The Reason Roundtable

Reason features editor Peter Suderman celebrates Repeal Day with his recipe for an Old Fashioned, and explains how government almost killed the cocktail.

Video by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

The New York Times drives John Stossel crazy. He wants to rip it up, because so many stories have left-wing bias. But he still reads it for the good parts. The Times does spend money to send reporters all over the world. Another reason is his neighbors read it and he wants to understand what they believe.

Here is some of the bias Stossel found in the paper last week:

The Times news section claims Trump's tweets on Islam succeeded in "Uniting Britain in Outrage." If you read the story, you see the outrage is just from the opposition Labour Party, "several" members of the Conservative Party, and comedian John Cleese. That's the whole country uniting in outrage?!

Another supposedly objective news headline says that ending Obama's net neutrality bureaucracy will hasten the internet's death. Stossel says that's ridiculous. All repeal would do is restore the freedom that allowed the internet to blossom in the first place.

The Times ran a full-page story glorifying Antifa thugs. The Times makes them sound fashionable and fun: "Black is Always in Fashion." It goes on to say "you know the look. Black work or military boots… ski masks… jackets, North Face brand…" Stossel argues The Times would do better reporting by exposing these violent people instead of praising their fashion.

He still reads The Times because what's in the "paper of record" is important, and fact-checked. Unfortunately, much of it is mean-spirited and absurdly biased.

Produced by Maxim Lott. Edited by Joshua Swain.

Is Pepe the Frog a symbol of free speech or artwork hijacked by racist hate groups? This iconic amphibian has been labeled a Nazi, condemned by a presidential candidate, and now is at the center of an important First Amendment battle in an era of unlimited replication, imitation, and mutation. It's a fight that involves the alt-right, Trump voters, a powerful Washington, D.C.-based law firm, and the anonymous online image board 4chan, a.k.a., the "asshole of the internet."

Pepe the Frog is the creation of 38-year-old cartoonist Matt Furie, who declined to be interviewed for this story. The anthropomorphic frog first appeared 12 years ago in Furie's web comic Boy's Club. In the series' most famous sequence, Pepe is caught standing at a toilet with his pants around his ankles. As he later explains, "feels good man."

It wasn't until a few years later, when someone posted the "feels good man" image to 4chan, that Pepe became a global phenomenon. The "feels bad man" and "sad frog" versions of Pepe emerged, and the meme spread from there.

Shot, written, and produced by Zach Weissmueller. Graphics by Brett Raney.

Music by Elvis Herod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/elvis_herod

Good, old-fashioned goats and the ancient Hindu practice of yoga are two things that don't seem to go together.

Yet, last year, a small farm in Corvallis, Oregon started offering classes that combined the two. Goat yoga is exactly what it sounds like: the practice of yoga in the presence of goats.

And then the unstoppable force of goat yoga locked horns with the immovable object of the Washington, D.C. Department of Health. When Congressional Cemetery Director Paul Williams applied for a livestock permit in the District of Columbia, he was greeted by four lawyers "ready to throw every curve ball they possibly could at me to prevent goat yoga."

Produced, shot, narrated, and edited by Todd Krainin.

On November 13, George Mason University economist and Cafe Hayek blogger Don Boudreaux faced off against Rick Manning of Americans for Limited Government in a public debate about free trade. The event was part of The Soho Forum, Reason's monthly debate series held at the SubCulture Theater in New York City's East Village.

The resolution: "The U.S. government should unilaterally abolish all tariffs and duties on imports and all subsidies to exports, thereby making all reciprocal trade agreements with other countries unnecessary." Boudreaux defended the proposition, and Manning attacked it.

Michael Eisen's goal is to change the way scientific findings are disseminated. Most research papers today are locked behind paywalls, and access can cost hundreds of dollars per article. The general public, and most scientists, don't have comprehensive access to the most up-to-date research, even though much of it is funded by U.S. taxpayers.

"It's a completely ridiculous system," says Eisen, an acclaimed biologist at UC Berkeley, an independent candidate for Senate in California running against Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D), and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science, or PLOS, which publishes some of the largest and most prestigious academic journals in the world. These publications stand out for another reason: They're open access, meaning that anyone with an internet connection can read them for free.

