Culture

C'mon, People, Let's Get Those Bitcoin Donations up to Keep Sending Brian Doherty Into the Wacky, Wonderful World of Lived-in Freedom!*

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So as of yesterday afternoon, Reason's annual Webathon, our drive to $200,000 in tax-deductible donations that ends today, had received the following category & number of gifts:

* By credit card: 477

* Paypal: 277

* Amazon: 65

* Bitcoin: 24

Look, I don't want to inject any ingratitude into what has been our most successful Webathon to date, BUT ONLY 24 BITCOIN DONATIONS??? As the man said, "Come on!" (Yes, I'm recycling.) If I had a Bitcoin donation for every time I had been asked by a libertarian–let alone lectured at by highly caffeinated Silicon Valley types–about how Bitcoin was going to undermine the very concept of the nation-state, well, I'd have more than 24 Bitcoin donations, that's what!

Which brings us to our most Bitcointastic of senior editors, Brian DohertyHere's what it's like in Brian's vibrant, anarchic world: You put a  3D-printed gun in your pocket (or just a regular gun, for that matter), summon an Uber, pay for it with Bitcoin, ride to the airport where you board a plane without showing ID, fly to Burning Man (I know there's no airports there shhhhhh*), dress up as Isabel Paterson, and ingest items purchased on the Silk Road.

Do you share that dream? Of course (many of) you do. (And for those who don't, that's cool: Brian's inherently tolerant world of peacable transactions between consenting humans also includes a lot of offline reading, perhaps in your Mike Love-style Freedom Pajamas.) 

So why not give us some of those Bitcoins you've been hoarding to help fund even more Dohertian explorations of what human pioneers are doing with their freedom?

Brian Doherty is the historian of the libertarian movement, including that of Reason itself. Check out his bibliography: This is Burning Man (2004), Radicals for Capitalism: A History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (2007), Gun Control on Trial (2008), and Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired.

Show me another publication that has a Brian Doherty. That's right, you can't. DONATE TO REASON RIGHT THE HELL NOW!

* Important correction: The inscrutable Mr. Doherty tells me there actually is an airstrip at Burning Man, for private planes only, no Big Corporate Airline jets, man….