Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.

Mitch Daniels:

Greetings and welcome to this installment of Liberty Fund’s Future of Liberty podcast. We are so fortunate to have with us today Katherine Mangu-Ward, who is the Editor-in-Chief. All caps.

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

That’s right.

Mitch Daniels:

At Reason magazine- for some of us our favorite publication. Welcome and thanks for being with us.

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

I’m delighted to be here.

Mitch Daniels:

So let me start by adapting the old bar stool line. What’s a nice libertarian girl like you doing living in Washington DC?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (00.48):

You know it’s a fair question, but my best go at an answer has two parts. The first is I grew up in the DC area, so it’s home for me. I’m a beltway baby and it’s hard to escape once you’re inside the vortex. But my other answer is somebody’s got to keep an eye on those guys. So many years ago, Reason magazine, which was founded in 1968, actually used to run ads that said we’re a political magazine that’s not based in Washington DC. It used to be a selling point, but so much of what we cover happens there that we really do need reporters on the ground, on the hill, kind of keeping an eye on Congress, on the President, on the vast and sprawling administrative state.

Mitch Daniels:

I guess that’s an acceptable excuse.

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

In, but maybe not of the city. How’s that?

Mitch Daniels (1.40):

We’ll settle for that and now that I know you actually have roots there, to the extent anyone ever can, we’ll give you a pass,

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

A local girl.

Mitch Daniels:

Alright. Despite your obvious youth, you’ve been at Reason quite a long time now and you’ve seen a lot of changes. Some of us still like to read magazines even occasionally, the kind you can hold in your hand. How many people are doing that and is the written word still the primary currency in the world of ideas in which you are a leader?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (2.19):

You know one thing that always astonishes me is that even in 2024, people who have not heard of Reason or coming across it for the first time, a question that they ask is, well, is it a real magazine? By which they mean do we murder trees and print it on there and mail it out to people? And I think that there is something about that that people find to be satisfying and also kind of validating, right? If you’re going to bother to print a magazine, you must be really serious about what you’re putting in there. We stopped doing very much direct mail or other advertising for the print magazine many years ago, and it was a surprise to us that actually our subscription numbers keep climbing. So there really are people who seek out and want a print magazine to read and leave on their coffee table and give to their friends,

Mitch Daniels:

Tear things out of…

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

Tear things out of…

Mitch Daniels:

You can scribble ’em on…

Katherine Mangu-Ward (3.14):

Maybe fold it up, put it in an envelope, mail it off to an unsuspecting victim, that’s for sure. Still a thing that we hear about. So yeah, I actually think the era of print magazines is not over, and oddly, there is a growing audience for people who I think want to get off their phones and get off their screens, but still maybe consume something meaningful about the news. Of course, that’s a smaller part of what we do now. When I was an intern at Reason in the summer of 2000, the website did exist, but the magazine was the primary product and we still did our proofing by fax. So it’s very, very different than what I said.

Mitch Daniels:

What’s a fax?

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

Yeah, yeah. I’ll teach the children about the fax symbol machines on this podcast. It’ll be great.

Mitch Daniels (4.01):

Define for the audience the difference between a capital “L” libertarian and a small “l” libertarian.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (4.08):

So Reason is a libertarian magazine, but we say that we are small “l” libertarian and that is to kind of center the word around the philosophy of libertarianism. Our motto is “Free Minds and Free Markets,” and that’s how we think about what libertarianism means. Capital “L,” libertarian we use, and most people use to refer to the Libertarian Party, which is a very different entity. Small “L” libertarianism I think is bigger and more important in many ways than capital “L” libertarianism. And one thing that we think a lot about at Reason is how to push the boundaries of small “l” libertarianism. So it’s about constraining the state, it’s about limiting government, it’s about limiting the size and scope of government, not just the dollars spent, but it’s also maybe a way of thinking about what we owe to each other and what it means to be an individual in a society with a state. We do a lot of internal debate and discussion about what it means to be a small “l” libertarian. There’s not one answer, but the libertarian party, capital “L” Libertarians is a distinct phenomenon.

