In 1993, when Jonathan Rauch's landmark book Kindly Inquisitors was first published, the idea that minorities need special protection from discriminatory or demeaning speech was innovative. Today, it's standard operating procedure--routinely enforced by universities, employers, foreign governments, and even international treaties. In a newly expanded electronic edition of his book, Rauch, an openly gay advocate of same-sex marriage and of gay equality generally, argues that suppressing hateful s...
Oct 16, 2013•1 hr 27 min
The rise in economic freedom in countries across the globe in recent decades has led to greater prosperity and improvements in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people. Economic Freedom in Action: Changing Lives profiles inspiring entrepreneurs from some of those countries and shows how increased opportunity has allowed them to build better futures for themselves and their communities. Join us to see a segment of the documentary from the Free to Choose Network, which will air on public t...
Oct 16, 2013•1 hr 26 min
President Obama recently voiced his ambition to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to as few as 1,000 deployed warheads. Yet while the United States has cut the arsenal's size greatly since the Cold War's end, its missions and composition have barely changed. Around 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons remain tied to a triad of systems — bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles — that are designed for preemptive strikes against enemy arsenals. Current plans ...
Oct 15, 2013•1 hr 32 min
What is the role of government in society? Different answers to this question have important consequences. Such disagreement recently led to the partial shutdown of the U.S. government. Thinkers from Aristotle to the American Founders to Ron Paul have argued that a crucial role of government is to protect individuals’ liberty to pursue happiness. While other thinkers have challenged this view, deeming it simplistic or unambitious in its pursuits, the Millennial generation has widely adopted the ...
Oct 14, 2013•1 hr 30 min
Since June, news reports based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have revealed the depth and breadth of NSA surveillance activities. The NSA scandal’s many dimensions include: mass domestic surveillance of telephone call information; allegations that officials deceived Congress, the courts, and the public about the nature of the NSA’s programs; alleged access to the Internet’s backbone and the traffic of major Internet companies; and systematic effo...
Oct 09, 2013•52 min
Since June, news reports based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have revealed the depth and breadth of NSA surveillance activities. The NSA scandal’s many dimensions include: mass domestic surveillance of telephone call information; allegations that officials deceived Congress, the courts, and the public about the nature of the NSA’s programs; alleged access to the Internet’s backbone and the traffic of major Internet companies; and systematic effo...
Oct 09, 2013•25 min
Since June, news reports based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have revealed the depth and breadth of NSA surveillance activities. The NSA scandal’s many dimensions include: mass domestic surveillance of telephone call information; allegations that officials deceived Congress, the courts, and the public about the nature of the NSA’s programs; alleged access to the Internet’s backbone and the traffic of major Internet companies; and systematic effo...
Oct 09, 2013•54 min
Since June, news reports based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have revealed the depth and breadth of NSA surveillance activities. The NSA scandal’s many dimensions include: mass domestic surveillance of telephone call information; allegations that officials deceived Congress, the courts, and the public about the nature of the NSA’s programs; alleged access to the Internet’s backbone and the traffic of major Internet companies; and systematic effo...
Oct 09, 2013•53 min
Since June, news reports based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have revealed the depth and breadth of NSA surveillance activities. The NSA scandal’s many dimensions include: mass domestic surveillance of telephone call information; allegations that officials deceived Congress, the courts, and the public about the nature of the NSA’s programs; alleged access to the Internet’s backbone and the traffic of major Internet companies; and systematic effo...
Oct 09, 2013•37 min
Since June, news reports based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have revealed the depth and breadth of NSA surveillance activities. The NSA scandal’s many dimensions include: mass domestic surveillance of telephone call information; allegations that officials deceived Congress, the courts, and the public about the nature of the NSA’s programs; alleged access to the Internet’s backbone and the traffic of major Internet companies; and systematic effo...
Oct 09, 2013•1 hr 2 min
Since June, news reports based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have revealed the depth and breadth of NSA surveillance activities. The NSA scandal’s many dimensions include: mass domestic surveillance of telephone call information; allegations that officials deceived Congress, the courts, and the public about the nature of the NSA’s programs; alleged access to the Internet’s backbone and the traffic of major Internet companies; and systematic effo...
Oct 09, 2013•53 min
Purchase Book The Constitution was designed to limit government power and protect individuals from oppressive regulation and the tyranny of majorities. But those protections are meaningless if judges aren't committed to enforcing them. America's judges have largely abdicated that responsibility. Instead of judging the constitutionality of government action, courts too often simply rationalize it. The problem lies not with the Constitution but with courts' reflexive deference to the other branche...
