Reason Video

With only 12 days remaining until election day, Gary Johnson brought Reason along for an intimate look at his campaign for a U.S. senate seat. Johnson and his supporters traversed New Mexico, attempting to win over voters from the snow-capped Rocky Mountains in the north of the state, to the rose-colored dunes of the Chihuahuan desert near the Mexican border. He campaigned at a biker bar in Las Cruces and to members of the Sikh faith in Española.

Not only did the former New Mexico governor grant Reason privileged access to his political life, he also showed a surprising willingness to cast aside rehearsed talking points. From the back seat of his SUV, Johnson spontaneously shared many of his private hopes, fears, ambitions, jokes, as well as insights into his personality.

Running as a Libertarian, Johnson's poll numbers have been as high as the twenties in a three-man race—and as low as 8 percent. Throughout the contest, he has maintained that he's not a protest candidate: winning the senate seat is his only goal.

This campaign could be Johnson's last, as he's pledged to give up politics if he fails to win this race.

Produced, photographed, and edited by Todd Krainin.

Music licenced under Creative Commons: "Tomorrow" by Bensound, "Faster Does It" by Kevin MacLeod

Cesar Garcia and his wife Claudia have lived in their home in the desert town of Coachella, California, for more than 13 years. They've raised three kids there, and Claudia runs an at-home daycare out of the house.

But three years ago, they made a mistake that could cost them their home and livelihood. When converting their back porch into a TV room, they neglected to get a permit from the city.

Garcia ignored early warnings from Coachella's buildings department. Then a team of inspectors showed up unannounced. He entered a guilty plea in court, paid a $900 fine, and demolished the structure as ordered by the judge. Next, he got the proper permit before rebuilding and upgrading the porch into a room for the daycare.

He thought the issue was resolved. But six months later a bill arrived for $26,000.

As the local newspaper the Desert Sun first reported, the city of Coachella is holding Garcia responsible for paying the cost of his own prosection.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Weissmueller and Alexis Garcia.

"Weightlessness," by Daniel Birch is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License

"The Otherworld," by Secret Jane is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial Share-Alike License

"Monolithes," by Lobo Loco is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial Share-Alike License

"Sad Marimba Planet," by Lee Rosevere is licensed under an Attribution License

Republicans and Democrats may genuinely hate each other, but they love their own power even more. That's why they collude so often to keep those pesky Libertarians, Greens, and independents away from the lucrative levers of government.

The 2018 midterms have been chock full of two-party shenanigans, all too often aided and abetted by journalists, pollsters, and the voters themselves. It all starts with ballot access.

Written by Matt Welch. Camera by Jim Epstein. Edited by Alexis Garcia.

Photo credits: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom

Is socialism more effective than capitalism in bringing freedom to the masses?

That was the resolution at a recent public debated hosted by the Soho Forum on October 15, 2018. It featured Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin magazine, and Gene Epstein, the Soho Forum's director and former economics and books editor of Barron's. Naomi Brockwell moderated.

It was an Oxford-style debate in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Epstein, arguing the negative, prevailed by convincing about 11 percent of audience members to change their minds.

Music: "January" by Kai Engle is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.

Civility is only going to return when people stop treating politics as the only thing that matters—and we start actually shrinking the size, scope, and spending of government and give ourselves some space to breathe.

Battleground - Ethan Meixsell

Work Week - Topher Mohr and Alex Elena

In New York, Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo wants to raise taxes.

But John Stossel interviews an interesting candidate with a different plan–Libertarian Larry Sharpe. He proposes alternative ways to raise money.

Although Sharpe is the Libertarian candidate, he's doing well for a third-party. A recent poll has him getting 13 percent of the vote. And after survey respondents hear his campaign pitch, that number goes up to 25 percent.

Stossel thinks the reasons for his success may be that he speaks well, campaigns constantly, and–unlike most libertarians–doesn't propose cutting existing government programs. He only wants to stop creating new ones. Sharpe also talks positively about unions.