Mitch Daniels (5.27):

Yeah, it is. Some of us have been watching and wondering whether at some point they could become a more material factor in our politics, hasn’t happened, but pursue that a little further. Talk about why it hasn’t, why they haven’t grown, especially with the dissatisfaction. Now, for the record dissatisfaction about the two established parties they’ve just nominated as we’re sitting here today, they’ve just nominated their next presidential candidate. What do you think their prospects are? Any opportunity for growth there or will small “l” libertarianism have to find other vehicles?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (6.11):

Yeah, I mean I would certainly love to live in a country where there was a robust third party that had libertarian leanings, and I don’t think that’s a crazy idea. I think libertarianism is very American. I think there are a lot of people in this country who would identify with some of the tenants of libertarianism and those people are like many other Americans, maybe not thrilled about the candidates that are on offer right now from the two major parties. I think the Libertarian party has a couple of things working against it. One is the deck is actually stacked, so our electoral system is jointly owned by the two major parties and they have all kinds of tools and tricks to keep third parties out, not just libertarians, but green party, reform party, independent candidates, the most powerful of which is excluding them from the debate stage.
For many Americans, their first moment when they really start to think meaningfully about who they might vote for is that moment that they see the two guys shouting at each other from behind podiums. And the debates actually up until this cycle have been totally locked down by a bipartisan debate commission that is not interested in opening up to third parties. Ballot access is another really big issue. It’s quite hard to get on the ballot if your party hasn’t been on the ballot in past elections. One of the libertarian party’s biggest wins has been decades of working on getting ballot access. So you will see libertarian party candidates on most ballots, but it’s a struggle and they have to kind of fight to keep their heads above water every single cycle.

Mitch Daniels (7.55):

Is it fair to say that another impediment to their growth has been lack of coherence in what they stand for or what they appear to stand for and some inconsistency from election year to election year in that?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (8.12):

So I do think that’s true of the libertarian party, but I also think it’s just as true of the major parties. I mean so many of the critiques that you can level against the libertarian party, the slightest bit of self-awareness on the part of a hardcore Democrat or a hardcore Republican, they’re going to say, oh yeah, actually our party has that problem too. Our party has super fierce internecine warfare over very small procedural issues. Our party has a tendency to validate after the fact, whatever the kind of presidential nominee says. Certainly we’re seeing that on display in both of the mainstream parties right now in particular. But libertarians’ are kind of fam-, I mean this is sort of to adapt an old joke, if you put two libertarians on a desert island, there’s going to be three kinds of libertarianism immediately. Right so there really is in libertarianism this streak for wanting to figure things out for yourself and kind of having your own variant of the philosophy and the libertarian party can suffer from that as well.

Mitch Daniels (9.18):

I like contrarians and you certainly have more than one view that qualifies, but here’s one that maybe you’d like to explain to the viewers. You think we should all stay home and not bother voting?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (9.33):

I do. This is the best way to get in a fight at a dinner party or maybe on a podcast. So we’ll see how it goes. I wrote a piece many years ago, a cover story for Reason on this topic. I am a non-voter. I don’t vote. And I think that in general, people really overvalue voting as a civic act. So the first thing I would say is I’m a political journalist, obviously. I think participating in the political process is really important. You should care about who governs you, but people kind of have this idea that they can just go and pull the lever and they’ve done their civic duty. And I think first of all, there have been vanishingly few elections that were decided by one vote, there’s just a mathematical issue here. You’re not the guy that’s going to decide the election. But then there’s also I think a kind of moral question, which is how do I interact with a system that I think is fundamentally unjust or produces bad outcomes?
And I think now more than ever, no matter who wins, I think it’s going to be bad. And I think you can say, well, it’s not your fault if the guy you voted for loses, but we kind of do this thing where we both say, if you don’t vote, you can’t complain. And also well by voting you ratified the result, you participated in the system and justified it. And so there’s this, we’re kind of trapped. And I will say it is our God-given right as Americans to complain. That is the most fundamental right that Americans have. It is not subordinate to voting. I will complain until my dying day, but I will not vote. And I think that you know important to disaggregate those things. Those rights come from different places and those privileges require different things of us. So people can vote if they feel like it’s fun, but I would just like for them to understand what it’s really doing and also what kind of system they might be complicit in.

Mitch Daniels (11.39):

My last contact with Immanuel Kant was about second semester of freshman year, but if we universalize your behavior, we’d have an interesting situation. Maybe that’s the answer.

