Reason Magazine

Mandating Disaster

2009-11-20T16:30:00-05:00

ObamaCare has nothing going for it anymore. With unemployment touching double digits, its economic timing is bad; with polls showing tanking support in every group outside of the narrow sliver of die-hard liberal reformers, its political timing is bad; and with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services last week saying that it'll add billions to the already out-of-control deficit, its fiscal timing has gone from bad to awful.

So how are Comrades Pelosi, Reid, and Obama able to march ahead with their grand designs undeterred? One reason is that Republicans have done precious little to seize the moral high ground from them. By insisting on the removal of the public option—instead of the individual mandate—as the price of doing business, Republicans have missed a major opportunity to put Democrats on the defensive and change the terms of the debate.

Republicans threw down the gauntlet on the public option—a government-funded, Medicare-style insurance plan that will compete with private insurance—in a June letter to Obama. "Washington-run programs undermine market-based competition through their ability to impose price controls and shift costs to other purchasers," they said. "The end result would be a federal government takeover of our health care system, taking decisions out of the hands of doctors and patients and placing them in the hands of a Washington bureaucracy."

True. But the problem is that Democrats don't need the public option to engineer a "federal takeover of our health care system." All they need is the power to force Americans to purchase insurance.

A mandate will fundamentally alter the relationship between Americans and their government. Instead of the government being accountable to them, they will become accountable to their government. No less than the Congressional Budget Office—a non-partisan government agency—once admitted as much. "A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action," it noted. "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States."

If the government can force Americans to buy coverage on the threat of fines or even imprisonment—an option that Nancy Pelosi has pointedly refused to rule out—every other government diktat becomes small potatoes by contrast. In fact, it becomes necessary. If uninsured Americans must buy coverage, why shouldn't other Americans be taxed to subsidize them? Why shouldn't the insurance industry be required to sell them coverage? Why shouldn't government set insurance prices to ensure affordability? Why shouldn't doctors and hospitals be asked to charge only "reasonable" rates—or offer only government-sanctioned treatments? Nothing about ObamaCare fundamentally changes so long as the individual mandate remains intact.

Therefore, instead of wonkishly droning about the public option, Republicans should counter Democrats' grand appeals for "universal coverage for all" with equally grand appeals for "medical freedom for all." They should stand together on the Capitol steps and issue the health care equivalent of Reagan's Berlin Wall ultimatum: "Mr. President: Tear up this mandate."

During the campaign, Obama himself successfully stopped poor Hillary dead in her tracks by reminding voters at every turn of her tyrannical plans to force them to purchase coverage. So why aren't Republicans doing the same to Obama?

The main reason is that they themselves are deeply conflicted about the mandate. On the one hand, every Republican on the Senate Finance Committee voted against it—except, of course, for Maine's Sen. Olympia Wavering-Heart Snowe. On the other hand, many Republicans, led by their intellectual lights at the conservative Heritage Foundation, among others, have long accepted—no, championed—the notion that unless people are forced to carry insurance, freeloaders who land in emergency rooms will cripple the health care system. Legislate personal responsibility, in other words. It was a Heritage plan for forced coverage that formed the blueprint for the Massachusetts universal care debacle that the then Republican Gov. Mitt Romney enacted.

Thus Republicans have no leg to stand on now that Obama, pulling one of his many switcheroos, has embraced the individual mandate. Heritage folks are trying to pull their own switcheroo by opposing Obama's mandate, saying what they had originally proposed for Massachusetts was not really a mandate but actually a self-insurance scheme under which an uninsured person would have to post a personal bond before being treated in an emergency room.

But countering mandates with bonds doesn't exactly make for a rousing rallying cry. Indeed, both ideas are based on the mistaken diagnosis that the central cause of our health care woes is the cost of uncompensated care that the uninsured get. The fact of the matter is that this care accounts for no more than $40 billion of the country's $2.26 trillion health care bill—or less than 3 percent of total health care spending. This is less than what department stores lose to shoplifting every year. Several private hospitals that I visited in India last month make a fraction of the profits that American hospitals do but still reported treating up to 10 percent of their patients for free.

The mandate barring American hospitals from denying treatment to anyone who lands in emergency—the root of the supposed freeloader problem—certainly imposes a heavy burden on some hospitals, especially in inner cities. But it is far from clear that it forces American hospitals as a whole to provide more charitable care to the uninsured than what they would have without it. It would certainly be worthwhile at some point to consider policy options to replace this mandate with mechanisms to strengthen voluntary charity by hospitals and others. In the meantime, however, there is zero evidence to suggest that this mandate is imposing a crippling enough burden on hospitals to warrant mandates on everyone else as well.

The Republican strategy for defeating ObamaCare consists of notifying: seniors that they will face rationing and loss of private Medicare options; the uninsured that they will face fines and possibly jail; the young and healthy that they will have to subsidize the old and sick, etc. Alerting Americans to the personal dangers they will confront under ObamaCare is certainly a legitimate part of the political process.

However, the downside of a strategy based entirely on fear is that even if it succeeds now, it won't help to define the proper terms for a genuine solution in the future. For that, Republicans have to offer a principled critique of ObamaCare that delineates the sharp moral choices that Americans face. The current health care battle is the domestic policy equivalent of the Cold War. Democrats are on the side of command-and-control mandates that deprive individuals of choice. Republicans should position themselves on the side of market-based solutions that empower—not enchain—patients.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a bi-weekly Forbes columnist. This article originally appeared at Forbes.

How to Get Ahead in Law

2009-11-20T15:00:00-05:00

Last June, District Attorney David Capeless of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, announced that he was dropping all charges against 44-year-old Bernard Baran, a man who has spent half his life behind bars on child molestation charges that the state no longer has the confidence to retry.

Baran was convicted in January 1985 of molesting six children at a pre-kindergarten day care facility in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was released on bond in 2006 after an appeals court determined that his trial attorney had been incompetent and that the prosecution may have withheld key exculpatory evidence. Baran says that during his jail term he was raped and beaten more than 30 times, necessitating six different transfers to new correctional institutions. Such is the cost the prison system exacts on an openly gay man convicted of molesting children.

Baran was one of the first people in the country to be prosecuted in the day care sex abuse panic of the 1980s, a bizarre nationwide hysteria fed by homophobia, fears of Satanism, and a wing of child psychology that used unproven interrogation techniques that critics say caused children to recount sexual incidents that never took place.

In this case, prosecutor Daniel Ford, now a judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court, showed the grand jury that indicted Baran an edited video interview with the children. According to court documents, the video shows several kids alleging that Baran had sexually abused them. Edited out was footage in which some of the children denied any abuse by Baran, interviewees accused other members of the day care faculty of abuse or of witnessing abuse, and, most important, interrogators asked the same questions over and over—even after repeated denials—until a child gave them an affirmative answer. Some children were even given rewards for their answers.

Withholding the unedited video from the grand jury was itself an act of misconduct. An appeals court suggested that prosecutor Ford may also have withheld it from Baran’s trial attorney. We can only say “may” because there has never been a hearing on the issue, and Baran’s trial attorney was far from competent. (Judge Ford did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) In granting Baran a new trial in 2006, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Francis Fecteau never moved beyond the inadequacy of Baran’s lawyer. When the case reached the state appeals court, the justices not only upheld Fecteau’s ruling; they looked more closely at Ford’s possible misconduct. “While the record does not settle the question whether the unedited videotapes were deliberately withheld by the prosecution,” the ruling said, “there are indications in the trial transcript consistent with that contention.”

The court further noted that it took years for Baran’s appellate lawyers to get prosecutors to turn over the unedited tapes. It also cited other examples of Ford’s failure to turn over exculpatory evidence, including evidence that two of the children who accused Baran may have suffered prior sexual abuse.

To make matters worse, the case against Baran was awash in homophobia. According to court documents, the first parents to come forward with accusations against Baran in September 1984 had just days earlier registered a complaint with the center that Baran was “queer.” The boy’s mother, who thought gays “shouldn’t be allowed out in public,” much less permitted to work at day care centers, said she “didn’t want no homo” watching her son.

When that child later tested positive for gonorrhea of the throat, Ford used the test against Baran at trial, even though a) the child never accused Baran of forcing him to perform oral sex, b) the child, in fact, specifically denied having sexual contact with Baran on the witness stand, c) Baran tested negative for gonorrhea, d) the boy had told his mother two months prior that his stepfather had orally raped him, and e) on the very day Baran was convicted, charges against the stepfather were turned over to the district attorney’s office for possible prosecution. Baran’s counsel was never informed of the allegation against the stepfather. Addressing the gonorrhea issue in his closing arguments, Ford implied that Baran’s “lifestyle” made it probable that he contracted gonorrhea at other times and knew how to quickly eradicate it to cover his tracks.

In his closing argument, Ford likened Baran at a day care center to a “chocoholic in a candy store,” hypothesizing that in the “five or 10 minutes” he was able to be alone with a child without being seen by other staff or children, Baran “could have sodomized and abused those children whenever he felt the primitive urge to satisfy his sexual appetite.” The appeals court that eventually overturned the conviction ruled that the incompetence of Baran’s counsel “facilitated the speculative, stereotypical, and deeply insidious links between homosexuality, gonorrhea, and child molestation.”

According to an affidavit signed by Baran’s boyfriend at the time, Ford spent an inordinate amount of time asking Baran’s boyfriend about his own sex life, employing variations of the word faggot and a mocking, drawn-out pronunciation of homosexual. Baran’s boyfriend also claims he was pulled over by police officers and further harassed on a daily basis, and that Ford told him, illegally, that if he spoke with Baran or Baran’s defense attorney he would be arrested.

In upholding the ruling that granted Baran a new trial, the appeals court added in a footnote that if the state wanted to retry him, Baran could file a motion for a hearing on Ford’s alleged misconduct. By dropping the charges, the D.A. avoided that hearing. “In my opinion,” says Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, “ the possibility of an embarrassing hearing into misconduct by a former prosecutor and now sitting Superior Court judge was the main reason, if not the reason, they decided to drop the charges. The appeals court opinion cut a bit too close to the bone for them.”

So while Bernard Baran is free after 22 years of incarceration, there are no plans to look into the actions of the prosecutor, now a sitting judge, responsible for his conviction. Ford’s career trajectory indicates the backward incentive structure that prosecutors face: Convictions produce rewards, while abuse rarely comes with a penalty.

Baran has said he isn’t sure he wants to endure a lawsuit, but even if he did, he would be unlikely to get to Ford. Prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity from civil rights lawsuits, even in cases of misconduct that lead to false convictions. They are rarely disciplined in other ways either. Courts and bar associations tend to avoid professional sanctions. A study released earlier this year by the Justice Project, a pro-defense advocacy group, concluded, “Despite the prevalence of prosecutorial misconduct all over the country, states have consistently failed to investigate or sanction prosecutors who commit acts of misconduct in order to secure convictions.”

The only way Ford’s actions in the Baran case might be examined would be for one of the state’s legal ethics boards to open an investigation, either on its own or in response to a complaint. In a September article in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, a spokesperson for the state’s Office of Bar Counsel said that of the 1,000 or so complaints the office investigates each year, just “nine or 10” involve the state’s prosecutors.

One Ford defender told the publication that it’s unfair to hold the judge accountable for something he did a quarter century ago. But it isn’t as if this is some musty, inconsequential case pulled from the depths of a Massachusetts courthouse. There’s fresh damage here. Ford’s successors spent 25 years defending his misconduct. And Bernard Baran spent that time paying for it.

Radley Balko (rbalko@reason.com) is a senior editor at reason.

Treating Wall Street Like the Mafia

2009-11-20T12:00:00-05:00

Perhaps Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) thinks of himself as a modern day John Sherman. In 1890, Ohio Sen. Sherman set out on a mission to establish “just competition” laws and level the economic playing field. His quest culminated in the dismantling of monopolies—such as American Tobacco and Standard Oil—and the passage of new laws prohibiting malicious competitive practices. In a similar way, Dodd now seeks the power to tear apart any company he considers a risk to the national economy. But unlike Sherman, Dodd isn’t out to create the best possible conditions for competition to thrive. He’s out for blood.

Dodd’s plan for overhauling Wall Street regulations, released last week, includes a proposed new organization: the Agency for Financial Stability (AFS). This new regulator would be tasked with identifying and addressing “systemic risks posed by large, complex companies as well as products and activities that can spread risk across firms.” This represents one piece of the most extensive proposal to reform financial services regulation—topping even the ridiculousness of the Obama plan and Barney Frank plan. Which is saying a lot.

