The Reason Roundtable

It's the Monday after the Oscars (which were pretty awful) and the Monday after the Conservative Political Action Conference or CPAC (also awful). And it's the Monday before President Trump's first address to Congress (you know where this is headed...).

Nick Gillespie is joined by Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward and Features Reporter Eric Boehm to talk the politics of awards shows, whether the Democratic Party will find a pulse again, what CPAC was like, and what to watch for in Trump's big speech.

Donald Trump has promised to slash taxes, junk regulations, repeal Obamacare, and expand school choice.

Given all that, shouldn't libertarians give him at least a little (maybe even a whole lotta) love?

No, says Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty in the latest Reason podcast, because Trump is actually trafficking in a "Dangerous Anti-Libertarian Nationalism" that is actually the antithesis of classical liberalism. "Free trade and free migration are...the core of the true classical liberal (libertarian) vision as it developed in America in the 20th century," says Doherty, author of Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement. "If you don't understand and embrace them, you don't understand liberty, and you are not trying to further it."

In a wide-ranging conversation, Doherty and Nick Gillespie talk about the rise of Trump and the role of Steve Bannon in the president's administration; why being a "rootless cosmopolite" isn't in any way antithetical to patriotism; and why the great Austrian-born economist Ludwig Von Mises—a Jew who escaped Nazism—provides the strongest possible case against Trump's "America First" message.

Produced by Mark McDaniel.

"I think [Trump] kind of has a zero-sum view of the world," says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Trevor Thrall. "'We're going to win, and we're going to beat people up hard to do it.'"

Reason TV's Nick Gillespie sat down with Thrall to discuss the Trump Doctrine, its potential effect on global stability, and America's role as an indispensable nation.

"We often focus a lot of attention on these big racial gaps and confidence towards the police. How well they do their jobs. Are they accountable? Do they use too much force? What the polling data suggests is that people are far more unified when it comes to what the police should be doing." says Cato Institute Director of Polling Emily Ekins, author of Policing in America: Understanding Public Attitudes Toward the Police.

"For instance, we asked people what they thought the top priorities of the police should be, and across racial groups and partisan groups it was the same. It was fighting violent crime, protecting you from being a victim of violent crime, and fighting property crime like robbery. The drug war was very low on that list."

Reason TV's Nick Gillespie sat down with Ekins at the International Students for Liberty Conference to discuss public opinion toward the police, criminal justice reform, and the millennial vote.

At the 10th annual International Students for Liberty Conference, Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward, former editor and longtime head of the Institute for Humane Studies Marty Zupan, and Nick Gillespie discussed the history and future of Reason and libertarianism in President Donald Trump's America.

Each talked about the signature issues of the decades we were at the magazine's helm (the 1980s for Zupan, the '00s for me, and currently for Mangu-Ward) and whether libertarianism is waxing or waning. Short version: Waxing!

This podcast was recorded live on Friday, February 17. Now finishing up its first decade, Students for Liberty reported that about 1,700 guests from all over the world attended this year's conference.

Produced by Mark McDaniel.

"Libertarians, in particular, should be really worried" about having a class of people with secret knowledge about our foreign policy than isn't available to "the average American," says Bloomberg View columnist Eli Lake. "These are the classic dangers of statism."

In our latest podcast, Lake—a self-described "big neocon, Putin-hating, war hawk on Russia"—talks about his recent column, "The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn," which argues that the mandarins of the national security state misused their access to sensitive information to undermine a member of a democratically elected government.

When the government puts "quantitative restrictions on immigration" it's attempting to centrally plan "a complicated market with people who have heterogeneous skills," argued economist Ben Powell at an immigration debate held Monday night in New York City. Powell, who's head of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, went up against Mark Krikorian from the Center for Immigration Studies, who argued that if the U.S. were to eliminate numerical caps on immigration "100 million people per decade" might come here—"a revolutionary policy" that would destroy our social fabric.

The event was hosted by the Soho Forum, a monthly libertarian-themed debate series. The following proposition was on the table: "U.S. immigration policy should be to issue migration visas, without any numerical limitations, to all applicants who are not on a terrorist watch list, and who do not otherwise have criminal records or contagious diseases."

"There's a shocking level of continuity from Bush's policies to Obama's policies to Trump's policies," says Reason.com Editor in Chief Nick Gillespie. "And that's what's so frustrating about partisan politics...if you don't want the government to be able to kick people out of the country who've broken no crime other than to come here without the authorization to work, you should really be a libertarian."

In the latest episode of the Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and Katherine Mangu-Ward discuss immigration raids, the "selective sense of moral outrage" over Trump, our surprisingly apolitical Grammys, Beyoncé's rebirth as a goddess of fertility, deep-state douche bags, and more.

Flemming Rose isn't going to watch the decline of free speech without a fight. In 2005, while an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, Rose commissioned twelve cartoons about Muhammad to encourage artists to overcome self-censorship. Extremists responded to the cartoons with attacks on western embassies and riots, resulting in the deaths of over 200 people.

Rose is no rogue provocateur. He is one of the planet's most committed defenders of free speech, the open society, and enlightenment values of tolerance and human rights.

For the video of this interview go here: https://reason.com/reasontv/2017/02/10/flemming-rose-tyranny-silence

When Rockwall County Sheriff Harold Eavenson told Donald Trump that a state senator was pushing civil asset forfeiture reform in Texas, the president responded: "Who is the state senator? Want to give his name? We'll destroy his career."

That prompted Pennsylvania State Senator Daylin Leach (D-17) to tweet: Hey @realDonaldTrump I oppose civil asset forfeiture too! Why don't you try to destroy my career you fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon!

So what is this legal process prompting threats of career destruction? In our latest Reason podcast, Nick Gillespie chats with Reason's criminal justice reporter C.J. Ciaramella about the history of civil asset forfeiture and the prospects for reform now that Jeff Sessions has been confirmed as attorney general.