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

So I will say…

Mitch Daniels:

Nobody gets elected.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (11.52):

I’m not a Kantian. And that’s one reason why, because I actually think the idea of universalizing behavior as a way to get to moral principles doesn’t always work. But I do say in that article, and I do believe I can write you a universal principle that accommodates this. And the universal principle is something like if your vote will influence the outcome of an election, it is imperative that you vote. But otherwise feel free to skip. If I’m voting in a PTA election and there’s only two of us there, I’ll vote. I’ll vote for that one. But I think there’s this kind of collective delusion that we have about the power of our vote and the propaganda that goes, there’s always these get out the vote campaigns and they turn out maybe lower information voters, voters that are being motivated by something other than a deep understanding of the issues or the stances of the parties.
So I think encouraging that may also not be the path to civic health. I think the closest analogy actually is probably when you go to a game, a sports ball game of your choice, people feel like voting is being on the team, but voting is being in the crowd, right? You’re cheering, you’re happy to be there, you want your guys to win, but actually going to the game does not influence the outcome of the game. And I think if people understood that better, you can still go to the game, but you should just not be confused about whether you’re on the team.

Mitch Daniels:

I think you can count on continued fights on that.

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

I do think so. I’m happy to fight. I love to fight. I think that’s one of the great things about the United States is we have a culture of scrapping it out on political disagreements.

Mitch Daniels (13.41):

Well, on that subject you pointing out, as many have at least for now polarization of our country, but the relatively small percentages who adhere to the two edges, you express the idea that you said hope is in the middle. Many have said this, but what’s the mechanism for that middle mobilizing or at least expressing itself in a way that begins to have more effect on events?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (14.18):

Yeah, so it’s tricky, right? Because on the one hand, I do think our politics are increasingly dominated by people who are extremely polarized, both in terms of substance, but more importantly affective polarization. So this idea that the other side is evil or will destroy the country or I think most importantly, the idea that the other guys broke the rules first and now we can break the rules too. I think that of schoolyard tit for tat thinking is so dominant and so dangerous, right? Because two wrongs don’t make a right as we also learn in the schoolyard, and it’s very hard to trace who the original bad actor was. But I used to say the libertarianism was a radical philosophy, and I still do think it has radical intent, but more and more I don’t see libertarianism as radical. I see it as actually being the real moderate philosophy that is to say, given that we can’t agree, could we try leaving each other alone a little bit? Could we try doing less, not more to get involved in each other’s lives Again, given that we have really demonstrated quite clearly that we can’t agree. When we do agree, it’s also sometimes not great. So there’s that piece as well. But I think that the notion of moderation is sometimes taken as kind of milque toast or mealy mouthed or squishy, but maybe actually moderation is something like a ceasefire or a detente or kind of toleration for each other, right?

Mitch Daniels (16.02):

Right. There is a certain asymmetry though when one side, which may assert that the other side broke a rule first, I want to come back to that in a second, but one side is not only happy, but feels fully justified in using the coercive power of the state or maybe other institutions to order the world in the way it sees as just and the other team is live and let live.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (16.39):

I’m not sure which teams you’re describing as which anymore. I mean, I would’ve said at one time that maybe at least Republicans paid more lip service to the idea of live and let live, and the left was a little more authoritarian. But more and more I hear people on the right say, you know what? We tried, we tried toleration, we tried live and let live, and those commies, lefties, progressives, whatever, they came after us. And so now we got to do the same. And you hear that on everything from trade policy. Well, China started it, so now we got to fight fire with fire. You hear it on partisan warfare, but also just everyday domestic policy as well. The idea that, well, sure, we would love to have free speech, but we’re going to need to pass a law coercing the social media companies to, and then on the left they have one proposal, and on the right they have the other proposal, but they’re both using the power of the state to try and coerce a private business or to help their side win or would if they could get away with it.

Mitch Daniels:

Today, one side’s got their hands on the levers and not just the state.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (17.54):

So I do think one thing that we learned coming out of the Covid pandemic was social media companies really cooperated with and were coerced by in a kind of reciprocal way that’s hard to disentangle the public health establishment. And so the Twitter Files- Reason did a bunch of reporting and obtained a bunch of documents about a similar phenomenon within Facebook, where you saw people within the bureaucracies of these social media companies sometimes reaching out and asking to be told what to do. But also sometimes having actors from the state, from the CDC, from the FDA, from the state department, from all kinds of places reaching out and basically saying, that’s a nice social media company you have there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it, if you got accused of disseminating misinformation. And so I do think my bias as a libertarian is to kind of ask the question where is the state exerting power? Even if it is subtle power, even if it is implied power. And it’s true often that there are going to be eager collaborators. That’s always the case in authoritarian regimes, but I still think in the end, the real villain isn’t the guy at Twitter who happens to be a lefty. The real villain is the guy at the CDC putting the pressure on the guy at Twitter.

