The Reason Roundtable

Some of America's largest cities are ratcheting minimum wage up, while progressive luminaries are calling to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Only evil people would oppose this, right?

Unless...That's what the robots want us to think?

When the government uses minimum wage laws to abolish cheap labor, it makes employees more expensive. Intentions aside, this compels businesses to reduce hours, lay off employees, or automate them to save on costs. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that raising the minimum wage to a mere $10.10 per hour would result in half a million people losing their jobs.

In the latest Mostly Weekly Andrew Heaton explores the minimum wage, and why the feel-good legislation comes with disastrous effects.

It's almost nine months into Donald Trump's presidency and here's a question for the old "Libertarians for Trump" crowd: How much more winning can you take?

There was a small but vocal band of limited-government folks who vocally supported the billionaire real estate mogul on the grounds that he couldn't possibly be as bad as Hillary Clinton or even most of the other Republican candidates, especially when it came to foreign policy.

Leading the pack was economist Walter Block, who beat me in a competitive debate in New York City right before the election. Block's argument was that "the perfect is the enemy of the good" and "the Donald is the most congruent with [the libertarian] perspective" especially on foreign policy.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, but what Donald Trump has shown us so far just isn't good enough.

Produced by Todd Krainin. Written by Nick Gillespie. Cameras by Jim Epstein. Production assistance by Andrew Heaton.

Star Trek gave us a glimpse of what might be possible in the future. Now our technology is catching up. But would we be able to fly the Enterprise today?

Probably not. We have so many rules and regulations that the Enterprise wouldn't get off the ground.

The food replicator would curtail our eating choices, the TSA would make it hard to board, the Transportation Department would ban "transporting."

Is "Star Trek: The Libertarian Edition" possible? William Shatner sat down to debate the idea with John Stossel at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas.

Produced by Naomi Brockwell. Edited by Joshua Swain.

On a hot summer night in July, crowds of people gathered in a remote wooded area in front of a concert stage. Their faces were covered in clown makeup and their arms and legs painted with hatchetman tattoos.

By the end of the night, they'd all be covered in sticky, cheap soda.

This was the annual "Gathering of the Juggalos" in Oklahoma City, where thousands flock to see their favorite rap group, Insane Clown Posse (ICP).

The Juggalos aren't just ICP fans— they've built a cultural identity around the music, the rap duo, and what it represents. In turn, ICP has stood up for its followers as they've been harassed and profiled all over the country. Unwittingly, these two white rappers from Detroit have become some of the nation's most determined advocates for free expression.

Written and produced by Paul Detrick. Shot by Alex Manning.

Some news outlets have claimed that there's a troubling "pipeline" from libertarianism to the most revolting corners of the alt-right movement.

Their evidence is that white supremacist Christopher Cantwell, the star of a Vice documentary about the racist, tiki torch-wielding Charlottesville mob, was once a figure in the libertarian Free State project, and alt-right icon and white nationalist Richard Spencer himself was once a Ron Paul supporter and self-identified as a libertarian.

Anyone who claims to care about individual liberty should reject the overt racism in Charlottesville, the broadly defined alt-right and the watered down "alt-lite" variants represented by provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulous and YouTube personalities Stefan Molyneux and Laura Southern, as well as the right-wing nationalism pushed by recently fired White House strategist Steve Bannon.

These expressions of right wing populism are the anti-thesis of libertarianism and they collapse under their own logic.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Graphics by Brett Raney. Music by Kai Engel.

Donald Trump's plan to double down on the war in Afghanistan delighted establishment journalists.

Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) reacted to the news with a two-day tweet storm explaining why the 16-year war has been a colossal failure.

John Stossel sat down with Rep. Massie in July at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas to discuss why the U.S. should immediately withdraw from this "graveyard of empires." Meanwhile, the war on drugs in Afghanistan has resulted in a doubling of opium production.

In the latest episode of Mostly Weekly, we're going to talk about "sports"—that thing where we gather around to watch a muscular stranger put a regulation size ball in a specific location.

Why are taxpayers forced to pony up cash for athletic ventures that don't benefit them? Franchise owners routinely extort generous stadium subsidies through threats of relocation. Universities jack up student rates to subsidize athletic programs that should be self-sustaining. And the Olympics is economically devastating to every municipality foolish enough to get suckered by one of the oldest scams around.

Host Andrew Heaton explores the sports phenomenon and why we should quit throwing other people's money at it.

"In 30 years, I will be younger than today, not older," says José Luis Cordeiro, who's a founding faculty member at Singularity University, a Silicon Valley think tank devoted to futurism. "Why? Because we are going to have rejuvenation techniques, and these experiments are beginning right now."

A mechanical engineer who studied at MIT, Cordeiro has worked in fields ranging from monetary policy to petroleum engineering, and he created the first formal "future studies" course at the Austrian School of Economics in Venezuela, his birth country.

Cordeiro is a extreme optimist, who says technological progress will solve most of the world's problems. He sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie at the annual libertarian conference Freedom Fest in Las Vegas to discuss immortality, artificial intelligence, and the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.

Star athletes earn far more than bench warmers—why can't schools adopt the same approach to remunerating talent? In most U.S. public schools, compensation is determined by one factor: years served in the classroom.

But in South Korea, the best instructors are treated like star athletes. Some earn millions.

The late Andrew Coulson, a former senior fellow at the Cato Institute, partnered with the Free to Choose Network to create the film School, Inc., which examines some of these free market successes abroad.

But School, Inc. is three hours! So John Stossel made a two-part short-attention-span version. In part two, Coulson looks at private school innovation abroad. And he travels to India, where poor citizens pay to send their kids to private schools to keep them out of the dreadful public system.

America's public schools fail our kids, and bureaucrats suffocate even the best teachers.

The late Andrew Coulson, a leading advocate of free-market education and a former senior fellow at the Cato Institute, partnered with the Free to Choose Network to create the recent PBS film School, Inc., which examines the problems with America's government-run schools and how to fix them.

But School, Inc. is three hours! So John Stossel made a two-part short-attention-span version. Part one of our abbreviated treatment explores why government-run schools are incapable of innovating, and retells the story of superstar teacher Jamie Escalante (made famous by the 1988 film Stand and Deliver), who was forced out by jealous colleagues.

In part two, which will run tomorrow, Coulson travels the world in search of ideas to fix America's public schools.

Coulson passed away in 2016 following a 15-month battle with brain cancer. For more on his contribution to the field, read his classic 1999 book, Market Education: The Unknown History.

Produced by Maxim Lott. Edited by Joshua Swain.