(From the Intellectual Ammunition section in Volume 18, No. 22 of the Liberator Online. Subscribe here!)
Here are five fantastic — and now award-winning — liberty videos.
On November 6, 2013 the libertarian Reason Foundation announced the winners of the first-ever Reason Video Prize, which “honors short-form video, film, and moving pictures that explore, investigate, and enrich our appreciation of libertarian beliefs in individual rights, limited government, and especially human possibilities.”
All are great, and you can see them all
here. Note at the upper left of the video, there’s a playlist of all five winning videos, starting with the winner, “I, Pencil.” So you can sit back and watch them in sequence, or pick whichever ones you want to see.
Drew Tidwell’s “I, Pencil,” produced for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, won first place and a $7,000 award. We’ve featured it in past issues. It’s a fantastic video adaptation of one of the greatest free-market essays ever written.
Second place ($2,000) went to Justin Monticello’s “Obama That I Used to Know,” a song parody that sums up the disillusionment of young Obama voters who voted for peace and civil liberties and got, in return… drones hits, illegal wars, crony capitalism, and other bitter fruits. Our favorite line: “Sometimes I think that Peace Prize winners shouldn’t have a kill list…”
Third place ($1,000) went to Isaac Reese’s “Game of Food Trucks,” produced for the libertarian Institute for Justice (IJ). This funny Game of Thrones parody asks a very serious question: Should the city of Chicago be in the business of protecting a few politically connected restaurateurs from competition? Hooray for the heroic entrepreneurs who are fighting back — with the help of IJ.
There were two other finalists.
“Top DHS Checkpoint Refusals,” produced by Mike Mills, is one you don’t want to miss. It’s a raw, astonishing compilation of citizens daring to stand up to authority by exercising their constitutional right to travel unmolested and to refuse questioning at Department of Homeland Security immigration checkpoints (that aren’t actually at the border). It’s also an eye-opening look at the sleazy, deceptive ways government agents try to imply powers that they don’t legally have. If all Americans had this devotion to civil liberties…
“Crony Chronicles: I Want to Grow Up to be a Crony” by Owen Brennan, Justin Folk, and Robert Perkins is a hilarious, if sad, portrayal of how the American dream has been perverted by crony capitalism, aka “crapitalism.”
Five fantastic videos for liberty. Check them out!
