From the Archives - Nipping ahead of regulators: Nick Gillespie discusses Reason.tv, free speech, and restraint (2010)

Nipping ahead of regulators: Nick Gillespie discusses Reason.tv, free speech, and restraint
August 2, 2010 3:27 AM MST

Reason.tv was started in October 2007 as a video journalism site designed to complement the work of the Reason Foundation, the print edition of Reason magazine, and the magazine’s web site, Reason.com.

Since then, according to Reason.tv’s editor-in-chief, Nick Gillespie, the site has grown every month, not only “in terms of web traffic but more importantly in terms of a kind of recognition among free-market-oriented, libertarian think tanks [for which] we are setting the standard for video.”

Gillespie spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner after a panel discussion hosted at Reason’s Washington office on July 12. (Another article based on this interview with Gillespie, focusing on the potential for privatizing Virginia’s liquor trade, appeared on Examiner.com on July 19.)

Measures of Success
In addition to its own web site, Reason.tv has a YouTube channel with 410 uploaded videos that have been viewed at least 5,840,679 times; it also has 16,363 subscribers and 7,398 “friends” on YouTube.

From among those 400-plus videos, Gillespie points to two of them as his favorites.

“One of them,” he says, “is Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey, a fifty minute, six-part series about how Cleveland might turn around a 60-year decline in population and economic fortunes. It’s a really interesting piece where we leverage all of the expertise we have in the public policy division of Reason Foundation, the journalism angle, etc.”

The other one he likes is called “UPS vs. FedEx, which was a two-minute long piece that looked at the way in which UPS is trying to get FedEx’s labor classification reclassified. We used a technologically advanced understanding of green screens and white screens and we had a lot of fun with it. It got a very complex message out in a very short period of time.”

Finding Government Nannies
A regular feature on Reason.tv is the “Nanny of the Month,” which looks at examples of paternalistic government action. Gillespie explained how he and his team find these “Nannies.”

Nick Gillespie

“We find the Nanny of the Month through two ways,” he said, first through original reporting by the staff of Reason, and second, through submissions by readers. “We get a hell of a lot – 50 to 100 – submissions a month.”

Gillespie noted that “that’s actually one of the things that’s interesting about the Web in general, that it’s a distributed intelligence network, so we’re getting a lot of information from people” who are strangers to the organization but who nonetheless “send us stuff.”

As the interview drew to a close, Gillespie mused that, “if there’s a message from Reason.tv, it’s that the 21st century, far from delivering on the utopian dreams of the 20th century, is a weird world where technology has continued to barely nip ahead of [the] government regulators at their heels across a wide variety of levels.”

Still, he remains optimistic, expressing the hope that “we’ll be able to outpace” government controls. The problem he sees is that the past two administrations – George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s – each have tried to restrict liberty in their own ways.

‘Worst continuity possible’
“This is something that I think people should understand,” he said, “which is that we tend to think in dichotomous terms about conservatives/liberals [or] Republicans/Democrats,” but these artificial divisions are “wrong.”

Gillespie pointed out that “George Bush signed the most restrictive campaign finance regulation act known to history, the McCain-Feingold law, which was then basically routed around by new technology. Barack Obama wants to control your political speech, he wants to control what is available on cable and satellite TV, and he wants to control what you can buy and sell on the Internet, just like George Bush.”

He concluded:

“Anybody who considers himself a liberal or a conservative should be concerned because what we are seeing is the worst continuity possible between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat.”



Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on August 2, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Does Robert Sarvis Disdain Austrian Economics?

Robert Sarvis

Various individuals who have been trying to cast doubt on Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert Sarvis' libertarian credentials have pointed to a comment he made in an interview with Ron Paul biographer Brian Doherty in Reason magazine, which has been interpreted to mean he is not entirely dedicated to Austrian economics, a staple of libertarian thinking.

Sarvis is the Libertarian Party's nominee for governor. He faces two rivals on Election Day, November 5: Republican nominee Ken Cuccinelli and Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe.

Current public opinion polls show Sarvis might expect 8 to 10 percent of the vote, an unusually high number for a Libertarian (or any third-party or independent candidate for statewide office) so close to an election.

