Reason Is THE Libertarian Voice in National Debates About Politics, Culture, and Ideas

Note: This is Reason’s annual webathon week, during which we ask our audience to support our activities with tax-deductible donations. If you like what we do, please consider supporting us. More details here.

Check out this novel take on the sexual harassment and assault scandals that are clear-cutting vast parts of Hollywood, the news business, and private companies:

We’re rightfully concerned about how the internet gives corporations more opportunities to exert power over consumers, but we talk far less about the flip side: We have more power over companies now, too. For better or worse, we’ve all become remarkably effective at mobilizing it to our own causes.

In contrast, look at Washington. If either Representative John Conyers Jr. or Senator Al Franken were in today’s corporate world, they’d be long gone. And just imagine if Roy Moore was a candidate for a C-suite job this month. He’d have no shot….

The modern American capitalist system is far from perfect. But for all its flaws, our system — and the digital communication channels it enabled — has delivered social justice more swiftly and effectively than supposedly more enlightened public bodies tend to.

As we observe and adjust to the sociosexual storm we’re all in, let’s appreciate the powers and paradigms making it possible: feminism, but also free markets.

That’s an op-ed written by Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown and published in The New York Times earlier this week. It’s not simply a sharp, bold, and provocative take on changing social mores, it’s an explicitly libertarian take that stresses individual agency and responsibility, the ways in which new forms of communication empower the voiceless, and why even powerful corporations can be brought to heel by market forces.

Brown’s piece, titled “NBC Didn’t Fire Matt Lauer. We Did,” exemplifies one of the major services Reason provides for its readers and like-minded libertarians. Not only do we publish dozens of articles every day, hundreds of videos and podcasts every year, and an award-winning magazine every month, our writers and editors appear all over the place, representing libertarian views where they are mostly lacking.

We don’t just preach to the choir at Reason, we go into the dragon’s lair and do battle with right-wingers, left-wingers, and everyone in between who wants to limit the way you can live your life. We strive to be your voice in national debates about politics, culture, and ideas, a voice that argues for hard-core libertarian principles such as autonomy and self-ownership, the right to be left alone, and the ability to live without having to ask permission for every deviation from the “norm” when it comes to lifestyle, business, or whatever.

Editor-at-Large Matt Welch is a one-man wrecking crew when it comes to appearing on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, making sure that “Free Minds and Free Markets” have a seat at the table; he’s a regular on satellite radio to boot. He and I have both had memorable appearances on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, where libertarians are greeted the way Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheikh were greeted by professional wrestling crowds in the 1980s. In recent months, Liz Brown has been joined in the Times’ pages by colleagues Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Robby Soave. We show up in The Washington Post, too, which employs a couple of former Reason staffers (David Weigel and Radley Balko), The Daily Beast, The Week, and just about every place in print, online, or on air that you can think of.

Later today, for instance, you can catch me on NPR’s wildly popular show On the Media, where I’ll debate net neutrality with Tom Wheeler, the former Federal Communications Commission chairman who implemented those very rules.

We’re not shrinking violets when it comes to representing, that’s for sure. We take our ideas, beliefs, and policies seriously. And we take seriously our role as the leading libertarian organization advocating not simply for reducing the size, scope, and spending of government but for a world in which individuals are free to pursue happiness as they define it.

I’ll leave you with more recent example of how Reason is taking its message—and yours—to the streets. Or at least to people who haven’t been exposed to libertarian ideas. On November 3, Katherine Mangu-Ward and I debated the editors of the socialist magazine Jacobin about the ethics and effects of capitalism at New York City’s Cooper Union. It was packed house (900 tickets were sold!) and mostly hostile not simply to laissez-faire but to even the idea of private property or wage work.

This sort of missionary work is part and parcel of what we do. In advertiser-speak, it’s part of our unique-selling proposition: We go out into the world spreading the good word of Reason wherever and whenever we can create an opportunity. Even and maybe especially in hostile territory.

Note: This is Reason’s annual webathon week, during which we ask our audience to support our activities with tax-deductible donations. If you like what we do, please consider supporting us. More details here.