The magician and entertainer explains his Libertarian philosophy, but also tells why he tries to avoid actively proselytizing or preaching to others about why they should adopt his beliefs. While he’s a Libertarian who favors maximum civil liberties and freedoms, some situations demand different responses, for instance, if a foreign country mounted an invasion against the United States.
Fifty-four percent of Americans say Congress should cut spending from current levels and 62 percent say Congress should forget about gun control and move on to other issues.
Social Security is widely popular, with 65 percent having a favorable view of the retirement portions of the program. But it’s also widely misunderstood as an individual retirement account rather than a transfer payment financed by current tax dollars.
A plurality – 45 percent of respondents – still dislike Obamacare and one in five Americans qualifies as libertarian based on responses to questions about the role of the government in social and economic affairs. The results come from the latest The Reason-Rupe Poll, a quarterly, national survey of 1,003 people via cell phones and landlines.
“I didn’t want to run for office,” says Gigi Bowman, Liberty candidate for the New York State Senate. The Long Island native decided to run for office after Empire State pols passed sweeping new gun control legislation. What particularly irked her was the large number of Republicans who supported the law. “That was shocking,” says Bowman.
Bowman, editor of How to Run for Office on a Liberty Platform and head of Liberty Candidates, encourages citizens who prize individual liberty to step up and run for a local office. What positions do Liberty candidates take? “Sound money, free markets, individual liberty, constitutional government, and non-intervention in foreign policy,” she says. “Basically the same as Campaign for Liberty,” the group founded by her political inspiration, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).
“The new GOP will need to embrace liberty in both the economic and personal sphere,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told a packed crowd at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Reason’s Matt Welch and Kennedy attended the first day of CPAC to take the temperature of the political organizers, media observers, and grassroot activists who are central to the Republican Party’s identity and political fortunes. What did they find? A movement that seems to gravitating to a baldly libertarian stance when it comes to everything from economics to social issues to foreign policy.
John Stossel interviews one of the few congressmen adhering to Libertarian principles and policies — Michigan Republican Justin Amash.
By nature, Libertarians are hard to gross out. New York University professor Jonathan Haidt says those who are easily disgusted tend to be conservatives, while Libertarians have a lower sensitivity toward disgust, whether it involves matters of sex, language, politics or morality. Haidt is the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics. Here, he discusses his findings in a lecture sponsored by the Reason Foundation at the Museum of Sex. A Q & A with New York Times science writer John Tierney follows.
“I think economics is cool, I think it’s fun,” declares musician and video director Dorian Electra. “I think other people should think that too.”
Electra has been creating economics-themed music videos since her high school senior thesis spawned the YouTube hit “I’m in Love with Friedrich Hayek.” Her latest video, “Fa$t Ca$h”, seeks to explain the boom and busts created by the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program.
Reason TV‘s Nick Gillespie caught up with Electra at the 2013 International Students for Liberty Conference to discuss her love of Austrian economists, how she discovered libertarianism, and her recent music project, “Party Milk.”
Dorian Electra, perhaps the only Libertarian music video producer, joins forces with Wolf Bush in an ode to “Party Milk,” a more wholesome craze than alcohol. As one YouTube commentator remarked, “ Before I discovered Party Milk, my life was only 2%. Now it’s whole.” Later today, we’ll present Reason TV’s interview with Electra. Be sure to return to see what she”s got cooking and to find out why she’s in love with economist Freidrich Hayek.
While Libertarians need to fight the growth of an overreaching federal government, they also need to get on with the business of living — regardless of how bloated and rank the government becomes. That’s the advice of longtime Libertarian activist Wendy McElroy, who is seeking to keep alive the individualist-oriented philosophies of Henry David Thoreau.
McElroy has elaborated on her thoughts in a new book The Art of Being Free: Politics Versus the Everyman and Woman. She talks about the book with Nick Gillespie from Reason TV.
“I recommend defaulting on the debt for several reasons,” explains best-selling author, investment strategist and libertarian commentator Doug Casey. “Perhaps the best one is that I don’t think it’s correct to make the next several generations of Americans indentured servants.”
His new book, Totally Incorrect, is a collection of conversations with Louis James that explore the ways in which centralized government power threatens cultural and economic progress. In a series of engaging and wide-ranging dialogues, Casey and James talk about everything from the Great Depression to drug use to the Roman Empire.
Reason TV‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Casey to discuss why America should default on its debt, why he spends most of his time in Argentina these days, and the importance of self-reliance and free-market principles.