Oct 08, 2013•1 hr 26 min
Purchase Book After its release in 2009, The Beautiful Tree drew widespread praise. The book tells the remarkable story of author James Tooley's travels from Africa to China, and of the children, parents, teachers, and others who showed him how the poor are building their own schools and learning to save themselves. Publishers Weekly declared it "a moving account of how poor parents struggle against great odds to provide a rich educational experience to their children." Writing in The Claremont ...
Oct 07, 2013•1 hr 26 min
What is the Common Core? Supporters assert that it is a high-quality, voluntarily adopted set of national mathematics and language arts standards that will help transform American education by aiming all students at uniform, lofty goals. Opponents argue that adoption of the Core was federally coerced, the standards are of dubious quality, and one size simply cannot fit all. Meanwhile, polling shows that the large majority of Americans know nothing about the standards, despite the fact that they ...
Oct 03, 2013•1 hr 30 min
Only a few weeks ago, President Obama seemed set on intervening militarily in Syria. He asked Congress for a vote authorizing the use of force, despite polls showing Americans were overwhelmingly against intervention in Syria. He then made his case in a primetime address. That, too, fell flat. Luckily for Obama, something strange happened leading up to the speech: diplomacy. Assad agreed to give up his chemical weapons. But will this U.S.-Russia accord work? How long before the calls for the Uni...
Oct 02, 2013•54 min
The World Trade Organization has been a pillar of the global trading system since its inception in 1995, serving an especially important role in the adjudication of trade disputes and, ultimately, helping to subdue protectionism. But the failure of multilateral negotiations to achieve broader and deeper reductions in global trade barriers, while bilateral and regional agreements have flourished, raises important questions about the WTO and its future. Will large agreements that establish new rul...
Oct 02, 2013•1 hr 36 min
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Oct 01, 2013•54 min
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Oct 01, 2013•58 min
Purchase Book A leading justification for the growth of government is the supposed need to control the power of big business and to spread the benefits of the liberal economic order to the greatest possible number of beneficiaries. However, according to Randall Holcombe and Andrea Castillo, the expansion of government results in a different concentration of power: cronyism, in which some people — typically the wealthy and the politically well-connected — have access to privileges that are denied...
Sep 27, 2013•1 hr 24 min
The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations have just completed their 19th round, and there is talk now that they are nearing the "end game" and a deal might be reached by the end of the year. However, there are reportedly still many unresolved issues and a fair amount of work ahead. Is a 2013 completion date realistic? If not, when will the TPP countries reach agreement? And if they do, what will the U.S. Congress think about the deal? Please join us for a discussion of these and other iss...
Sep 20, 2013•1 hr 26 min
America's Longest War is a new documentary from the Reason Foundation about the federal government's 40-year war on drugs. It chronicles the history of drug prohibition from President Nixon's declaration of war in 1971 through President Obama's broken promises on medical marijuana. After more than $1 trillion taxpayer dollars and thousands of paramilitary raids on American homes and drug arrests each year, the prisons are overflowing with drug offenders. Is the drug war working? According to the...
Sep 19, 2013•42 min
Purchase book How can America find its way back from economic stagnation, fiscal calamity, and national "malaise"? In his new book, American Conservative Union vice chairman Donald J. Devine argues: the same way it has before, through "a restoration of the constitutional synthesis of freedom and tradition" at the heart of the American experiment. In America's Way Back , Devine makes "the case for 21st century 'fusionism'" — a reinvigoration of the Cold War–era conservative-libertarian alliance t...
Sep 19, 2013•1 hr 26 min
After the needless death of his father, business executive David Goldhill began a personal exploration of a health care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. In Catastrophic Care , Goldhill shows the U.S. health care sector is not worth preserving in anything like its current form — and President Obama’s health care law is likely to exacerbate its failings. Goldhill proposes a different and radical solution to these agonizing problem...
Sep 18, 2013•1 hr 29 min
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Sep 17, 2013•1 hr 1 min
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Sep 17, 2013•1 hr 14 min
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Sep 17, 2013•1 hr 9 min
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Sep 17, 2013•1 hr 12 min
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Sep 17, 2013•1 hr 23 min
Purchase Book In 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court became the center of the political world. In a dramatic and unexpected 5–4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts voted to save the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Unprecedented tells the inside story of how this constitutional challenge raced across all three branches of government and narrowly avoided a collision between the Supreme Court and President Obama. The book offers unrivaled inside access to the key decisionmakers in Washin...
Sep 13, 2013•1 hr 34 min
Purchase Book In the conventional wisdom, conspiratorial thinking lurks mainly on the fringes of American politics — the "preferred style only of minority movements," as Richard Hofstadter put it in his influential 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." In his new book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory , Jesse Walker begs to differ. Walker insists, contra Hofstadter, that "the Paranoid Style Is American Politics." From the colonial era, through sundry Red Scares...
Sep 13, 2013•1 hr 4 min