Mitch Daniels (19.24):

Maybe the greater villain. But did you see any evidence of resentment resistance, anybody taking offense among the social media actors?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (19.39):

Oh yeah, I think so. There was absolutely in those email chains that came out and in the direct message chains that came out, there were people sometimes in other conversations saying, Hey, is this legal? Hey, is this wise? Hey, this doesn’t comport with our standards. And that actually I think was underappreciated in those conversations. It was often the case that they had some kind of existing moderation policy and then someone internally or externally said, okay, we got to block this guy. And somebody somewhere in the chain said, on what grounds? And we also did see people from the House of Representatives from the Senate reaching out and saying, you don’t have to follow these rules. And some unexpected people like [?] and others kind of just saying, this isn’t consistent with our principles of free speech and it’s not going to end well. So I actually do think not to be like Mr. Rogers about it, but you can look for the helpers, you can look for people who are trying to do the right thing and they’re there…

Mitch Daniels (20.41):

Good to know. Can we hope for some? Now there’s been a…scandals, not too big a word, I think scandalous disclosures of things that many people suspected all along, that the government was being knowingly duplicitous about some of the mandates and interpretations of the facts and the science at the time. Now there’s been a string of these disclosures and even confessions about what was known and not known about the origins of the virus, about masks, about whether the [Great] Barrington Declaration recommendations were at least legitimate and discussable. Anything going to come of that or will that all be simply evaporate?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (21.40):

Gosh, I’m so torn because on the one hand, I would just love to think that maybe somewhere in the system someone would acquire a little bit of humility. They really did screw up quite badly on the origins hypothesis. And so part of me thinks like, well, massive public embarrassment is a good teacher. On the other hand, this is hardly the first time that something like this has happened. Reason ran a piece by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky about some of these new disclosures about what folks at the NIH knew and when they knew it about the theories about gain of function research and what was going on in Wuhan. And this kind of gets back to first principles for me, but I really think that the answer fundamentally has to be reducing the power of these government entities because I think as long as they have the power, they’ll abuse it. And so the question is, well, why was the NAH making these decisions in an unaccountable way to fund this research? Why were they looping around and working around established safeguards to prevent this kind of thing? We actually have Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was one of the authors of the Barrington Declaration. He’s reviewing Fauci’s memoir for us. So you can expect that to be a bit of a barn burner. And I think that’s right. I do think we need to kind of not only push back in real time, we also need to hold people accountable after the fact when we have more information. I think this is the role of the press. We do the Freedom of Information Act requests. We take the people who knew what was going on and we say, we’re not going to just all pretend this didn’t happen. But in the end, I think this is why I think you got to defund these agencies. You have to reduce their scope. You have to reduce the kind of amount of space that they’re given by legislators to make decisions on their own right. Congress has a job and for many, many years it’s chosen not to do it, and they could be constraining all of these types of things, and they’re choosing not to because it’s a hard fight.

Mitch Daniels (23.57):

Those of us who would like to believe that these gross errors and dereliction that we’re talking about were either the result of honest misjudgments or biases that people acted out to a point that would welcome the humility you talked about and some confessions, because absent that, it’s only natural for people to come to more sinister conclusions, conspiracies and all that.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (24.34):

Yeah, I mean, I do think the sort of public choice literature has a lot to say about this, which there are many, many, many experts in this area. So I’m going to do a horrible paraphrase and just say, government actors who do bad things don’t have to be bad people. That’s one of the insights that I think is so important that there are incentives for public servants to grow their empires, to keep their activities secret, to gather as much funding and influence as they can to dodge oversight. These are all things that are kind of built into the system, and you can put decent people into these jobs and they end up doing horrible things. And I do think that a lot of what happened during Covid is best explained that way, and not through some kind of sinister conspiracy or supervillain type explanation. Sometimes everyone’s doing their best, but responding to incentives and you just get utterly disastrous results, which is why we have to have fewer people empowered to make these decisions for us in the first place.

Mitch Daniels (25.44):

Yeah, that’s what I was really getting at. Having spent some time in public life, I’ve always been mystified how hard a word “oops” is for people.

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

Not just in the public sphere, I’m sorry to say.

