“When you look at government policies, there’s a massive transfer of wealth from the young and relatively poor members of society toward the old and relatively members of society,” says Veronique de Rugy, a Reason magazine columnist and economist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

In 1970, de Rugy notes, transfers from the young to the old took up about 20 percent of the federal budget. In a few years, that figure will break the 50 percent barrier as the population ages and Social Security and Medicare ramp up. Those programs are paid for by payroll taxes that suck up around 15 percent of every dollar most workers will ever make.

Yet the #Occupy movement spends most of its energy railing against “the 1 Percent” richest Americans, whose wealth is not gained at the expense of the “99 Percent.” Rather, it comes from providing goods and services that people want to consume.

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The Supreme Court is back in session with major decisions coming on the legality of Obamacare, Arizona’s anti-immigration law, and the right of property owners to due process.

How’s the court expected rule in these cases and what are the likely implications of its decisions?

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Presidential Candidate Ron Paul’s growing libertarian movement within the Republican Party is causing a high degree of angst among American liberals, who historically deflected any criticism of their crony capitalism by attacking Republicans as sycophants for the “American empire and big finance.” But with Ron Paul’s decades of authentic opposition of the “Military Industrial Complex” and the Federal Reserve, the left is being challenged as their vitriolic moralizing is boomeranging back at themselves and their Democrat allies.

An article: “Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals”, by Mat Stoller of the Roosevelt Institute and former Policy Advisor to Democrat Congressman Alan Grayson, describes Ron Paul as:

“dedicated first and foremost, to his political principles, and his work with his grassroots base reflects that. Politics and procedure simply didn’t matter to him.”

Stoller confesses that liberals treasure the Federal Reserve as a power-tool of big government they wield to advance their social and military agenda. He concedes Paul and his staff have been effective by working with “vigor and principle” to force greater transparency regarding the Fed’s central banking practices and is disturbed that as Paul’s libertarian movement grows the power of the Fed to advance the liberal agenda will be diminished.

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They touch our lives in so many ways, and Reason.tv kicks off awards season by acknowledging those who have devoted their lives to minding other people’s business.

Live (to tape) from the fourth floor of the Sepulveda Center in Los Angeles, it’s the third annual 2011 Nanny of the Year Awards!

These United States have produced many worthy nominees in 2011. Who could forget the city planner who threatened a woman with 93 days behind bars for growing vegetables or the state senator who did his best to outlaw crossing the street while listening to an iPod (shortly before pleading guilty to federal corruption charges).

But this year the golden Nanny goes to the Wolverine state pol who’s bent on making most any kind of teacher-student sex–not just a fireable offense, but a felony, even if the student is older than age 18 or even if teacher and student are middle-aged. (And, in an apparent attempt to secure nanny gold, our winner is also fighting to force school kids to recite the pledge in front of genuine made-in-America flags.)

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And another one bites the dust…

Politico is reporting that Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico is dropping out of the Republican primary to run as a Libertarian candidate in the 2012 elections.

Ironically, at a time of national deficit, Governor Gary Johnson is among the few candidates running for president who has actually cut government, but the media has repeatedly cut him from the debate. In the New Mexico statehouse, he vetoed 750 bills, fired 1,200 state employees and left the state with a billion-dollar budget surplus, which is the sort of toughness that Republicans claim to long for, but Johnson has only been invited to two of the nationally televised debates, much to his dismay.

Johnson reportedly expressed frustration that he was not being invited to the debates and that, despite doing better in the polls than Jon Huntsman or several of the other established candidates, he could get no media attention. In early September, Johnson polled higher than Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum, yet he wasn’t invited to the Reagan debate. He polled the same as Herman Cain at one point.

Media attention has been key for this election. Just ask Newt Gingrich, who used the force of his personality and the platform afforded by the mainstream media networks to run for president. For weeks Gingrich lacked organization, and his campaign had defections that seemed to have left it moribund, but he debated his way back into the game. That’s a lot easier to do if you actually get invited to the debates.

