

·       The morality of freedom: how to know what to fight for and when

·       January 6th as a failure of duty, and what true constitutional leadership requires

·       Trump, responsibility in office, and the role of virtue in political life

·       How persuasion, clarity, and even humor (à la Bastiat) can advance freedom

Palmer draws on decades of experience—from supporting dissidents in the USSR before the Berlin Wall fell to working in Ukraine’s struggle against Russia today, and fighting for self-defense rights, marriage equality, and freedom from conscription in the U.S.

The through line is clear: defending freedom takes more than theory—it requires virtue, duty, and clarity of purpose to make liberty resilient and worth fighting for.



Want to explore more?

Juliette Sellgren 

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliette Sellgren and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.AdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back. Today on August 19th, 2025. I'm excited to welcome Tom Palmer to the podcast. He is a global freedom fighter. He's been all over the world. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, he spent a lot of time over there helping people out who were looking for an alternative to what life is like in the Soviet Union under communism. And since then he's been all over. He spent time in the Arab world, in China. Currently he's helping the fight in Ukraine. This guy has been fighting for freedom his whole career and it's really inspiring and I'm excited to be talking about this today because we're in a really weird moment for freedom. There are a lot of people who don't like it or don't see its value or don't think about it at all, and that's a little worrying. And so we're going to figure out what works, what doesn't, when we're fighting for it and why it's important. So with that, welcome to the podcast.

Well, thank you Juliette. It's a pleasure to be with you today.

I have a question for you before we jump in, and it might be related, but maybe not. What is the most important thing that young people my age or younger should know that we don't?

Well, I'm going to cheat a little bit and say there are two things.

Awesome.

And they both have to do with thinking about the long term. And it's something that's harder to do when you're younger because you don't think about what's going to happen in 25 years, but 25 years passes faster than you think. So the first thing in my opinion is especially for your generation and younger, is to save money and to do it wisely. Don't put it in a stock because it's a depreciating asset and you inflate  away the value of it, but put it into stocks, not stocks and bonds at your age, but stocks and save. And it means that when you get a pay raise, don't just consume a hundred percent of it, consume 70% of it, put the rest of it into savings and don't think about it so that when you are old and gray or when you have a really rainy day, you've got a whole bunch of money stored up.

And that means that when you're old, you'll be rich and being rich is a lot better than being poor. So that's one thing to think about. And getting yourself used to it, not spending all the money and stretching yourself and going out all the time, buying every meal outside and paying expensive prices for fancy coffees, make coffee at home and save that money. I wish I had done more of that when I was younger. I started thinking about it when I was much older than you are. 

The second thing is related to that is that everybody is going to die and older people are more likely to die long before you do. And it's important to say goodbye to them if you have the opportunity. So I can think of people whom I was so grateful that when I knew that they were ill or failing, I was able to go and spend time with those people. That meant a lot. There are three people where I had scheduled, I said, oh, I'll put it off. And I had visits scheduled, but it was too late and I didn't get to say the things I wanted to say. So remember, everybody is going to die and don't just consider it a downer, although it's not a happy thought, but it means you should schedule the time to be able to go and say goodbye to them,

Man. Yeah. Wow. That kind of got me a little bit. Yeah, I do need to do that. We all need to do that, which that's such a good piece of advice.

I tried to think more carefully about it. As I said, there are three cases of people whom I said, okay, I'll do that, but a little bit later and I'll make time for it. And that it was too late. And if someone says, “I'm very ill,” it really means something.

It means you need to get there. Now, of course there are hypochondriacs amongst us, but these were not cases like that. And there are cases in which I did not take it seriously enough, and I deeply, deeply regret not having said, okay, I'll be there next weekend.

Yeah, well, and if it's a hypochondriac, arguably these types of people that you do want to say goodbye to, you should know them well enough to know if that's what's driving or not.

Yes, exactly.

Thank you for sharing that, and I think we're getting into it. Now, your first piece of advice actually is part of the reason why we've had this turn towards kind of illiberal anti-free philosophies and political attitudes. Because people are not only spending a hundred percent their paychecks, young people in particular, but they're actually spending above that, right? They're dipping into the pool of credit and overextending themselves. And it's visible, at least here. I know so many people who it is a little coffee out every morning and we go out every weekend and nope, there's something about that where you actually can't afford to do something like that and then you do, it must infuriate people who I don't know. I mean you were saying before we got on the call that a lot of this is happening from the right now and instead of from the left. And I think it's kind of this, it starts in part, and this is not the entire narrative, but it feels as though it starts in part from whatever that symptom is that people are overextending themselves past. They're not thinking about the future, and then you leave those who care about marriage and children and they want women to work or to stay in the home and have this set of beliefs that want to send us back to the 1950s. And that's why in part, I think, I don't know,

I'm not so sure there's such a clear line in that regard. I think that there are two features of governmental policy that are having very negative consequences. One is something I don't think most people are aware of, but they should be. And that is the unfunded liabilities that governments all around the world are running up. That's sounds like such a boring accounting term. What it means is government expenditures that are expected to be made, but there's no corresponding revenue source. There's no revenue corresponding to it. And very few governments take that into account of their national accounting. So in the United States, there is so-called national debt. People focus on that. That's debt held by the public from government bonds. But there's the unfunded liabilities which is not accounted for officially Australia does. Australia has a much better national accounting system for government. They put that on the books and say, this is the money we're obligated to pay for which we have no revenue.

