The Reason Roundtable

If hatred is the country's main political motivator these days, you might as well lean into it.

"We often hear the term 'gun culture' being thrown around as invective, says David Harsanyi in his new book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun. But "'gun culture' is no less part of American life than 'religious culture' or 'speech culture.' As our history unambiguously illustrates, gun culture is inextricably tied to American culture. One cannot exist without the other."

Harsanyi's meticulously documented and fluidly written history tells the story of how guns first showed up in the New World and the roles they played not just in fighting wars and settling the frontier but developing all sorts of industrial and commercial breakthroughs in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the latest Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie also talks with him about current battles over gun control and why calls for greater restrictions on ownership and the ability to carry often come when gun violence is ebbing rather than increasing.

Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a syndicated columnist, and the author of several previous books, including The People Have Spoken (and They Are Wrong): The Case Against Democracy and Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

David Harsanyi's First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun documents the unique presence of firearms in U.S. life.

The alleged Saudi Arabia state murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi raises a thousand questions, beginning with: Should we sell arms to Saudi Arabia? Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch discuss.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

'18 - Ghosts II' by Nine Inch Nails is licensed under CC BY NC SA 3.0

It's bad when U.S. presidents think of weapons sales to dictatorships as jobs programs, but should we remove political constraints on arms dealing altogether?

It's bad when U.S. presidents think of weapons sales to dictatorships as jobs programs, but should we remove political constraints on arms dealing altogether?

With populism on the rise, capitalism under attack, and socialism back in vogue, the work of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) is more relevant than ever. Hayek started his career as a wunderkind professor, joining the faculty of the London School of Economics in his early thirties, and was a central figure in the debates that consumed the profession during the Great Depression. He would go on to spend most of his seven-decade long career as an outsider, his work diverging from the mainstream following the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s and '40s. Eventually the world circled back to Hayek's ideas, and he was one of two recipients of the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Today, Hayek is best known for his enduring insights on emergent order, for his critique of central planning, and for his argument that all knowledge in society is decentralized and that a modern economy thus relies the coordinating role of prices and private property. In his final book, The Fatal Conceit, Hayek attacked wrote that "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Hayek's enormous body of work is the subject of a new book by the George Mason University economist Peter Boettke, which takes a deep dive into Hayek's writing and serves as a rousing call for a serious rethinking of libertarian and classical liberal thought. "Liberalism is in need of renewal," writes Boettke, who started his career as an expert on post-communist economics in the former Soviet Union. "Too much time and effort has been put into repackaging and marketing a fixed doctrine of eternal truths, rather than rethinking and evolving to meet the new challenges." Even Hayek, Boettke notes, made mistakes late in his career, such as his kind words for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Hayek's great legacy is his understanding of economics and liberal political theory as a process for creating a world in which individuals and society could become more free, equal, and prosperous over time. In this Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie talks with Boettke about the historical and intellectual context of Hayek's thought, the influence of Hayek's mentor Ludwig von Mises on his work, and how libertarians can follow Hayek's dictum that "we must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage."

In a bold new book about Hayek, the George Mason economist says "too much time and effort has been put into repackaging and marketing a fixed doctrine of eternal truths."

Reason's Matt Welch sat down with the popular libertarian writer and podcaster to discuss his ideological journey, his LP plans, and controversial past associations.

Is Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation really Michael Avenatti's fault? Is the best response really restructuring the way the U.S. government is put together? Was the fiasco really the product of Americans' thirst for political combat? Reason editors discuss.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

'Two in The Back' by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0