Support Reason and Help Us Influence the Next John Stossel, Drew Carey, and…

…Nick Gillespie?

Before our 2009 webathon ends next Friday (November 20), We're looking to get 500 new donors to Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine, Reason.com, Reason.tv. Like all magazines of ideas, we don't fully cover our production costs via subscriptions, ad sales, and other revenue streams, so we depend on generous, like-minded people such as yourselves. "Free Minds and Free Markets" aren't free!

Your donations are tax-deductible and if you give $100, you get your choice of Brian Doherty's awesome history of the modern libertarian movement, Radicals for Capitalism, or Peter Bagge's fantastic collection of a decade's worth of cartoon journalism for Reason, Everybody is Stupid Except For Me. Go here to donate and what level gift gets you what level of swag.

What do you get (besides a book, a bumper sticker, a feeling of inner satisfaction?) when you give to Reason? One of our major goals is to help create the next generation of libertarian writers, thinkers, and citizens. People who are dedicated to increasing personal freedom in every way, shape, and form possible. People who will take that message to more and more people, with greater and greater influence and impact.

Reason started publishing in 1968 and it has been turning on folks to libertarianism ever since. Consider these three examples:

John Stossel: The best-known libertarian in the news media, Stossel has just left ABC News, where he co-hosted 20/20 for years and did awesome specials on free-market ideas, like last spring's "Bailouts and Bull," which was inspired by Reason.tv segments on the drug war, immigration, and economics. Stossel is moving to  Fox Business Channel, where he will have a weekly show. Stossel says he was a generic consumer-affairs reporter, yapping about exploding coffee pots and repair-shop scams. Until he encountered Reason back in the 1980s:

"It was a revelation…. Here were writers who analyzed the benefits of free markets that I witnessed as a reporter. They called themselves libertarians, and their slogan was 'Free Minds and Free Markets.' I wasn't exactly sure what that meant, but what they wrote sure made sense."

Drew Carey: The co-creator and star of his own legendary sitcom and the popular host of The Price is Right was the force behind creating Reason.tv, where he's hosted documentaries on the drug war, markets for organs, eminent domain abuse, and much more. A longtime reader of the magazine, Carey credits Reason with giving voice to his political sensibility, telling Time magazine:

I never thought I was a libertarian until I picked up Reason magazine and realized I agree with everything they had printed.

Nick Gillespie: The two guys just mentioned live on another planet from yours truly in terms of stature and audience, for sure, but there I am, in places such as The New York Times quoting Hayek and calling for the legalization of just about everything. Or calling out George W. Bush as a big-government disaster in the Wall Street Journal. And (with Matt Welch) defining libertarian in The Wash Post.  I started working for Reason magazine back in the fall of 1993, when the incredible Virginia Postrel was editor. Working for Reason was a dream job for me because the mag had shaped my thinking from an early age:

My older brother, away at a college that…was, ironically enough, Milton Friedman's undergraduate alma mater, ran across a magazine called REASON and started passing old issues my way. References to F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises abounded in those pages… all pointing to an intellectual tradition that had somehow escaped my teachers' attention. By the time I graduated college and began covering zoning and planning board meetings for a daily newspaper, my blood would boil at the ways in which municipal martinets struck down or heavily modified proposed home improvements and additions.

This is what Reason mag, Reason.com, Reason.tv does: It gets people to think differently and more critically. It gets them to engage the world around them and push harder and harder for freedom in all its varieties. It celebrates the possibilities of the future, of science and technology, and human ingenuity. Reason lights the lamp of liberty in the hearts of all sorts of people by providing intellectual sustenance, a sense of community, and a sense of meaning and mission.

By supporting Reason, you're helping to create the next John Stossel and the next Drew Carey. And you're helping to change the world by making "Free Minds and Free Markets" the battle cry for a future so bright we're all going to need UV-deflecting corneal implants that will only be invented if we beat back the headlong rush to government control of every aspect of our lives.

So please help us hit our goal of 500 new donors. We appreciate whatever support you can send our way and we can promise that we'll put it all to the best use possible in the fight for freedom. Go here to donate now.