Innehållsförteckning för July 2015 från Reason

ON PAGE 31 of his popular The Conservatarian Manifesto, Charles C.W. Cooke makes a statement so satisfyingly true that I have ripped it off a half-dozen times on television. “When was the last time you heard an aspiring conservative politician say, ‘As George Bush said…’ or ‘I’m a George W. Bush conservative’?” asks Cooke, a witty political writer for National Review. “The mere thought is preposterous.” As Cooke notes, “During the Bush administration’s turbulent eight years, the Republican Party steadily ruined its reputation, damaging the public conception of conservatism in the process. Republicans spent too much, subsidized too much, spied too much, and controlled too much.” And yet here we are in spring 2015 and the top of the GOP presidential polls is haunted yet again by the most persistent…

EVEN BEFORE it became clear that Feidin Santana was witnessing what local authorities later described as a murder, it took guts for him to record the police encounter that ended in Walter Scott’s death. Santana, who was walking to work at a barbershop in North Charleston, South Carolina, the day before Easter, risked retaliation by camera-shy cops the moment he stopped talking on his smartphone and started using it to capture Scott’s interaction with patrolman Michael Slager. Although the First Amendment right to record the police as they perform their duties in public is well established, cops often violate that right by ordering people to turn off their cameras, confiscating their cellphones, or arresting them on trumped-up charges. The shooting of Walter Scott, which led to Slager’s arrest thanks to…

ON APRIL 13, when Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) officially announced that he was running for president, the first-term senator didn’t mention a single successful policy that he had championed while in office. A day earlier, when Hillary Clinton launched her long-awaited White House bid, her campaign website didn’t even have an issues page. And then there was Scott Walker. The Wisconsin governor, best known for his hardfought, victorious showdowns against public sector unions, stands out in the field as the upper-tier potential candidate (he had not officially announced as of press time) most aggressive in touting his recent job performance. In wavemaking pre-campaign speeches—a January address at the Iowa Freedom Summit that catapulted him from 4 percent in local polls to the head of the Iowa pack, and a February…

War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, by Ian Morris, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 495 pages, $30 IS WAR GOOD for anything? In the long run, the Stanford historian Ian Morris argues, it’s good for almost everything. In War! What Is It Good For?, Morris makes the case that war has played an essential role in mankind’s development and in the growth of human well-being. The book endorses not just strong government but imperialism; as applied to recent history, this translates into strong support for the historic role of the British Empire and the current global policies of the United States. Morris isn’t one to shy away from big, sweeping theses. In Why the West Rules—For Now (2010), he took on…

Starting in the 1930s, Alan Lomax roamed the world recording folk music of all kinds, from Mississippi prison songs to Uzbek ballads, plus sermons, stories, children’s games, ambient noise, and other audio artifacts of human life. In one of my favorite Lomax tapes, the Arkansas singer Neal Morris passes along some local lore about the song “Jesse James.” The lyrics have it all wrong, he says: The Ford boys shot someone else and then collected the reward anyway, letting James secretly survive into the 20th century. Lomax was a controversial figure. One side of the spectrum accused him of Communism; the other end complained that he exploited the people he recorded, giving himself writing credits on the songs he collected. But whatever you think of the man, his archive is…

In 1999, the famed comics writer Alan Moore published the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a comic series built around the exploits of such turn-of-thecentury creations as Captain Nemo and Allan Quatermain. The initial concept, Moore said, was for the team to be the “Justice League of Victorian England,” but the series eventually incorporated generations of characters, from James Bond to Harry Potter. Some of the characters were changed enough to not trigger copyright complaints—or not named, as in the case of a distinctly Potter-like character who turns out to be the Antichrist. But many were pulled from the public domain. Moore’s tradition continues in the latest installment, Nemo: River of Ghosts. A spinoff built around Nemo’s daughter, it features characters from dime novels, like Broad Arrow…

“Blood and Leviathan” (page 62) is STEPHEN DAVIES’ review of War! What Is It Good For? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a book that tries—but fails—to make the case that large-scale conflict is the driving force behind human development. Davies, 60, is the education director at the Institute for Economics Affairs, a Londonbased think tank, and the author of Empiricism and History (Palgrave Macmillan). His research focuses on the private supply of public goods, including law enforcement. “I became persuaded of the real possibility of a functioning stateless society through reading David Friedman and through historical research on the way that public goods of all kinds have been provided by voluntary means,” he says. LENORE SKENAZY, 55, is founder of the Free-Range Kids movement, which battles the notion “that our children…