The financial crisis has made off with nearly $30 trillion in global wealth. Dodd believes Wall Street banks and other financial institutions are the chief culprits in this dubious economic caper. And to exact revenge, he will push for some of the toughest, most expansive regulatory powers to date.

To do this, Dodd plans to go Elliot Ness on Wall Street, using economists and accountants as if they were FBI agents. Only instead of targeting Al Capone and Big Angelo Lonardo, these number-crunchers would be given nearly limitless power to hunt down systemic risks inside America’s financial institutions.

Here’s one of the biggest problems with this (and with the Obama and Frank plans, too): the government offers only a dangerously vague definition of what constitutes a financial institution. So not only would Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase qualify, but firms like Wal-Mart, Ford, and Texas Instruments—not exactly the companies you think of when discussing Wall Street regulation—might be subject to higher compliance standards as well. It all depends on the subjective whims of the Agency for Financial Stability.

As outlined in the Dodd plan, AFS would be an independent agency, one whose chairman was appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. It would also have a 9-member board comprised of federal financial regulators and an independent expert.

The structure is similar to President Obama’s proposed Financial Services Oversight Council. Both of these proposed overseers would monitor the market for systemic risks, and would possess the authority to collect information from financial institutions as needed. The major difference is that where the Obama council would only have the power to designate firms as “Tier 1” companies, a category that would require stricter regulation, Dodd’s agency would actually have the power to break-up those companies considered too big to fail.

In other words, an Agency for Financial Stability would enjoy unprecedented power over the private sector. Presently, if the government wants to take a large firm apart, it must first take its case to court, proving that the company is either a monopoly or that it is maliciously attacking its competitors.

Yet not only would Dodd’s AFS write rules for capital requirements, leverage limiting, and risk management compliance, it would also have the authority to treat Wells Fargo or UBS like the Bonanno crime family.

Which means that the risk of undue political influence is palpable. Let say’s enough people come to believe that Goldman Sachs is secretly controlling the Treasury Department, as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi so viciously claimed. All those people need to do is pressure the government into taking the company apart on the grounds that it’s size has become too critical to the economic health of the nation. There are certainly enough anti-Goldman Sachs staffers on Capitol Hill to make that happen. And it doesn’t take a follower of Ayn Rand to imagine a scenario where flimsy justifications like “to expand competition” and “create a fair playing field” start rolling off the tongues of aggressive AFS agents.

Nor is the Agency for Financial Stability the only part of the Dodd plan worth worrying about. His regulatory overhaul proposal also includes a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, similar to the one currently being considered in the House. Even more aggressive than Rep. Frank’s version, this consumer agency would also ultimately protect the market to death.

The Wall Street Journal pointed out last week that the Dodd overhaul plan would open up anyone who associates with someone accused of fraud to civil suits, even if prosecutors have no proof or are just on a fishing expedition. The Dodd proposal also repeats the errors of the Obama plan on issues like derivative reform, hedge funds, and executive compensation.

There are a few good ideas in the proposal. Consolidating federal banking rules into a single regulator could do a lot to simplify and refocus banking rules. Though that reform shouldn’t be kept separate from consumer protection concerns, and it would be inappropriate for the regulator to force the various charters under its supervision into one-size-fits-all regulations.

The Dodd plan also requires large firms to provide “funeral plans” outlining how they could be quickly and effectively shutdown in the case of an emergency. In theory, this is just a part of responsible risk management. But the Dodd plan treads into dangerous waters by giving AFS the authority to approve or reject such plans.

In the end, the Dodd plan is on the highest order of hubris. Politicians in Washington honestly believe they can fix the economy and prevent future calamity. Sure, they weren’t quite right when they “fixed” the system after Enron, or when they “reformed” the rules under Clinton, or when they “fixed” everything after the Savings and Loan Crisis. But this time will be different! At least Elliot Ness knew enough to change tactics after several initial failures to capture Al Capone.

The current financial crisis was largely brought about by well-intentioned regulations that just got it wrong. We thought that 8 percent was enough capital for banks to hold onto in case they ran into trouble. We thought that subprime mortgage-backed securities were decreasing risk. We were wrong on both counts. We can’t anticipate every risk. Under the Dodd plan—like the Obama and Frank plans before it— we’ll be proven wrong once again.

Anthony Randazzo is a policy analyst for Reason Foundation.

Friday Funnies

2009-11-20T07:00:00-05:00

The Salvia Ban Wagon

2009-11-19T15:00:00-05:00

A couple of years ago, John Bulloch watched an alarming report on an Atlanta TV station about an exotic-sounding drug called Salvia divinorum. Bulloch had never heard of the plant, a psychoactive relative of sage that the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico, have used for centuries in healing and divination rituals. But according to the news report, salvia was becoming increasingly popular among American college students, who sometimes called it “Sally D” or “magic mint” (since salvia, like sage, is a member of the mint family).

The most horrifying fact of all: Salvia was perfectly legal. In their far-reaching crackdowns on drugs that people enjoy, state and federal legislators somehow had missed a plant that contains the most powerful naturally occurring psychedelic known to man.

Bulloch—a Republican state senator who represents the area around Ochlocknee, Georgia, a tiny town near the Florida border—was astounded. “I thought, ‘Why hasn’t somebody already jumped on this?’ ” he told the Florida Times-Union in March 2007. “I hurriedly got legislative counsel to draft the bill”—legislation making it a misdemeanor to grow, sell, or possess salvia. “Since then,” the Times-Union reported, “Bulloch has been scouring the Internet to find information about salvia. None of what he has learned has dissuaded him from trying to make it illegal.”

Bulloch’s approach to salvia—ban first, ask questions later—epitomizes how drug policy is made in America. Although his bill has not yet passed, 15 states have banned salvia since 2005, and many others are considering similar legislation. Their precipitous action makes the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which has been monitoring salvia as “a drug of concern” since 2003 but still has no definite plans to classify it as a prohibited substance, look rational and reticent by comparison.

The penalties for violating state salvia laws vary from modest fines to decades in prison. Kenneth Rau, a North Dakota bottling plant employee who has the dubious distinction of being the first American arrested for salvia possession, bought eight ounces of leaves on eBay for $32 in December 2007. He says he did not realize a state ban on the plant had taken effect the previous August—a plausible claim, especially since the plant matter that police discovered in his home was clearly labeled “salvia.” Last spring Rau received three years of probation for simple possession. But he originally was charged as a dealer and could have received a prison sentence of up to 20 years, all for a bag of leaves that was legal in North Dakota four months before he bought it and remains legal in most of the country.

To drug policy historians, the reasons for the rush to ban salvia are familiar. Sensationalistic press coverage, in this case supplemented by salvia users’ documentation of their own trips on YouTube, has attracted the attention of legislators eager to grandstand as guardians of vulnerable and impressionable “young people.” Few politicians can resist the allure of a drug described as “cheaper than marijuana, stronger than LSD, as fast-acting as crack cocaine, and legally available to minors” (as The Ithaca Journal put it in 2004). The endless repetition of a few anecdotes that supposedly demonstrate salvia’s dangers—most conspicuously, the story of a Delaware teenager’s 2006 suicide—has found a receptive audience among politicians who automatically assume that an unfamiliar psychoactive substance must be a menace. And since these lawmakers bridle at the notion that anything good could possibly come from altering your consciousness, they see no downside to banning salvia before it becomes a problem.

The idea that salvia “could become the next marijuana” (as the Associated Press warned last year) is mostly misbegotten. The salvia experience is so unpredictable, so incompatible with social interaction, and so frequently boring or unpleasant that it’s safe to assume the herb will never be as popular as pot. But the comparison rings true in several other respects: Both salvia and marijuana are psychoactive plants linked in the public mind to Mexico, both appear to be nontoxic for all practical purposes, and both have intriguing medical potential. Salvia’s detractors, like marijuana’s in the 1920s and ’30s, claim it causes insanity and violence. In both cases prohibition occurred at the state level first. If salvia continues to follow the pattern set by marijuana, it will ultimately be banned throughout the country, despite a dearth of evidence that it poses a serious threat to individual health or to public safety.

Something About Mary

Salvia’s ritual use in Mexico goes back hundreds of years, but outsiders paid little attention to it until the mid-20th century. Starting in 1938, anthropologists and naturalists visiting Oaxaca mentioned a visionary tea made from a plant variously called hierba Maria (herb of Mary), hoja de adivinación (leaf of prophecy), or ska Maria Pastora (leaves of Mary the Shepherdess). They reported that the local healers known as curanderos used the potion, traditionally linked to the Virgin Mary, to diagnose illness and locate lost objects, finding clues in what their patients/clients said under its influence.

The self-taught American mycologist and ethnobotanist R. Gordon Wasson, best known for his research on hallucinogenic mushrooms, was the first visitor to describe his own experiences with ska Maria Pastora. In a 1962 leaflet published by Harvard University’s Botanical Museum, Wasson announced “a new Mexican psychotropic drug from the mint family” that he and his colleagues dubbed Salvia divinorum (diviner’s sage). He said it was “a psychotropic plant that the Mazatecs consume when mushrooms are not available,” a “less desirable substitute” for psilocybin-containing fungi.

In a 1961 salvia ceremony, Wasson drank a foul-tasting mixture of leaf juice and water under the guidance of a curandera. “The effect of the leaves came sooner than would have been the case with the mushrooms, was less sweeping, and lasted a shorter time,” he reported. “There was not the slightest doubt about the effect, but it did not go beyond the initial effect of the mushrooms—dancing colors in elaborate, three-dimensional designs.” The second time around, about a year later, Wasson was joined by his friend Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD. They experienced similar effects.

Given Wasson’s lack of enthusiasm for salvia, it’s not surprising that the plant remained obscure for decades, with nothing like the fame or following attracted by LSD, psilocybin, or peyote. That began to change in the 1990s, thanks largely to the efforts of another amateur ethnobotanist.

Daniel Siebert first came across salvia in the late 1970s while researching medicinal plants. Later someone gave him a cutting, which he used to grow a plant that he added to his collection of interesting herbs. About a year later he accidentally broke off part of the plant and decided to try it, chewing up a wad of 26 large leaves. “It was that initial experience that really piqued my interest,” he says. “I found the effects really intriguing, and it was very comfortable and easy to handle—much more manageable than most other psychedelic drugs I had tried.” Today Siebert, who lives in Malibu, runs the Salvia Divinorum Research and Information Center (sagewisdom.org), the most comprehensive online repository of information about the plant.

The website, which also sells the herb, includes a link to a 1994 article Siebert published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology that helped explain why ska Maria had disappointed so many psychonauts. Siebert’s research confirmed that salvinorin A, first isolated a decade before, was the plant’s main psychoactive ingredient. It turned out to be highly potent, producing noticeable effects at a dose of half a milligram, compared to about 10 milligrams for psilocybin and 250 milligrams for mescaline. (Contrary to some overheated press reports about salvia, LSD, a synthetic psychedelic, is far more powerful than any of these, effective at doses as low as 50 micrograms, or five-hundredths of a milligram.) Siebert’s experiments with volunteers who tried different routes of administration revealed that swallowing salvia was the worst way to absorb salvinorin A, which is “deactivated by the gastrointestinal system.” Two other routes were much more successful: through the oral mucous membrane (by holding masticated leaves or leaf juice in the mouth) and through the lungs (by inhaling the vapor).

This information, combined with the realization that salvinorin A is highly stable and remains in salvia leaves even when they’re dried, set the stage for the plant’s commercialization. Soon it was available from head shops and online vendors in the form of liquid extracts and smokable dried leaves, often fortified with extract. Holding the liquid in the mouth more closely resembles the traditional method of consuming salvia, with the effects felt in five to 10 minutes and lasting an hour or two. But the alcohol-based extract tastes terrible and produces relatively subtle effects. (See “Salvia and Salivation,” page 42.) The smoked form produces faster, more intense, and shorter effects, appearing within 30 seconds and subsiding after five to 10 minutes. It sells much better.

According to the latest data from the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 1 million Americans used salvia in 2007, up from 750,000 in 2006, the first year the survey asked about the drug. Those numbers make salvia currently more popular than LSD, used by 620,000 Americans in 2007. (In terms of lifetime use, however, acid droppers outnumber salvia smokers by nearly 10 to 1.) Salvia, like other psychedelics, is most popular among 18-to-25-year-olds, 2 percent of whom report past-year use.

