The Reason Roundtable

Venezuela didn't try real socialism. Bitcoin is a tool for criminals. Without big government, warlords will take over.

We traveled deep into the woods of New Hampshire to ask the libertarians at the 2018 Porcupine Freedom Festival, a.k.a. PorcFest, what lines they're most tired of hearing.

Organized by the Free State Project, the annual festival is a week-long campout for libertarians, anarchists, and other self-identified fans of freedom. They gathered to attend workshops, purchase cannabis-infused coffee with cryptocurrency, and talk philosophy around a raging bonfire.

There was plenty of ideological diversity, but the attendees seemed united by the reactions that their friends and family members have to their political views.

Produced, shot, and edited by Justin Monticello. Music by Dan Lebowitz, The Grand Affair, Geographer, and Matt Harris.

Marty Zupan talks about editing Reason in the 1980s, meeting Hayek before it was cool, moving to IHS, and life in the liberty movement.

In his new book, Suicide of the West, National Review's Jonah Goldberg talks about what he calls "the Miracle"—the immense and ongoing increase in human wealth, health, freedom, and longevity ushered in by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. At turns sounding like Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and economist Deirdre McCloskey, Goldberg writes, "In a free market, money corrodes caste and class and lubricates social interaction….Capitalism is the most cooperative system ever created for the peaceful improvement of peoples' lives. It has only a single fatal flaw: It doesn't feel like it."

As his book's title suggests, Goldberg isn't worried the world is running out of resources. He's troubled by our unwillingness to defend, support, and improve customs, laws, and institutions that he believes are crucial to human flourishing.

"Decline is a choice," he writes, not a foregone conclusion. While he lays most of the blame for our current problems on a Romantic left emanating from Rousseau, he doesn't stint on the responsibility of his own tribe of conservative fearmongers and reactionaries.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason, Goldberg talks about his new book, his persistent opposition to Trump, how his thinking has evolved on a number of culture-war issues, and why he can't just admit once and for all that he's becoming a libertarian.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia and Austin Bragg.

The short answer is no. The longer answer is maybe, a little at a time, and that's a problem. Plus, is 2018 turning into 1968, a year of high-profile violence?

Few TV shows—especially few political shows—can compare to Firing Line, the talk show hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr. In its original incarnation, it ran for 33 years and over 1,500 episodes and featured guests ranging from Muhammad Ali to Ronald Reagan to Jack Kerouac to Milton Friedman to Mother Teresa.

The show went off the air in 1999, but now it's back on PBS with Margaret Hoover in the host chair.

Born in 1977, Hoover is the great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, a former contributor to Fox News and CNN, and the author of 2011's American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Alexis Garcia.

Once upon a time, travel shows were stodgy as fuck. Television tourism was populated with pleasant, proper people who strolled the Champs-Élysées or the beaches of Rio to show you how to do pleasant, proper, prepackaged things. Early travel shows regarded the locals as curiosities. Interactions with the host were either staged or kept at a respectable distance, while finding a good cruise and shopping for bargains were paramount. Until the 1990s, travel shows were mostly about watching a trusted host sniffing his way through fine wineries, meandering through Baroque Period museums, lounging around four-star hotels, and indulging in the sensual pleasures of eating familiar fare with the right fork at the right restaurant, and always with the right kind of people.

Then came Anthony Bourdain. He began every show with a parental advisory warning and was 10 times snarkier than all the other hosts put together. His punk nonchalance stuck out like a middle finger to every travel show that went before him. He savaged rival chefs by name and held in righteous contempt every culinary fad and pompous ideology that stood in the way of pure food enjoyment.

In prison for life, Remy looks back on his violent past and contemplates where it all went wrong who's to blame.

Written and Performed by Remy

Shot and Edited by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg

Mastering by Ben Karlstrom

Music tracks by Grind Time Production Squad

Reason editors grapple with disassociation etiquette, family separation, third-party legal doctrine, health association plans, and the existential despair of Fozzie Bear

Should the U.S. Constitution be interpreted and applied according to the original meaning of its text?

On June 11, 2018, two leading constitutional legal scholars, Georgetown's Randy Barnett and Cornell's Michael Dorf, debated "originalism," which seeks to protect against arbitrary and personal interpretations by jurists, while making the law stable, predictable, and consistent in its application.

The debate was hosted by Reason and the Soho Forum, which runs Oxford-style debates, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains more ground is victorious. The resolution was: "The U.S. Constitution should be interpreted and applied according to the original meaning communicated to the public by the words of the text."

Dorf won the debate by changing the minds of 20 percent of the attendees.

Many leftists hate Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto.

As an example, Peterson cites studies that find, in wealthy countries that focus most on equality, like Sweden, even fewer women major in science and math. Instead they pick fields that deal with people, like teaching, and men tend more toward technical fields.

Peterson says this shows that when men and women have the most freedom to decide what they do, they pick fields that line up with their natural biological interests.

That idea infuriates leftists. "It should infuriate them," Peterson tells Stossel. "Because I'm going right at the heart of the radical leftist doctrine."

That doctrine is social justice, the idea that all groups should have equal outcomes; that there should be just as many female CEOs, scientists, and computer programmers, because men and women are essentially the same. If outcomes differ, it must be sexism.

Peterson says that the focus on group equality is a spinoff of Marxism. That after Marxism failed spectacularly in the economic realm, Marxists applied their way of thinking to issues like the difference between men and women.

Peterson calls for the opposite of Marxism–a focus on the individual.