The Reason Roundtable

The perils—and profits—of being identity-focused in business, content, and audience

Reason's movie reviewer handicaps the Academy Awards and explains why this is the best and worst time to be a consumer of popular culture.

Why should Congress cough up the money to build a border wall? President Trump claims it would help stop the flow of deadly drugs coming in from Mexico.

Historically, in terms of sheer weight, marijuana has been Mexico's leading illicit drug export to the U.S. But last year, "the average Border Patrol agent was seizing just 25 pounds [of marijuana] for the entire year, or less than half a pound per week—a drop of 78 percent from 2013," writes David Bier, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, in the cover story of Reason's April 2019 issue.

This trend has nothing to do with increased border security, or a crackdown on the Sinaloa Cartel and its former leader, Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, who was found guilty on 10 criminal counts in U.S. federal court last week. The falloff in pot smuggling, Bier argues, is a direct result of state-level legalization here in the U.S.

Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Bier to discuss why easing pot prohibition is doing what the failed war on drugs never could.

Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Austin Bragg and Todd Krainin.

Photo credits: Edgard Garrido/REUTERS/Newscom, Tomas Bravo/REUTERS/Newscom, Gary Moon/ZUMA Press/Newscom.

Lightless Dawn by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100655

Artist: http://incompetech.com/

Frank talk about evolution, feminism, politics, and why we don't want to acknowledge social progress.

How an independent helped shape the Democratic policy agenda.

Here are three rules you should know about "Hate Speech" and the First Amendment.

This is the second episode of Free Speech Rules, a video series on free speech and the law. Volokh is the co-founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, which is hosted at Reason.com.

Written by Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA.

Produced and edited by Austin Bragg, who is not.

This is not legal advice.

If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.

Please use responsibly.

For his new book, Timothy Carney toured parts of the country that are working and parts that are not. What he found is deeply disturbing.

Last week, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Senator Edward Markey introduced the Green New Deal, a non-binding resolution that would radically overhaul America's economy in the name of fighting global climate change. The resolution bundled together a variety of big-ticket progressive policy priorities, not all of which were obviously related to climate change, from universal health coverage to a jobs guarantee to subsidized college.

The proposal was swiftly praised by much of the 2020 Democratic presidential field—yet even some liberals wondered if it was trying to do too much at once. In attempting to be all things to everyone, would the Green New Deal end up being nothing to anyone?

Veronique de Rugy, a Reason columnist and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, joins us to explain what the Green New Deal means, why it would be so expensive, and why even socialist countries in Europe don't try to do this much.

Interview by Peter Suderman. Edited by Meredith Bragg, Todd Krainin, and Mark McDaniel. Cameras by Bragg and Krainin.

FRACTURES by Ryan Little.

Photo Credits:

STEVE FERDMAN/UPI/Newscom

JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS/Newscom

Estelle Ruiz/ZUMA Press/Newscom

Alex Edelman/SIPA/Newscom

Q&A with economist Veronique de Rugy.

Noah Rothman says the right and the left are using appeals to victimization and identity politics to gain political power.