As is often the case with drug fads, interest in salvia has been driven partly by the same press coverage that has encouraged legislators to crack down on it. Salvia distributors say they see spikes in sales after anti-salvia articles appear. “Every time there’s a news story on it,” says John Boyd, CEO of Arena Ethnobotanicals in Encinitas, California, “it brings it to people’s attention.”

Still, salvia is much less popular than marijuana, used by 25 million Americans in 2007. It is also less likely to be used more than once. Tiffin University psychologist Jonathan Appel, who co-authored a 2007 article on the rising popularity of salvia in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, says, “We’re talking about a small percentage of people who are using it and an even smaller percentage of people who go back and use it again.”

‘The Worst Substance of This Earth’

Siebert says the prevalence of smoking, which produces quick, intense effects, helps explain why many users report overwhelming experiences they are not eager to repeat. High doses are another factor, since vendors compete based on the potency of their fortified leaves, bragging that they are anywhere from five to 100 times as powerful as the untreated plant. “When you smoke,” Siebert says, “the effects come on almost instantly, and it’s disorienting. Suddenly you have this dramatic shift of consciousness, especially if you’re taking a high dose, and it can be frightening and uncomfortable. That starts everything off on the wrong foot.”

Last year a commenter on reason’s blog, Hit & Run, called salvia “THE WORST substance of this Earth,” adding, “If you want kids to stay off of drugs, give them some Salvia and tell them this is what cannabis, hash, and LSD are all like.” Erowid.org, a website that provides information on a wide variety of psychoactive substances for an audience that is more Leary than leery, is less vehement, but it notes that salvia’s effects “are considered unpleasant by many people.” Bryan Roth, a psychiatrist and pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina, led the research that showed how salvinorin A binds to the brain. “Most people will say they don’t like it,” he says. “It’s just too intense. If it has any effect at all, I would say it would be to diminish the tendency for drug abuse.”

Users are apt to be especially disappointed if they are expecting a fun party drug similar to marijuana. “I smoked with a friend last week who became the leg of a table,” says Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. In his 1994 paper, Siebert listed commonly reported themes of salvia experiences, including “becoming objects,” “visions of various two-dimensional surfaces,” “revisiting places from the past,” “loss of the body and/or identity,” “various sensations of motion,” “uncontrollable hysterical laughter,” and “overlapping realities.” Such experiences might be interesting, rewarding, or revealing, but they are not exactly conducive to social activities.

“Salvia is not a recreational substance,” says Jeffrey Bottoms, who works at Mazatec Garden, a salvia importer and distributor in Houston. “It isn’t pleasant. It doesn’t make you feel good. It’s not a mood elevator. If you’re depressed, it’s not going to make you feel a little better. In fact, it will make you feel a lot worse.” Ready to try it yet?

First you may want to check out the videos. Search for “salvia” on YouTube, and you’ll find hundreds of videos of teenagers and young adults staring into space, laughing hysterically, falling over, crawling on the floor, and speaking in tongues while their friends alternately giggle and reassure them that it will all be over soon. These videos, widely credited with helping to popularize salvia, do not make it seem very appealing. Nor are they all that alarming, except perhaps as a sign that a disturbingly large number of people want the world to see their displays of drug-induced idiocy. In some of the videos, the salvia smoker freaks out a little, but these “bad trips” (breathlessly advertised as such) look pretty mild, consisting mainly of restlessness and a repeatedly expressed wish for an end to the ride, which arrives soon enough.

Yet the YouTube videos come up frequently in newspaper stories about salvia and in the comments of politicians who want to ban it. In January, explaining his motive for sponsoring a prohibition bill, Maryland state Sen. Richard Colburn (R-Dorchester County) told the Baltimore Examiner that the YouTube footage is “pretty disturbing,” adding, “Just imagine if that was your child.” Colburn’s YouTube-inspired bill would classify salvia as a Schedule I substance, making people who sell it subject to prison terms of up to 20 years. According to the Santa Fe Reporter, New Mexico state Rep. Keith Gardner (R-Chavez), sponsor of a similar bill, “says all the evidence he needs of the drug’s dangerous potential is available on YouTube.” He told the paper the videos are “dramatic as hell—you gotta watch ’em. At first I thought, ‘This is just somebody pretending.’ It’s amazing how powerful this drug is.”

Texas state Rep. Armando Martinez (D- Weslaco) says he introduced a bill that would ban salvia sales to minors based on “what we’ve seen on YouTube and what a friend of mine’s nephew had mentioned about all this.” He settled on age restrictions, as opposed to a complete ban, because it seemed easier to accomplish. “Any way we could stop this from getting into the hands of our children or adolescents,” he says, “I think that it’s something we need to do. If that means a complete ban, then I would support a complete ban.”

Texas state Rep. Charles “Doc” Anderson (R-Waco) already does, arguing that age restrictions could “do more harm than good,” making salvia use a mark of adulthood. The New York Times reports that Anderson has tried to stir up support for a ban among his colleagues by citing a YouTube video that shows a salvia smoker behind the wheel of a car. The video in question, “Driving on Salvia,” is part of a humorous series called “Being Productive on Salvia” featuring a Los Angeles production assistant named Erik Hoffstad. Other episodes include “Gardening on Salvia” and “Writing a Letter to Congress on Salvia.” The running gag is that Hoffstad can’t manage to do much of anything after taking a salvia hit. In “Driving on Salvia,” he never actually tries to start the car, and the scariest moment occurs when a cat unexpectedly jumps on the hood.

‘Beyond Anything We Have Seen Before’

Martinez and Anderson both raise the specter of salvia-impaired driving, but neither can cite any real-life examples of it, in Texas or elsewhere. That’s not surprising, since (as Hoffstad’s video illustrates) someone tripping on salvia, unlike someone who has had a few drinks, is in no condition to get into a car, start it up, and drive away. It seems the only way this hazard could materialize is if someone brought a bongful of salvia with him on a drive and lit it up while stopped at a light. Although the driving scenario seems implausible, salvia prohibitionists are right that there is a potential for accidents under the drug’s influence, which is why vendors warn their customers to put away hazardous objects and enlist a “sober sitter” to keep an eye on them during their trip.

When I press Martinez and Anderson for examples of actual harm caused by salvia use, as opposed to hypothetical risks, the best they can do is cite bad but brief trips. Anderson also claims “we are seeing the flashback scenario.” But as Siebert notes, “Any kind of intense or traumatic experience,” including war, car crashes, and near-death experiences, “can produce flashbacks.…Intense psychedelic experiences can be extremely frightening, and it may be that there’s some internal psychological mechanism of revisiting that kind of material later. But it doesn’t appear that there’s any organic, direct reason for this. It’s not like the drug hangs around the system and suddenly pops up in your brain one day. It seems to be more like the way the brain deals with very intense or confusing experiences.”

Last fall Anderson told the Waco Tribune-Herald that “with a single use [salvia smokers] can cause some serious, serious damage to their brain.” Roth, the salvia researcher, says “there’s no evidence for that statement.” In fact, says Siebert, animal studies of salvia give “no indication of it having any significant toxic effects, even at doses that are hundreds of times more than what humans would ordinarily use.” Even salvia’s detractors concede that addiction does not seem to be an issue, since few people who try the drug want to use it on a regular basis. Despite a dramatic increase in use during the last few years, emergency rooms are not seeing a flood, or even a trickle, of salvia users, probably because a hospital trip usually takes longer than a salvia trip.

The lack of alarming statistics helps explain why the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which has the power to ban psychoactive substances without new legislation, is still waiting and watching six years after declaring salvia a “drug of concern.” DEA spokesman Rusty Payne says, “I don’t think we have enough information yet.” And there’s no telling when they will. “It’s going to take a while,” Payne says. “If we decide to schedule [salvia], we’ll publish a notice [in the Federal Register]. If we don’t, we won’t.” Although Payne says the delay should not be read as a judgment on salvia’s dangers, the DEA can act much more quickly when it wants to, as when it banned MDMA on an emergency basis in 1985. “When they say they’ve been looking at it for years,” says Rick Doblin, “it means it’s not much of a problem.”

Nor is salvia a high priority at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Officially, the FDA says herbal products like salvia are “unapproved new drugs” and “misbranded drugs” if they are “marketed with claims implying that these products mimic the effects of controlled substances.” Products are deemed to be “illegal street drug alternatives” when they are “intended to be used for recreational purposes to effect psychological states (e.g., to get high, to promote euphoria, or to induce hallucinations).”

“I am aware of that law,” says Arena Ethnobotanicals CEO John Boyd, “and that’s why if you check our website there are no references to anything like that.” Many salvia vendors do tout the psychoactive effects of their products, promising “psychedelic,” “visionary,” “enlightening,” and “enjoyable” experiences. Yet except for two warning letters it sent in 2002, the FDA does not seem to have taken any enforcement actions against companies that sell salvia. While FDA spokesman Christopher Kelly says “we do not discuss potential, pending, or ongoing actions,” none of the distributors I interviewed was aware of any recent warnings or seizures.

As for Congress, Rep. Joe Baca (D-Calif.) introduced a bill to ban salvia in 2002, declaring, “We know very little about the drug, but what we do know is frightening. This drug’s power is beyond anything we have seen before.” But the bill died in committee, and Baca never reintroduced it. I contacted his office a couple of times to find out why but did not get an answer.

‘Our Existence in General Is Pointless’

By contrast, there’s been a flurry of anti-salvia activity at the state level in the last few years. With so little evidence that salvia is hazardous, prohibitionists lean heavily on anecdotes. Ohio state Rep. Thom Collier (R-Mount Vernon), who introduced a salvia ban that took effect in April, said he was motivated by the death of a Loudonville boy who was shot by a friend. But according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “it isn’t clear whether the friend was on the drug when he shot and killed the 12-year-old.” The Columbus Dispatch notes “there was no direct evidence…that the shooting was drug-related.”

Similarly, when Rep. Baca proposed a federal salvia ban in 2002, he cited the case of Daniel Moffa, a 15-year-old Rhode Island boy who smoked salvia one morning and stabbed his pot dealer on the way to school. Moffa later told WPRI, the Fox affiliate in Providence, that he was “paranoid” and “hallucinating,” thinking the dealer looked “evil” and “horrible.” The story sounded fishy to Daniel Siebert, since he didn’t think a salvia user on a trip that intense would be able to coordinate his movements well enough to meet someone and repeatedly stab him. Still, Moffa’s parents initially blamed salvia for the assault because “we had no other plausible explanation,” the boy’s father explained in a 2007 email message to Siebert. Since then, the father said, “we have found out that Dan suffers from bipolar affective disorder with psychosis.” While “the salvia may have contributed to an episode,” he added, it “was not the real cause.”

The most influential salvia horror story involves Brett Chidester, a Wilmington, Delaware, 17-year-old who in January 2006 pitched a tent in his parents’ garage, went inside it with a burning charcoal grill, and stayed there until he was dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Brett had been experimenting with salvia and claimed it had given him profound insights. “Salvia allows us to give up our senses and wander in the interdimensional time and space,” he wrote in an essay discovered after his death. “Also, and this is probably hard for most to accept, our existence in general is pointless. Final point: Us earthly humans are nothing.”

A month after Brett’s death, his mother, Kathy Chidester, told the Wilmington News-Journal: “We just won’t have any answers, and we have to learn to accept that. But my gut feeling is it was the salvia. It’s the only thing that can explain it.” A month later, the state legislature had approved Brett’s Law, which made salvia a Schedule I drug. The same week the ban took effect, Delaware’s deputy chief medical examiner, Adrienne Sekula-Perlman, changed Brett’s death certificate, adding “salvia divinorum use” as a contributing cause.

Since then Kathy Chidester has campaigned for similar laws across the country, and 15 more states have either banned salvia or (in the case of California and Maine) prohibited sales to minors. The laws all passed by overwhelming margins, in some cases unanimously. Anti-salvia bills have been introduced in at least 22 other states. “My hope and goal is to have salvia regulated across the U.S.,” Chidester wrote in testimony supporting the proposed salvia ban in Maryland last January. “It’s my son’s legacy and I will not end my fight until this happens.”

Appel, the Tiffin University psychologist, does not think salvia should be legal for general use, but he is reluctant to draw any firm conclusions about Brett Chidester’s death. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying it caused him to commit suicide,” he says. Such explanations, he adds, are “a way to try to make sense of something that’s pretty senseless. We’re always looking for rationalizations and reasons, particularly when there aren’t any.”

