Nick Gillespie on the Nanny State and the Libertarian/Conservative Riff, part 1

welcome to the weekend I'm John caldera president of the independence Institute and your devil's advocate with Mia I'm a big fan of Nick Gillespie from Reason TV thank you for joining us thanks for having right for those people who are stuck watching you know PBS as a mainstream they don't quite understand that there's a whole new world of tentative television coming and it doesn't come over the broadcast waves it doesn't even come through your digital television signal it it comes through your internet connection right it's it's broadband rather than broadcast talk talk to me just a little bit about this upcoming new way of getting news and information to people video but it's on internet that's right well you know reason TV started in 2007 and we produce this year will produce about 400 distinct video pieces many of them documentary segments looking at policy issues ranging from immigration to drug legalization to copyright protection you name it and we're part of this huge shift that you see in some mainstream media organizations of newspapers and what not are putting more and more video online but then other independent producers or places like YouTube that aggregate content from all sorts of people who are just posting everything up there even the AP now probably produces as much video which is up there online as it does print copy but reason TV is an outgrowth of the reason foundation which people might be a big fan of libertarian-leaning and magazine Reason magazine one of the reasons I got caught in this movie it was Bob Poole your rounder just did an incredible job and finally you they used to have these things called paper and you would open up the paper and you'd read these things and I'd read about Bob Poole's research and what Reason Foundation was doing this is incredible right now it's moved a lot of our job in the think-tank world is to communicate we do it on this show my radio show on the Internet what's different about reason TV well I think reason TV I had been the editor of Reason magazine from 2000 to 2008 before taking on this new media stuff one of my goals there was to kind of promote what I called capitalism with a human face and we can actually do that much more effectively with video I think I mean that's that's part of it is that you know words are great pictures are great words and pictures together or even better and I think one of the things that reason TV allows us to do is to reach and reach new audiences and also tell stories in different ways that can be quite emotional quite comic well since our side fails our side doesn't tell narratives we don't tell stories we throw up flow charts and graphs we have a theorems we talk about patriotism and Liberty but we don't show the guy whose house is being taken because Walmart got the council to condemn it we don't show the guy who's in pain yeah because his cancer drugs have been taken away or or he's not allowed to have medical marijuana or you know some treatment hasn't been approved yet that's absolutely true and one of the things that video can bring I think is an immediacy and the emotional dimension to what it means to want to live in a free world are our subtitle as free minds and free markets and humanizing that is very important to give you an example we did a what I think is a very powerful piece about the DC school voucher program which was something coming into office Barack Obama had said he was going to allow this small small pilot program for school choice vouchers in DC of course after he got into office he almost immediately pulled the plug on it or had it has various minions do it and we found these this woman and her daughter who were participating in the program and were benefiting from it and who were big Barack Obama supporters and seeing them engage the issue really drives home that you know school choice is not something that can be told particularly well in in in terms wonderful to show Rock Obama's two beautiful children going to the classiest arrive at high school around DC and then for this program that allows just one little safety valve for working families in Diesel to get choked off as soon as you get right office yeah good stuff all right for those let's let's take a quick peek here here's a tease this is what you're missing when you see reason TV let's take a look for reason TV for reason TV for reason TV I'm Nick blessing you may have heard that UPS isn't quite the fight with FedEx although they're both package delivery companies they're governed by totally different federal labor rules would Obamacare lead to death panels is it a government takeover supporters and the President himself are fighting back against such claims it's time to legalize pot once and for all Congress is about to pass what's being called the biggest financial sector reform package since the Great Depression but the new regs won't be any more effective than the ones they replace and preventing the next major panic and it tells us who the real villain is here a federal government that is big enough and powerful enough to absolutely positively guarantee that it can crush any business overnight so basically reason TV is just you primping around in a leather jacket there's many many teeny bopper fans yeah and occasionally an old orange corduroy shirt yes that is the crucial element to reaching the young girl I think that you know self-promotion is probably the way forward to liberty and freedom girl for all at least for me but you just want to be women now has this helped ya know go to barter for what God is that the guy from recent TV no and I have gone to a lot of faculty cocktail parties at various places where it hasn't helped at all to be quite honestly if you notice my nose gets progressively flatter as the videos go on because I keep getting punched in the face that's a good thing be you we're not the only ones that are doing this quite independence Institute because we do animated videos we do all sorts of videos reason TV was run real early and early on in this how do you judge success how do you judge whether or not the Liberty message is getting out that's it's a good question I mean you can look at certain things obviously like views on YouTube and things like that and we've had you know we've had videos that have been seen over by over 300,000 people and then there you also look at it in terms of what kind of impact does it have for a more select audience so for instance we've had good feedback from a couple members of Congress of things that we did that they were definitely watching and reacting to so that success and that you're getting into the mind of people who really have their hands on the lever of power but then part of it is also growing you know a sense of aesthetics like are we are we getting better it's storytelling is it is it fun is it interesting is it exciting at least some subset of our audience and you know we're doing pretty well that way left does this really well I mean the left has handled this and would you agree with me that those of us on the right do are really trying to play catch-up we don't know how to tell stories as well even though that our stories I think are much more compelling those are individualistic right there you know but they know how to label a story well we're just learning this I don't know if I agree with that and here's one of the reasons you know the old joke used to be that the the reason why the left one the sixties was because they had better music and better clothes and I think you know there's something big music yeah certainly and I think better clothes I mean yeah but in any case we can debate that if and we will be that if you had a TV show maybe we could have exactly what sixties clothes were good bell-bottoms were those good bell-bottoms are more of a seventies thing but yeah bottoms are great hip huggers name is Paisley you know and you're talking to somebody who has a more in a color in like 25 years but it was all good as far as I'm concerned when Ken we're you a big lapel kind of guy you had the wide lapels that would go no I we share an italian-american heritage and I think under compensate my parents kept me in pretty tight lapel jackets so in other words you also have the shiny disco shirts that I said it's mostly my Italian horn it's probably showing but what is that Italian horn I don't know I try to avoid it we're both New Jersey that's we're both from Middletown New Jersey that's right and you can't tell me I can't tell you what that is stupid Guinea you horned they told me that we couldn't work blue so I don't think I can explain it now and this is a family show got it so but to talk about that question of playing catch-up and whatnot I actually think that this is starting to happen and in new media first off a lot of the older stories and the kind of traditional sob stories have faded and are and I think we're seeing a resurgence broadly defined on the right but also on the left where the for me and this is something I believe in that the the political spectrum is left left to right and it's more about are you in favor of control or are you in favor of choice and this is one of the reasons why it's an interesting time to be a libertarian because we have witnessed a you know eight years under generally Republican government which was not good for individual liberty we are witnessing the you know hopefully two years of control under a democratic government which is also terrible and awful and even worse for liberty and that what I think people are starting to figure out is what what I want is you know I want choice in my life I want the same choice that I have when I go to a Starbucks when I go to when I go to school when I go to the hospital you know when I have a job when I have a gender

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Views: 10,870

Rating: 4.9550562 out of 5

Keywords: gillespie, caldara, nanny, state, libertarian, reason, ATF

Id: KovKlEVizGU

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2010