Table of contents for August - September 2016 in Reason

It was the Libertarian National Convention’s moment of truth. After selecting Gary Johnson as the party’s presidential nominee on the second ballot, skeptical delegates—riven by a decades-old third-party conflict between purity and pragmatism—were now voting for a second time on whether to hold their noses and accept as their veep Johnson’s pick, the internally unloved but externally impressive former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld. Weld, distrusted and openly booed by many of the assembled for his 1990s support of an assault weapons ban, his 2016 endorsement of Ohio Gov. John Kasich for president, and his 2006 broken promise to run for governor of New York as a Libertarian, had fallen a tantalizing eight votes short of the vice presidential nomination on the first ballot. Now the simmering conflict between the radicals…

“To counter the avalanche of progovernment persuasion, who comes to Washington to criticize spending programs? In the case of most programs, no one.” —James L. Payne, “Bad Influence” “Unfortunately, political reformers routinely define apathy as ‘not voting.’ While this hypothesis is easy to test (all you have to do is count heads), it ignores the proud tradition of, say, the Constitutional Convention delegates who threatened to walk out unless the document included a Bill of Rights. Sometimes not voting reflects the belief that the lesser of two evils is evil.” —Rick Henderson, “It’s OK to Hate Politics” “Efforts to prevent globalization by imposing immigration barriers or boosting corporate welfare amount to nationalist economic planning. Like more familiar socialist economic plans, they are based on the false assumption that a small…

Harvey Saunders put a video camera on his dashboard after being hit with two parking fines he says he didn’t deserve. He soon caught a Hull, England, parking warden moving a “No Parking” cone in front of his car and then writing him a ticket. Officials have since rescinded the fines. Danesiah Neal, 13, said a police officer with the Fort Bend, Texas, school district told her she could face felony forgery charges after trying to pay for some chicken nuggets at school with a $2 bill from 1953. The officer apparently did not recognize the bill, and because of its age a counterfeit pen did not work on it. Cops eventually brought the bill to a bank, where someone confirmed it was real. Officials in New Jersey say 7,827…

In May the House of Representatives approved what The New York Times described as “a mountain of bills addressing the nation’s opioid abuse crisis.” The 18 bills passed “by huge bipartisan margins.” A flurry of legislative activity like this usually materializes when the drug problem it targets is already receding. That seems to be the case with the so-called opioid epidemic, notwithstanding the fresh attention attracted by the April 21 death of Prince, which involved the painkiller fentanyl. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), nonmedical use of opioid analgesics such as oxycodone and hydrocodone peaked in 2012 and has since dropped below the 2002 level. Although the recent decline in prescription painkiller use was accompanied by an increase in heroin use, total opioid use was…

Their accounts begin differently but end in the same place. Antoinette Frink was the owner of an auto dealership in Ohio; she sold a dozen vehicles to customers who were in the business of distributing cocaine. Luis Rivera, a former pilot and Army National Guardsman, began smuggling drugs from Colombia into the United States in his 20s. Barbra Scrivner was a young mother whose husband sold crystal meth. All three are nonviolent offenders who were sentenced to decades in federal prison in the 1980s, when our national anxieties about crime took a viciously punitive turn. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act, passed in 1986, stripped judges of discretion to decide on the particulars of a case how much time a person truly deserved, instead introducing mandatory minimum sentencing. The Violent Crime Control…

The Starz network TV show The Girlfriend Experience follows the exploits of law student Christine Reade (Riley Keough) as she enters the world of high-end Manhattan escorting. A serialized take on a 2009 Steven Soderbergh film by the same name, the Starz version, which debuted in April, is rife with well-lit sex scenes and lingering close-ups of Christine’s conflicted visage. But there’s too little to differentiate this “happy hooker” narrative from its many thematic predecessors, save for a so-so legal thriller subplot. That doesn’t necessarily make The Girlfriend Experience a bad show; you could do worse on a date night or rainy Saturday. And Reade’s character— intelligent, unsentimental, and ambitious—presents a fictional sex worker more nuanced and relatable than most. But despite critical acclaim and good indie-Hollywood pedigree, the show…

“Hippie modernism” may sound like a contradiction in terms. But it’s not a bad description for a certain sensibility of the 1960s and ’70s, when the counterculture’s utopian dreams found room for cybernetic technology, experimental architecture, new media, and avant-garde art. Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Walker Art Center), a mammoth book pegged to an exhibition now touring the country, aims to illuminate that era of Fuller domes and Be-Ins. Its essays are a mixed bag: There is interesting history here, and sometimes there are thoughtful critiques, but there is also a lot of jargon and ideological ax-grinding. (Inevitably, someone links the Whole Earth Catalog to “the dawn of neoliberalism.”) But it’s always great to look at—not just for the old art and artifacts that it reproduces but for…