Roth, the University of North Carolina psychiatrist, is also opposed to using salvia recreationally, partly because of the psychological risks. But he says it’s difficult to say what role the drug might have played in Brett Chidester’s suicide. Although “it’s tragic that this young guy killed himself,” he says, “there’s no way of knowing if salvia had anything to do with it.…There have been a couple of reports of people having long-term psychotic episodes after smoking it that have appeared in the literature. It would seem, given the apparent widespread use of salvia, that if these are side effects, they don’t occur at very high prevalence. Otherwise, the ERs would be filled with people having bad salvia reactions.”

Siebert concedes that salvia “might have influenced [Brett Chidester’s] thinking in some way” but adds: “He must have already had some thoughts about suicide. I don’t think salvia’s just going to put thoughts into peoples’ heads. Mentally healthy people don’t decide to take such a drastic action based on [an idea] they had during a drug state. Psychedelics basically amplify a lot of your own internal stuff. If you’re already having some kind of dark thoughts, a psychedelic experience could amplify that, and it could lead to a problem for some people.”

Notably, there is no indication that Brett Chidester was under the influence of salvia when he killed himself. The idea seems to be that using the drug encouraged him to reach conclusions about the nature of life that were conducive to suicide. That theory, notes Richard Glen Boire, a senior fellow at the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics, “could apply to some of the greatest pieces of art in the history of the world. It would make Nietzsche a controlled substance. There is a lot of cultural production out there that shows a way of looking at the world that isn’t all sunny and rosy.”

‘One Life Lost Is One Too Many’

If Brett Chidester’s suicide looms large in the thinking of anti-salvia legislators in other states, that’s partly because they rarely have evidence of harm caused by the drug closer to home. According to local press coverage in one state after another, police are not reporting salvia-related problems. Neither are schools, hospitals, or drug treatment centers. Legislators want to ban it anyway.

Their reasoning is simple: Why wait for a problem? Martinez, the Texas legislator, says he favors “a proactive approach.” Over the course of my 10-minute interview with him, he says “one life lost is one too many” four times and “you can’t put a price on life” three times. To his colleague Anderson, who utters the phrase “it’s a hallucinogen” eight times during a 30-minute conversation, it’s self-evident that any drug falling into that category should be banned.

Georgia state Sen. Don Thomas (R-Dalton) has a similar attitude. In 2007 he candidly told the Florida Times-Union he knew nothing about the benefits of salvia use. “I just know about the publicity of the dangers of it,” he said, “so my first impression is to ban anything of that nature.” That same year, defending legislation that would ban the sale of salvia to adults, Wisconsin state Rep. Sheldon Wasserman (D-Milwaukee) told the Wisconsin State Journal, “This bill is all about protecting our children.”

Salvia prohibitionists say a complete ban is necessary to protect children because, as Wisconsin state Sen. Julie Lassa (D-Stevens Point) told the Wausau Daily Herald in 2007, “many people believe that because it is legal there are no risks associated with using salvia.” Last year Massachusetts state Rep. Vinny deMacedo (R-Plymouth) told the Plymouth News, “I believe by not making this drug illegal we are sending a message to our youth that it is OK.” Appel, the psychologist, agrees that salvia users “make the assumption that because it’s legal it’ll be safe.”

But people do not assume that tobacco and alcohol are safe simply because they are legal. Furthermore, anyone researching salvia online would come across myriad warnings from vendors and users about the drug’s risks, along with the YouTube videos, which highlight the potential for bad trips. “I don’t buy this idea that people think because it’s legal it must be good,” says Doblin, “because the corollary is not true.” Especially when it comes to marijuana, he says, “People don’t think, ‘It’s illegal, so it must be bad.’ ” People inclined to experiment with salvia, he says, generally don’t believe that “the drug laws make sense.”

To the extent that people do believe that, says Richard Glen Boire of the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics, it’s a dangerous misconception. “In a mature society,” he says, “you would laugh at the idea that if something is available it is therefore stamped ‘approved’ and ‘safe.’ I don’t think we should be creating a society that’s safety proofed in a way that [ignores] the reality of living.”

Yet the war on drugs has conditioned people to expect that, with a few grandfathered exceptions, psychoactive substances that are not classified as pharmaceuticals will be banned. You hear it from salvia smokers on YouTube as well as salvia scaremongers in state legislatures: I can’t believe this stuff is legal. Ultimately, that is the crux of the prohibitionist argument. Salvia must be banned because it’s legal.

Once a few legislatures act on that premise, public officials in other states start to worry they will look irresponsible if they don’t follow suit. Last year Van Ingram, compliance branch manager with the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy, told the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, “Our neighbors in Tennessee and Missouri felt it was important enough, so it is important for us to look at it as well.” A month later, after the Florida legislature approved a salvia ban, state Sen. Evelyn Lynn (R-Daytona Beach) told the Associated Press, “I’d rather be at the front edge of preventing the dangers of the drug than waiting until we are the 40th or more.”

‘A Philosopher’s Tool’

Since there is no political upside to resisting prohibitionism, it’s surprising when legislators decline to panic. Two states—Maine and California—have prohibited salvia sales to minors instead of banning the drug completely. This year Maryland’s House of Delegates likewise ended up rejecting a ban and endorsing age restrictions, but the state Senate did not act on the bill before the end of the legislative session. The Drug Policy Alliance, which testified against the Maryland ban, also helped change a New Mexico prohibition bill into a ban on sales to minors, although the legislation has not passed yet.

One respectable antiprohibitionist argument is that banning salvia could impede valuable medical research. Salvinorin has intriguing properties that have made its derivatives the focus of research aimed at finding better treatments for pain, drug addiction, depression, and various neurological conditions. “For those of us who study this sort of thing,” says Bryan Roth, “the fact that salvinorin binds to just one [brain receptor] is pretty amazing. It opens up the possibility that if we can find drugs that block the effects of salvinorin at that receptor, they might be effective in treating a number of diseases.”

Roth worries that placing salvinorin on Schedule I of the federal Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive category, will “make it more difficult to do research on it and investigate the potential therapeutic utility of derivatives. By definition, a Schedule I drug is devoid of any medical benefit. That makes it next to impossible to demonstrate any medical benefit. They made LSD Schedule I in the ’60s, and they’re only now getting around to looking at potential medical benefits. It really slows things down.”

While some salvia prohibitionists say they don’t want to interfere with scientific research, they do not recognize any legitimate nonmedical use for the plant. They see teenagers getting wasted on YouTube, and they see medical applications that might one day be approved by the FDA, but nothing in between. Siebert, who thinks thrill-seeking salvia smokers do not understand what the plant is all about, recently told the German magazine Hanfblatt, “Salvia is not an escapist drug. Quite the contrary: It is a philosopher’s tool.” He says, “It produces a very internal state where you go into yourself. You’re more aware of your subconscious feelings, and often you gain insight into problems in your life that you’re trying to tackle.” Last year he told Newsweek, “I realized I wanted to marry my wife as a result of the salvia experience.”

In a 2003 Erowid survey of 500 salvia users who filled out an online questionnaire, 47 percent reported “increased insight,” while 40 percent said they felt an “increased sense of connection with the universe or nature.” Other commonly reported effects were improved mood (45 percent), calmness (42 percent), weird thoughts (36 percent), a feeling of unreality (32 percent), and a feeling of floating (32 percent). About 26 percent reported “persisting positive effects,” compared to 4 percent who reported “persisting negative effects” (typically anxiety). The sample was self-selected, so the responses are not necessarily representative, but they give a better sense than the YouTube videos do of why some people might find value in the salvia experience.

“It makes things that are bothering you become clear,” says Mazatec Garden’s Jeffrey Bottoms. Some users report that salvia relieved their depression or helped them break bad habits. A 2001 case report in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology described a 26-year-old woman whose chronic depression disappeared after she started taking small doses of salvia three times a week. Arena Ethnobotanicals CEO John Boyd says he tried to give up cigarettes many times over the years and finally quit the week after his first salvia experience. Doblin notes that Canadian Quakers who have used salvia during meetings “felt that it deepened the silence and made people speak more from the heart.”

Although Siebert does not put much stock in spiritualism, he recognizes that other salvia users see their experiences in religious terms. “It seems so real that people often interpret it at face value and think they have actually had some kind of spiritual journey,” he says. “I don’t personally believe that’s what is really going on. But that doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful for people.”

By contrast, Worcester County, Maryland, Commissioner Linda Busick is sure a salvia experience cannot possibly be meaningful, at least not in a good way. “It’s supposed to be inducing spiritual growth,” Busick scoffed in a 2008 interview with the Salisbury Daily Times. “It’s certainly detrimental to anyone who uses it. I don’t know of any beneficial effects that it has.” Van Ingram, the Kentucky drug control official, is on the same page. “Anything that makes you see visions or things that are not there,” he told the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer last year, “is hardly harmless.”

Anything? As Boire notes, “The visionary state goes back millennia, and it cannot be prohibited. Every night we enter into a visionary state. Every book you read, everything that goes through your sensory apparatus, creates a type of vision.” Doblin adds: “Seeing visions is the core of a lot of different religions, and whether that’s harmful or not depends on the context, the support, how people interpret the visions. Seeing things that are not there is not necessarily harmful. This whole idea that different is bad, that a change in consciousness is in itself harmful, is really one of the fundamental problems inherent in the drug war.”

Senior Editor Jacob Sullum (jsullum@reason.com) is the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (Tarcher/Penguin).

Worse Than Taxes

2009-11-19T12:00:00-05:00

Bill O'Reilly is mad at me because I'm not mad enough about taxes.

Last week on The O'Reilly Factor, we talked about California's and New York's enormous budget deficits and planned tax increases. Those states would have big surpluses had they just grown their governments in pace with inflation. But of course they didn't. Now the politicians act like their current deficits are something imposed on them by the recession.

But that's nonsense. They created the problem with their reckless spending.

Let's look at the particulars. Had the government of New York state grown at the rate of population and inflation over the past 10 years, it would have a $14 billion surplus today. Instead, spending grew at twice the rate of inflation. So New York has a $3 billion deficit.

To dent California's deficit, bureaucrats will withhold an extra 10 percent from every taxpayer—at least from those who don't flee the state. New York planned to raise the price of new license plates, but then backed off. The visible tax was unpopular. But the hidden taxes grow.

Hidden taxes are more pernicious because they disguise what we pay for government. We blame merchants, not our legislators, for the high price of gasoline, liquor, cigarettes, and phone calls, but the money goes to the political thieves.

New York imposes a gas tax of 61 cents a gallon—almost a quarter of the cost of the gas. New York City taxes cigarettes at $4.25 a pack. Washington state collects $26 per gallon of hard liquor. Illinois politicians take a sneaky cut when you buy junk food: They add 6.25 percent to the cost of soda and candy.

My phone bill lists seven different taxes—unintelligible stuff like a "Public Safety Commission Surcharge" and an "MCTD tax." The payroll tax is one of the biggest hidden taxes. You assume that you know what you pay because it's listed on your paycheck, but that's actually only half of it. Employers must pay an equal amount—money that otherwise would have been part your salary.

O'Reilly was most indignant about the visible taxes. "You, Stossel, are going to be paying 45 percent of your money to the government!" he said. I replied that I already pay more than that, since I live in New York City.

But I apparently was not indignant enough, because later in his show he told comedian Dennis Miller, "Stossel doesn't get it."

O'Reilly is right about my not being furious. It's not that taxes don't anger me. They do. But I'm more angry about the arrogance of the ruling class. It reminds me of Walter Williams' riff: "Politicians are worse than thieves. At least when thieves take your money, they don't expect you to thank them for it."

Taxes, even counting hidden taxes, are not the real measure of what the thieves take. The true burden of government, the late Milton Friedman said, is the spending level. Taxation is just one way government gets money. The other ways—borrowing and inflation—are equally burdens on the people. (State governments can't inflate, but they sure can borrow.)

O'Reilly told me that America is ready for a tax revolt. I hope he's right. But I don't think it will happen until more people see the ruling elite for what it is: a gang of arrogant bullies that has the audacity to believe that they know how to direct our lives better than we do.

That's why, bad as the taxes are, I'm more upset about ObamaCare, Medicare, the "stimulus," the auto bailout, the bank bailouts, the Fannie/Freddie bailouts, the trillions in guarantees, and on and on.

