Why I Support Reason with a Tax-Deductible Donation (and You Should Too!)

We’re near the tail end of our annual webathon, the one time a year we ask our online audience to help support Reason’s principled, award-winning libertarian journalism. Go here now to check out giving levels and make a donation. All donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law—and are absolutely vital to our ability to produce the thousands of articles, videos, and podcasts that we’ve been cranking out annually since our start in 1968.

To me, Reason has always been more than a source of news: It is central to how I think about politics, culture, and ideas. More than anything else, it made me a libertarian and brought me into the larger libertarian movement. Both online and off, Reason has created a community for like-minded people to think about how to create the best world possible, to argue over policy and culture, and to refine and revise our thoughts about, well, “free minds and free markets.”

That’s a role it continues to play for our younger readers, watchers, and listeners who know they don’t buy conventional conservative, liberal, or progressive takes on how the world operates. Reason is a portal to a world of ideas, policies, and mindsets that don’t just celebrate economic and civil liberties but make it more likely that freedom will carry the day. As befits an outfit that explains and defends the endless creative destruction that characterizes a free economy and a free culture, we are constantly pushing into new ways of reaching people.

We started out humbly, as an irregularly published mimeographed mag that went out to hundreds of people via the U.S. mail (alas). Last year, Reason videos alone averaged 10 million views a month, with two-thirds of that audience being under 35 years old. Your contributions make it possible for us to keep reaching more and more people, especially when they are trying to figure out who they are and what their role in the world will be. So please consider supporting our efforts.

I started reading Reason back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, after my older brother John discovered it at college and started sharing it with me while I was in high school. Here, he said, I think you’ll like this. Around the same time, I discovered Milton and Rose Friedman’s book Free To Choose and I took to calling myself a libertarian—someone who believed in free expression, limited government, and giving people the maximum space to live the lives they wanted to, as long as they respected other people’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What really sold me on Reason was the way its contributors told stories and made arguments that were rich in fact, history, and context—and that they shared how they came to their conclusions. No hiding the math, so to speak. Reason presents libertarianism not simply as an ideology that might maximize economic output and reduce government waste, but as a robust and resilient operating system for a better world.

And it produces great, myth-busting journalism. Consider one of the stories I must have read soon after finding Reason. “Love Canal: The Truth Seeps Out,” from the February 1981 issue, documented how the real villain in one of the great environmental scare stories of the day was the Niagara Falls, New York, Board of Education, not a defunct chemical company that was constantly fingered as a cold-hearted culprit in the spread of toxic substances that caused cancers, tumors, children born with horrible birth defects, and more. Reason‘s coverage drove home for me how the ways we often talked about the private and public sectors were just hopelessly naive.

I joined the staff of Reason as an assistant editor in the fall of 1993, applying while working on my doctorate in American literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and after realizing I was likely a bad fit for academia. By then, I had absorbed not just Reason‘s journalistic chops but its intellectual framework as articulated over the years by such editors and writers as Robert W. Poole, Marty Zupan, Thomas W. Hazlett, and especially Virginia Postrel and Jacob Sullum. I had already heard about Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Robert Heinlein, but it was in Reason that I first encountered the likes of Friedrich Hayek, James Buchanan, Ludwig von Mises, Rose Wilder Lane, and others who helped ground my thought in a rich, living tradition of classical liberal thought that provides an urgent alternative to those pushed by conservatives (national or otherwise) and progressives (including democratic socialists). Whether notionally right-wing or left-wing, everyone else seems to be interested in controlling your choices. As a media outfit, Reason stands nearly alone in trying to protect and multiply your choices.

I give to Reason because when I was first getting interested in the world around me, it helped me figure out where I belonged intellectually, philosophically, politically, and culturally. If it did that for you, I hope you’ll consider supporting our efforts to keep reaching—and creating—the next generation of libertarians. And giving those of us already in the fold a place to call home.