“My favorite are the articles on the Internet that blare: ‘Rand Paul is not a libertarian.’ Guess what? I’m a Republican.…When I describe it, I say ‘I’m libertarian-ish.’” —Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), interviewed by Politico after announcing that he’s running for president, April 7 “I don’t throw anything away. I’m like two steps short of a hoarder.” —Hillary Clinton, interviewed by re/code’s Kara Swisher, two weeks before admitting she deleted all the personal emails off her private server, February 24 “I’ll tell you this: He ain’t got no e-mail problems. He ain’t got no foundation problems. What you see with Joe is what you get.” —former South Carolina Democratic Chairman Dick Harpootlian on why Democrats should nominate Joe Biden instead of Hillary Clinton in 2016, The Washington Post, March 4…

In 1993, Bill Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), thus ensuring the federal government would have to show a “compelling interest” before it could enforce a law infringing on the practice of religion. Six years later, then–Gov. George W. Bush, who was vying to replace Clinton at the White House, sought to put a statewide law on the books that would do the same in Texas. But as Steve France explained in the July 1999 issue of reason (“Establishment Pause”), liberal groups and politicians—who had roundly celebrated the federal bill—sang a different tune when it came to Bush’s version. Somewhere between Clinton and Bush, the realization had set in that respecting religious liberty at times means permitting someone to choose not to do business with certain classes of…

FOR MANY libertarians, it’s a recurring frustration: Why do candidates who seem attractive before the race begins suddenly sound so much squishier once they hit the campaign trail? Take Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator with high hopes of becoming the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. He’s far more libertarian on foreign policy and the surveillance state than most members of his party. But in recent weeks, he has taken a harder-line stance on using military force, even calling for an increase in overall military spending. Likewise, Rep. Paul Ryan (R–Wis.), 2012’s closest thing to a Republican champion of entitlement reform, suddenly reversed course and delivered a passionate speech in defense of Medicare spending at the Republican National Convention once the vice presidency was on the line. A concept from economics…

ALMOST NOBODY likes to talk about cutting government during election season. Campaigns are a time to promise more—more spending! more tax cuts! more services!—not less. Mitt Romney was more candid than the typical presidential aspirant, though not strategically unusual, when he told The Weekly Standard in 2012 that he was likely to prune back cabinet departments as president but refused to reveal which ones, on grounds that it might be used against him politically. “Will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes,” Romney said, “but I’m not going to give you a list right now.” In this early stage of the 2016 campaign, reason seeks to keep everyone’s eyes on the prize of reducing the size and scope of government. Below, a guide to the…

Before social media made it easy for sex workers to tell their own side of the story, $pread served as an outlet for writing “by and about” sex workers. Founded in 2004, the New York City–based quarterly covered cultural, political, personal, and economic aspects of sex work—from porn to prostitution to any commercial exchange for erotic labor. The $pread anthology (Feminist Press) showcases the breadth and quality of this indie mag. Between short personal essays (“Diary of a Peep Show Girl”) and interviews with folks like “the D.C. madam” lay accounts of sex workers from Mexico to Mumbai. The topics covered remain relevant today: federal laws making online finance hard for adult businesses; prostitution offenders added to sex-predator lists; anti-immigration and anti-prostitution efforts disguised as “anti-trafficking.” Readers will also learn…

Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, by Catherine Holder Spude, University of Oklahoma Press, 344 pages, $24.95 LIKE MANY boomtowns of the 19th century West, where the discovery of precious natural resources on ungoverned land caused explosions of economic development and population growth, Skagway, in what was then the District of Alaska, was for a time a virtually anarchocapitalist republic, a working-class libertine haven, and a seat of women’s power. But as with many Western boomtowns, the eventual exhaustion of the resources combined with invasions by moral and governmental authorities to end the dreams of the men who came to Skagway with pickaxes, gold pans, and a thirst for the good life. They also pushed some of America’s wealthiest and most independent women onto the streets, into jail cells,…

Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News, by A. Brad Schwartz, Hill and Wang, 416 pages, $35. THE WAR OF THE WORLDS has become a historical Rorschach test. Some people are convinced the legendary radio drama drove panicked hordes into America’s streets. Others treat that story more skeptically, arguing that the terror induced by Orson Welles’ masterpiece has been significantly overblown. As the years recede, the debate over the events of Sunday, October 30, 1938, often appears unresolvable. In classrooms, online, in print, and in documentaries, everyone seems to use the panic story to validate their preconceptions about media power and mass audiences. The existing historical evidence apparently allows all of us to find the panic, or calm, we believe happened that night.…

The killing of Walter Scott Shot in the Back Jacob Sullum ON APRIL 7, police in North Charleston, South Carolina, charged one of their own, Patrolman Michael Slager, with murder in the shooting death of a motorist named Walter Scott. Slager initially claimed through an attorney that he feared for his safety when he shot Scott. But video from a bystander shows Slager firing eight rounds at the fleeing man, striking him in the back. “When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey said after viewing the recording. “When you make a bad decision, don’t care if you’re behind the shield or a citizen on the street, you have to live with that decision.” Slager, who is 33 and white, pulled over Scott, who was 50 and black,…

1. CHARTERS ARE INCREASINGLY POPULAR AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS 2. CHARTERS GENERALLY PRODUCE BETTER RESULTS THAN TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS FOR LESS MONEY 3. CHARTERS SERVE MORE DIVERSE STUDENTS 4. CHARTERS PERFORM BETTER FOR POOR MINORITIES For sources visit www.reason.com/CharterFacts…

Charles C. W. Cooke is a writer at National Review and author of The Conservatarian Manifesto (Crown Forum), a book about a “certain coterie on the right” that combines elements of the conservative and libertarian philosophies. Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Cooke in March to talk about how the two groups can learn to get along. To see more, go to reason.com. Q: What is a conservatarian? A: These are the people who say when they’re around libertarians, they feel conservative; when they’re around conservatives, they feel libertarian. The fault lines are that they disagree with libertarians on immigration, foreign policy, and sometimes abortion. They disagree with traditional conservatives on federalism, gay marriage, and drugs. And they tend to be disappointed with the Bush years. Sometimes not because…

REED WATSON sees a silver lining in California’s epic drought. “Only such an environmental crisis changes the law,” says Watson, executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Montana. “Only when a situation gets so severe do people begin to define property rights and turn to markets to solve environmental problems.” Make no mistake: The drought in California is dire. The current shortfall in precipitation has now lasted four years. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that supplies most of California’s surface water is just 5 percent of the April 1 average. As an emergency response to the situation, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered the State Water Control Board to “impose restrictions to achieve a 25 percent reduction in potable urban water usage through…

Marc Maron was a Saturday Night Live reject in the ’90s and did time on Air America before the network folded. Then he started a podcast, WTF, which became widely popular and acclaimed, with celebrities from Jon Hamm to Fiona Apple making pilgrimages to his garage. Two years ago Maron parlayed that self-created cultural product into an IFC network sitcom about a fictionalized version of himself. Maron’s third season premiered in May. It shows the recovering alcoholic has-been/never-was navigating a different world, changed both by his sobriety and by technology. In one episode, Maron jokes to a radio host about the host reading ad copy on air. On his podcast, Maron notes, he’s free. But even free culture has to pay the bills, and Maron reads plenty of ad copy…

The goal of “Freedom Just Around the Corner” is to trace, through stamps and mail, the story of “black America” from the Civil War through the civil rights era. That’s an ambitious undertaking, especially considering the exhibit’s size—it comprises two tiny rooms within the cavernous marble National Postal Museum. Yet it manages. A focus is the Black Heritage series of stamps, which feature such African-Americans as Harriet Tubman and Thurgood Marshall. More interesting are the letters and envelopes. One was scrawled with “Sent girl Susan”; signage explains that the slave probably had no idea she was delivering a message ordering she be sold. Another, addressed to John Brown, found the insurrectionist just before his hanging. A third contained condolences for the wife of Medgar Evers, an assassinated civil rights leader.…