Reason is funded by the Kochs. Along with the American Spectator, "think tanks" like the Cato Institute, and zombie "advocacy" groups like Americans for Prosperity -- plus countless others -- it's a front for their self-serving ideology.

As Adam Curtis pointed out in The Trap (IIRC), think tanks were once just that: they were developed for finding novel solutions to problems. Later, with neoconservativism, they became a means to distill a predetermined message into something that only seemed new, but was in fact the same old socio-economically-stratifying crap.

That's 1% propaganda top-down.

He's defending the vague, abstract comic book version of laissez-faire capitalism, which is generally what neoconservatives -- and neocons calling themselves libertarians -- tend to do. It doesn't mean it's what they practice. The Kochs have been at the government teet more than once, and from more than one government. Charles Koch even talked up Social Security and Medicare to get their ideological mouth-breather, Hayek, to come to the US, and give up Austria's sweet universal health plan. Yet one of the Kochs' biggest goals has been destroying such programs for the rest of us. They spend tons of money on lobbying, manipulating the public, pressuring their employees to vote according to their views, and so on.

What's important to them is that WE wind up believing that bullshit about capitalism, so we'll keep happily digging our own graves, and not blame them for their deliberate undermining of democracy.