The thrash metal band Megadeth has never shied away from political controversy. Their breakout 1986 hit Peace Sells...But Who’s Buying? offered a sardonic take on Reagan-era America. Their 1990 single “Hanger 18” traded in X-Files–style conspiracy theories about government coverups. More recently, frontman Dave Mustaine, who started the band after getting kicked out of Metallica, has emerged as an outspoken conservative who claims to own every book written by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. “I hope to see a Republican in the White House,” Mustaine has said. Dystopia, the band’s recently released 15th studio album, preaches a similarly right-wing message. “No controlling who comes through the door,” Mustaine snarls on “The Threat Is Real,” a hawkish ode to the War on Terror. “Why cower to all those who oppose the…

ROBERT EVERETT JOHNSON is an attorney at the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm based in Arlington, Virginia. His role as Elfie Gallun Fellow for Freedom and the Constitution involves a lot of writing and speaking about America’s founding principles. “The Constitution is a thoroughly radical document,” the 32-year-old Harvard Law graduate likes to say. “The 14th Amendment, the most important part of the whole document, was drafted by a group of abolitionists and anarchists who literally described themselves as ‘Radical Republicans.’” Before joining the institute, Johnson clerked for both Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Nick Sibilla has been a writer at the Institute for Justice for almost four years. He resides in Northern Virginia (“Mordor,”…

“It just doesn’t make sense to require a nonviolent drug offender to serve 20 years, or in some cases, life, in prison.” —President Barack Obama, announcing the commutation of 58 prison sentences, Medium, May 5 “On the one hand, I’ll say #NeverTrump, and on the other hand, I’ll say never say never.” —The Weekly Standard founder and editor Bill Kristol, The Steve Malzberg Show, May 2 “Call the government.” —North Carolina tow truck driver Kenneth Shupe, refusing to tow a car outfitted with Bernie Sanders stickers, May 2 “We are witnessing a compression of the working period in which bad policy shelters in the shadows, the time frame in which unconstitutional activities can continue before they are exposed by acts of conscience.” r —Edward Snowden, writing about whistleblowing, The Intercept,…

“Crime has become the most hotly contested social policy issue of the 1990s,” wrote Martin Morse Wooster in the October 1994 reason, “but the debate is decidedly overheated. Statistics issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department suggest that if you live in an area that isn’t infested by drug dealers (and, of course, if you don’t happen to be a drug dealer), your odds of being a victim of violent crime are about the same as they were 10 years ago.” In other words, Wooster was saying the perception that crime fighting needed to be a top governmental priority because violent crime was on the rise was totally unfounded. Sound familiar? Something similar is happening today. Americans are more concerned about crime and violence than at…

Next year the White House will have a new occupant, but one thing is almost certain not to change: a U.S. foreign policy driven by mindboggling sums of taxpayer money. With the exception of Bernie Sanders, all the major-party presidential candidates during this election season have said they would oppose military spending cuts. Even the relatively non-interventionist Sen. Rand Paul wanted to bust the military spending caps put into place by the Budget Control Act of 2011, while the other Republican candidates essentially fought over who wanted to increase spending most. Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, left no doubt that he intends to keep the military gravy train rolling. Trump may have said that President George W. Bush lied about Iraq (a war that he claims, falsely, to have…

P.J. O’Rourke once called Hillary Clinton “a chowder-skull” and “a bossy little rich snoot of a goody-two-shoes.” So it surprised a lot of people when the political humorist announced that he’s voting for her. Clinton, O’Rourke said on the May 7 episode of the NPR show Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me!, was “the second worst thing that could happen to this country. But she’s way behind in second place, you know? She’s wrong about absolutely everything. But she’s wrong within normal parameters!” Of the presumptive Republican nominee, he warned: “They’ve got this button, you know? It’s in a briefcase. He’s gonna find it.” Rand Paul once called Donald Trump “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag” and said “a speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president.” But the…

Libertarians like their genre fiction just fine and read lots of it. Science fiction is a staple, from Ayn Rand’s Anthem to the works of Robert Heinlein to Joss Whedon’s dearly departed television series Firefly. Murray Rothbard is on record as a reader of detective novels. Rand praised Ian Fleming and Mickey Spillane for the rough heroism of their potboilers. Rose Wilder Lane’s and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s independence-minded stories of settlers on the frontier have been staples of children’s literature for generations. But when it comes to romance novels, it seems as if fans of the free market aren’t buying what Fabio is selling. Hayek isn’t on record anywhere as a fan of Gone With the Wind. And Coase and Mises are strangely silent about the charms of regency romances…