Mitch Daniels (25.59):

Well, that’s true, but it’s more important in some cases when people are holding a public trust and acting on behalf of others and spending money that they confiscated through taxation and the public. My reading has been, and my experience has been there’s more understanding than that. What’s harder for us in the public to understand is when people disassemble and refuse to admit error, obvious error, and then if the press is not serving its historic function of correcting that, it just feeds the notion that something worse is going on.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (26.45):

I think that’s right, and I think this is something that we see as our role at Reason. We wear our ideological biases on our sleeves. We say, we’re libertarian. This is what we’re doing. We’re looking for analysis and stories to tell you about the world, questions to investigate and report on that are congruent with a libertarian worldview. But to me, what that means is we’re going to think to look places other people might not think to look. And I think there still are lots of rewards for genuine holding power, accountable style journalism. Unfortunately, there are also lots of rewards for sucking up to power journalism, and you see a lot of that, particularly at our major papers.

Mitch Daniels (27.28):

Yeah, you’ve mentioned in a couple contexts the new technologies which are rushing on upon us faster than some of us can keep track of. From the very beginning, the dawn of the information age, people have wondered and speculated whether these magnificent innovations would enhance freedom and enable freedom or become the instruments of oppressing it. Where do you think we are and which is the greater likelihood?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (28.05):

So I think ultimately technology is a human thing, and so it has all the attributes that humans have, including that it is both freedom enhancing and also can empower instruments of control. So I would generally describe myself as a kind of techno optimist. I think in general, this story of the last 200 years, let’s say, is a story of international trade in not only goods and ideas, but especially the place that goods and ideas come together, which is technology to make people’s lives better. And we’re talking about dramatic reversals in literacy and access to clean water, education for everyone, but especially for women. Just base what kind of income per capita different nations have. And I think all of that is genuinely attributable to technological innovation in some sense. I think sometimes the technologies that have the most influence are technologies we wouldn’t think of exactly in those terms.
So governance technologies, the idea of rights is a technology in a way. It’s a kind of tool to use to build things, institutions, for example. But I think on the kind of simpler definition in my industry, we are better able to communicate with more people and more people are better able to communicate with each other than they ever have been. And I just have to believe that that is a win for freedom. Yes, people are saying totally stupid things to each other a lot of the time, but people were always saying stupid things to each other. They were just saying it to each other on a smaller scale. And sometimes people hear something that’s really life changing. Sometimes people learn something they didn’t know before. Sometimes people see something from a new perspective. And I think communication technology in particular, of course has its downsides, but ultimately is a freedom promoting thing. Of course, if you do this all in public and you do it all on the record, it’s also super convenient for governments who might want to crack down on certain types of speech.

Mitch Daniels (30.24):

So what should we make of the not just suggestions now starting to happen on social media limitations on young people?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (30.35):

So I am fundamentally opposed, and I know that in some ways that’s a lonely position because almost everyone on both the left and the right now says some version of, hasn’t this gone too far? Can’t we make rules? Can’t we make laws? So I would say two things. One is government’s pretty bad at anything it tries to do. And so I think we should assume that especially when it comes to technology, they’re going to screw it up. Not that there mightn’t be a perfect regulation that could exist, but the odds that my buddies in Washington DC are going to get that exactly right are so low, and in the meantime, they may wind up really messing up a quite important technology in ways that are hard to see in advance. But I think the other piece of it is, I’m old enough to remember when Republicans in particular used to talk about how parents are responsible for their children. So I think it’s often, what about the children? We have to protect the children. Social media is a case where parenting very much can be the remedy, and I think it’s appropriate to say the right decision-making level for whether your kids should be on social media is your household, not Washington DC.

Mitch Daniels (31.53):

Differentiated from alcohol, drugs, a number of things driving, a number of things we place age limits on. Is this materially different?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (32.05):

I think it’s materially different for a couple of reasons. One is it’s almost impossible to avoid quite dramatic knock-on effects for adults if we try to impose these age limits for kids. So for example, in several states, the way that they’re trying to enforce these age limits that have already gone into effect is you have to upload your driver’s license to prove your age reasonable enough. That’s what we do if you want to buy beer. But to me, it’s a different thing to show a liquor store clerk my driver’s license versus to give my driver’s license and then presumably attach everything that I do on TikTok, say, to my real identity and also give that information to a government That seems like a recipe for disaster. So I do think so often it is the case that restrictions that are meant to protect children are actually the thin end of the wedge to restrict adult choice and adult behavior. And I want to be vigilant about that. Reason recently did a big project in collaboration with Bellwether, the kind of education research folks over there who brought together a huge data set about the cutoffs for every age in every state for different activities. So when can you work? When can you vape? When can you get birth control? When can you get married? When can you drive a tractor? And one thing that was really interesting to me is how totally incoherent it was. Every state was different. They were different in different patterns.