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“Ever since the War on Drugs, everything has hit the fan,” says Romesh Bhattacharji, former Narcotics Commissioner of India. Rather than continue the unnecessary and costly drug war, Bhattacharji advises the United States to simply “Relax, take it easy, [and] tolerate.”

Last month, at the Cato Institute’s “Ending the Global War on Drugs” conference, Bhattacharji’s sentiments were echoed by ex-drug czars, cops, politicians, intellectuals, liberal and conservative journalists, and even the former President of Brazil.

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High, persistent unemployment and a sluggish economy underscore what all but the most-dedicated supporters of Barack Obama know to be true: The president’s 2009 stimulus program was a massively expensive bust.

Understanding why the stimulus failed is an important step in understanding how the government can—and cannot—goose economic recovery. To get a better sense of how and where the stimulus went wrong, Reason.tv focused on Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that’s home to a large number of government contractors and other recipients of money earmarked for the sorts of “shovel ready” projects that were going to bring the economy back to life.

President Obama’s top economic advisor Larry Summers laid out ground rules for how stimulus dollars should be spent: The funds must be ”targeted” at resources idled by the recession, the interventions must be ”temporary,” and they needed to “timely,” or injected quickly into the economy.

None of that turned out to be true. “Even if you were to believe that government spending can trigger economic growth,” says Veronique de Rugy, Reason columnist and senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, “the money is never spent in a way that’s consistent with the conditions laid out by the Keynesians for it to be efficient.”

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“3 Reasons We Shouldn’t Bail Out Student Loan Borrowers” is written and narrated by Nick Gillespie and produced by Meredith Bragg.

About 3.33 minutes long. Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason’s YouTube channel to receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.

As the cumulative total of student loan borrowing approaches $1 trillion dollars, calls to forgive some or all of that debt are mounting. Federally guaranteed student loans make up more than half that total and Barack Obama is pushing to cap the amount any borrower must pay back in a given year and forgive outstanding balances after 20 years.

Among Occupy Wall Street protesters, calls to bail out student loan holders are arguably the single-most voiced demand and sites such as Forgive Student Loan debt beat the drum for immediate and widespread relief.

But forgiving student loan debt is a very bad idea for at least three reasons.

1. These loans are voluntary. All borrowers are excrutiatingly well-informed of how much they’re borrowing and how much they’re going to have to pay back.

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It turns out minding other people’s business is a worldwide affliction. In this very special edition of Nanny of the Month, we explore nannyism across the pond. Fat taxes are all the rage in Europe. After the skinny Danes slapped a tax on foods high in saturated fats, other European pols—including British Prime Minister David Cameron—have considered following suit. In Australia’s Northern Territory, they’re bringing alcohol prohibition back—incrementally, that is—by barring problem drinkers from buying grog. What could possibly go wrong?

But in the first-ever Nanny of the Month Global Edition, top dishonors go to the European Union’s control freaks who have cracked down on free-range kids, slapping regulations on everything from baby rattlers (which have brand-new noise restrictions) to blowing up balloons (not to be done by tots under age eight!). (more…)

“Someone has to do something for Guatemala. The government doesn’t do anything,” says a Guatemalan resident Reason.tv calls “Miguel.”

In the past few years, the drug war has resulted in more than 40,000 deaths in Mexico and the situation in Guatemala is just as bleak. Last year alone, 5,000 people died in drug-war-related incidents.

Corrupt police do little to protect Guatemalans, and Guatemala’s corrupt court system convicts only 5 percent of arrested criminals.

In Guatemala City, private security guards outnumber police officers five-to-one, and robberies at gunpoint are common. For the impoverished people who live in Guatemala’s biggest city, life has become extremely dangerous.

Not all crime in Guatemala is committed by drug gangs, but there is no aspect of life in the country that has not been made far worse by prohibition and the black markets and violence such a policy inevitably creates.

