The Reason Roundtable

Free trade came under attack this election cycle with all major party candidates making statements that blamed bad trade policies for the loss of manufacturing jobs and and the decline of the middle class. The top target of scrutiny has been the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a bipartisan deal that removed all trading barriers between the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

While President-elect Donald Trump has referred to NAFTA as the "worst trade deal" ever signed, economists have come to the general consensus that NAFTA has had an overall positive effect on the economy since its passage in 1993.

Produced by Alexis Garcia. Music by Chris Zabriskie and Puddle of Infinity.

Reason's Nick Gillespie joins Flemming Rose, the publisher of the "Mohammed cartoons," at the Cato Institute to discuss threats to expression in politics, culture, and social media during a Trump administration. With a president elect who has promised to "open up" libel laws and shut down parts of the Internet, there's a lot to worry about.

"This is a market solution to one of the biggest health crises we've ever seen in the history of the world," says Aaron Biebert, director of A Billion Lives, a documentary that makes the case that regulatory agencies and non-governmental organizations are engaged in a campaign of misinformation against e-cigarettes. "It's disturbing to me that something that's working is being demonized."

Interview by Zach Weissmueller. Music by Chris Zabriskie.

If you listen to Elon Musk, driverless cars are a technology that are just around the corner.

But, Bob Poole, Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow and Director of Transportation Policy at Reason Foundation is skeptical of Musk's timeline. "Skepticism is coming partly from researchers [...] at UC Berkeley, at Carnegie Mellon, at MIT who say this is a much harder problem than a lot of people, including Elon Musk, make it out to be."

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Editing by Paul Detrick.

"People are driven by their self-interest [which is why] they're always going to use the best tool [at their disposal]," says bitcoin entrepreneur Rodrigo Souza. "And that's why I think technology is going to drive us to a freer society."

Souza has played an important role in the growing popularity of bitcoin in Latin America. In addition to being an outspoken libertarian and a popular YouTube personality, he’s the founder and CEO of BlinkTrade, which operates the largest bitcoin exchanges in Vietnam, Pakistan, Venezuela, Brazil, and the second largest in Chile.

In the U.S., bitcoin is used mainly by libertarians and tech geeks, but, as Souza explains, it's catching on in Latin America solely for practical reasons. Venezuelans are using bitcoins to buy food and medicine from abroad, routing around the government capital controls that make it virtually impossible to spend government-issued bolivars outside the country. In Brazil, bitcoin users are escaping tariffs that can run as high as 60 percent.

In our latest podcast, Souza and Reason's Jim Epstein discuss how bitcoin is being used in Venezuela and Brazil, Souza’s personal experience with inflation in Latin America, his libertarianism, and more.

Daniel Hannan is one of Brexit's biggest champions. A Member of the European Parliament and a leading Euroskeptic, Hannan's advocacy of withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union has earned him international attention. While critics regarded the "Vote Leave" campaign as a dangerous retreat from globalization, Hannan has made consistent, libertarian arguments for withdrawal as a path towards greater democracy and free markets.

Noting the E.U.'s sluggish economic growth rates and its failure to establish free trade agreements with China and India, Hannan believes the U.K. should take charge of its own economic destiny. "I want people to be making the ethical argument for free trade as the supreme instrument of poverty alleviation, of conflict resolution and of social justice," Hannan says. He adds, "It's the multinationals that thrive on the distortions and the tariffs and the quotas, he says. "And it's the poor who will benefit most from their removal."

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alex Manning.

"What we know [about Trump] so far is that he talked a lot about crumbling infrastructure and the need to make America's infrastructure great again," says Bob Poole, Searle Freedom Trust Fellow and the Director of Transportation Policy at the Reason Foundation. "This suggests a big new emphasis on some kind of federal transportation program."

Poole sat down with Nick Gillespie to discuss the transportation policies likely to be introduced in the new Trump administration and reasons for libertarians to feel hopeful when it comes to the president-elect's infrastructure plan. "I'm encouraged by what I see," says Poole, who cites the involvement of Shirley Ybarra, a former Reason Foundation fellow and Secretary of Transportation in the state of Virginia, as a sign that Trump will look to public private partnerships as part of his transportation strategy.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia. Music by Topher Mohr and Alex Elena and Jingle Punks.

As our world becomes more hyper-individualized, our taste in food is following suit. From cooking in our own kitchens to finding new creative dishes at restaurants, we're all becoming artisanal chefs and demanding gourmands. Yet politicians and activists, often in a misguided attempt to keep us safe, are passing increasingly bizarre and counterproductive laws to keep us from buying, making, and eating the food we want.

In Biting the Hands that Feed Us: How Fewer, Smarter Laws Would Make Our Food System More Sustainable, lawyer Baylen Linnekin gives readers a view of the overlooked consequences of the many absurd rules baked into America's food system. Since at least the New Deal, he writes, overreaching buttinskies on the federal and local level have tried to shut down entrepreneurs, charities, and even home gardeners who are just trying feed themselves and others. From the U.S. Department of Agriculture dictating how butchers cure meat to New York City's then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg banning food donations to homeless people to banning berry-picking in public parks, no food practice seems too small to regulate in the name of safety.

A solution, says Linnekin in an interview with Reason's Nick Gillespie, is to simply emphasize good outcomes rather than rigid processes. Linnekin, who founded the nonprofit Keep Food Legal and has served as an expert witness in an ongoing federal First Amendment food-labeling lawsuit, also writes about "food freedom" at Reason.com every Saturday (check out his archive here).

"November 8th wasn't the election of a monarch," says Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). "It was the election of the head of a third of our government."

A Tea Party Republican who decided to "get on the Trump train," Massie says that under the new president he'd like to reverse the "erosion of the legislative branch's power" that started under George W. Bush. As part of that effort, he wants to see Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) replaced as house speaker. "I'm very concerned about the combination of Donald Trump and Paul Ryan and the implications for our national debt," Massie says.

In our latest podcast, Nick Gillespie talked with Massie about the GOP's "implosion," why Massie thinks Trump has to fulfill his mandate to build a wall, whether he might run to replace Paul Ryan as house speaker, and if he thinks the new president is someone he can work with in promoting his pro-freedom agenda.

Libertarians are able "to grapple with [Trump's victory] more quickly because we're used to despair," says Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward. "We never wake up after election day and say, 'the brave new future delights me!'"

In our latest podcast, Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Elizabeth Nolan Brown discuss Trump's big win. An obvious takeaway is that libertarians were right to be worried about the expansion of executive power under Obama. (Should they resist the impulse to gloat?) Elizabeth Nolan Brown talks about her recent piece on why Clinton lost, and how the results from last two presidential elections contradict claims that Trump voters are all secret racists. Was it actually a backlash against political correctness that got Trump elected? In the end, did Gary Johnson do well or disappoint?