Reason.com is the website associated with Reason magazine and the Reason Foundation. On The Bob Zadek Show it appears both as a publication listeners are urged to subscribe to and as the workplace of a recurring set of guests.
The site and its publisher
Matt Welch, introduced by Bob Zadek as editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, described the site’s offerings: reason.com, a subscription page that gets the magazine at eleven issues a year for twenty dollars, and a blog. He said the magazine is published by a nonprofit foundation based in LA called the Reason Foundation, whose think-tank style work appears at reason.org A Libertarian Plan (2010).
Nick Gillespie was introduced as editor of Reason.com and Reason TV, and as a former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011). Scott Shackford was introduced as an associate editor at Reason.com covering tech surveillance, privacy, criminal justice reform, LGBT issues, national security policies, and sometimes wedding cakes How Bail Traps the Poor in Jail with Scott Shackford (2018). Lenore Skenazy said she writes for what she called the libertarian site reason.com Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014). Elizabeth Nolan Brown directed listeners to reason.com, to her Twitter handle @ENBrown, and to a group she runs called Feminists for Liberty Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the War on Sex Workers (2019).
Zadek’s own framing of the publication was consistently promotional. He called it his very favorite magazine and described it as politics made breezy A Libertarian Plan (2010). He told Gillespie he was a strong supporter of the arts and did not want to be forced to pay for art he happened not to like Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011). To Nolan Brown he called Reason the must-read publication, saying he follows its Twitter feed and blog and had been with the editors that weekend Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the War on Sex Workers (2019).
Welch on the federal budget
Welch’s 2010 appearance was organized around specific cuts. He said the politically difficult part was not the same as the pragmatic part, and led with getting the government out of the housing market, asking why there is an entity that had already been thrown $150 billion of bailout money in terms of Fannie and Freddie, which he said guarantee trillions of dollars worth of mortgage including the toxic material that was supposed to be cleaned up A Libertarian Plan (2010).
Zadek added that Fannie and Freddie guaranteeing mortgages is a relatively new federal activity, and that for most of the country’s history people bought houses and paid fair prices for mortgages without any federal guarantee. Welch answered that other countries without a similar institution have the same if not higher levels of homeownership, and said the government should be unwound from that business. He conceded that the pain would be felt by Wall Street companies that assumed the government would back their gambling, and by people who used their own house as an ATM machine or a casino; he said he was sorry their bad bet did not work, and that letting prices fall is what would let a lifelong renter like himself finally afford a place in Palm Springs A Libertarian Plan (2010).
On agriculture, Welch said more than $20 billion a year goes in direct payouts to farmers, naming Monsanto, big agribusiness, and Archer Daniels Midland, and argued the money directly impoverishes third-world farmers. Zadek compared American agricultural policy to the painting American Gothic and said closing the Department of Agriculture would make supermarket prices cheaper the next day. Welch then turned to the FCC, which he said was launched to allocate scarce broadcast spectrum that is no longer scarce, and which he said now tries every day to come up with new ways to censor, requiring long studies of minority and female ownership of second-tier radio stations in mid-markets A Libertarian Plan (2010).
Welch also raised the Davis-Bacon Act. Zadek said it was done to keep Blacks out of the government contracting market in 1931, and that Bacon was a Long Island congressman who could not stand the thought of Blacks competing against whites for federal contracts. Welch said the prevailing wage requirement means contractors cannot competitively bid, that it uses public money to reward union friends, and that it is a hidden tax; he cited living wage ordinances on hotels near LAX as a local example. He said the stimulus could be repealed, with $300 billion in unspent stimulus money, and criticized the multipliers behind it. His final proposal was to bring the troops home, saying the Cold War is over and no more troops should be in Germany, Korea, or anywhere else, a position he attributed to Gary Johnson, who Zadek said would be his guest the following week A Libertarian Plan (2010).
Gillespie on arts funding
Gillespie’s 2011 appearance concerned the National Endowment for the Arts, which Zadek said the federal government formed in 1965 to funnel money to artists. Zadek opened by proposing, as an analogy, a federal agency granting money to really bad lawyers so they could produce really bad law for clients who would never pay Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011).
Gillespie said public financing of art is not necessary, and that publicly financed art is easily censored art, because public support for the arts brings public outcry over the arts. He described himself as a huge supporter of the arts who had spent about a decade getting a PhD in literature, and said one need not be a philistine to oppose the subsidy. He compared art to religion, arguing that if there is freedom of religion, which also means freedom from religion, there should be freedom of art, which means freedom from art. He said Americans give about $13 billion a year in philanthropic donations to arts and related cultural organizations, beyond admission fees, ticket prices, and book sales, an amount that dwarfs the hundreds of millions going to the National Endowment for the Arts and its state and local analogs. He called the subsidy morally wrong, aesthetically suspect, and financially unnecessary Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011).
Skenazy on British child-protection law
Skenazy, who said she writes for reason.com, described two developments in Great Britain. She said a law in Parliament called the Cinderella Law was expanding the definition of child cruelty, which had meant starving, beating, or molesting a child, to include psychologically harming the child. She said she did not want people second-guessing the effect of any parenting decision, and gave the example of leaving a nine-year-old at home to watch Harry Potter while running errands, which she said made the child feel proud. She also described a Scottish measure called a named person, phased in over five years, assigning a person to each child to make sure the child is treated right by the parents. She characterized this as the government as mother-in-law, with the power to take the child away, and said that while she welcomed the existing mechanism for removing genuinely abused children from harm, that mechanism already exists and need not be expanded Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Shackford on bail
Shackford’s 2018 appearance concerned bail. Zadek said judges are human beings with a fear of headlines about a released defendant who commits another bad act, and therefore a profound bias to set high bail even when bail is inappropriate, because a judge will never have a headline for setting bail too high but might have one for setting it too low. He said bail reform measures had been tried with mixed success and had somewhat bipartisan support, and said Senator Rand Paul and Senator Kamala Harris had joined forces on bail reform measures, with protective detention to be discussed after the break How Bail Traps the Poor in Jail with Scott Shackford (2018).
Zadek described Shackford’s piece as “Innocent Until Proven Guilty, But Only If You Can Pay,” and said bail is the ugly underbelly of the American criminal justice system because the only way to have your freedom under certain circumstances is if you can afford to buy it. He said the primary purpose of bail is to make sure you show up for trial, not to punish or incarcerate, and that the only issue before the court is whether you are a flight risk, so that a person who is not a flight risk should not have to put up any money How Bail Traps the Poor in Jail with Scott Shackford (2018).
Across episodes
Five episodes spanning 2010 to 2019 bring Reason.com to the show, and the excerpts show no development in how the site is treated: in each, a Reason writer is introduced by title, promotes the site or magazine, and argues a libertarian position, with Zadek supplying the framing and the praise. The one recurring substantive thread is federal subsidy and coercion — Welch on housing, agriculture, the FCC, Davis-Bacon, and the stimulus; Gillespie on the arts; Skenazy on British child-protection law; Shackford on bail — but the excerpts do not show the guests responding to one another.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when Reason.com or Reason magazine was founded, who owns or funds the Reason Foundation beyond Welch’s description of it as a nonprofit based in LA, or how the site’s editorial operations relate to the magazine’s. They do not give circulation, revenue, or staffing figures, and they do not describe any internal disagreement among the Reason writers who appeared. No excerpt states the outcome of the bail reform measures, the Cinderella Law, or the named person scheme, or the fate of any budget proposal Welch discussed.