The politicians' spending schemes represent presumptuous interference in our lives. They are an assault on our autonomy.

John Stossel will soon host Stossel on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of Give Me a Break and of Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.

Reason.tv: Buy American Pot—A very special message from the American Marijuana Growers Association

2009-11-19T10:30:00-05:00

Sarah Palin and the Decline of Conservatism

2009-11-19T07:00:00-05:00

The 19th century American writer Henry Adams said the descent of American presidents from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant was enough to discredit the theory of evolution. The same could be said of the pantheon of conservative political heroes, which in the last half-century has gone from Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to Sarah Palin. That refutation may be agreeable to Palin, who doesn't put much stock in Darwin anyway.

You can confirm all this by looking at what the three wrote. Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, made his reputation four years earlier with an eloquent and intellectually coherent volume, The Conscience of a Conservative, which laid out a blueprint for the policies he favored.

Reagan likewise made the thinking person's case for conservatism. Between 1975 and 1979, after he had finished two terms as governor of California, he did some 1,000 radio commentaries, most of which he wrote himself. They were later collected in Reagan, In His Own Hand, which provides the texts of his handwritten manuscripts and proves that, far from being the "amiable dunce" of liberal mythology, he thought hard and clearly about the issues of his time.

Palin? Her new memoir, Going Rogue, fills up 413 pages, but it has less policy heft than a student council speech. Where Reagan dove into the murk of arms control and Goldwater fathomed federal farm programs, Palin skims over the surface of a puddle.

Amid all the tales of savoring the aromas at the state fair and having her wardrobe vetted by snotty campaign staffers, she sets aside space to lay out her vision of what it means to be a "Commonsense Conservative." It takes up all of 11 pages and leans heavily on prefabricated lines like "I am a conservative because I deal with the world as it is" and "If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes."

But the priorities of Going Rogue are striking poses and attitudes, not making actual arguments about the proper role of government. The book is meant to create an image, or maybe a brand—folksy but shrewd, tough but feminine, noble but beset by weaklings and traitors, ever-smiling unless you awaken her inner "Mama Grizzly Bear" by scrutinizing her loved ones.

No one could be more pleased with her than she is with herself. Reading the book is like watching Palin preen in front of a mirror for hours on end, as she tirelessly compliments herself for courage, gumption, devotion to family, and maverick independence.

Who needs policy? In her world—and the world of legions of conservatives who revere her—the persona is the policy. Palin is beloved because she's (supposedly) just like ordinary people, which (supposedly) gives her a profound understanding of their needs.

That attitude used to be associated with the left, which claimed to speak for the ordinary folks who get shafted by the system. Logic and evidence about policy, to many liberals, were less important than empathy and good intentions. Now it's conservatives who think we should be guided by our guts, not our brains.

Palin is the embodiment of this approach, never imagining that knowledge and reflection might be of more value than instinct. When Oprah asked if she had felt any doubts about her readiness to be vice president—which requires the readiness to be president—Palin replied breezily, "No, no—I didn't blink. … I felt quite confident in my abilities and my executive experience and I knew that this is an executive administrative job." (The audience tittered.)

Contrast that with Reagan, who after learning of his victory on Election Night 1980 told his supporters, "There's never been a more humbling moment in my life." Palin doesn't do humble.

You could almost forget that for well over a year, Republicans have ridiculed Barack Obama as lighter than a souffle, an inexperienced upstart who owes everything to arrogant presumption and a carefully crafted image. But Obama wrote a 375-page book, The Audacity of Hope, that shows a solid, and occasionally tedious, grasp of issues.

It is hard to imagine Palin (as opposed to a ghost writer) producing anything comparable. Almost as hard as it is to imagine that modern conservatives would expect it.

Leaders who can think? That's so 20th century.

Globalization With a Human Face

2009-11-18T16:30:00-05:00

Free trade is never more necessary—or vulnerable—than in times of economic distress. The current global downturn is no exception. Protectionist barriers have shot up all over the world, including the United States. Earlier this year, Congress killed a pilot program allowing Mexican trucks to transport goods across America and included “Buy America” provisions in the stimulus bill banning foreign steel and iron from infrastructure projects funded by the legislation. More disturbingly, President Barack Obama, after chiding Congress for flirting with protectionism, initiated his own ill-advised affair by imposing a 35 percent tariff on cheap Chinese tires.

If the world manages to avoid an all-out trade war of the kind that helped trigger the Great Depression after the U.S. imposed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in 1930, it will be in no small part due to the efforts of one man: Jagdish N. Bhagwati, an ebullient and irreverent 76-year-old professor of economics at Columbia University. Bhagwati has done more than perhaps any other person alive to advance the cause of unfettered global trade.

A native of India, Bhagwati immigrated to the United States in the late ’60s after a brief stint on the Indian Planning Commission, where he learned first-hand the insanity of an economic approach that tried to modernize a country by cutting it off from world trade. Since then, he has devoted his efforts, both in academia and in the popular press, to showing that there is no better way of improving the lot of both advanced countries and the developing world than through free trade. His path-breaking contributions to trade theory have put him on the short list for a Nobel Prize in economics.

Though a dogged trade advocate, Bhagwati is anything but dogmatic. He is a free spirit who draws intellectual inspiration from many disparate ideological camps. A self-avowed liberal, he is also something of a Gandhian social progressive, though Gandhi himself supported economic autarky. Bhagwati works with numerous Third World NGOs on a host of human rights issues. Yet he has no problem taking on these groups—or his famous student, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman—when they question the benefits of trade. In fact, he devoted his 2004 magnum opus, In Defense of Globalization, to a point-by-point rebuttal of these critics. Although he doesn’t vote Republican because he dislikes the party’s nationalistic jingoism, he readily declares that Democrats pose a far bigger threat to international exchange than Republicans.

This summer Shikha Dalmia, a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation, interviewed Bhagwati in his New York office.

reason: You have been on the short list for a Nobel Prize in economics for your contribution to trade theory. Could you explain what your main contribution is?

Jagdish Bhagwati: My breakthrough in trade theory was very simple, as all breakthroughs are. Back in the 1950s, when the case for free trade was widely regarded as less compelling analytically than today, protectionists had one very powerful argument on their side. They noted that a country necessarily benefits from free trade only when markets are perfect—that is to say, only when market prices reflect true social costs can we expect these prices to guide allocation correctly. Take pollution. Say your production process makes you spew things into the air and water but you do not have to pay for this pollution. Then the social cost of harming others is not being taken into account by you and hence your production costs are less than the “correct” social costs.

So you could take two points of view. The time-honored view was that when there is such “market failure,” or what might be better called a “missing market,” the case for free trade was compromised and any form of protectionism was justified. I argued that if you had a market failure, fix that, and you are back to perfect markets and the legitimacy of free trade. So, for example, you can have a polluter-pay principle on the environment. If you do that, then there’s no damaging spillover which has not been taken into account.

The proper policy response then is not to abandon free trade but rather to fix the market failure and then to embrace free trade. This was a revolutionary thought. For 200 years, serious economists had abandoned free trade in the presence of market failures of one kind or another.

reason: In Defense of Globalization was addressed to non-academic critics of free trade and globalization who claim that globalization does not have a human face. What was your argument?

Bhagwati: When I was in Seattle in 1999, when everything went haywire as far as trying to get a new round of trade negotiations, I realized that the young people who were agitating, and some of the older folks also, were not interested in whether trade was good for national income and prosperity. They were claiming that globalization has an adverse impact on a whole lot of social issues—gender equity issues, environmental issues, the effects of globalization on the polity and democratic rights. In short, to use the fetching phrase, they were concerned that economic globalization lacked a human face.

My book addressed precisely such issues. I found that, contrary to the fears of the critics, most social agendas were advanced rather than handicapped by globalization. Globalization, I concluded, had a human face.

Take women’s issues, for example: If you look at what happens to the gender gap on pay inequality, it turns out that you can make a perfectly solid argument that in fact it’s narrowed rather than widened as a result of international trade. The reason is very simple: If a man is paid twice as much as a woman, when they are both equally competent, that is inefficient. So when you are engaged in international competition, you’re really not going to be able to indulge your prejudice in this way. This will lead to more demand for women and less for men, bringing pressure to bear on their relative wages in the direction of greater pay equality.

Two brilliant young women, Sandra Black and Elizabeth Brainerd, did their dissertation at Harvard on this hypothesis. They found that in two decades in internationally traded industries in the United States, the gender wage gap narrowed faster than in non-traded industries. Trade had thus been good for an important social objective, not a drag on it.

reason: You still hear the argument—President Obama made it during his campaign—that we want fair trade, not free trade.

Bhagwati: In the United States the phrase “fair trade” holds a lot of sway, because fairness is an important issue here. In the United States it’s the equality of opportunity, not of outcome, that matters. We have a fairness-oriented culture. The Europeans, who are actually more stratified—they’re more into equality of outcome. The social mobility of people is much less, so they want the state to intervene and redistribute. They’re more into justice and we’re more into fairness.

So if you want to be a protectionist in the U.S., you’ve got to say that these Japanese or these Indians are trading unfairly. People will much more readily give you protection if they think the other guy is a wicked unfair trader.

President Obama hasn’t really understood the case for free trade because I don’t think he’s been too interested in trade. His background is as an activist working with the poor people, so he hasn’t thought about these issues. So he ends up listening to other people, and a lot of people who are protectionist are around him, particularly the unions, who are afraid of international competition. But they dress up the fair trade argument in altruism, that they’re doing it to raise the labor standards and wages of workers in India and Brazil and so on and so forth, when in fact, they’re doing it to protect their own workers from competition. The president doesn’t seem to realize that this is something which other people, whom you pretend you’re trying to help, actually see as a naked, cynical ploy.

Instead of pandering to union fear, Obama has got to engage them. You have got to help these doubting Thomases confront their fears. He’s got to say that trade with the poor countries is actually helping, not hurting, you. The unions’ main fear is that unskilled jobs are disappearing. They see these jobs being taken up elsewhere where the labor is cheap. But they can’t hold onto these jobs anyway. What they get in return from trade are cheap products that they need as consumers. So free trade moderates the downward pressure on their real wages.

Big portions of the wages of poor workers go toward low quality textiles, for instance. That is well-established. But if you look at the structure of protectionism, if you go and buy something from Anne Klein that’s going to be expensive, but it carries no tariff at all because these high-end designers compete on variety. Tariffs matter where the competition is on prices. So the low-quality items which poor people buy end up carrying higher tariffs than high-end items that rich people buy.

reason: So free trade’s harm to union workers as producers is minimal, but the harm to them as consumers would be very great if we didn’t have free trade?

Bhagwati: Yes. So what President Obama has to do is basically change the ethos in this country so that it understands that the United States has profited enormously from free trade. Free trade has rescued India and China from poverty, yes. But the U.S. working class has also profited from international trade.

He’s got to make an eloquent case like that. He’s got to see that this is something that needs as much attention and as much of his eloquence as the speech he made on race after he got into trouble over his pastor.

But then to move the case of free trade forward, the Obama administration has to show global leadership, because the U.S. is the biggest trading country. He has got to make sure that the stimulus package and everything that he does is completely consistent with openness. I think he’s got to understand this is not something he can keep postponing and postponing.

When President Clinton came in the first year, he was into Japan bashing and he hadn’t made up his mind on whether he wanted trade or not, because he had advisors on both sides. So his first year was extremely tentative. Then he made up his mind and was fiercely pro-trade after that. President Bush, the junior, he too gave into steel tariffs when he first came in, but after the first year, when he found his feet, he was very pro-trade.

President Obama doesn’t have that luxury because the weaknesses are showing in the way the stimulus is being designed and played out. So someone has to tell him very clearly that he doesn’t have the luxury of most presidents, which is to use a first year to find your feet on trade. He’s got to be out there and he’s got to provide the leadership. He’s got to bring in the people who waiver and dither, the AFL-CIO, the Democrats who are indebted to the AFL-CIO, and say: “Look, you’re wrong. Here, let’s have a debate.” There are lots of Democratic economists who’d be able to engage these guys in a proper debate.

reason: In recent years, the opposition to free trade hasn’t just come from left-wing unions, but also people on the right who fear that outsourcing will cause the U.S. to lose its economic edge as it imports high-value-added products and exports low-value-added ones. How do you respond to that?