Charles C.W. Cooke cited the Reason interview on National Review Online on October 31, for example. 

Another instance of the questioning of Robert Sarvis' libertarian bona fides can be found on Examiner.com, where International Politics Examiner Andrew Moran wrote:

George Mason University is known for its free-market economics program (see Walt Williams). This is where Sarvis attained his economics degree. However, he doesn’t adhere to the principles of Austrian Economics, which is usually what libertarians promote.

Here is what Sarvis said in his interview with Reason: “I’m not into the whole Austrian type, strongly libertarian economics, I like more mainstream economics and would have been happy to go elsewhere.”

Wait does he mean “mainstream economics” that has gotten us into this current mess and continues to cause more problems?

An answer to that question may be found in an interview I did with Sarvis two years ago, when he was running for the Virginia state Senate.

That interview was also published on Examiner.com (just a coincidence). I had asked Sarvis about his favorite economist, and he offered up names of three people he admired: Friedrich Hayek, Adam Smith, and Scott Sumner.

It seems that, to Sarvis, "mainstream economics" means that derived from the work of Adam Smith, author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Here's the relevant excerpt:

His libertarian philosophy is reflected in his answer when asked about his favorite economist. Without pausing, he named Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian Nobel laureate who taught at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago.

“Hayek is someone who really influenced my thinking,” Sarvis explained: “How to think about problems that face national economies and how public policy can influence it in many unintended ways.”


While a lot of people, such as talk-show host Glenn Beck, focus on Hayek’s 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, Sarvis said he “was more influenced by his 'The Use of Knowledge in Society,' which was probably the seminal paper that won him the Nobel Prize, and also [volume] one of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, where he talks about rules and order.”

In addition to Hayek, Sarvis cites Adam Smith as an influence in his economic thinking.

“In philosophy, they say, there’s Plato and all else are footnotes,” he quipped. “I think that can be said more truly of Adam Smith than of Plato.”

Among contemporary economists, Sarvis pointed to Bentley University professor Scott Sumner, who blogs at TheMoneyIllusion.com. As Americans have focused on the financial crisis and the recession, he said, “Sumner has been the most persuasive in what exactly is going on [with regard to the] monetary policy mistakes of the Fed. We really are in many ways repeating some of the mistakes of the depression.”

Then there is Sarvis' biographical sketch on the web site of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. (Both the Mercatus Center and the GMU economics department are hotbeds of Austrian economists.)

Emphasis added below:

Robert is a native of Northern Virginia and a lifelong believer in freedom, free markets, and the rule of law. He holds degrees in mathematics from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge and a JD from NYU School of Law. During law school, he co-founded a libertarian and classical liberal law journal, the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, dedicating the first issue to Friedrich Hayek, and he has been outspoken in arguing against government regulation of the tech industry. Robert has worked as a software developer, a lawyer, and a tech entrepreneur, and his research interests span a wide range of topics relating to law, economics, and public policy.

Can the off-hand comment Sarvis made to Reason about his choice of a graduate school overwhelm the other evidence of his admiration for, and influence by, Austrian economists?

Author Interview: Jesse Walker on 'The United States of Paranoia'

Reason magazine books editor Jesse Walker is author of the recent book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (HarperCollins, $25.99), which reaches back to the earliest days of American history to examine how conspiracy theories take hold and what kind of influence they have on politics when they fail to fizzle out.

Acknowledging that his new book draws partial inspiration from and is partially a reply to Richard Hofstadter's famous monograph, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Walker explained in an interview with me last month at the Cato Institute that The United States of Paranoia “grew out of a lot of things.”

'Folklore of conspiracy thinking'
He had “been writing stories that touched on these issues for many years. At one point in the book, I quote from interviews I did way back in 1995 for a magazine article.”

In particular, Walker said, he “wanted to explore the folklore of conspiracy thinking in America and just what we can learn from these stories – even the ones that aren't true [and] hat they say about the anxieties and the experiences of the people who believe them.”

Walker acknowledged that conspiracy theories and urban legends “overlap,” but they are not the same thing.

“The two big differences are that sometimes a conspiracy theory is true and, by definition, no urban legend is true,” while “not all urban legends involve conspiracies, but many do.”

