Reason Magazine presents itself as a courageous outsider “pushing back against socialism,” but its real and consistent function is far more familiar: it operates as an ideological shield for concentrated private power while marketing itself as anti-authoritarian.
This is a standard maneuver in modern propaganda systems. Power is most effective when it doesn’t look like power.
Libertarian rhetoric of this kind is not hostile to domination. It merely relocates domination from the state to the corporate sphere and then declares it freedom. When corporations dismantle labor protections, privatize public goods, extract monopoly rents, or exert overwhelming control over markets and politics, this is described as “voluntary exchange.” When the public attempts to limit that power through democratic means, it is branded “socialism.” The effect is to defend hierarchy while pretending to oppose it.
Their attacks on socialism are therefore not serious economic analysis but ideological boundary-setting. Socialism is never accurately presented as worker control, democratic ownership, or liberation from wage dependency. It is reduced to caricature: inefficiency, tyranny, stagnation.
This sleight of hand allows them to avoid grappling with the actual historical record of capitalism—colonial plunder, labor repression, environmental destruction, financial predation, and the steady transfer of wealth upward. Those realities are treated as either accidental, irrelevant, or the fault of insufficient markets.
What this messaging really polices is not economic truth but political imagination. The goal is not to prove that corporate power works well—it plainly does not for most people—but to convince the public that no alternative can even be discussed without being mocked as dangerous or naive. That is how ideological control functions in advanced societies: not by force, but by narrowing the range of acceptable thought.
The irony is that the policies Reason defends—deregulated capital, privatized infrastructure, financial dominance, and weak labor power—are exactly what have produced the insecurity, debt, medical bankruptcies, housing crises, and political alienation now tearing societies apart. Yet the suffering created by those policies is then used as proof that any attempt to restrain corporate power must be “unrealistic.”
This is not journalism in the public-interest sense. It is advocacy for one of the most powerful institutions in human history—the modern corporation—clothed in the language of individual liberty. Its real message is simple: you are on your own, power is private, and democracy must never be allowed to reach the places we spend half our lives: the workplace itself.
Any rational observer should be able to see this is not a defense of freedom. It is a defense of rule by the wealthy.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people and movements creating a more free, regenerative and democratic society.
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