The Reason Roundtable

Short answer: no

In the spring of 1989, Chinese students occupied Tiananmen Square, erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty, and called for democracy and individual rights. By the fall, people living in East Germany took hammers and chisels to the Berlin Wall, unleashing a wave of revolutions that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an auspicious year for human freedom.

Nineteen eighty-nine was also the year that Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto published The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in The Third World, which radically challenged conventional wisdom about the underlying cause of persistent poverty in the post-colonial landscape. Drawing on his extensive field work with the Peruvian-based think tank the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, de Soto argued that people were pushed into the black market and wider informal economy because governments refused to recognize, document, and promote legal ownership of land and other assets.

Reason's Nick Gillespie caught up with de Soto in Washington, D.C. in June, where he received the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Julian L. Simon Memorial Award, named for the late free-market economist who believed that "mankind is the ultimate resource."

'Subdivision of the Masses' by Philipp Weigl is licensed under CC BY 4.0

'By Grace' by Podington Bear is licensed under CC BY NC 3.0

'Garden of Untamed Roses (Act II)' by Lloyd Rogers is licensed under PD

President Donald Trump's new nomination to serve on the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, is "supremely qualified" for the job, says Case Western Reserve University law professor and Volokh Conspiracy blogger Jonathan H. Adler.

In most ways, he continues, Kavanaugh is a good pick from a libertarian perspective. He's been a widely respected judge on the D.C. Circuit for a dozen years, he's an "originalist" when it comes to the Constitution (meaning he believes the text and meaning of laws when they are passed are central to their application), and he's a principled critic of the administrative state (rule by agency bureaucrats rather than Congress).

So what's not to like if you're libertarian? Adler, who also writes for National Review, says that Kavanaugh is a cipher on issues surrounding the rights of criminal defendants. And when it comes to the procedural rights of enemy combatants, to national security measures, and to certain aspects of executive power, the 53-year-old D.C. native may be more deferential than most libertarians would want.

In a wide-ranging conversation about the shifting balance of power on the Supreme Court, confirmation-hearing hypocrisy from Democrats and Republicans, and fact-free attacks on the Federalist Society as a secretive king-making group, Adler talks with Nick Gillespie about the future of abortion and same-sex marriage and the likely outcome of Kavanaugh's nomination.

"We're looking at a destruction of the Constitution of the United States," if Donald Trump gets to pick Supreme Court justices. That's what Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) told MSNBC recently. A couple more appointments to the top court, she said to Chris Matthews, and you can kiss abortion rights, integrated schools, and more goodbye.

That completely deranged point of view is reaching a fever pitch today, the day that the president will announce his replacement for retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. On today's Reason Podcast, Matt Welch moderates and Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie talk about Trump's Supreme Court shortlist, just how much the Supreme Court matters in the long run, and whether The Donald is a net positive or negative for libertarian-minded Americans. Matt Welch also gives a first-hand report on what he saw at the Libertarian Party convention in New Orleans, and we talk about the legacy of Steve Ditko, the co-creator of Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, and other more-popular-than-ever superheroes. An ardent Objectivist and Ayn Rand fan, Ditko contributed two comics to Reason in 1969, each of which took aim at "neutralists" who were willing to "compromise" with evil and thus become evil themselves (that's a rough paraphrase).

'Fuck It' by Broke For Free is licensed under CC BY NC 3.0

Trump freaks out Democrats with second SCOTUS pick; the Libertarian Party comes of age; how Steve Ditko created the modern action movie

"I was a college student during the Vietnam War era, but I was putting myself through college and was way too busy with that to be one of those students... When I landed with Reason... I didn't know what 'Berkeley' was... I didn't know who Goldwater was," says Marty Zupan, who started writing for the magazine in 1972. "But when I encountered libertarian or classical liberal ideas...they just resonated with me."

Zupan became editor in chief in 1984, helming it during its move from Santa Barbara, California to Los Angeles. In 1989, she left Reason and the West Coast to take a job at the Institute for Humane Studies, where she would become president in 2001 before retiring in 2016. Her Reason archive is online here.

Founded in 1968 by Lanny Friedlander (1947–2011), Reason is celebrating its 50th anniversary by hosting a series of in-depth conversations with past editors in chief about how the magazine has changed since its founding, what we've gotten right and wrong over the years, and what the future holds for believers in "free minds and free markets."