Bhagwati: It’s an irrelevant argument. To say that the United States should be exporting high-value items rather than low-value items is itself a fallacy. But America’s great comparative advantage lies in innovation. For someone like me who has come from India it is very obvious that this country is full of innovators. When I was a student I read about Britain’s Industrial Revolution. And it was powered by all kinds of people, inventing the spinning jenny and so on. They were like little Americans, you know, thinking of new ways of doing things and making a buck. Almost every other American I know is thinking about something, some way to do something. We are a highly inventive people, and technology therefore is our driving force. It’s not savings and investments which are driving our productivity. It’s technology and innovation and immigrants like me—not me in particular—lots of people who come here and by the second generation go through the mill and become Colin Powell or Orlando Patterson at Harvard.

Nobody can compete with us in the long run, in my view, because these are not advantages which people in traditional societies can reproduce. So we’re always going to be doing high value. We’ll lose the high value we generate to others quickly because now technology diffuses very fast. But then we’ll have new ideas, new technologies.

reason: Which side poses the bigger threat to free trade, conservatives on sovereignty, neo-mercantilist grounds, or liberals on equity and environmental grounds?

Bhagwati: In the U.S., I think the Democrats are the biggest threat to free trade. I don’t see the right-wing threat to globalization in terms of sovereignty as being a major one, frankly.

Conservatives are principled people, so they have Edmund Burke type of reservations about continuous change and so on. But they are not people who are going to undermine the rule of law when it comes to trade. Even their arguments against immigration are rule-of-law arguments. Anti-globalization noises saying we’ve lost our sovereignty and so on and so forth, it’s not going to get very far in the U.S. system.

The threat from the left, on the other hand, is much more serious because they oppose free trade on equity grounds. I love America. I have settled in it. But there is a tendency, particularly on the part of the Democrats, to become totally self-righteous on everything and this is the way it has to be and if you disagree, then you’re a Republican. I mean, that’s the way they argue it. It’s unbelievable. They don’t want to argue the merits of the case.

reason: Why do you think Republicans are better on free trade than Democrats?

Bhagwati: Both the last Bush and Ronald Reagan believed in America. They thought that their own people could win. That made them more prone to accept international competition and trade.

They carried that attitude over into politics, of course. For instance, President Reagan won the Cold War by pushing Gorbachev to the limit. But he was lucky. President Bush went into Iraq with the same attitude, and that was unfortunate.

But since they both believed that Americans would win, they were good on international trade, although maybe for the wrong reasons. Democrats don’t believe that America can remain number one, and hence they cannot bring themselves to be completely in favor of open markets.

reason: You are a big believer in multilateral trade agreements over bilateral trade agreements. What’s wrong with bilateral trade agreements?

Bhagwati: Free trade agreements and protectionism are two sides of the same coin. When I have free trade just with you, I’m freeing trade with you but I handicap those who are not members of our free trade area. They have to keep paying the duties to get into our markets. So that becomes a de facto way of increasing protection against outsiders. Multilateral free trade would be a closer thing to pure free trade.

But there are two additional worries about bilateral trade agreements: One, we don’t just have two or three free trade agreements. Today there are close to 500, and every week there’s another new one being constructed. As a result, you’re getting all kinds of special tariffs, rules of origin, and other things multiplying in the system, something which I’ve called the spaghetti bowl. Exporters rightly get upset by the large numbers of tariffs they face depending on where you’re coming from.

Two, how do you enforce these agreements in a globalized world? It’s very chaotic. Parts are coming from everywhere. For a country to have to then decide which product is my partner country’s product rather than an outside country’s product becomes completely arbitrary. A car produced in Canada with Japanese steel and German chemicals, where 80 or 90 percent of the parts may come from elsewhere—is that a Canadian car or is it really something else? Does it qualify for the zero tariff under the North American Free Trade Agreement or not?

reason: Was NAFTA a mistake?

Bhagwati: I think in retrospect, yes. It’s not a slam dunk argument because it did bring in Mexico. Otherwise, they were talking about CAFTA which included just Canada and the U.S. But when you brought in Mexico, it made it a much bigger thing.

President Clinton was carrying on the multilateral negotiations in tandem with NAFTA. But NAFTA created worries on the part of the unions here, because this is a poor country and they were worried that Mexican competition would really hurt their wages. So even though the multilateral talks would’ve gone through without any difficulty, President Clinton ended up having to fight very hard for NAFTA, which survived by a very narrow majority. In order to win NAFTA, he had to give in on things like labor standards and so on. That’s when all these social things became part of trade deals. From there, it never looked back.

So in retrospect, I would say, because of the concessions they had to make, Clinton started us down a road which really has been counterproductive.

There is another thing to worry about. When you look at a trade agreement like NAFTA, it’s about that thick (holds his hands about two feet apart). When I debate people like Lori Wallach of Public Citizen, she arrives with a lot of books, and among them is this NAFTA treaty she carries for effect. I hope she gets a hernia from doing this often enough, because it looks pretty heavy to me. I wouldn’t be carrying it around. Anyway, she shows this book and asks, “Is this free trade?” And mad as she is, she’s right to raise that issue. You should be able to say maybe in 10 pages that in these sectors we are going to liberalize and so on. But nine-tenths of what’s in these agreements are things which have nothing to do with trade. Labor standards, environmental standards, intellectual property rights. If I were Jane Fonda, in order to sell more workout tapes, I could put into the agreement a clause that the president of Mexico has to do his exercise to my tapes. And it would go in, because ours is a lobbying culture and nobody really would know that it’s there. Because who opens these things except the lobbyists?

So many developing countries are now waking up to the fact that they’re being sold a bill of goods in the form of trade agreements.

reason: Do you think a global externality problem like global warming poses a fundamental threat to free trade?

Bhagwati: I think it depends on the way you do it. First, you’ve got to decide whether there is a problem of an externality. I have doubts about these scientists who claim to have a consensus on global warming because, you know, Freeman Dyson, a great scientific figure, says these guys are really low-level scientists and I’m told by many that they, in fact, are. And if they reach a consensus, I don’t care. I mean, that’s the consensus of incompetents.

But so long as only the scientists were talking about global warming, nobody paid the slightest attention. Remember, not a single senator voted for the Kyoto resolution back in the ’90s. Even Al Gore and Clinton had to walk away from Kyoto. But then the polar bears were threatened, the glaciers began to melt, and then that great French film about the penguins which touched all our hearts came out. So these were three whammies. Even if you live in Peoria you will understand, wrongly maybe, that global warming is a problem. I tell all my students: If they think of something like that for free trade, please let me know.

What countries like India and China are saying is that if the CO2 was accumulating and it’s going to create a disaster, then that took a lot of time to establish. So they want the West to bear primary responsibility for the damage it has caused in the past. If America applies some kind of a carbon tax and it says that if India and China don’t impose a similar tax, it’s going to use what is called border tax adjustment, then that is protectionism. And there’s no reason why Indians and Chinese have to accept this. Just as America was not willing to accept it when it didn’t sign onto Kyoto and Europe started threatening a countervailing duty on American exports. But everybody reacted to that talk and said this is a cockeyed thing to do. Peter Mandelson, who was the EU Commissioner, said it was very unwise because the United States will retaliate.

It’s ironic that we are now using exactly that kind of threat on India and China. But America’s fuel tax is so much lower than that of most other countries, except the Middle East. So India and China are going to hit us because we had a low gas tax for a long time. And all hell would break loose. India and China are big guys. They can get legal [World Trade Organization] retaliation against the U.S. Or India could take away contracts from Boeing and give them to Air France. It can have nuclear reactors go to France rather than to G.E. Caterpillar would be shut out.

So I suggest a different way. If in our own U.S. system you’re going to get your companies to clean up under the Superfund Act, that’s a tort principle which we accept. Then we ought to be willing to pay in some form to other poor countries for the past damages. The West has completely ignored this suggestion so far. It has provided maybe a few million dollars in assistance to Third World countries for this purpose. But if the West seriously starts contributing to this fund, Third World countries could get anywhere from $150 million to $1 billion to mitigate global warming.

reason: This is a political non-starter, you know.

Bhagwati: Yes. But the president actually has made some remarks about border tax adjustments not being such a good idea. He’s got to do more than that. He’s got to say this is a crazy thing to do. He’s still very cool—he needs to lose his temper once in a while. Because it’s too important. The U.S. is one of the biggest trading nations in the world. We want the rule of law. We don’t want retaliation, which would be massive. India and China are not Zaire or Zimbabwe. They’re not little countries you can push around. We don’t want to unleash that kind of trade war, because it would be very hard to control, I’m afraid.

My Body, Their Choice

2009-11-18T15:00:00-05:00

"My body, my choice" has long been a rallying cry for abortion-rights advocates on the left, many of whom have recently been vocal supporters of the Democratic health care reform agenda. But as abortion advocates are now discovering, abortion rights aren't as easily compatible with health care reform as they might have once thought. Turns out the more government gets involved in health care, the more difficult it becomes to truly retain choices about one's body.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) first scheduled the vote on health care reform, it remained unclear whether she had enough support to pass the bill. Even amongst Democrats, there were still concerns, arguably the most important of which was whether or not the bill would allow federal money to fund abortions. At the last minute, Pelosi, working with Catholic bishops and pro-life Democrats, allowed a vote on an amendment sponsored by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.).

The text of the three-page amendment was straightforward: "No funds authorized or appropriated by this Act...may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion." The amendment allowed exceptions for medical emergencies that put a woman at risk of death, and maintained that nothing in the amendment's language would prohibit a non-federal entity—whether a person or a state or local government—from purchasing supplemental coverage for abortions, provided that any such purchase isn't made using federal subsidies.

The amendment passed, and may have been the deciding factor in House passage of the bill. But now the amendment is causing trouble for Democrats in the Senate. And indeed, many liberals who support both health care reform and abortion rights now find themselves in a quandary, supporting health care reform while decrying an amendment that was likely the key to its passage.

That's because, given the scope of congressional health care reform proposals, the relatively straightforward prohibition on using federal funds to pay for abortions could have far-reaching consequences.

Most analyses of the amendment agree that the most significant effects will be in the individual insurance market. Under the reform bills now being considered, anyone who did get health insurance through his or her provider would be required to purchase it from an exchange—a government-managed marketplace of highly regulated insurers. The vast majority—an estimated 86 percent—of those who purchase their insurance this way would receive government subsidies, and thus would be barred from spending that money on any plan that covers abortion. These individuals could still purchase a separate abortion rider with their own funds, but the requirement that this be an additional (and unsubsidized) step almost certainly means that fewer individuals will end up with abortion coverage than would have otherwise.

Outside the exchange, there's some debate about whether the amendment would technically bar abortion coverage from some private, employer-provided insurance plans, though it appears less than likely. At The New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen writes that Stupak's amendment "wouldn’t immediately impinge on the roughly 60 million women ages 18-64 who presently get health insurance through their jobs or their spouses’ jobs." And Brian Buetler, a Talking Points Memo reporter who has written about the Stupak amendment, says that "the least-impacted women will be those whose employers (or whose spouses' employers) provide them insurance," but also notes that "over time, the reform packages under consideration allow ever larger employers to participate in the exchange."

Still, although it's not clear what the limits of Stupak's reach might be, some of the stronger warnings about its effects are clearly mistaken. At The American Prospect, for example, Ann Friedman wrote that "Stupak would actually prevent employer-based plans—ones that are not supported by your tax dollars—from covering abortion." But the analysis she links to argues that employer-provided plans could be affected because they are touched by federal funds used to pay for reinsurance and small-business wellness programs—in other words, that they would be barred from offering abortion coverage because they make use of those pesky taxpayer dollars.

For pro-choice, pro-reform liberals, this is exactly the problem: On the one hand, they support a massive expansion of government funding and bureaucratic control into nearly every corner of the health care system. On the other hand, they're incensed that the government would make rules about how that funding can be used.

It's grimly ironic: After spending much of the year ridiculing opponents of health care reform for insisting that reform would put government in between doctors and patients, they're now up in arms that government has gotten involved in decisions they believe should only be made by women and their doctors.

But if the history of bureaucracy teaches us anything, it's that what the government funds is what the government controls. Or, to put it another way: When the government gets involved in making everyone's health care decisions, it may be your body, but it won't be your choice.

Peter Suderman is an associate editor at Reason magazine.

The Palin Experience

2009-11-18T12:00:00-05:00

These days, where you fall on the crucial issue of Sarah Palin tells the rest of us all we need to know about your character. You're either A) a scum-sucking, terror-loving elitist or B) a radical, tea bag-loving simpleton.