And it's led to somewhat better budgetary policies than in the us, but the size of that unfunded liability is staggering. And it's primarily a middle income transfers in the form of Medicare and Social Security. Those are the two huge elements. And they're considered the golden rail, in not the golden rail, I apologize, the electric.

That you don't touch. And so no one is willing to talk about those, but they're gigantic. And it means that when you are old, hard as it is for you to imagine that, but there, if you're lucky, will come a day when your hair is turned gray and all of that, and there won't be any money in the kitty for your state pension. You will have paid all your life for parents and grandparents, but what you'll get is a lot of nothing because it's organized as a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme or a chain letter. There are various ways of describing this current money that goes in is spent and they say, oh, it's invested. Don't worry. It goes into the Social Security trust fund. That's just a big IOU. It just says, we will pay you money. That's it. All the money it's put in is spent immediately and already they're dipping into the so-called IOU or the so-called trust fund, which is funded out of general government revenues.

So there's nothing there, there unlike, and that's why I encourage actually saving your own money in stocks. You own something, you own shares of companies. And a very wise person told me when I started doing this, he said, Tom, you're not informed enough and you're not smart enough to be a stock picker because only pick particular stocks if you know something about them that other people don't know otherwise, the information is already factored into the price. It's already priced in. So buy the whole stock market, buy index funds that are every company that's publicly traded, you own the whole economy. That, and over time those are likely to go up though sometimes they dip, but usually for short periods of time and over time you end up with something more and more and more valuable. So that's where people should be investing because you shouldn't be counting on Social Security. It's basically going to be gone by the time you are qualified to dip into it. 

The other thing that is visible, however, and that is grotesque and has generated a certain sense that I think young people feel that the game is rigged is what's happened to housing prices. So virtually every price in real terms is falling except for two things. One is labor. That's a good thing because that's what you and I do. We have our labor. Neither one of us was born at a great family with landed estates and some like futile holdings. We work and we get paid for our work. So we're laborers and the price of labor has gone up, which is why rich people longer have servants. They have washing machines and vacuum cleaners instead of people beating their carpets and washing their dishes and so on. Used to be just go back a hundred years ago, wealthy people had servants living in their houses. Not anymore. Richest people in the world don't have live in servants.

They might have a gardener or a maid who comes in twice a week or something like that. It's totally different because labor has gone up in price. Everything else has gone down in price except one thing. And that's in recent years. And that's housing. Why? Well, it's NIMBYism, it's supply and demand. If you restrict the supply, prices are going to go up. Demand is increasing. We have bigger population. People want their own houses. And so younger people look out and they say, my parents were able to afford an apartment or a condo or a house or something, and my grandparents had a house and I can't afford it. I have to work for many more years to accumulate the down payment. And the question was why is that? What's because governments in all of the major metropolitan areas and wealthy countries around the world, whether it's Australia or United Kingdom or Western Europe or US or Canada or wherever, have restricted supply.

And that means it's harder to get that first house, the starter house and to be able to have equity in it. And that means we need to remove the restrictions on housing supply. In my opinion, it is one of the features that has driven a lot of the illiberalism because of this feeling that the game is rigged. In fact, real incomes, what you can consume has gone up dramatically in every other dimension except housing, which is one that really focuses young people as they're entering the labor market and saying, where am I going to live?

Yeah, it's like the one thing you can't really avoid- that and food, but if food prices are decreasing, it's like the other need.

That's right. And by the way, we're talking about in real terms. So the nominal price of something may be rising, but if incomes are rising faster, it means the real price has falling or the real purchasing power of your wages are going up. And they have been, there's no question about that, that people generally are so much better off than they were 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 70 years ago. And I don't consider myself particularly aged, although I'm 68, so I'm not a kid. I certainly remember we didn't have air conditioning, we didn't fly in airplanes, we didn't. And then the obvious things, mobile telephony and computers and so on, but rich people did have air conditioning. I didn't have it growing up. And now very poor people have air conditioning. It's considered like a necessity now, especially in America. Well, lots of places.

So those things are now just taken for granted. The fact is it means that incomes have gone up dramatically. But again, this housing issue because of what's called NIMBYism, not in my backyard, people say, oh, we're in favor of more housing for poor people someplace else, more dense housing some other place, but we don't want to change the character of our neighborhood, which is to say we don't want anyone to be able to build in this neighborhood. And that's having a terrible, terrible consequence.

So as we begin continuing this conversation, but talking about how you actually fight for freedom daily, I want to start with asking why and not just why is freedom important, but why is it important to fight for freedom not only in your home country, but everywhere you've been all over the world? Why is that for you such an important thing to do? Why freedom? Why globally?