Produced by Justin Monticello. Music by Silent Partner, Vibe Tracks, and MK2.

Bernie Sanders and others on the left want higher taxes on "millionaires and billionaires." Would that be a good idea? Most rich people became prosperous by creating wealth, not taking it from others.

Jim Caruso took over a bankrupt brewery and turned it around by inventing creative craft beers. He now employs more than 100 people. The company he runs, Flying Dog Brewery, is worth millions.

Caruso had a good answer when John Stossel asked him about the "unfairness" of some Americans having so much more money than others. The top fraction of earners does now own almost half of America's assets.

Caruso pointed out that Steve Jobs was worth $10 billion when he died. But since Apple sold more than 2 billion devices, Jobs collected just $5 per device. "I think Steve might have been underpaid here," he says.

Most on the left don't see it that way. "The feeling tends to be that somebody like Steve Jobs took something away from everybody else," Caruso says. "What did Steve Jobs take? He had this idea, wouldn't it be great to have a thousand songs in your pocket... one of the most massively important tools for productivity and communication in life."

Stossel says Jobs, and all entrepreneurs (if they don't partner with or freeload off government) create far more wealth than they take.

Produced by Maxim Lott. Edited by Joshua Swain.

Did you know that the pilgrims almost starved after they arrived at Plymouth Rock? That's because they were forced to farm "collectively." The corporation that funded the expedition said, "grow food together. Divide the harvest equally."

This is a terrible idea. It creates what economists call the "tragedy of the commons." When you share property and the results of your work, people farm until the land is barren, don't work as hard, or steal food from others.

John Stossel gathers young people from Students For Liberty and runs an experiment to demonstrate this "tragedy of the commons." It shows the solution is private property, which is what saved the pilgrims.

Governor William Bradford finally decided to "assign each family a parcel of land". Once the pilgrims had property rights, they became much more productive and brought in huge harvests -- which they were then able to share with the Indians.

So this Thanksgiving feast, don't forget to say "thanks, private property!"

In July of 2017, Los Angeles imposed a "road diet" in the quiet beach community of Playa del Rey, replacing car lanes with bike lanes and parking spaces. The roads were suddenly jammed with traffic. The community was livid.

"Most of Playa Del Rey didn't know this was happening," says John Russo, a local resident and co-founder of Keep L.A. Moving, a community group formed to fight back against the city's unilateral decision to reconfigure the streets. "It really created havoc for us because we have no other roads to take."

Road diets are part of a strategy known as Vision Zero, in which Los Angeles aims to eliminate all traffic-related fatalities by 2025. It's an idea borrowed from Sweden, which in the '90s started experimenting with reconfiguring the roads to encourage more commuters to bike or take mass transit to work.

"In order to achieve zero deaths, public officials have been doing some odd things," says Baruch Feigenbaum, the assistant director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, the 501(c)(3) that publishes this website. Road diets aren't "based on science" or any "empirical findings."

Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Garcia, Alex Manning, Todd Krainin, and Paul Detrick.

Do you have the right to rent your body to someone else?

In most of America, you don't. But prostitution is legal in parts of Nevada.

Julie Bindel, author of the book The Pimping of Prostitution, wants that to change. She co-founded Justice for Women, a group that fights to end all prostitution. Bindel tells John Stossel, "I've interviewed a lot of sex buyers, and they talk about women like they're human toilets or spittoons for men's semen."

Does that mean it should be illegal?

No, says Christina Parreira, a PHD student at the University of Nevada who studies legal prostitution. She became a prostitute herself to gain access to the legal brothels and interview women there. She argues, "we don't need protection, we're consenting adult women. [Groups like Bindel's] say that it's oppression against women and we're being exploited. But I feel more exploited by these supposedly liberal women that are telling me that I'm being exploited."

John Stossel confronts Bindel, Parreira, and Dennis Hof, owner of seven legal brothels in Nevada.

Produced by Naomi Brockwell. Edited by Joshua Swain.