Yet believe it or not, one can (as I do) admire Palin's charisma and roots, appreciate her dissent on the policy experiments brainy folks in Washington are cooking up, and, at the same time, believe she has no business running for president in 2012.

In fact, all you haters out there motivate me to root for her.

There's nothing wrong, for instance, with The Associated Press' assigning a crack team of investigative journalists to sift through every word of Palin's book, Going Rogue, for inaccuracies. You only wish similarly methodical muckraking were applied to President Barack Obama's two self-aggrandizing tomes—or even the health care or cap-and-trade bills, for that matter.

The widely read blogger and purveyor of all truth, Andrew Sullivan, was impelled to blog 17 times on the subject of Palin on the same day Americans learned that the Obama administration had awarded $6.7 billion in stimulus money to nonexistent congressional districts—which did not merit a single mention. To see what is in front of one's nose demands a constant struggle, I guess.

And it's not just bloggers. What choice do media outlets have but to provide comprehensive coverage of pistachio salesman and Playgirl-posing Levi Johnston, doltish erstwhile father of Palin's grandchild, a man whose only discernible talents are the possession of operational sperm and the ability to humiliate the former vice presidential nominee?

How could a major magazine such as Newsweek be expected to use a cover photo of Palin campaigning or spending time with her child who has Down syndrome when editors simply could borrow a shot of the 45-year-old mother of five decked out in her exercise tights—nudge nudge, wink wink—from a Runner's World piece and slap the headline "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sarah?" onto it?

Newsweek must have a point. Palin is a populist dead end. "Just over half of Americans," a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds, "have an unfavorable opinion" of Palin overall, "as many say they wouldn't consider supporting her for president and more—six in 10—see her as unqualified for the job."

Similarly, a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll recently found that 48 percent of Americans disapprove of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a woman busy writing policy that affects all of us. Does this not require a "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Nancy?" headline from the venerable magazine?

Who knows what is to become of Palin? Today, though, there is little doubt the left is using her to create ugly stereotypes and attack limited-government types across the country.

Palin claims that a presidential run is not on her "radar screen right now." She may have gone rogue on John McCain—joining the rest of America—but Palin will have to work to articulate her positions, show more intellectual curiosity, and fuse her magnetism with more substantive thinking.

But because of the stupendously nasty campaign waged against her, she might not get the chance.

At least, that's this scum-sucking elitist's opinion.

David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Denver Post and the author of Nanny State. Visit his Web site at www.DavidHarsanyi.com.

Reason.tv: Your Flight Has Been Delayed—And It's Washington's Fault!

2009-11-18T10:00:00-05:00

Menu Mandate’s Missing Math

2009-11-18T07:00:00-05:00

The most conspicuous effect you will see from President Obama’s health care overhaul won’t be at your doctor’s office or the hospital. It will be at your local Burger King.

That’s assuming the Senate goes along with a provision, already approved by the House, that requires restaurant chains with 20 or more locations to display calorie counts on their menus. Although supporters claim such mandates have the power to make people thinner and prevent obesity-related disease, New York City’s experience suggests they have little or no impact, possibly because customers who are interested in nutritional information can already obtain it.

New York began requiring calorie counts on restaurant chains’ menu boards in July 2008. The first study to examine the regulation’s impact, reported in the American Economic Review last May, found that average calorie intake (measured by receipts showing what a sample of customers had bought) remained basically the same at a Manhattan coffee shop and at a Manhattan location of a hamburger chain while falling by 77 calories at a Brooklyn location of the same chain.

Another study of New York’s menu mandate, reported in Health Affairs last month, was even less encouraging. The researchers found that the average calorie count for meals at four fast food restaurants in poor neighborhoods (McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and KFC) rose by 2.5 percent after the rule took effect.

Comparing interview responses to diners’ receipts, the researchers found that what people said did not correspond very well to what they ate. The share of diners who said they noticed calorie counts rose dramatically after the menu mandate kicked in, from less than 20 percent to 54 percent. But less than a quarter of those who reported seeing calorie information said it led them to consume fewer calories, and “even those who indicated that the calorie information influenced their food choices,” the researchers noted, “did not actually purchase fewer calories.”

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene prefers to cite its own, unpublished data, but even these numbers do not live up to the hype that preceded the menu mandate. Surveying 275 locations, the department found statistically significant drops in calorie consumption at just four out of 13 chains (McDonald’s, KFC, Au Bon Pain, and Starbucks).

It appears that all of these decreases were modest. The one highlighted by the health department was a 23-calorie drop at Starbucks, 9 percent of the pre-regulation average.

“We were not expecting to see miracles,” a health department official told The New York Times. But it’s hard to see how such weak results—which may not even represent net reductions, since people could easily make up for fewer calories at Starbucks by eating more elsewhere—can possibly stop 150,000 people from becoming obese and prevent 30,000 cases of diabetes over five years, as the health department predicted last year. Nor are they likely to translate into an average weight loss of three pounds a year, as the California Center for Public Health Advocacy claimed in pushing that state’s menu mandate.

Press coverage of the health department’s study emphasized a seemingly more impressive finding: Diners who said they saw calorie information and used it in deciding what to eat—15 percent of all customers—consumed 106 fewer calories than the other diners. But that difference cannot be attributed to the menu mandate, since diners who use nutritional information are apt to be the ones who were most calorie-conscious to begin with.

Such customers had this information even before New York decreed that it appear on menu boards, since fast food chains were already providing calorie counts on their websites and on posters, tray mats, and flyers in their restaurants. The impact of making the numbers more conspicuous was therefore limited to the customers who were least inclined to use them, and the same will be true if a similar menu mandate is imposed nationwide.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist.

Reason.tv: Mike Flynn on Big Government (The Website!) & The Videos That Cut Down ACORN

2009-11-17T16:30:00-05:00

The Methuselah Manifesto

2009-11-17T15:00:00-05:00

Los Angeles, California—If you’re under age 30, it is likely that you will be able to live as long as you want. That is, barring accidents and wars, you have centuries of healthy life ahead of you. So the participants in the Longevity Summit convened in Manhattan Beach, California, contend. Over the weekend Maximum Life Foundation president David Kekich gathered a group of scientists, entrepreneurs, and visionaries to meet for three days with the goal of developing a scientific and business strategy to make extreme human life extension a real possibility within a couple of decades. Kekich dubbed the effort the Manhattan Beach Project.

Tech entrepreneur and futurist Ray Kurzweil opened the conference with a virtual presentation on exponential technology trends that are bringing the prospect of achieving longevity escape velocity ever closer. “We are very close to the tipping point in human longevity,” asserted Kurzweil to the conferees. “We are about 15 years away from adding more than one year of longevity per year to remaining life expectancy.” This has been labeled by summiteer and life-extension guru Aubrey de Grey as longevity escape velocity. Achieving escape velocity, according to Kekich, would mean that “your projected day of reckoning moves further away from you rather than closing in on you.”

“Health and medicine will be a million times more powerful in 20 years,” Kurzweil declared. He predicted that the complexity of biology will yield to the exponential powers of applied information technology and take off. He cited Moore’s Law which predicts doubling of microchip functionality and halving their costs every two years. The decrease in cost and increase in speed of sequencing whole human genomes is outpacing even Moore’s Law. In 2000, the first genome was sequenced after 14 years and at a cost of $3 billion. Now various startups offer the potential to sequence an individual’s DNA for less than $100 in under an hour.

The goal of the summit was to devise scientific and business strategies with the goal of demonstrating the capability to reverse aging in an older human being by 2029. By then, Kurzweil argued, people will be beginning their intimate merger with information technologies, biotechnologies, and nanotechnologies. Kurzweil, age 61, emphasized, “Something I am personally interested in is not just designer babies, but designer baby boomers.”

Going Back to Move Forward

Anti-aging research is a rich and varied territory right now. Researchers are finally beginning to get a handle on the actual causes of aging. With this increased scientific understanding, some researchers now believe they are on the way to figuring out how to stop it, and—eventually—how to reverse it.

University of California, Riverside biochemist Stephen Spindler reported on his research seeking caloric restriction mimetics. It is well established that restricting many mammal species to about two-thirds of what they would ordinarily eat extends their healthy lifespans. For example, calorie restricted mice live up to 50 percent longer, and experience less heart disease and cancer than those who eat as much as they want. Spindler is now screening a variety of compounds including pharmaceuticals to see if they mimic the effects of calorie restriction in mice. He presented early results that show that some compounds, like cholesterol lowering statin drugs and the immune suppressant rapamycin, do seem to increase mouse lifespans. However, Spindler added that more is not necessarily better. Mice receiving combinations of compounds are not living any longer. “I personally would caution people taking large amounts of supplements in combination to be careful,” said Spindler. The good news is that several major pharmaceutical companies are working on calorie restriction mimetics known as sirtuins.

Michael Rose, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine, has been breeding long-lived fruit flies to one another for decades. Rose’s work is built on the premise that natural selection is the cause of aging. Specifically, natural selection works to keep organisms healthy and alive until after they have reproduced. Once they’ve reproduced, natural selection no longer works to prevent the accumulation of damage that leads to aging and death. Your body is no longer needed by your germ cells once their genes have moved on to the bodies of your children.

Using artificial selection for longevity, Rose has produced fruit flies that live four times longer than normal, the human equivalent of being healthy at age 300. The Methuselah flies are more fecund and better at handling environmental stresses than are normal flies. Since fruit flies and humans share many similar genes, insights garnered from the genomics of long-lived flies are being used by Genescient LLC to develop anti-aging supplements for people. The company plans to release its first product in 2010. “In my world biological immortality is possible,” said Rose.

William Andrews, head of Sierra Sciences (motto “Cure Aging or Die Trying”) talked about his company’s project to identify compounds that lengthen telomeres. Why do that? Telomeres are repeated sequences of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes to keep them from unraveling and to keep them from binding to other chromosomes. At conception, telomeres are about 15,000 repeats long. Each time a cell divides it loses about 100 repeats, growing ever shorter. When the repeats get short enough, cells generally receive a signal that tells them to die. Andrews argues that telomeres control aging in cells and thus control aging in us. A new study this month reports that centenarians have longer telomeres than controls do.

According to Andrews, when an adult’s telomeres get down to about 5,000 repeats they die of old age. By looking at telomere length in a blood sample, Andrews claimed, “I can tell how old you are and how long you have before you die of old age.” (For the curious, Spectracell offers a commercial telomere length test.) The only cells in our bodies that do not suffer telomere shortening are reproductive cells because the enzyme telomerase keeps adding new repeats as they divide. The goal of Sierra Sciences is to develop compounds that will reactivate telomerase in somatic cells to stop telomere shortening. After screening more than 160,000 compounds, Sierra has come up with 33 that activate telomerase and lengthen telomeres. “This would be the biggest thing to hit the planet, if we can turn these into drugs,’ said Andrews. Also represented at the summit was TA Sciences which manufactures a telomerase activator as a supplement called TA 65, which is derived from the astragalus plant. Cost? A mere $8,000 for a six month supply.

Why do some people live to be over 100 years old? That’s the question that Stephen Coles, head of the Supercentenarian Research Foundation (SRF) is trying to answer. Supercentenarians are people who are over 110 years old. In the world there are 76 currently validated supercentenarians, 72 are female and 4 are male. The genetic underpinnings of their longer lives are still murky. However, Coles has performed a number of autopsies and he has found that most died of senile cardiac amyloidosis, the accumulation of amyloid fibers in their heart muscles.

John Furber, founder of Legendary Pharmaceuticals, discussed the problem of accumulating crosslinked proteins and sugars inside and outside of cells, e.g., fibers like those that killed Coles' supercentenarians. The digestive organelles inside cells called lysosomes slowly become clogged with advanced glycation end-products (AGEs). The promise of one product that aimed to break up damaging crosslinks, alagebrium, has faded with the financial prospects of the company that developed it. If old fibroblasts, the cells that produce connective fibers, could be rejuvenated, say by restoring their telomere lengths, then, perhaps drug interventions like alagebrium might not be needed. Interestingly, there is some evidence that periodic fasting upregulates autophagy, the process by which cells digest accumulating cellular and extracellular junk.

Anti-aging research is not for the faint-hearted. Biologist Michael West was one of the founders of the biotech stem cell company Geron. He later founded Advanced Cell Technology which worked on therapeutic cloning. Therapeutic cloning, a.k.a somatic cell nuclear transfer, involves inserting nuclei from specific patients into human eggs to produce stem cells that are immunologically matched to those patients. The goal would be to transform these stem cells into other cells—nerve, muscle, immune system cells—which could be used to repair damaged or old tissues and organs.