This past May, Reason.tv’s Paul Feine spoke with “Miguel” about what it’s like to live in a city controlled by drug gangs and corrupt cops.

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“I’ll tell you a secret. I got some money and I should be taxed more.”

That’s what an #OccupyWallStreet protester told Republican presidential candidate and former two-term Gov. Gary Johnson (R-N.M.) as he toured Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park on the evening of Tuesday, October 18.

“I actually inherited money when George W. Bush decided to have no estate tax,” the protester continues, “and I think that is totally outrageous. So I decided to keep 20 percent for myself and give 80 percent away. But I think if we rely on the kindness of strangers that the poor will keep getting screwed, so civil libertarians don’t work for me for the poor.”

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“[Teaching] is the only workplace, the only occupation, where by and large you are not paid, promoted, recognized, measured in any way having to do with your performance, only having to do with how long you’ve been breathing,” says journalist and media entrepreneur Steven Brill.

His new book, Class Warfare, chronicles the rise of a reform movement that’s bringing a measure of accountability and choice to public schools. The book grew out of Brill’s widely read 2009 New Yorker piece about the “rubber room,” a holding pen for New York City teachers who couldn’t be fired after they were removed from their classrooms for poor performance.

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Nanny of the Month turns two-years-old this October, and the busybodies who mind your own business show no signs of letting up.

Take formerly dog-friendly New York City which has banished man’s best friend from any establishment that serves food or alcohol (and that includes outdoor patios!). Then there’s Michigan Gov. Rick Snyner who’s tackling childhood obesity by introducing a statewide database to keep anonymous tabs on kiddies’ weight.

But the this very special nanny comes to us from a California city that is fighting (and fining) a couple that hosts Bible studies at home. Presenting Reason.tv’s Nanny of the Month for September 2011: San Juan Capistrano City Attorney Omar Sandoval!

The city slapped Chuck and Stephanie Fromm with fines totalling $300 for violating a municipal code which prohibits religious, fraternal, or nonprofit organizations from meeting on residential property without a conditional use permit (CUP). The Fromm’s gatherings can attract as many as 50 people and the city says that causes parking problems, but the Fromm’s disagree saying there is plenty of parking in their semi-rural neighborhood where large homes sit on even larger lots (the Fromm’s lot includes a corral, barn, and large lawn). The Fromms have held their gatherings since 1994 and say their neighbors support them, except for one woman whose recent complaint sparked city action.

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Peter Bagge is the pre-eminent libertarian cartoonist. An intelligent, anti-authoritarian streak runs throughout his canon, especially in his hit comic book from the 1990s, HATE , a hilarious and politically incorrect series focusing on the semi-autobiographical slacker-misanthrope Buddy Bradley. Bagge frequently contributes his own brand of “cartoon journalism” to the pages of Reason magazine where he also serves as a Contributing Editor.

Bagge discusses how he came to define his libertarian political worldview at a young age, and laments his frustration at being an artist who’s political views are frequently mischaracterized as “right wing” by other artists, simply for failing to be in lock-step with the rest of the predominatly progressive-left art world.

He also discusses a recent Reason assignment which took him within the walls of a women’s prison, and how the experience led him to question his own preconceived notions about the drug war and involuntary incarceration for drug users.

His funny, outrageous and often introspective anthology of Reason cartoon journalism, “Everyone is Stupid Except Me (And Other Astute Observations)” is available from Fantagraphics.

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In 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act, which gave federal, state, and local governments unprecedented power to shape residential life. One of the Housing Act’s main initiatives - ”urban renewal” -  destroyed about 2,000 communities in the 1950s and ’60s and forced more than 300,000 families from their homes. Overall, about half of urban renewal’s victims were black, a reality that led to James Baldwin’s famous quip that “urban renewal means Negro removal.”

