The Changing Face of Selling Liberty Online
As regular readers will know, yesterday CEI released the 25th anniversary edition of our annual report on federal regulation, “10,000 Commandments”, by my colleague Wayne Crews. The full report is 100 pages long, but feel free to treat yourself to the op-ed length version in USA Today.
We’ve been publishing and promoting the study for many years, and our strategies and methods have changed as the years have gone by. When we first started our video project in the mid-2000s, we made “10,000 Commandments” one of our first productions. In the video above from 2008, we review the burdens of the regulatory state with talent from the CEI staff and video shot right in our (previous) office. Back then YouTube itself was only a couple of years old, and many nonprofit organizations were jumping into the online video space for the very first time.
A more recent production from 2017, above, features Wayne explaining the many informal rules and directives that agencies issue which he calls “regulatory dark matter.” The graphics and animation are more sophisticated and the overall production shows the impressive leaps forward that online video has made over the last several years.
We’re excited at CEI to keep pushing the boundaries on how we communicate the ideas of liberty, and the new formats and platforms that we’ll be able to use in the future. Whether it’s our YouTube channel, Twitter account, Facebook page, or Instagram account, we’re committed to taking the message of free markets and limited government wherever there is an audience to reach (though, sadly , we never did end up creating that CEI-branded island in Second Life we were all so excited about). If you’d like more of what you see here, please follow and like us in those places, and leave us messages on where else we can plant a flag.