Reason’s Video Docs Debunk the ‘Socialists of All Parties’

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth—especially when it comes to not just defending but actively championing “free minds and free markets”?

This is a particularly good question to ask during Reason‘s annual webathon, the one week a year that we ask our online audience to support our principled libertarian journalism with tax-deductible gifts (go here now for a list of giving levels and associated swag). Last year, the webathon raised over $600,000—and I just got word that Reason Foundation Chairman Gerry Ohrstrom has offered to match the next $100,000 worth of donations we receive.

That means that your $100 gift becomes $200, your $500 becomes $1,000, and your $10,000 is cause for a massive celebration.

Your support is absolutely vital to our efforts—and with Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani bro-ing out in the Oval Office, the national debt set to zoom past $40 trillion, and Congress effectively in a coma, we’ve got our work cut out for us in the coming year. Nobel-winning economist Friedrich Hayek dedicated The Road To Serfdom to “the socialists of all parties” back in 1944. Yet here we are today, with Republicans cheering the federal government taking “golden shares” in private companies and unabashed “Democratic Socialists” heading up major cities like Seattle and New York.

Reason TV (as we called it back then) started releasing online documentaries in late 2007 and I was honored to serve as its first editor in chief from 2008 to 2018. At the start, our docs mostly featured comedy legend Drew Carey and covered all kinds of libertarian topics, such as making the case for medical and recreational marijuana, why creating legal markets for human organs would benefit everyone, and exploring amazing new virtual worlds like Second Life. Our first long-form series, Reason Saves Cleveland (2011) was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and brought our way of thinking (and filmmaking) to different audiences in a way that only video can.

We’ve come a long way since then. We distribute all sorts of long, short, funny, sad, and serious videos on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and especially YouTube, where we’ve accrued more than 1.26 million subscribers and generated over 470 million views as of this writing.

But it’s the documentaries I want to focus on for a moment (donate now!), because they are something no other political magazine pulls off quite like us. Our secret is that we apply the same standards of journalism to our videos as we do to our print articles, tackle tough questions, and propose principled yet pragmatic solutions. Our documentaries reach millions of people and move the heart as well as the head.

Consider Zach Weissmueller’s “Why Oregon re-criminalized drugs,“ released in October. As a magazine that supports legalizing all drugs, the easiest thing in the world would have been to ignore the fact that Beaver State residents changed their minds just a few years after voting to decriminalize all drugs. Zach, who got his start as a Reason video intern in 2010, took a crew to Portland, the state’s largest city, and reported on what exactly went wrong with a policy change that has worked incredibly well in places such as Portugal. Talking with junkies, policymakers, residents, and business owners, Zach makes a compelling case that ultraprogressive Portland screwed up by failing to “keep its city livable for drug users and non-drug users alike” long before decriminalization entered the picture.

A similar commitment to deep reporting and analysis energizes Justin Zuckerman’s “The socialist housing plan for New York City,” which documents the history and effects of the various forms of rent control promised by the Big Apple’s incoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani. It’s easy to do a flyover of the subject, but Justin and his crew take their cameras to the streets of New York while laying out the economic arguments against letting politics set prices rather than market forces. At the center of the documentary is the impact bad rent laws have on a struggling young couple, Julian and Zena, who are already paying the cost of terrible policy.

I worked with Justin on another housing-related documentary released earlier this year. In “How Texas Beat California on Housing,” we figured out why rents have been declining in Austin despite population surges but increasing in San Francisco despite population losses. We tracked down a worker who left S.F. for Austin and we talked with land-use scholars, activists, and realtors to make sense of a seemingly confusing story of supply and demand. Regardless of ideology, everyone we talked with in Austin told us that the answer to rising demand is to increase supply (duh!), which is far easier to do in Texas than in California because of various local and state policies. The result is a richly textured analysis of our nation’s number one affordability concern—and an obvious way to address it: build more housing and prices will come down.

But such powerful and proven libertarian insights are in retreat almost everywhere and need to be constantly restated in bold, new ways to new audiences. Longtime Reason collaborator Kennedy and Video Managing Editor Natalie Dowzicky showed why free buses and city-owned grocery stores—two major policy initiatives promised by Mayor-Elect Mamdani—have never worked in practice and aren’t what New York residents care about.

We live in remarkably stupid times, at least when it comes to politics and policy. Donald Trump has spent much of the past year implementing, delaying, and futzing with a disastrous tariff policy that was first systematically debunked 250 years ago by Adam Smith (for a 2025 Reason critique, watch Andrew Heaton’s “Why Trade Is Good and Tariffs Are Bad”). The mayor-elect of the largest city in the country won by promising to deliver policies that have failed catastrophically in recent memory.

Reason‘s video documentaries stand athwart such stupidity, saying here’s a better way to make the world a richer, fairer, and awesome place. Your generous and tax-deductible donations (go here now and double those dollars!) during Reason‘s webathon are the best way to help us keep making more of them.