Mitch Daniels (33.40):

Well, we like states to be different, don’t we?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (33.42):

And we do. So in theory, this is a kind of laboratories-of-democracy type situation. In practice it seems like just as a nation and even within states, we don’t have a clear idea of when people become adults and when they should have responsibility over their own lives. And I worry about the fact that we’re generally infantilizing teenagers in particular. I want kids to take responsibility for themselves and grow up maybe a little faster than they’ve been growing up in the kind of helicopter parenting age. So I do want kids to have freedom where appropriate. And again, I think it’s the parent’s job to decide when.

Mitch Daniels (34.18):

So one last question about where appropriate, what about leaving them legal but banning them in schools where there is evidence that they get in the way of the educational process?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (34.29):

Yeah, I think that’s totally reasonable, but I would say this is where a little of my maybe more radical libertarianism comes out. You know what makes this decision really easy if there are no public schools, if this is something where you’re sending your kid to a school of choice and you can opt into a policy, right? So I think it’s one thing if you say, okay, every school child in Montana, no phones, no social media. Well, yeah, there might be people who disagree. There might be people who want something different for their kids. It’s a little too one size fits all for my taste. I still think it’s permissible. Kids do have more restrictions on their freedom within a public school, though they do have free speech rights within a public schools as the Supreme Court has established. And so I think there are some questions there, but I would love to see a world where there’s true school choice, heavily voucher-ize if you want to still involve state funding or just private schools. And in that case, parents could choose for their kids how much access that.

Mitch Daniels (35.31):

Well, welcome to Indiana where we’ve had total school choice…

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

I know I’m happy to be here!

Mitch Daniels (35.35):

Among public schools, charter schools, and a private voucher system for essentially everyone now for quite a long time.

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

So I’d like to see schools be able to experiment the way they have with so many other things here.

Mitch Daniels (35.48):

One last school question. You’ve written, or at least a time ago, you wrote very approvingly of online education even in the younger ages. Now, we had a very large clinical trial of this recently. Did we learn anything that either reinforced your view or modified it?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (36.08):

Yeah, so I think the thing that we learned during Covid; I had young kids during Covid and as a parent really experienced this firsthand. What we learned is that our kids’ in-person education was pretty bad in a lot of cases. I think so many parents got this lens onto what their kids were doing during the day. And yes, it was the Zoom version. And yes, it was maybe hastily put together, especially at first, but there were so many parents who said, oh my God, is this what school is like? Is this what kids are doing all day? And they were really unhappy with that. I don’t think the problem is the computers. I think the problem is the schools. I think the problem is the teachers’ unions. I think the problem is the kind of culture war discourse around curriculum. For my part during Covid, my kids went from attending public school to attending a micro school, a private school. I’m lucky I cause I have school choice. Many folks in Indiana have school choice, but not everyone does. And so right now, the school that my kids go to is, it’s an Acton Academy, two different kinds of Acton-modeled schools actually. And they use online tools all the time. They’re learning math from Khan Academy. Sal Khan is teaching them math on the internet, but they’re doing it in the context of a school that’s built to a human scale in a way that I think makes sense for kids.

Mitch Daniels:

There is some social interaction as part of it.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (37.38):

Sure. And I don’t think anybody is saying the pure perfect utopia would be one where no one ever leaves their basement. But I do think we so often are comparing the way that online learning plays out in real life to some kind of imagined ideal of in-person universal public schooling. And that’s the wrong comparison. I remain bullish on online education and certainly feel like it’s working for my kids.

