I have watched Ron Paul for a very long time and one trend I see over and over is the split that emerges between people of roughly under the age of 40 and those who are older when his name is mentioned. I have no polling data to back this up, but young people seem to like Ron Paul and older people seem not to.

This is by no means uniform. I know plenty of older folks who love the good doctor and plenty of young people who do not like him, but generally the above statement holds I think. Why is this?

Fundamentally I believe it comes down to faith in the markets and whether or not one is playing for the future, or if one is clinging to the past.

Young people have much to lose in the economic quagmire we find ourselves in, namely their future. They recognize that times have changed, that the old economic regime is corrupt, and in order to get things going in any real way (not government stimulated) fundamental reforms must be implemented. Many, including myself would embrace a gold standard or a standard based on a basket of commodities. This is a radical departure from the Fed centered fiat currency regime. It would disrupt the current economic order, but a reset is needed and many young people recognize that it is vital that we head in this direction before it is too late. The economic hubris of the 20th century has come home to roost. We would like a real economy.

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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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With the rise of Ron Paul in the Presidential Primary polls; America may be ready to crush crony capitalists by embracing “libertarianism.” As the founding philosophy that once unified our nation; today libertarianism represents the true existential threat to the crony capitalism that has flourished for decades in both established political parties. But with both political parties in decay and independents positioned to determine the outcome of next year’s Presidential and Congressional elections; voters seem ready to embrace a political philosophy that puts strict limits on all government activity in order to maximize individual liberty and economic freedom.

Libertarianism is defined as “any political position that advocates a radical redistribution of power from the coercive state to voluntary associations of free individuals.” To the political party establishments who fund their existence on the ability to attain this power and rent it back to their crony capitalist fellow travelers; libertarianism was dismissed as a “popular, dogmatic political cult in the vein of Marxism-Leninism.” The political elites have been comforted that “libertarians would never get hold of true power – for unlike their Marxist-Leninist brethren, they are a political cult without a broad base of support; they have no proletariat and no peasantry!” But in the age of social networking’s viral formation of voluntary associations at virtually no cost; libertarianism has found its broad base of support that can competes favorably versus paid advertising that drives the “peasant” support of the established parties.

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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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“I’ll say this plainly, I’ve said it before – Taxation is theft. It presumes the government has a higher claim on our property than we do,” says Judge Andrew Napolitano, the host of Fox Business’ Freedom Watch and the author of the new book, It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with the outspoken libertarian commentator to discuss topics ranging from abortion (the judge is fiercely pro-life) to Occupy Wall Street (he welcomes the protest against corporatism) to Rep. Ron Paul (“the Barry Goldwater” of our moment) to the role of religion in the quest for freedom.

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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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I had lost touch with my friend and businessman Domingo Bernardo many years ago, and he finally turned up on Facebook.  Domingo’s story is an incredible one:

My father “earned” his way out of Cuba by working essentially as a slave on the sugar cane fields for 2 years, where more than 25% of the people died within a year from malaria, as a punishment for asking for an exit visa.  We went back to Spain with the clothes on our backs (I was a toddler).  When Franco died, many Spaniards (my whole family is from Spain, my parents were in Cuba for only a few years), figured Socialism would come in, so many (like us) left, running from socialism to a country where we knew no one, had no jobs, and didn’t understand the culture or the language.  Socialism always does that — creates an incentive for the bright, the educated, the entrepreneurs and the wealthy to leave, leaving the country with what?  So we came to the U.S.

I learned English at 14, worked hard to get out of the ghetto, got into Cornell with a special language waiver, managed to get a Cornell engineering degree, then joined the Navy. Part of the reason I served was that I felt like I owed the country something for taking us in. I got hurt in Bosnia,came home, worked hard to establish a business, and now I’ve left my country, because I can’t take the Socialist slant anymore, and I am so tired of the regulations that make it almost impossible to do business in the U.S.  When I closed my home theatre installation business, I was not an engineer; I was a paper-filler-outer.  I have ZERO incentive to start my business in the USA between the taxes and the regulations.  The last straw was this summer; there are now over 6,000 lamps I can no longer use in jobs.  If I do, there is a fine of $5000 PER LAMP all for some hoax called Global Warming.  By the way, the new “better” lamps are from 4x to 10x costlier, and the “environment-killing” lamps are being used in every other non-EU country.

