The Reason Roundtable

"For the first time, a growing number of young people actually think freedom isn't a big deal," says sociologist Frank Furedi, who's an emeritus professor at the University of Kent and author of the new book, What Happened to the University: a sociological exploration of its infantilisation.

The university was once a place where students valued free speech and risk taking, but today "a very illiberal ethos has become institutionalized," says Furedi. "In many respects, it's easier to speak about controversial subjects outside the university...It's a historic role reversal."

Furedi sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about the roots of this intellectual shift on campus—and how to fix it.

Edited by Mark McDaniel. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander. Music by Bensound.

On today's episode of the Reason Podcast,

Katherine Mangu-Ward joins Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and Andrew Heaton to discuss weaponizing words in the broader struggle for free speech; the recent congressional shooting; whether heightened political rhetoric in Trump's America is responsible for violence; Michelle Carter's conviction of manslaughter for convincing her boyfriend to kill himself (setting a precedent that equates words with weapons); Donald Trump taking America's Cuba policy backwards (though his rhetoric is outpacing his reforms); and a new FOIA request obtained by Reason's C.J. Ciaramella revealing the FBI's misgivings about Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax (also a libertarian).

In Mean Dads for a Better America, comedian and Fox News contributor Tom Shillue celebrates "the generous rewards of an old-fashioned childhood" of the kind he had growing up in a Boston suburb in the 1970s and '80s. Shillue's parents, he explains, were old school and never tried to be his and his siblings' friends. In fact, he aspired to be what he calls a "Darth Vader dad," a grumpy, grouchy, and morally absolute figure who inspires fear along with awe and love. Through dozens of richly recollected stories about everything from trying out for sports teams to mental breakdowns to hunting for pornography in the woods, Shillue explains how he learned responsibility, respect, and self-reliance.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie that also covers politics and the demise of the Fox News late-night show Red Eye, Shillue says,

"Look, bullying made me stronger"... [there was] a bully across the street, [and my mother said], "Go hit him back." And I punched him back, and maybe I came out on the bad end in that fight, but I felt like it was worth it to fight back, and that most of the book is filled with appreciation [for that sort of guidance]. I appreciate my scary dad. I also appreciate the bullies, because I feel like they made me stronger.

Shillue talks about why he believes his rougher-than-the-kids-today upbringinallowed him to navigate young adulthood more easily and how he is trying to raise his own children as free-range kids ready to face a world very different—and in most ways far better—than the one in which he grew up.

"There's not a-vote-for-this-party type of politics" in progressive rock, says David Weigel, author of The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock, "There is a utopianism about it... 'Let's create a new world....It was very much a music and lifestyle where you tuned out, where you went to a festival, where you got into an arena. And a time where there were fewer distractions, as well.

Weigel's history of a musical genre that includes bands such as King Crimson, Yes, ELP, Genesis, and more is a rich journey into one of rock's least-appreciated moments. The former Reason staffer (archive here) who now covers national politics for The Washington Post argues that many subsequent forms of music owe significant but often-unacknowledged debts to the organ-centric sounds of prog rock.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Weigel weighs in on politics in the Trump era. "There is not a lot of space for libertarianism in politics right now...except on the issues where libertarianism intersects with the donors who have done the most for Donald Trump. I feel like my friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are pretty happy about Trump's positions on climate. [CEI's] Myron Ebell [has] literally joined the administration," he says. "But the criminal justice reform side of libertarianism has kind of retreated to the states, where it's doing okay but has no clout in DC anymore."

"What we're witnessing," says Nick Gillespie on today's Reason Podcast, "is the end of a bunch of things"—the Clinton political dynasty, Brexit, French establishment politics, the collapse of the May government in the United Kingdom—"and in that end, there is the possiblity of...a different, 21st-century world...where politics and policy follow all the advances in personalization and individualization and autonomy we see in our cultural and political lives."

Gillespie is joined by Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward and Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch. Andrew Heaton moderates a discussion that heatdly talks about former FBI director James Comey's controversial testimony about Donald Trump, the results of last week's election in Britain, a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar featuring a titular character who looks a lot like the president, and whether Infowars' host and 9/11 truther Alex Jones is actually the libertarian he self-describes as.

