The Reason Roundtable

60 years ago today, Atlas Shrugged was published. The novel still sells 100,000 copies a year.

But not everyone will celebrate the book's anniversary. Ayn Rand is someone people love to hate. Years after her death, people still feel compelled to attack her ideas.

A recent John Oliver segment said her philosophy, objectivism, "is just a nice way of saying 'being a selfish asshole.'"

Fortunately, not all people think that way. Many young people, discovering Rand for the first time, say her ideas inspire them. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a free market advocacy group that promotes Atlas Shrugged on college campuses, says "it's surprising how much appetite there is" for Rand's ideas. Stossel challenges him, saying, "no, college students are socialists!" Kirk responds, "They're not socialists… 60% say they think socialism is a good idea and then 70% say they don't want to pay higher taxes and they don't trust the government. They just don't understand what socialism really is."

Facts matter more. But often it's fiction that expands people's minds and changes how they think.

Produced by Naomi Brockwell. Edited by Joshua Swain.

"Young women are really putting their foot down and saying, 'These are our bodies,'" says Vanessa Grigoriadis, a National Magazine Award-winning journalist and the author of the new book, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus. 'We don't care what you, 55-year-old college president, thinks is consent.'"

From the conviction of Vanderbilt University football players for raping an unconscious student, to the he-said-she-said story behind Columbia University's "mattress girl," to the discredited Rolling Stone account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, few topics generate more emotion and outrage than sexual assault on college campuses.

Grigoriadis's book is a deeply researched and nuanced take on campus relationships and the often-fuzzy boundary separating consensual sex from assault. Over the past three years, she interviewed over 100 students and 80 administrators on 20 different campuses, and her findings further complicate an already complicated story.

In a wide-ranging interview, Reason's Nick Gillespie and Grigoriadis grapple with this question, the proper role of campus tribunals in administering justice, what constitutes due process for alleged offenders as well as victims, and whether a "yes means yes" affirmative consent standard should be the norm.

What's the best way to make the Post Office faster and cheaper? Pull the government's tendrils out of it and let it loose in the private sector. That's what countries like Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands have done as email and social media eclipse traditional snail mail. In the latest Mostly Weekly Andrew Heaton explores why the Post Office is leaking money and stamps all over the place, and the best way to it get it on track.

As communication technology has grown by leaps and bounds, the Post Office struggles to remain relevant. More importantly, it's struggling to remain fiscally solvent. Its unfunded liabilities are at a staggering 70 billion dollars. Meanwhile, it's losing money every year–it's lost $50 billion in the last decade, and is pushing up against the credit limit allowed by Congress. A day of reckoning is on the way, and when that happens, it will either need a massive taxpayer bailout, or private sector flexibility.

Mostly Weekly delivers the answer to America's mail problem. And it does so quickly, without long lines, and without losing billions of dollars in the process.

J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that governments will "close [bitcoin] down." In the U.S., thankfully, that can never happen because bitcoin is protected by the First Amendment.

When communism was first implemented 100 years ago, people were excited. Western academics and media figures at places like the New York Times praised the ideology even as millions starved. The praise continued even as communist leaders murdered political opponents.

Today, some Antifa activists carry communist flags. Some say communism failed in the Soviet Union because it wasn't "done right."

But communism has been tried again and again–in dozens of countries. It always fails. Stossel talks with Lily Tang Williams, who grew up in China, where tens of millions starved to death after government abolished private farms. Lily's father taught her to trap rats for food, but then even the rats ran out.

Produced by Maxim Lott. Edited by Joshua Swain.

When the minimum wage goes to $15 an hour "you kill jobs," says Andrew Puzder—"businesses close, businesses reduce staff and automate, and businesses reduce the hours of the employees they have."

But "what you can't measure, which is really what hurts economic growth...is the number of restaurants that don't open."

Puzder is best known as the former head of CKE Restaurants, the parent company of fast fast-food chains Hardee's and Carl's Jr. When he was named CEO in 2000, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Puzder focused his attention on improving the customer experience, improving the food quality, simplifying the menu, and emphasizing good service. Ten years later, CKE had quadrupled in value.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Puzder at FreedomFest 2017, the annual libertarian conference in Las Vegas.

Edited by Ian Keyser. Cameras by Meredith Bragg and Justin Monticello. Music by Kai Engel.

Berkeley once had 20,000 college lectures available on their website. Anyone could watch for free. But then government said the videos were illegal because they didn't have captions for the deaf.

Captioning 20,000 videos would cost millions. So instead, Berkeley just took down all the videos. That meant nobody outside the college would be able to see them.

But one person didn't let that happen.

Jeremey Kaufmann just started a new service called LBRY (pronounced "library"). He posted the Berkeley videos and thousands of others.

LBRY is kind of like YouTube–but unlike YouTube, it can't be censored.

Kaufmann says he isn't afraid to host the videos on his operation, because unlike Berkeley, he didn't create them. He says that means he's not legally responsible. We'll see. One never knows what our authoritarian government will do.

Three cheers for entrepreneurs like Kaufmann who risk their time and money to keep information like these college lectures available.

Produced by Maxim Lott. Edited by Joshua Swain.

It was big news when our national debt recently passed the $20 trillion mark. What's less understood is exactly why having such a massive debt is a bad thing. The short answer is that too much debt slows economic growth, reducing living standards.

The sheer size of the existing debt is deeply worrying to economists on both the left and the right, who agree that when debt reaches 90 percent of GDP for five years in a row it means painfully slow growth, creating what's called a "debt overhang."

Edited by Mark McDaniel. Written by Nick Gillespie. Graphics by McDaniel and Meredith Bragg. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Alexis Garcia.

Hillary Clinton's new book What Happened attempts to explain Trump's upset victory in 2016 through a series of reasons which are not Hillary Clinton. The gambit runs from apathetic white lady voters to Russian meddling to the inscrutable popularity of Donald Trump. When Clinton's focus turns to herself, however, she's light on culpability. She admits she can be guarded, but that admission doesn't encapsulate the relentless political ambition paired with shady financial dealings and a willingness to subvert national security that turned off much of the country.

In the end Clinton was also just a bad candidate.

In the latest Mostly Weekly Andrew Heaton explores Clinton's new book, so you don't have to.

High-speed rail lines began popping up in Europe and Asia in the early 1980s. Passengers were exhilarated by the futuristic trains rocketing between cities on glass-smooth rails at upwards of 200 miles per hour.

With high-profile roll-outs in France and Japan, bullet train mania was underway. And then reality set in.

"The costs of building such projects usually vastly outweigh the benefits," says Baruch Feigenbaum, assistant director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, the 501(c)(3) that publishes this website. "Rail is more of a nineteenth century technology [and] we don't have to go through these headaches and cost overruns to build a future transportation system."

Supporters, who claim that most high speed rail systems operate at a profit, use accounting tricks like leaving out construction costs and indirect subsidies. If you tabulate the full costs, only two systems in the world operate at a profit, and one breaks even.

Produced by Justin Monticello. Cameras by Alex Manning, Austin Bragg, Zach Weissmueller, and Monticello. Music by Grégoire Lourme, StrangeZero, Silent Partner, John Deley and the 41 Players, Jingle Punks, Topher Mohr and Alex Elena, Pavel Malkov, Elettroliti, and Riot.