You need to understand Domingo as I did.  We were on the same dorm floor freshman year.  All he did was study.  He busted his ass, and every other day he talked about how grateful he was to the U.S.  He always intended to join the Navy, despite us (at the time, foolish liberals) trying to talk him out of it.  For this man to do all he has done, then leave of his own free will?  Wow. (more…)

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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He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

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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There’s no way to appreciate fully the contributions of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006), who would have turned 99 years old this weekend, to the growth of libertarian ideas and a free society.

This is the man, after all, who introduced the concept of school vouchers, documented the role of government monopolies on money in creating inflation, provided the intellectual arguments that ended the military draft in America, co-founded the Mont Pelerin Society, and so much more. In popular books such as Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose, written with his wife and longtime collaborator Rose, he masterfully drew a through-line between economic freedom and political and cultural freedom.

Yet his ultimate contribution to freedom and liberty is found less in any of the specific argument he made and more in the ways he made them. Friedman provided an all-too-rare example of a public intellectual who was scrupulously honest, forthright, and fair in every debate he entered. Whether he was duking it out with fellow Nobel Prize winners and other high-profile economists or making the case for the morality of capitalism with TV hosts such as Phil Donahue and angry students, he always argued in good faith, admitted when he was wrong, and enlarged the circle of debate.

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Welcome to Ask a Libertarian with Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the new book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America.

Go to http://declaration2011.com to purchase, read reviews, find event dates, and more.

On June 15, 2011 Gillespie and Welch used short, rapid-fire videos to answer dozens of reader questions submitted via email, Twitter, Facebook, and Reason.com. In this episode, they answer the question:
“What’s the libertarian position on abortion?”

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Welcome to Ask a Libertarian with Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. They are the authors of the new book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America.

Go to http://declaration2011.com to purchase, read reviews, find event dates, and more.

On June 15, 2011 Gillespie and Welch used short, rapid-fire videos to answer dozens of reader questions submitted via email, Twitter, Facebook, and Reason.com. In this episode, they answer the question:

“Why ask a libertarian? Why now?”

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Federal spending will top $3.6 trillion this year, but what’s your share?

The Government Cost Calculator is a new online tool that can be found at MyGovCost.org. A project of the California-based Independent Institute, it allows you to plug in your age, income, and education level to generate a series of tables that show your share of both current and future federal spending across more than a dozen categories. You can break out your share of spending for defense, Medicare, Social Security, and other areas and calculate what you could be earning if you were able to keep the money and invest it at a 6 percent rate of return.

The idea behind the project is that the true cost of government is reflected not just in your tax bill, but in your opportunity cost, what you could be doing with those dollars if you didn’t have to hand them over to the government.

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In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the last century, and future Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek engaged in a legendary battle of ideas about the role of the government in ending and causing economic downturns.

Last year, George Mason University economist Russ Roberts and director-producer John Papola retold that debate in the form of a rap video, “Fear the Boom and Bust,” in which Hayek and Keynes fight it out over the causes of the Great Recession.

In a new video, the battle continues: Should government juice spending via massive stimulus or “do nothing” once a recession is underway? And did World War II end the Great Depression? Whatever side you take, the video, which pulled over 500,000 views in its first week, is sure to entertain and edify.

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The single-largest annual meeting of conservatives and small-government fellow travelers, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), kicked off in Washington, D.C. today on Thursday, February 10, 2011.

The big story leading up to the conference was a high-profile boycott by outfits such as The Heritage Foundation and figures such as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) due to the participation of GOProud, a gay conservative group that lobbies for lower taxes and equality under the law. As a spokesman for Heritage put it, “We want to promote economic freedom, a strong national defense and social conservativism. We think these policies are indivisible…It’s not a boutique. You can’t pick one and not the other.”

Reason’s Michael C. Moynihan was on hand to gauge the mood of CPAC. While some anti-gay conservatives stayed away, libertarians and small government types proliferated, agitating for less spending, an end to the drug war, and greater social freedom.

And, in the case of the John Birch Society, a smiting from on high.

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Jay Greene is the author of numerous studies demonstrating that more choice in education leads to better outcomes. A professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush institute , Greene is also the author of Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About our Schools—and Why It Isn’t So.

Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Greene at the National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, D.C., to talk about why competition makes schools better.

This interview is part of National School Choice Week, a non-partisan initiative to raise awareness of how competition and choice can transform K-12 education.

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