He pointed out that “one rich source of material in the book was just looking at the works by the sociologists and anthropologists who collect urban legends and that sort of folklore.”

Anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism
Similarly, while some conspiracy theories have anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic roots, not all do.

“There are a lot of anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which is not to say that anyone who believes in a conspiracy theory shares those bigotries,” Walker explained.

“Of those conspiracy theories that involve scapegoating a group, the three that seem to have the most potent influence in American history were those involving Catholics, blacks, or Indians. Obviously, there are also ones involving Jews, gays, liberals, conservatives, and others, but those were the big three.”

On the other hand, he said, “if I were writing a history of European paranoia, anti-Semitism would be much closer to the core,” adding that there are “a number of anti-Semites in the book,” which focuses on American history.

Even little-known and generally forgotten conspiracy theories can re-emerge unexpectedly, Walker said.

Some of them “will continue to be around and mutate and find new forms. I never would have guessed in the 1980s,” for instance, “that there would be all sorts of rap lyrics about the Illuminati” two decades later.

At my prompting, Walker commented on some well-known conspiracy theories involving President Barack Obama, the AIDS virus, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Birtherism
One common conspiracy theory of the past few years has been based on the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States. This has earned the sobriquet “birtherism,” and includes such elements that Obama was born in Kenya and his official birth certificate from Hawaii is a fake.

Jesse Walker

“There's a lot to unpack there,” Walker said about that theory.

In the book, he said, he gives three reasons for why “birtherism has taken hold and even has believers now, even though it's pretty hard to make the case for it being true at this point.”

The first is a “desire for a magic bullet, something that can win you a political victory without the pain of political persuasion. It's worth noting,” Walker explained, “that birtherism initially caught on among the diehard supporters of Hillary Clinton during the primaries in 2008 before it migrated to the right.”

A second reason “is the fear of the foreign.”

If someone is “afraid of foreign Muslims and [doesn't] like the president, it's easy to be attracted to the idea of the president being foreign and/or a Muslim.”

In general, he continued, “if people who are uncomfortable with the idea of America as a multicultural nation, to them, the President is metaphorically foreign for all sorts of reasons and a conspiracy theory is very good at making the metaphoric into the concrete.”

The third reason, Walker said, is that birtherism is “a way to maintain your respect for the presidency while rejecting a president. If you can say, 'he's a usurper, pretender to the throne' – you actually see these sort of royalist metaphors in a lot of birther literature” – the birther can claim respect for the office if not for the man.

Walker added that he is “not saying that every birther subscribes to all three of those. Those groups overlap.” There are people for whom none of those reasons fit, “but those are three themes that often come up in the birther literature.”

AIDS created by U.S. government?
Another conspiracy that emerged relatively recently was the idea that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus.

There a lot of different AIDS theories, Walker said, but the one he addresses in his book “is the idea that white doctors were injecting black babies with AIDS. You might remember that rumor in the '80s.”

That story is “obviously not true,” he noted, but still “it's easy to see how it could catch on among people who have experienced a long history of high-handed or abusive treatment from the white medical establishment, including some genuine conspiracies, like the Tuskegee Experiment. That sort of lays the ground work for believing other conspiracy theories.”

9/11 truthers
Those who refuse to believe that Islamic-extremist hijackers destroyed the World Trade Center by crashing jet planes into the Twin Towers are known as “9/11 truthers.” They often say that the U.S. government engineered the collapse of the buildings in order to trigger a war and reduce Americans' civil liberties.

The question of 9/11 trutherism is “one that has people have adopted that for so many reasons, I really hate to reduce it to any one or two.”

Sometimes, Walker pointed out, “people say that trutherism is a paralyzing idea because everything is stacked against you. The flip side is that you just have to worry about what's happening in Washington not trying to disentangle what's going on in foreign lands.”

That is not, however, “the only reason that trutherism catches on,” and he addresses some of those other possibilities in his book.

As it happens, Jesse Walker was also a guest of Coy Barefoot on WCHV-FM's “Inside Charlottesville” on August 27, talking about The United States of Paranoia.

(This article is based on two previously published pieces on Examiner.com.)

Note: Cross-posted from Book Reviews by Rick Sincere.