We’re nearing the end of our annual webathon, during which we ask readers of Reason.com to support our efforts to produce increasingly influential, principled libertarian journalism to poltiics, culture, and ideas. Our audience continues to grow in leaps and bounds, with 45,000 print subscribers and over 4 million visits to Reason.com each month. Last year alone, Reason TV more than doubled its viewership by pulling 2.2 million watchers monthly at Facebook and YouTube.
Tune in to Reason’s Facebook page tomorrow (Tuesday, December 6) an 12 noon eastern time for a livestream with me, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and a gaggle of guest stars. We start at noon sharp and will keep going until the cows come home, answering every question, responding to every comment, and turning on each other like high-profile detainees under federal investigation.
As I’m fond of saying, the Libertarian Moment is now. The old parties are dying, losing membership in droves and each incapable of gaining clear victories in the presidential race. That Trump won the Electoral College while handily losing the popular vote to the other least-liked major-party candidate is all you need to know to realize we are in the last days of the 20th century, when a two-party duopoly could force us to pick one of their mediocre, visonless candidates. No more. Trump’s minority win, built on the back of racial and ethnic resentments in a world that is globablizing full speed ahead and on the promise of bringing back manufacturting jobs that peaked as a percentage of employment in 1943, is the surest sign he’s the end of a line, not the creator of a new operating system that will take us boldly, confidently, and prosperously into the 21st century.
As Matt Welch and I detailed in The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America, even during the Great Recession and a slow-growth economy, our personal lives, our cultural lives, our technological, culinary, and work lives are getting better and better. We have more options on how to live than ever before, more freedom to do what we want to do, eat what we want to eat, marry whom we want to marry, and on and on. It’s only in the areas directly controlled or regulated by government—health care, education, retirement, foreign policy—that you see resistance to the sorts of rapid change and individual empowerment and personalization we take for granted everytime we fire up our smartphones.
This is THE value proposotion of Reason in all its iterations and platforms, and why we ask you to support our work with a tax-deductible donation. Uniquely among leading sources of news, commentary, and analysis, we:
- speak to the existing community of self-identified libertarians (of all parties and of no parties), giving you news, comfort, and a place to call to home in an often-cold and uncaring (if not actively hostile) world.
- we help to create the next generation of libertarians, of people who believe in Free Minds and Free Markets, of social tolerance and governmental responsiblity.
- we speak to our peers in the media who often are looking for a coherent and powerful framework through which to understand current events, history, and the direction of the future. Characters as different as John Stossel, Drew Carey, “renegade” historian Thaddeus Russell, and Camille Paglia have spoken of being influenced mightily by Reason.
- we speak to policymakers, people in the nonprofit sector, and in the business world in a similar way, giving them pragmatic solutions to pressing policy questions but also providing an aspirational way of thinking about creating surplus good in a world of scarce resources.
- finally, we are YOUR voice in the world of public opinion and media. Reason publishes a widely read monthly magazine, we post hundreds of thousands of words and images every month at our website, and we create hundreds of original videos and podcasts every year. We’re not rehashing the conventional wisdom in any of this or doing the dreary old “horse-race” game of betting on which old nag of a party will get the glue factory first.
No, we’re talking back to right-wingers and left-wingers and we’re winning the broad center that’s tired of treating politics like one more season of Survivor. We’re introducing you to characters such as Cody Wilson, the creator of the 3D printed gun, and Ross Ulbricht, the Eagle Scout imprisoned for life for running the Silk Road website. We’re flying out to Ferguson, Missouri to see what the hell is going on between cops and minorities, and we’re showing how bitcoin is allowing starving Venezuealans to get food off the grid. And we’re talking with cutting-edge entrepreneurs such as Whole Foods’ John Mackey, Overstock.com’s Patrick Byrne, and Iron Chef Geoff Zakarian.
So, if you dig what we do, please consider giving us a tax-deductible donation. We might write the words or take the pictures, but it’s YOU who makes it all happen. For nearly 50 years, Reason has been libertarian voice in the wilderness. Since our start in 1968 as a very humble journal, we’ve all come long and far. A fistful of Nobel economists were hard-core libertarians. The word libertarian is increasingly recognized and popular. Reason articles, videos, people show up everywhere. The old system in politics is crumbling—think of it! The Dems and the Reps have EVERY advantage and all they could nominate were two tired, old, nostalgic, backward-looking meat sacks who want to control more and more of our lives at the very moment we have more freedom than ever!—and the question before us, in 2017 and 2117 and beyond is: What kind of world do you want to live to be 200 in? Hillary’s, Trump’s, or Reason’s? Your donation of $25 or $100 or more might help make the difference.
And do tune in to Reason’s Facebook page tomorrow (Tuesday, December 6) an 12 noon eastern time for a livestream with me, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and a gaggle of guest stars. We start at noon sharp and will keep going until the cows come home, answering every question, responding to every comment, and turning on each other like high-profile detainees under federal investigation.
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