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"In many cases," says Richard Rothstein, "the federal government did create...segregation in metropolitan areas and in cities that had never known segregation before. In other cases...it did reinforce segregation that was already in existence. But the country was much, much more segregated as a result of these federal policies than it was before, or would be today without them."

Rothstein is a former education reporter at The New York Times, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund Thurgood Marshall Institute and University of California at Berkeley's Haas Instititue. He's also the author of The Color of Law, a revisionist history of housing segregation in America that argues that government policy was a major force in creating ghettos and making sure that blacks and whites lived in separate neighborhoods.

On today's episode of the Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie and Rothstein discuss the role that government intervention played in establishing the patterns of segregated residency that persist to this day and how that squares with the current political climate.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

As the co-host of the immensely popular true-crime podcast Last Podcast on the Left, Ben Kissel regularly delves into the minds of serial killers and other moral monsters. And as the co-host of the political podcast Abe Lincoln's Top Hat, he susses out all sorts of issues about ideology, policy, and the status quo.

But it's his latest gig that just might be the most difficult: The 35-year-old Wisconsin native is running to be Brooklyn Borough President.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Kissel talks about getting endorsements from both the Libertarian Party and the Reform Party (!), his "pragmatic" libertarianism and support for gun rights and rent stabilization (!), his presidential vote for Gary Johnson, and why new media has made it easier than ever for both producers and consumers of culture to get what they want when they want it.

President Donald Trump has dubbed this week "infrastructure week" and promised to roll out plans to revamp how the federal government funds the building and maintenance of roads, railways, ports, and more. His first concrete proposal is to shift the nation's air traffic control system from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to an independent, nonprofit corporation that will be funded by the airline industry.

Although this is the model that has been used successfully in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and elsewhere, it has long been sunk by a bipartisan coalition of congressional lawmakers who insist on maintaining an antiquated system in which flights are still kept track of the same way they were 50 years ago.

"It's an excellent idea," says Robert W. Poole, director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website. "The government-managed air-traffic system in the United States is lagging behind all the rest of the developed countries. Over the last 30 years, almost all of them have created government corporations mostly or a private nonprofit in Canada, which is really the best model, because a government bureaucracy has a really difficult time running a high-tech service business like air-traffic control. We have intermittent funding, we have sequestration of funding budget for the FAA, we have lousy managers of major procurements who can't seem to get them done on time or on budget. Meanwhile our competitors, so to speak, overseas in the U.K., in Australia, in Canada, [and] Germany have better technology that are all paid for by fees and charges, just like a utility."

Poole is the author of the 2013 study "Funding Important Infrastructure Spending in a Fiscally Constrained Environment," which analyzes public-private partnerships that have successfuly upgrade and operate roads, bridges, and more with little or no tax dollars being spent. In a conversation with Reason's Nick Gillespie, Poole points to projects such as the Indiana Toll Road, which was leased to a private company for 75 years for an upfront payment of around $4 billion under Gov. Mitch Daniels. In addition to the payment, the company committed to updating and improving the road itself and its service plazas while allowing the state oversight on any rate increases for users.

Poole is cautiously optimistic about Trump's infrastructure spending plan because the president is opening the process up to firms that have the capital necessary to modernize American infrastructure without governments at all levels borrowing huge amounts of money. These companies not only have expertise in building and operating large-scale projects, they "hundreds of billions" of dollars they're ready to invest, says Poole. It's just that there haven't been many projects available due to pork-barrel politics that tend to view infrastructure spending as a source of patronage jobs and influence-peddling.

Nick Gillespie, Andrew Heaton, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch discuss topics in the news, including the responses to the London terrorist attack; the Trump administration's decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord; the fallout from Bill Maher's use of the n-word; Kathy Griffin's picture with Trump's severed, bloodied head (and claim that he had successfully destroyed her career); and the meltdown at Evergreen State College after activists asked white students and faculty to leave campus for the school's annual "Day of Absence."

Congress's Constitution is a 500-page academic book about legislative authority, written over the course of a decade.

How fortunate for author Josh Chafetz, a professor of law at Cornell University and contributor at The Hill, that his topic has suddenly become rather trendy, as the general public takes a newly keen interest in the question of what leverage the House and Senate have over, say, a newly elected president.

Tune in to hear Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward talk with Chafetz about how what you learned in school about the balance of powers isn't quite right, the story behind why filibusters are so common these days, and why former House Speaker John Boehner (R–S.C.) is underrated.