The Reason Roundtable

Do alternative financial service providers merit their reputation as rip-off artists? Why do their customers choose to remain "unbanked?" To better understand how these businesses operate and why people choose to patronize them, Lisa Servon took a break from teaching at the University of Pennsylvania to work as a teller in the South Bronx and Oakland. She discovered that traditional banks are neglecting the poor and bilking the middle class, leaving payday lenders and check cashers to fill a crucial need. Produced, edited, and hosted by Todd Krainin.

The first rule of the Congressional Fight Club, says Trey Radel, is "don't buy cocaine from a federal agent."

In January 2013, Radel came to Washington as a Republican congressman representing Florida's 19th district, an area that includes Fort Meyers and Naples. He had been a TV anchor prior to his win and he ran on a libertarian-leaning Tea Party platform of shrinking the size, scope, and spending of the government. Just a year later, Radel resigned from Congress after getting busted buying drugs and pleading guilty to misdemeanor cocaine possession.

Ironically, Radel has always been a staunch critic of the drug war. In his riveting new memoir about his short time in office, he documents not just his self-destruction but a political system that puts maintaining the unsustainable status quo and fattening party coffers first and philosophical ideals and good policy last. Democrazy: A True Story of Weird Politics, Money, Madness, and Finger Food is a no-holds-barred account of what it's like to come to Washington and really, really screw up.

More than that, though, it reveals a system that needs radical reform if the United States is going to avert an entitlements-driven financial crisis and a drift toward even greater polarization and economic stagnation. In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Radel explains the compulsions that destroyed his political career; doubles down on libertarian positions regarding the drug war, civil liberties, and foreign policy; and articulates his worries that Americans won't demand systemic change until the country has gone "full Greek." "I fear," he says, "that Donald Trump is going to slip into George W. Bush-era policy that led itself to making Republicans disaffected, which was this: Let's lower taxes, increase spending, and pray to God the economy booms. I'm afraid that's just not going to happen."

Bombing Syria was the type of "foreign policy idea Donald Trump was railing against all through the campaign," says historian Thaddeus Russell, "but clearly the [Steve] Bannon and Steven Miller faction is waning or being pushed out, and now it's a return to the good old days of Wilsonianism: killing people in order to save them."

On today's podcast, Russell joins Reason editors Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward to talk about the Syria bombing, why "presidents become more warlike over time," how the Trump Administration's divide over foreign policy is reminiscent of a similar split in the Reagan White House, Reason magazine's cover story on "Why the Wall Won't Work" ("a fine summation" according to the New York Times' editorial board), and the subtext of U.S. Army Gen. (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal defense of federal funding for public broadcasting on the grounds that PBS makes kids better good soldiers.

"[McChrystal's] argument is precisely [the argument] cold war liberals were making in the '50s, 60s, '70s, and '80s," says Russell, "which is that we need a single, unified culture that makes everyone identify as Americans before identifying as individuals."

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"It is in the vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the use of deadly chemical weapons," said President Donald Trump in explaining a U.S.-missile strike on a Syrian airbase. That might sound good and even noble in theory, explains Emma Ashford of the Cato Institute, but the plain truth is that he's wrong. What's worse, it's far from clear what either the United States or other countries in the region will do next.

The essential lesson that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump keep forgetting is that military interventions, especially in other countries' civil wars, often makes things worse, Ashford tells Nick Gillespie.

Produced by Austin Bragg. Cameras by Todd Krainin and Mark McDaniel.

In our latest podcast, Nick Gillespie chats with Dolce, a former editor-in-chief at Details and Star, about his new book, Brave New Weed: Adventures into the Uncharted World of Cannabis. They chat about how legalization has opened up new frontiers in marijuana use, and why Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions won't destroy this burgeoning industry.

Eugene Volokh has a few things to say about things that aren't supposed to be said. Volokh, a professor of free speech law at U.C.L.A., has seen books banned, professors censored, and the ordinary expression of students stifled on university campuses across the nation.

Volokh believes free speech and open inquiry, once paramount values of higher education, are increasingly jeopardized by restrictive university speech codes. Instead of formally banning speech, speech codes discourage broad categories of human expression. "Hate speech. Harassment. Micro-aggressions," Volokh says. "Often they're not defined. They're just assumed to be bad, assumed they're something we need to ban."

Edited by Todd Krainin.

Reason editors Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch discuss the news of the week, including Mike Pence's refusal to dine alone with women; why boozy dinners with male colleagues can, in fact, advance careers (and not in a gross way); how Mad Men ratified our horror at workplace social mores of the '60s and '70s; Big Bird, Nicholas Kristof (the pundit who reliably comes up with the dumbest thing to say on pretty much any topic), and our month-long, phony conversation about cutting government spending; Elon Musk's latest rocket launch; why Trump's tweet on fighting—and working with—the Freedom Caucus perfectly encapsulates the relationship between libertarians and the GOP over the last 30 years; and Venezuela as a textbook case of socialism leading to violence, starvation, and death. (Ok, but should we try it just one more time?)

In an era of daily internet outrage, Dave Rubin stands out for his willingness to engage a wide spectrum of political opinions with a civil tone. His show, The Rubin Report, has hosted the likes of alt-right gadfly Milo Yiannopolous, crusading atheist Sam Harris, and ex-governor-turned-conspiracy-theorist Jesse Ventura, all in a spirit of non-partisan intellectual inquiry. In our latest podcast, Reason's Nick Gillespie chats with Rubin about leaving The Young Turks, the regressive left and Islam.

On today's podcast, Reason's Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch discuss immigration in the context of Robert Draper's masterful New York Times Magazine story on Steve Bannon, in which the presidential advisor slimes libertarians for "not living in the real world;” what to do about the giant loogie hanging off Paul Ryan's face after the collapse of the GOP's health care bill (and Ryan's failure to live up to the title of "wonk king);" whether the coming push for tax reform will go any better than the health care debacle; and the Associated Press' controversial decision to permit journalists to use "they" as a single, gender-neutral pronoun. Is this language evolution or devolution? And WWDJKS (what would DJ Khaled Say)?

At this year's South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, Reason put together a panel of experts to discuss "Get a Warrant: The Fourth Amendment and Digital Data." The panel discussed important current surveillance and privacy issues in play right now and specifically focused on the role Congress plays in helping establish limits to authority and how citizens (and people attending the panel) can push for reforms.