Mitch Daniels (38.05):

There’ve been a number of reported public opinion surveys among younger people that suggest a very different view of this country, of its institutions of free minds and free markets than every other generation, including the ones just adjacent plainly, an ignorance of traditions and history and a probably related hostility, at least expressed capitalism, free speech and so forth. How concerned are you or aren’t you? Is this something they’ll learn and grow their way out of, or will America look very different when they’re in charge?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (38.51):

I’m sure America will look very different when they’re in charge because America always looks very different. Every generation changes things. I can’t quite get all the way on the kids-these-days-are-bad bandwagon, even though I certainly have seen plenty of evidence of it. I think there’s a couple of things going on. One, I think if there’s anything that we’ve learned since at least 2016, but maybe further back, polls are tough. Polls are tough to interpret. And it’s not clear that when kids say we live in late stage capitalism and it’s bad that they have any visceral sense of what that means or even that they really believe that so much is just that, that’s what they hear their peers saying.
We also do see this problem with adults. I’ve been very struck recently, by the way in which partisan views on both trade and immigration just swap depending on who’s in power and what they’re doing. It suggests that lots of Americans just don’t actually have deeply held views framed in ideological terms or in policy terms. And I actually think that’s a good thing. I think frankly, it’s a better country if people don’t think and talk as much about electoral politics. Now that’s different than big ideas, and that’s different than kind of civic engagement. But when kids say, I’m a socialist, what does that mean? I don’t think they know. I don’t think I know. I do think the joys and conveniences and freedoms afforded by a capitalist society with a robust liberal tradition are pretty great in real time. And I think people will be very hesitant to give them up even as much as they kind of want to fight it out on the partisan level. So I think it’s going to be okay. I think that we actually have just a very, very deep well to draw on in the United States. I think the educational options for kids are so, they’re changing so radically right now and that maybe not every kid comes out of school understanding why capitalism is great, but more kids will have that opportunity in the coming years. So I do think that the tide can turn.

Mitch Daniels (41.10):

I think we have to take a charitable view. I do anyway, of too many young people today. First of all, they’ve not seen a pretty picture. If your whole exposure either to our market system- just had a few good years, but some very lousy years while you’ve been of age and paying attention, and our political system has been less attractive and less uplifting, let’s say, than it has been for much of American history. We’ve had bad moments before, but this is not one of our better periods. And you compound that with frankly, a miseducation or at least lack of in too many of our schools that have left young people without any really sense of perspective of the things you just talked about. So that gives you some hope that maybe life or later learning will moderate these views.

Katherine Mangu-Ward (42.11):

I do also think real life is different than school. And I actually was talking to some education reform folks who said they hate that expression. They hate people contrasting school and real life school is real life for these kids. And that’s true, but there’s nothing like getting your first paycheck and having the tax bite out of it. That’s right. To just move everybody a couple ticks toward the libertarian side of the spectrum, even if only in that moment of outrage.

Mitch Daniels:

There was this kid I read about a long time ago, apocryphal probably said, who is this FICA guy and why did he take so much of my money?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (42.43):

Absolutely. And I think that that’s real. I think that there is kind this experience. Maybe people are skeptical of the capitalist system as they understand it, but they’re also skeptical of the state. And the worst equilibrium is one that’s very low trust, where people say capitalism is bad, the state is bad, everything’s bad, and they become kind of nihilistic. But I also think there’s a more optimistic view, which is that it balances. Yes, maybe capitalism isn’t perfect, but on the other hand, they just took a third of my paycheck and spent it on what aid to foreign nations that I don’t approve of their conduct or enforcing book bans in Florida or whatever it is that makes these kids mad. They have the police that are beating people in the streets. You can take kind of a lefty perspective on they’re taking my tax money and they’re doing horrible things with it. And I think that that does pull people back from this kind of antis status quo radicalism.

Mitch Daniels (43.49):

So let’s finish. I’m going to give you an invitation to make us all feel better here. Okay. At the end, look out 20, 30 years, let’s say mid-century. Is America a freer nation than today or less so?

Katherine Mangu-Ward (44.07):

So I think it’s freer, and I think there are a couple reasons why. One is technology. I think that as long as the world outside of government is growing faster than the state, that life gets better. And so I think that there are days when it feels like maybe the growth of government is overtaking the private sector, but for the most part, that’s not the case. Government does get bigger, but people just living their lives and doing interesting things in the market and as artists and as engineers, they just are making the world freer and better. They’re giving people more choices and more ways to collaborate and interact and speak to each other. As long as that continues, then I think the world keeps getting better. And so far that is where we are.

Mitch Daniels (45.00):

Well, Katherine Mangu-Ward, one of the reasons I’m inclined to optimism is that you and Reason magazine are, they’re on the parts looking for things others haven’t looked for or found yet. Please keep doing that. And I think there’s an excellent chance that that better tomorrow does arrive. Thanks for being with us.

Katherine Mangu-Ward:

Thank you so much for having me.

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