The Reason Roundtable

The Reason Podcast crew covers deficits, tariffs, Russians, gender, and more.

Congress is "given a pile of papers, sometimes a couple thousands pages long, a few hours before the expiration of a spending deadline," says Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). "When there's no opportunity for debate, for discussion, for amendment, for individual members to improve [legislation], you've effectively disenfranchised almost 300 million Americans."

Since toppling longtime incumbent Bob Bennett in a 2010 primary and then riding the Tea Party wave to become the junior senator from Utah, Lee has been one of the most careful and liberty-friendly legal minds in public office.

As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he'll participate in the upcoming confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. But he was almost in the hot seat himself: Lee was one of the seven finalists Trump considered to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Lee talked with Reason's Matt Welch about the Supreme Court selection process, Kavanaugh's Fourth Amendment views, and the senator's longstanding goal to get a sentencing reform bill on President Trump's desk.

Edited by Paul Detrick.

Photos of Sen. Mike Lee, Credit: Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom

Armadillo by Silent Partner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary_download?vid=cfa8d2f35697f58e&f=m

On July 2, 2018, Reason and The Soho Forum hosted a debate between Erik Voorhees, the CEO of ShapeShift, and Peter Schiff, CEO and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital.

The proposition: "Bitcoin, or a similar form of cryptocurrency, will eventually replace governments' fiat money as the preferred medium of exchange."

It was an Oxford-style debate in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Voorhees won by changing the minds of 15 percent of attendees.

Produced by Todd Krainin.

No legal commentator on cable news is more energetic, constitutionally minded, or libertarian than Andrew Napolitano, who has served as Fox News' senior judicial analyst for nearly two decades.

A former New Jersey Superior Court judge, Napolitano is a nationally syndicated columnist—you can read him at Reason—and the author of a shelf full of books about law, history, and race in America.

Reason's Nick Gillespie caught up with the judge at FreedomFest, the annual event held every July in Las Vegas. We talked about Donald Trump's ongoing makeover of the federal judiciary, whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will be good for libertarians, what it's like to be an ex-Republican, and the imminent return of Freedom Watch, the popular and controversial show that Napolitano hosted on Fox Business from 2006 to 2010.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia.

"Namaste" by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music Artist: http://audionautix.com/

Photo Credits: Gage Skidmore/Flickr, Pat Benic/UPI/Newscom, Joshua Roberts/REUTERS/Newscom

Have you used a plastic straw lately? Did you feel guilty? Celebrities and activists hope so! They want us all to #stopsucking.

Politicians took notice. Seattle recently banned plastic straws, and other places are considering similar bans.

Companies are also getting in on the trend; Starbucks recently decided to phase out plastic straws in all its stores by 2020. Other companies like American Airlines, Sea World, and Royal Caribbean are planning to ban plastic straws.

In our latest video, Stossel TV contributor Kristin Tate, author of How Do I Tax Thee, examines what a straw ban would accomplish.

Angela Logomasini, a senior fellow at Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Tate that "the idea that you're going to ban straws and save the world is ridiculous."

Plastic pollution in the ocean is a real problem, but only about 1 percent of it comes from the U.S. Of that 1 percent, only a tiny fraction comes from plastic straws.

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

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

Reason's Justin Monticello and Zach Weissmueller went to the Venice Beach boardwalk to test the bullshit detectors of passersby. How easily could they distinguish inaccurate headlines from the accurate ones, such as "BREAKING: Hillary Clinton Killed During FBI Raid," and "Trump asks Japan to build cars in the U.S. It already does."

"Rate Sheet" by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

"Slow Line Stomp" by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

"Setting Pace" by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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"The Basket" by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis, was once associated with the feminist movement. Then he changed his views. "I don't agree with the part of feminism that says, 'Men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed,'" Farrell tells Maxim Lott, a senior producer of Stossel on Reason.

For example, men die five years earlier than women, have more dangerous jobs, and are often passed over for custody. Boys are two times more likely than girls to commit suicide. Boys are 29 percent less likely to get a college degree than girls.

So why do men earn more and have more influence in government and business? A big reason, Farrell argues, is that men are filling social expectations to become the family breadwinner.

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