In this Reason Podcast, Zupan talks with Nick Gillespie about her experiences and growth in the libertarian movement and focuses on the unique role that the magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets" has played over the past half-century. "One of the virtues of Reason was that it drew on the multiple strands within the libertarian, classical liberal world out there," she says. "Reason would publish a debate, say, between a non-interventionist and a, 'No, really the Soviet Union and its empire is an existential threat to the US and we need to do something about it.' We had the internal debates."

Marty Zupan talks about editing Reason in the 1980s, meeting Hayek before it was cool, moving to IHS, and life in the liberty movement.

In his new book, Suicide of the West, National Review's Jonah Goldberg talks about what he calls "the Miracle"—the immense and ongoing increase in human wealth, health, freedom, and longevity ushered in by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. At turns sounding like Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and economist Deirdre McCloskey, Goldberg writes, "In a free market, money corrodes caste and class and lubricates social interaction….Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of peoples' lives. It has only a single fatal flaw: It doesn't feel like it."

As his book's title suggests, Goldberg isn't worried the world is running out of resources. He's troubled by our unwillingness to defend, support, and improve customs, laws, and institutions that he believes are crucial to human flourishing.

"Decline is a choice," he writes, not a foregone conclusion. While he lays most of the blame for our current problems on a Romantic left emanating from Rousseau, he doesn't stint on the responsibility of his own tribe of conservative fearmongers and reactionaries.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason, Goldberg talks about his new book, his persistent opposition to Trump, how his thinking has evolved on a number of culture-war issues, and why he can't just admit once and for all that he's becoming a libertarian.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia and Austin Bragg.

For all the student speech that's being squashed on college campuses these days, higher education faces an even-more serious threat: intellectual conformity among professors, researchers, and scholars. Over the past 25 years, for instance, the "American academy went from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left. Similar trends and problems are occurring in the UK and Canada."

Enter Heterodox Academy, a group of academics and scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and research sciences that has its origins in a blog started in 2015 by New York University’s Jonathan Haidt. The group currently claims over 1,800 professors and graduate students as members whose mission is "to improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing viewpoint diversity, mutual understanding, and constructive disagreement."

"Ideological frameworks, including political orientation, powerfully inform the assumptions scholars and professors make, the questions they ask, the outcomes they value, and the way they interpret their data and their world," Heterodox’s founding documents argue. "When campuses don’t include ideologically diverse voices and don’t engage seriously with dissenting ideas, students and scholars miss the opportunity for their thinking to be challenged." The group offers a wide-range of resources, ranging from a blog to a podcast to an online library of texts and videos, that are designed to help start and sustain wide-ranging, serious conversations among academics.

Headquartered in New York, Heterodox Academy recently sponsored a day-long “Open Mind” conference (you can watch the whole thing on the group’s website) featuring scholars and journalists from all over the political spectrum.

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Heterodox Academy’s Deb Mashek about her goals for the conference and the group. A Ph.D. in social-and-health psychology who was a full professor at Harvey Mudd College in California, she became Heterodox Academy’s first full-time executive director earlier this year.

Imagine it’s sometime in the future, but not so far in the future that you’re not still putting together flat-packed furniture.

You realize you need to drive some screws into the bookcase or whatever it is you're assembling. Instead of rummaging through your garage or basement for your goddamned electric screwdriver, you tap out "rent a drill" on your a smart phone app. A few minutes later, a package arrives at your door. It contains a drill, you drive the screws, you send the drill back. Total time: 10 minutes. Total cost $2.50.

That’s a scenario from Tomorrow 3.0, a new book by Duke University economist and political scientist Michael C. Munger. Subtitled Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy, it takes a long look at what he says is, after the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions, the third great economic revolution in world history—a revolution that is already well under way.

Nick Gillespie talks with Munger about the future of work in a gig economy, the possible need for a guaranteed basic income, and why laws and policies designed to preserve the labor status quo inevitably increase the pace and magnitude of disruption. Co-editor of The Independent Review, Munger also explains how he came to his libertarian beliefs and how he designed the arresting cover of his latest book.