Support Reason and Help Reach the Next Generation of Libertarians

We’ve got just two full days left in our 2014
Webathon.

We’re looking to raise $200,000 to support our print, online,
and video journalism over the coming year. We’re published by the
501(c)3 Reason Foundation, so your
donations don’t just come with fun swag ranging from subscriptions
to the dead-tree mag to winter-cap beanies to signed copies of
staff-written books, and more: They’re also tax deductible.
Go
here to give!

Your gifts won’t just help us produce more award-winning
articles, videos, and exposes like Peter Suderman’s outing of Chad
Henderson, the widely touted first person to successfully sign up
during the program’s launch, as
a fraud); Tracy Oppenheimer’s video investigation of an Auburn,
Alalbama cop who was fired for refusing to
go along with ticket quotas; and Lenore Skenazy’s
reporting on a working mother who was arrested for letting
her daughter play unsupervised (the mother was fired from her
job to boot). Your gifts won’t just allow us to send videographers
and reporters to Ferguson, Missouri to report on breaking news
about police-abuse protests and to dispatch people to confront
Occupy and global-warming activists in New York, Los Angeles, and
Washington, D.C. 

Reason is also working hard to help reach younger people and
readers with our optimistic libertarian message of “Free Minds and
Free Markets.” As Reason’s widely discussed summer poll found,
millennials are less partisan than older Americans and they are, in
the words of Reason’s Polling Director Emily Ekins, the “politically
unclaimed generation.”

Millennials have grown up in a world of
relentless government intrusion in every aspect of their lives and
an unbroken series of government failures, too: Increasing
nanny-state rules governing everything from soda pop to smoking to
riding bicycles without helmets; two long and failed wars, bailouts
of favored mega-firms, a useless stimulus, and the slowest economic
recovery in post-war memory.

As Ekins and I wrote in our cover story for Reason‘s special
issue on millennials, younger Americans aren’t

the second coming of Murray Rothbard-style anarchism [and don’t
embody whole-scale] Reaganesque disdain for government solutions.
While millennials clearly prefer free markets to state-managed
ones, they are split on whether free markets are better at
promoting economic mobility (37 percent) than are government
programs (36 percent). Seven in 10 support government guarantees
for housing, health care, education, and income for the truly
needy. Yet almost as many—65 percent—think overall
government spending should be reduced, and 58 percent favor cutting
taxes.

Like all generations before them, millennials are trying
to figure out what kind of world they want to create and live in.
And more than previous generations, they are open to hearing about
alternatives to the worn-out right-left, liberal-conservative,
Democratic-Republican antinomies that are plainly not working
anymore. Raised in the Internet Age, millennials intuitively
understand that much power is being decentralized but they also are
starved for serious discussions and explications of the sorts of
economic, political, and social institutions that will allow for
maximum freedom of expression while taking care of the neediest
among us. Reason has those answers—or is at least staging that
conversation in a way that representatives of the old ways of
thinking just can’t or won’t.

Check out our special landing page devoted to
millennials for a sense of what I’m talking about. There you’ll
find a dozen-plus pieces that reveal a fresh, new way of thinking
about things, one that stresses choice over control and the great
ways that new technologies and mind-sets are opening up vast
possibilities. And as important, we look at the ways in which
older, wealthier, more powerful people are trying to maintain a
status quo that screws over their own kids’ future.

It’s precisely Reason’s principled messages of social tolerance
and fiscal responsiblity that offers a new way of thinking about
politics, culture, and ideas. We reject authoritarian politicial
correctness while embracing a robust appreciation for and defense
of true lifestyle diversity. We lay out policy solutions that will
provide for the truly needy and indigent without destroying the
economy via endlessly growing handouts for wealthier, older
Americans. We embrace a foreign policy that is based on engagment
and true national defense rather than endless intervention and
meddling. We celebrate hipster capitalists and entrepreneurs
without promoting crony capitalism for whomever happens to know the
next president, speaker of the House, and Senate majority
leader.

Those are among the reasons why libertarianism and Reason
appeals to younger Americans. We offer a principled alternative to
the demonstrated failures of ideological and political identities
that stagger about like zombies, mostly dead but still
destructive.

Fully 40 percent of Reason.com’s audience is under 35 years old
and over 55 percent of Reason TV’s YouTube audience is under 35
years old. We’re speaking to these people because we respect them
and bring a sense of urgency and optimism to our work as well as a
sense of humor and epistemological humility to our world view.

Please help us reach even more younger Americans and
grow the next generation of libertarians. Your tax-deductible
donations will not just help us do more and better journalism. It
will help you create a future that is freer, more innovative, more
prosperous, and filled with people who understand the value of
“Free Minds and Free Markets.”

Go
here now to support Reason!