The Reason Roundtable

What do you think of when you think of plastic surgery? Fish-lipped women on the Real Housewives shows? Or maybe aging Hollywood actors who look like burn victims. Michael Jackson's disappearing nose? Or Lindsay Lohan's rubberized lips? When internet slideshows of plastic surgery fails are only a click away, it's easy to think about facelifts, eye jobs, liposuction, Botox injections, and all the rest as a mark of narcissistic people who refuse to grow old as nature intended.

But that's not the only—and certainly not the best—way to think about plastic surgery, as the new documentary, Take My Nose...Please!, which will be premiering in Los Angeles and New York City this weekend, makes abundantly clear.

Directed by the nearly 90-year-old journalism legend Joan Kron, Take My Nose...Please! follows two actresses as they contemplate getting work done. Along the way, viewers learn the history of modern plastic surgery and are exposed to a powerful argument that plastic surgery is just one more way of improving ourselves, like diet, exercise, and education.

Intro video produced by Todd Krainin and written by Nick Gillespie. Interview produced by Mark McDaniel.

Want to earn money showing someone around? It's not as simple as it sounds. Many cities require a license in order to do that.

It is part three of our Bottleneckers series.

Produced by Naomi Brockwell. Edited by Joshua Swain.

This Constitution Day, John Stossel asks: what's the most important part of the 230-year-old document?

Many people we asked in New York couldn't name a single right.

Parts of the Constitution are hard to read. But they're still important! John Stossel goes through some of the most important ones, like:

-- The right to free speech

-- The right of the people to bear arms,

-- The guarantee of trial by jury

-- The 13th amendment, which outlawed slavery

Stossel also asks liberty-supporting people like Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) for their picks.

Produced by Maxim Lott. Edited by Joshua Swain.

With Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey in the news, the country is being treated to a real-time debate over the sins of so-called price gouging, or sharp hikes in the cost of food, water, fuel, and other essential items in affected areas.

Defenders of gouging, including many libertarians, stress that price hikes force customers to prioritize their purchases while incentivizing suppliers to bring necessities to market. So if jugs of water are selling at $10 a gallon, businesses have a motivation to truck them in. And at that price, no one's going to use them to wash their cars.

Critics, however, say that it's immoral to use the price mechanism to meter out essentials in a crisis.

Both sides ignore a far more-important reality: Local and national businesses routinely give away goods and services more efficiently than public-sector responders or charities can manage.

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

EPA Chief Scott Pruitt has set out to transform the agency he leads to a greater extent than any of Trump's other cabinet appointees, pledging to end what he dubbed the agency's "anti-energy agenda" by loosening requirements on carbon emissions and eliminating land use restrictions.

In his first speech to EPA employees, Pruitt laid out his goal of returning the agency to its core focus of protecting the environment while following what he called "the letter of the law."

"I believe that we as an agency, and we as a nation, can be both pro-energy and jobs and pro-environment," Pruitt told his staff.

Environmentalists vehemently opposed Pruitt's appointment, depicting him as a climate change denier determined to undermine the EPA's core mission of protecting the environment.

One of Pruitt's first targets is a controversial rule on water pollution put in place by the Obama administration that he deemed a "power grab" by environmental regulators.

To better understand why property rights advocates applauded the move, consider the case of fourth-generation farmer John Duarte, who has fought a protracted and costly legal battle with federal regulators over how to till his 450-acre farm in Tehama County, California.

Produced by Alexis Garcia. Camera by Zach Weissmueller and Todd Krainin.

The Vietnam War led to more than 1.3 million deaths and it's one of the most divisive, painful, and poorly understood episodes in American history.

Documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have spent the past decade making a film that aims to exhume the war's buried history. Their 10-part series, which premieres on PBS next week, is a comprehensive look at the secrecy, disinformation, and spin surrounding Vietnam, and its lasting impact on two nations. The 18-hour film combines never-before-seen historical footage, with testimonies from nearly 80 witnesses, including soldiers on both sides of the conflict, leaders of the protest movement, and civilians from North and South Vietnam.

With the release of The Vietnam War, Gillespie sat down with Burns and Novick to talk about the decade-long process of making their new film, and why understanding what happened in Vietnam is essential to interpreting American life today.

Produced by Todd Krainin. Interview by Nick Gillespie.

The national debt just skipped past $20 trillion, which puts America's indebtedness at "unfathomably staggering." (And the chunk you owe personally at "a lot.")

The math behind the national debt is so complex that Reason TV decided to lean on "Cosmos" to explain it.

Written and produced by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton. Edited by Austin Bragg.

Four years after the Snowden leaks, the government is still collecting Americans' private information. Though the NSA claims it ended bulk collection of domestic phone calls, the agency is still operating several other far-reaching domestic spying programs.

Now there's a way to end these unconstitutional practices. The NSA gets its authority to spy on U.S. Citizens from Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The law will expire this year after it hits its five-year sunset. Lawmakers will soon be deliberating over whether to renew Section 702 for another five or maybe even make it permanent.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Music by Kai Engel and Lee Rosevere.

"The Republican Party hates libertarians," says Nicholas Sarwark, chairman of the Libertarian National Committee. "And as they show their disgust and distate, and try to punish their legislators, what they're doing is driving them into our arms."

Sarwark sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie at the annual libertarian conference Freedom Fest in Las Vegas to discuss Donald Trump's effect on libertarianism, the LP's plans for 2018, and Gary Johnson's impact as a presidential candidate.

New York comedian Dave Smith says he "became a libertarian through the Ron Paul movement. "He challenged all of my preconceived notions about what government was [and]...inspired me to read all of these people, like Rothbard, Mises, and Friedman."

When Bernie Sanders became a national figure, what Smith hated most about the Vermont senator was that he was aesthetically like a carbon copy of Paul—"a kind of disheveled, older guy who's just a truth teller."

[The difference was that] Bernie would go around to these kids and be like, 'Hey, so you're a college kid in 2017, you're among the richest, freest, most privileged people who have ever existed, [so] billionaires should be paying your bills for you!'...It was the difference between a propagandist and a truth teller."

Smith, 34, is a regular on the New York Cit stand up circuit and hosts two popular podcasts on the GaS Digital Network, Legion of Skanks and Part of the Problem. On September 11, he'll release his first comedy special, Libertas, which will be available for download here.

Smith sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about how Trump manipulates the left, why the media's reaction to the Syria bombing was "the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life," how libertarians can appeal to Millennials, and his decision to have the alt-right lightning rod and "racist shock jock" Christopher Cantwell as a recent guest on his podcast.