The car wash industry, which employs low-skilled, mostly immigrant workers, has been the focus of an ambitious unionization drive since 2012. Working conditions at car washes were also cited as a raison d'être in the successful campaign to raise the state minimum wage to $15 per hour, which takes full effect in January of 2019.

As Reason chronicled in a feature story in our July 2016 issue, the real world impact has been mainly to push car washes to automate and to close down.

Two years later, there are more unintended consequences. The $15 minimum wage is fostering a growing black market—workers increasingly have no choice but to ply their trade out of illegal vans parked on the street, because the minimum wage has made it illegal for anyone to hire them at a competitive rate.

The minimum wage is also cartelizing the industry: Businesses that have chosen to automate are benefiting from the $15 wage floor because outlawing cheap labor makes it harder for new competitors to undercut them on price and service.

As a sequel to the 2016 article, this video takes an in-depth look at the real world consequences that result when politicians interfere with a complex industry they don't understand, enabled by media coverage that rarely questions the overly simplistic tale of exploited workers in need of protection.

"Curtains are Always Drawn" by Kai Engel is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

"Industrial Music Box" by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license

"Desert City" by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license

"Summer Days" by Kai Engel is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Tom Woods stands accused of many things, but laziness is not one of them.

A senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Woods is the author of a dozen books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. He's written curricula for the Ron Paul homeschool program; he co-hosts, along with economist Robert Murphy, the weekly Contra-Krugman podcast, which dissects columns by New York Times Nobel laureate Paul Krugman; and he posts a new episode of the popular Tom Woods Show every day.

A champion of the Austrian School of economics and a devotee of Murray Rothbard, Woods didn't exactly start out as a radical anti-statist. He was, he says, a "moderate Republican," happy to lavish government spending on domestic programs and to launch bombs at evildoers abroad. It was the 1992 presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan, who was against the Gulf War and opposed to new military adventures abroad, that began the transformation. Now, Woods is one of the leading antiwar voices in the libertarian movement.

Never one to shy away from a social media scrap, Woods got into an epic Twitter feud last summer with the leadership of the Libertarian Party. One side called the Mises Institute a gateway drug to white nationalism and the alt-right, while Woods and his allies mocked the Libertarian National Committee as a bunch of "social justice warriors." Then something curious happened: After the L.P.'s Mises Caucus failed to dislodge party chair Nicholas Sarwark at this year's national convention, Woods and his friends redoubled their efforts to transform the party from within.

Edited by Mark McDaniel and Todd Krainin.

Oxygen Garden by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Attribution License.

Photo credit: George Skidmore. (CC BY-SA 2.0.)

Socialism has become cool in America, under the nice name "democratic socialism."

Gloria Álvarez ‏knows better, because she's from Latin America and studied socialism there. She says: Watch out! Socialism has a clear track record of wrecking every country that implements it.

Cuba tried socialism. Things got so bad that tens of thousands fled the island on dangerous, makeshift rafts. Others paid lots of money to be allowed to leave.

Álvarez interviews people who fled. One man told her that in Cuba: "You don't see any future. Everything is stagnated...health care, education, nowadays they're in ruins."

Another said: "My father [a doctor] had to sell illegal meats out of his ambulance...because Cuban doctors earn less than 1% of American doctors."

Because of his experience with socialism, that man is now running as a libertarian for a Florida State House seat.

The $36 billion U.S. supplement industry isn't subject to FDA regulation, which both facilitates experimentation and allows products that don't live up to their health claims to flourish.

Neil Thanedar has a free market solution: In 2012, he co-founded Labdoor to bring accountability to the supplements industry without quashing its dynamism. The company, which has received backing from venture capitalists Mark Cuban and Y Combinator, buys products right off the shelves, tests them, and then posts the results on its website.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller sat down with Thanedar in one of the company's San Francisco labs to talk about the supplements market, the advantages of privatizing consumer protection, Labdoor's vision of a blockchain-based network of testing facilities, and the company's decision to test supplements marketed by InfoWars founder Alex Jones.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Justin Monticello.

"Brushed Bells in the Wind," by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial International 4.0 License

"Seatbelts are Essential," by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial International 4.0 License