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, by Michael V. Hayden, Penguin Press, 464 pages, $30 Though he’s been out of government for more than seven years, it feels like Michael Hayden never left. He directed the National Security Agency (NSA) for a six-year stretch, helming it during President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping program and spearheading its efforts to expand offensive uses of hacking and cyberwarfare. He ran the CIA for the three twilight years of the Bush administration, vocally and assuredly defending its past uses of torture as both effective and moral, and accelerating its use of drones to kill suspected terrorists in Pakistan. We are still arguing about all of these things today, and Hayden is still arguing about them with us.…

Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, Alfred A. Knopf, 640 pages, $17.95 It’s boom time for left-leaning histories of capitalism. After a long lull for the genre, 2014 saw the English translation of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a surprise bestseller, and the publication of the Harvard historian Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton. While the latter hasn’t matched Piketty’s commercial success, Empire made a splash in academia and is widely recognized as a significant work, winning the Bancroft Prize, being named finalist for both the Pulitzer and Cundill prizes, and getting tabbed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of that year. While Piketty is ultimately an economist trying to wring mathematically comparable data from widely disparate historical sources, Beckert…

The Fox Network sitcom The Last Man on Earth, wrapping its second season, started as a common childish fantasy: What if the world were ours to play with, no worries about how it affected anyone else? Will Forte as everylastman Phil Miller has fun with this premise, but very quickly the title becomes a misnomer as Forte’s willful, envious, selfish character tries (and often fails) to build a healthy community with a wife and a bickering circle of companions. Storytelling about a small band reforging civilization is always ripe for socio-economic theorizing. The most interesting lesson here is an unforced hallelujah to modern industrial capitalism. The survivors of the show’s mystery plague manage to (improbably) continue thriving off the leftover wonders of our civilization, from packaged food to fuel and…

Matthew Keys, a 29-year-old journalist, was sentenced to two years in prison this April after being convicted on three felony counts related to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Calling Keys a disgruntled ex-employee of the Tribune Company, federal prosecutors accused him of passing his log-in credentials along to hackers associated with Anonymous, the decentralized network of activists known for creating mischief for governments, corporations, and others. The hackers, prosecutors said, used his log-in info to briefly deface a single page on the Los Angeles Times website in 2010. Keys maintains his innocence, though he admits to having infiltrated several Anonymous-affiliated chat rooms for stories he wrote about the group. His troubles began, he says, when he refused to hand over his source material to FBI agents who were…

Is America’s accumulating pile of regulations slowing down economic growth? According to a new study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the answer is yes: Thanks to regulatory drag, the U.S. economy is $4 trillion smaller than it otherwise would have been. How do regulations harm economic growth? “For each new regulation added to the existing pile, there is a greater possibility for... inefficient company resource allocation, and for reduced ability to invest in innovation,” explain the Progressive Policy Institute economists Michael Mandel and Diana Carew in a 2013 policy memo. “The negative effect on U.S. industry of regulatory accumulation actually compounds on itself for every additional regulation added to the pile.” Mandel and Carew offer three explanations for how that pile slows growth. In the first, regulations…

The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, by Heather Mac Donald, Encounter Books, 233 pages, $23.99 “We have entered an era of intense antipolice activism, led by the federal government in conjunction with agitators like Al Sharpton,” Heather Mac Donald claims in her book The War on Cops. Just how many times have we entered this era? Twelve years before Black Lives Matter came on the scene, Mac Donald delivered a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute titled “The War on Police.” Her 2003 book Are Cops Racist? was subtitled How the War Against the Police Harms Black Americans. Here we go again. Mac Donald, who is based at the Manhattan Institute, is one of the right’s most prominent voices on…

Hatsune Miku is on a 10-city North America tour this spring. The turquoise-haired star is filling stadiums with glowstickwielding superfans, as she has in Japan for years. She’s also not a real person. Miku is a vocaloid—a carefully marketed persona of a singing synthesizer application from Crypton Future Media. Anyone can create a Miku track using the consumer software that generates her teenybopper Stephen Hawking voice, and thousands have. She appears on stage as a 10-foot tall hologram projected onto a transparent pane—a high-tech version of the “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion common in haunted houses— accompanied by a live band. YouTube videos of the 2016 tour reveal some delightfully meta moments, including yellow-clad twin sidekicks Kagamine Rin and Len dancing the Robot to a song called “Remote Control.” Miku also sings…