New York City’s Manhattantown (1951) was one of the first projects authorized under urban renewal and it set the model not only for hundreds of urban renewal projects but for the next 60 years of eminent domain abuse at places such as Poletown, New London, and Atlantic Yards. The Manhattantown project destroyed six blocks on New York City’s Upper West Side, including an African-American community that dated to the turn of the century. The city sold the land for a token sum to a group of well-connected Democratic pols to build a middle-class housing development. Then came the often repeated bulldoze-and-abandon phenomenon: With little financial skin in the game, the developers let the demolished land sit vacant for years.

The community destroyed at Manhattantown was a model for the tight-knit, interconnected neighborhoods later celebrated by Jane Jacobs and other critics of top-down redevelopment. In the early 20th century, Manhattantown was briefly the center of New York’s black music scene. A startling roster of musicians, writers, and artists resided there: the composer Will Marion Cook, vaudeville star Bert Williams, opera singer Abbie Mitchell, James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosemond, muralist Charles Alston, writer and historian Arturo Schomburg, Billie Holiday (whose mother also owned a restaurant on 99th Street), Butterfly McQueen of “Gone with the Wind” fame, and the actor Robert Earl Jones.

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Reason’s Nick Gillespie talks with the one-and-only Penn Jillette about his best-selling new book, God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales, his friendship with Glenn Beck, skepticism versus cynicism, the role of religion in terrorism, why he’s a libertarian, and much more in a wide-ranging conversation.

Penn Jillette is the larger, louder half of Penn & Teller. For the magical duo’s official website, go here.

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Reason’s Matt Welch, coauthor of the new book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America, talks with Emily Ekins, Reason’s polling director, about what the new Reason Rupe Public Opinion Survey tells us about how Americans think about federal spending, and debt.

Ekins argues that Americans primarily want to cut spending, not raise revenue, to deal with the debt crisis.

“[Americans] believe that [cutting spending] will…do more to help the economy than hurt,” Ekins says. “Fifty-seven percent believe that, where as only 20% believe that it would mostly harm the economy.”

The Reason-Rupe survey is online here and here (pdf).

This Reason Foundation project is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation.

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At FreedomFest in July, Reason’s Nick Gillespie talked with investor (and Reason Foundation donor) Don Smith about the economy and his outlook for the market. Smith expects the U.S. will continue putting off a meaningful resolution to its debt problem, but he’s thrilled the issue is finally getting attention. Despite recent market woes, Smith is bullish on stocks: With money-market funds paying almost nothing, he says, where else are people going to put their money?

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Many have wondered why Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former Obama administration official as Ambassador to China, climate-change believer, ally of Harry Reid and all-around anti-Tea Party candidate is running for the Republican presidential nomination.  Were the 2012 Republican primaries your typical RINO race (not that there aren’t abundant RINOs in the current field, at least in this author’s view), it would be clear that Huntsman would be setting himself up as the establishment, “civil,” “grown up” candidate, in the mold of a more liberal Mitt Romney.

However, primaries are determined by the most ardent partisans, which for the Republican party today certainly means Tea Partiers, and conservatives and libertarians who hold similar views to those of the Tea Party.  Given that it is abundantly clear that those who will determine the Republican nominee will never accept a person with Huntsman’s political views, one must wonder why he is in the race.

I believe I have found a plausible answer.  Jon Huntsman Jr. is potentially the key to four more years of Barack Obama, not by running as a Republican but by running as an Independent.  Allow me to explain.

By running to the left of the rest of the Republican field, Huntsman likely has no intention of competing in the Republican primary.  Instead, he may use the Republican primary and his substantial personal wealth to set up for a run in the general election as an Independent — as the “reasonable” candidate in a field characterized by the mainstream media as consisting of terrorist Tea Partiers practicing radical brinksmanship and wanting to take us back to the Antebellum era, and President Obama who has proven ineffective, weak and ever-willing to compromise.

Independents who buy this line thus may look to spend their vote on a more moderate and palatable candidate.  Jon Huntsman would be their man.

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