The Reason Roundtable

Elizabeth Warren, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and most of the 2020 presidential field agree that tech companies have too power. But maybe they don't like the competition.

Reason editors debate whether private concentrations of power in the tech industry, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren rails against, are worrisome enough to warrant government intervention.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

'Ragtime Dance' by Scott Joplin is licensed under Public Domain.

Q&A with the co-founder of Institute for Justice about immigration, his legal philosophy, his battles with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and that tattoo.

"I am a capitalist," says Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is also a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. "I believe in markets."

She's got a funny way of showing her faith. Last week, she unveiled her plan to break up tech giants such as Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple. She's called for a "wealth tax" that would target households with over $50 million in assets and introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act, which would force corporations with over $1 billion in annual revenue to get a national charter and give employees the right to vote in 40 percent of a company's board of directors. She was also the driving force behind the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an Obama-era agency that was widely assailed by free-market analysts as overly intrusive and unaccountable.

To get a sense of where Warren's ideas come from, Nick Gillespie talked with Todd Zywicki, a longtime critic of Warren. Zywicki teaches law at George Mason University and is the former director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. Zywicki says Warren is a direct ideological descendant of Louis Brandeis, the Progressive Era lawyer and Supreme Court justice who attacked what he called "the curse of bigness" in business and pushed for a massively regulated economy. Warren, says Zywicki, has thoroughly absorbed Brandeis's distrust of large firms, as well as his belief that "disinterested" bureaucrats can smooth out any and all issues with free markets. What she doesn't understand, he says, is that the regulatory agencies championed by Brandeis were routinely captured by the businesses they regulated or diverted by the idiosyncratic whims of commissioners, leading to the increasing ossification of the U.S. economy through much of the 20th century until deregulation took hold first during the Carter years and later under Ronald Reagan. More recently, notes Zywicki, the Dodd-Frank laws passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to limit the power of banks have actually increased concentration in the financial sector.

Photo credit: Alex Edelman/picture alliance / Consolidated/Newscom

George Mason's Todd Zywicki says the senator and presidential hopeful has inherited the ideas of Louis Brandeis without learning the lessons of overregulation.

The kids are trending "socialist," presidential candidates are disgorging mega-proposals like popcorn, and Republicans aren't governing like they worry about this stuff, so what's a libertarian to do except reach for the orange saffron diaper?

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

'IMF' by DOt is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 30

Democratic mega-proposals, GOP budgetary fictions, prostitution decriminalization surprises, and Zardoz moments galore

In today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Coleman Hughes, a 23-year-old junior at Columbia University who has emerged over the past year as one of the most prolific and insightful commentators on race and class in the United States.

He's analyzed the relatively forgotten legacy of the gay, socialist, anti–affirmative action civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin for The New York Times, discussed the "colorblind legacy" of Martin Luther King, Jr., in The Wall Street Journal, and published a growing list of articles on everything from Kanye West's conservatism to the racial wealth gap at the heterodox website Quillette.

Hughes talks about his childhood in New Jersey, the climate for free speech on today's campuses, playing trombone in a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays Mondays in New York, and more.

Photo credit: Coleman Hughes.

Meet the undergrad who is recovering the legacy of gay, socialist civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin while explicating Kanye West's conservatism.

The cartoonist talks about being libertarian, why Marvel is OK with "serums" but not drugs, and how comic books have evolved over the past 30 years.