Reason Foundation

... for a variety of reasons, and this goes back to, you know, World War II or wage and price controls and things like that.

You have, you know, I, you know, whatever my comp- I don't even know what my c- uh, Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, I don't know what they pay monthly for my premium, and I barely know what my premium is.

Uh, personally-

And do you know what your deductible is? Do you know what your deductible is?

Al, uh, Dick Cheney had come from, um, had come from the oil industry and, and was kind of persuaded that, you know, this was a problem.

But you've always had in the United States these, a, a small group of well-funded, uh, free market fundamentalist think tanks, uh, who call themselves things like Heritage Foundation or Reason Foundation.

They've always got freedom in their, in their mission, and they've generally promoted these free market fundamentalist views, and that's been allied to, um, a wing of the, uh, o- of the Republican Party, which was, you know...

You remember the Tea Party, uh-

Uh, contracting out water supplies.

Reason Foundation does a lot of that kind of stuff.

There are clearly better and worse ways to do that.

There are, but there are also higher and lower stakes, right? So it's true-

What a treat for us today.

I'm delighted to be joined by David Nott, who has for 21 years been the power behind Reason Magazine and The Reason Foundation.

For the few of you who don't know about Reason Magazine, it is the libertarian intellectual powerhouse.

It launched, I think, in 1968 as a small student magazine, and it has grown.

Electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, and other really efficient vehicles are paying almost nothing for using the roads and many of them paying nothing.

Adrian Moore is a transportation economist at Reason Foundation and an advocate for mileage-based taxes.

He points out states have already lost billions in potential revenue.

exacerbating critical problems with crumbling roads.

Well, out of grad school at the University of Maryland, had my master's in public policy, studied energy, environment, and technology policy.

Had internship at, uh, Breakthrough Institute and the Reason Foundation.

Worked at Tesla.

Uh, worked in energy consulting.

Yeah, and I mean, it's kind of the obvious one we've talked about a lot.

It feels like a little bit ad nauseum at this point as a movement, but obviously the different affordability issues right now, mainly with housing, healthcare, student loan debt, has contributed to this in terms of pausing for the economic conditions that are making people look for an alternative to our existing somewhat free market, not entirely free market, but somewhat free market system described by my friend Reem from the Reason Foundation as the status quo on our panel.

But there's another element that I want to get at that I think doesn't get discussed as much, which has been a long game, I think, throughout our lifetimes of normalizing socialism writ large.

It became An internet phenomenon, kind of a joke and a meme in the first point on social media and things like YouTube and stuff.