That’s the theory, but no one has been able to perfect the practice; no stem cell lines have been derived from cloned human embryos so far. West now heads up BioTime, which is increasingly focused on using induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS cells). IPS cells are created by dosing normal adult cells, say skin cells, taken from a patient with various embryonic factors that cause it to revert to an earlier stage of development. IPS cells can be transformed into other types of cells which can be used to repair damage or rejuvenate tissues and organs. For example, new hemangioblasts, the precursor cells of blood, could be used to reconstitute and rejuvenate the human immune system.

Former biotech company founder Robert Bradbury proposed that the accumulation of misrepaired double strand breaks in the DNA that makes up our genes as a significant cause of aging. If a single strand is broken, the second strand functions as a template for guiding the proper repair of the broken one. Misrepaired genes make distorted proteins which do not work as well or not at all. By age 70, each cell averages several thousand double strand breaks. However, some cells are unscathed by these breaks. Bradbury is developing techniques to identify these “pristine stem cells” which he believes may be used to grow new organs and tissues to replace damaged or old ones. He points out that there are some 2,600 stem cell therapy trials currently underway in the U.S.

Gregory Fahy, the chief scientific officer of 21st Century Medicine is working on the cryopreservation of tissues and organs. Fahy pointed out that about one-third of people die of organ failure, e.g., heart attacks, kidney failure, and the like. The problem is that the ice crystals that form during freezing damage organs a lot. His company has developed a number of low toxicity cryoprotectants which enable the vitrification of organs as they cool. Vitrification prevents the formation of ice crystals and thus limits freeze damage. Vitrified corneal cells transplanted into the eyes of vervet monkeys work. Fahy has successfully transplanted a dog kidney kept at 0 degrees Celsius for four days.

Theoretical biogerontologist, Aubrey de Grey, the founder of the SENS Foundation and the Methuselah Foundation, is the energizer bunny of anti-aging scientific research and advocacy. SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, which De Grey defines as “an integrated set of medical techniques designed to restore youthful molecular and cellular structure to aged tissues and organs.” De Grey focused on one proposed anti-aging solution which is to install mitochondrial genes in the nuclei of cells. One theory of aging is that the cellular powerhouses, the mitochondria, produce highly reactive molecules called free radicals as a side effect of generating energy to run cells. These free radicals over time cause mutations in mitochondrial genes which become ever more damaged, producing even more free radicals in a downward death spiral. If these mitochondrial genes could be moved to the more protected nucleus this free radical death spiral could be greatly attenuated. Engineering this migration from mitochondria to nucleus has been successful for one gene so far.

De Grey also addressed the problem of eliminating the damaging crosslinked proteins and sugars that clog cells and damage the extracellular matrix. The SENS Foundation is funding research to find enzymes in bacteria that degrade these organic complexes with the goal of turning them into drugs.

Beyond Biology

One major barrier to cracking the problem of aging is a shortage of researchers. Computer scientist Peter Voss, the founder of Adaptive Artificial Intelligence, aims to solve that researcher shortage by creating the equivalent of thousands of researchers and research assistants by means of artificial general intelligence. “Imagine hundreds of thousands of Ph.D.-level machines chipping away at the aging problem,” mused Voss. Two years ago at the Singularity Summit, Voss declared, "In my opinion AIs will be developed almost certainly in less than 10 years and quite likely in less than five years." At the Longevity Summit, Voss predicted that his artificially intelligent researchers would be ready in six years.

Biology is nanotechnology that works. Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle, from the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, outlined their vision of how a robust medical non-biological nanotechnology would work in 20 years or so. Freitas won the 2009 Feynman Prize for Theory, in recognition of his pioneering work in molecular mechanosynthesis. Nanotechnology aims to control matter at the atomic and molecular scale. “The difference between good and bad health is how your atoms are arranged,” pronounced Merkle. The goal of medical nanotechnology is to unleash exceedingly tiny machines to patrol throughout the body and its cells repairing damage as it occurs. They envision respirocytes to carry oxygen more efficiently than red blood cells; microbivores to attack and digest pathogens; and even chromallocytes to repair and replace damaged chromosomes.

In his presentation Kurzweil envisioned constant nanotech monitoring of individual brain cells. Such nanotech devices would “ultimately capture our mind files and back them up,” suggested Kurzweil. “A thousand years from now, people will think it pretty daunting the people today went through life without backing up their mind files every day.”

But what if you don’t live long enough to take advantage of the new longevity treatments coming along in a couple of decades? For example, this life expectancy calculator suggests that there is a 50 percent chance that I will live only another 33 years. Kekich, who convened the summit, urged participants to take good care of their health—diet, exercise, supplements, stress management—because they are not gambling on just 15 years more of life, but perhaps 1,500 years of life.

But what if the grim reaper comes despite your best efforts to stave him off? Ralph Merkle, in his role as a board member of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, explained the goal of cryonics. Cryonics involves storing human bodies or brains at the temperature of liquid nitrogen (320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit). Alcor defines cryonics as “a speculative life support technology that seeks to preserve human life in a state that will be viable and treatable by future medicine.” Or as Merkle put it, “We want a second opinion from a future physician.” The idea is that if brain structure is preserved, nanomedical devices would be able to restore a person to life sometime in the future. Merkle acknowledges that cryonics is highly experimental (to say the least), but we do also know what happens to the control group. Merkle ended with his standard quip, “So you have to decide if you want to be in the experimental group or the control group.”

Immortality, Inc.

Some the brainstormers in the business strategy session of the Manhattan Beach Project were new media entrepreneur and Disney executive Oliver Luckett, 2008 Libertarian Party VP candidate Wayne Allyn Root, computer and biotech entrepreneur Richard Offerdahl, marketing expert John Lustyan, social media marketer Michael Terpin, Lifestar Institute COO Kevin Perrott, CEO of TA Sciences Noel Patton, filmmaker Michael Potter, marketer Joe Sugarman, computer entrepreneur Ken Weiss, and Bill Faloon, co-founder of the Life Extension Foundation.

Hanging over the entire event was a single question: Why are so many people unaware of the tantalizing possibility of soon achieving extreme human life extension? And why do so many reject it when they hear about it? Luckett put his finger exactly on the chief problem. Aspiring to live for hundreds of years sounds creepy to most people. And the longevity “space” is filled nearly to the brim with scammers and charlatans, peddling all manner of 21st century snake oils.

To illustrate the creep-out factor, Luckett told the story of offering the trailer to the documentary about Ray Kurzweil, Transcendent Man, to run on his father’s campaign website (his father is running for governor of Mississippi). The campaign handlers took one look at it and said, “Keep that trailer as far away as possible. We can’t have a trailer talking about transcending religion being shown at the local Baptist church.”

As someone who has leveraged social media into several businesses, Luckett urged summiteers to focus their efforts on spreading their message using those new communications technologies. People trust new ideas that come from their friends. Of course, social media “friends” now include stars and athletes. Being in Tinsel Town, the assembled marketers spent some time brainstorming about which film or TV stars might take up the cause of promoting longevity research. Apparently, Suzanne Summers is an enthusiast, but I sure hope that the summiteers can find some other celebrities.

The summiteers also puzzled over the frustrating fact that no billionaire evidently wants to live forever. Why else have none come forward to finance serious life extension research? Entrepreneur Offerdahl explained that rich people fear the ridicule of their friends. Longevity quackery is rife and rich folks don’t want to suffer embarrassment in front their friends who would accuse them of being dupes. Like all non-profit efforts, the summiteers longed to find one billionaire who would risk ridicule to support serious life extension research.

How much cash is needed to get a good start on the goal of stopping aging by 2024 and demonstrating that it can be reversed by 2029? Kekich crunched numbers to come with a figure of a mere $63 million to jump start a future of perpetual youth. Of course some avenues are already being explored by well-funded biotech and pharmaceutical companies, e.g. calorie restriction mimetics like sirtuins. After batting around a few ideas, the group finally focused on a proposal by Bill Faloon to create a public life extension research company. The goal of the corporation would be raise money to invest specifically in companies that research technologies aiming to stop and reverse aging, not just treat diseases. The Manhattan Beach Project participants would seek to raise an initial $5 million before bringing the company to the public. Faloon and another participant committed a million dollars to the project. One idea was to call it MaxLife Capital, but my favorite proposed corporate moniker was Immortality, Inc.

At the end of the summit, David Kekich’s poignant question still resonates: “Will you be part of the last generation to die from aging, or will you be part the first generation to enjoy open-ended youth and vitality?”

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is available from Prometheus Books.

Where’s That Inflation?

2009-11-17T12:00:00-05:00

From September 2008 to September 2009, the Federal Reserve pumped an unprecedented $2 trillion into the financial system by buying Treasury bonds and assets from banks. According to most mainstream economists, such action should create a general increase in prices.

Inflation is the result of more dollars chasing the same number of (or fewer) goods. As the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman put it, in one of his main contributions to “monetarist” economics, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon—that is, it’s caused by an expansion in the supply of money or credit. So why haven’t we seen inflation in 2009? Are we looking in the wrong places, or is it time to update monetarist theory?

The monetary base, which consists of currency in circulation plus bank reserves on deposit with the Federal Reserve, has exploded, as Figure 1 shows. Figure 2, by contrast, shows inflation as gauged by the consumer price index (CPI)—the cost of goods purchased by the average U.S. household—and by a measure called the median CPI. Standard CPI is the traditional measure for inflation, but a few extreme outliers (such as the price of fuel) can throw off the average; thus the median is a more robust statistic to estimate the central tendency in the data.

So while the standard CPI shows deflation over the past year, that stems from a few anomalous sectors, such as energy, where prices have dipped significantly since 2008. The median CPI, on the other hand, shows an inflation rate that does not look very unusual.

The standard explanation for the lack of inflation is that banks are sitting on all that new cash. As soon as the economy shows signs of recovery, goes the theory, banks will make more loans, and the broader monetary aggregates will shoot up rapidly. But that expectation ignores an important factor: Beginning in October 2008, for the first time in history, the Federal Reserve started paying interest on reserves held by banks. So even when the economy starts heating up, banks will have an incentive to hold money rather than lend it.

What’s more, should inflation rear its head anytime soon, the Fed could suck the newly created money out of the banking system by selling assets, such as some of the higher-quality mortgage-backed securities it bought from banks at the depth of the financial crisis. That would decrease the amount of money in the system and choke back inflation.

On top of that, the Georgetown University economist Donald Marron has argued, if investors really thought we were on the verge of inflation, we would see the 10-year Treasury or 30-year mortgage rates go through the roof. But that hasn’t happened.

Marron’s view reflects what might be called the monetarist consensus. It is embraced by economists across the political spectrum, including Obama’s economic adviser Larry Summers and the current and former Fed chairmen. It is a position that relies on the wisdom of politically independent (and hopefully monetarist) central bankers to manage both the economy and the threat of inflation.

Besides placing undue faith in the Fed’s ability to time perfectly any necessary anti-inflationary measures, the consensus suggests that the nation’s central bank now has the heretofore undiscovered ability to increase the money supply without creating inflation. If true, this would be an important new development, since inflation has long been rightly vilified for destroying entrepreneurship and long-term economic growth. But if false, this conceit could prove dangerous indeed. And it’s probably false.

On his blog Free Advice in September, the Pacific Research Institute economist Robert Murphy argued that inflation is already here but economists are missing the signs. “From [December 2008] until August 2009, the unadjusted CPI level has increased 2.7%, which translates to an annualized increase of just over 4%,” Murphy wrote. He acknowledged that “ten-year yields [on Treasury bonds] are…low” but added that the price of gold has increased enormously. “Why do we assume that TIPS [Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities] traders are genius forecasters, but gold traders are morons?” he asked.

In an email message, Murphy adds: “I believe we are currently witnessing a bubble in Treasury debt. I consider the current yields on 10-year U.S. government bonds to be absurdly low, just like the price of housing was absurdly high in early 2006. After this bubble bursts, investors will slap themselves on the forehead and say, ‘What were we thinking? Why did we rush into Treasurys even as the government told us it was planning to double the federal debt burden in a decade?’ ”

The St. Lawrence University economist Steven Horwitz agrees both that inflation is already happening and that it is widely misunderstood. Monetarists, he says, were “too focused on aggregates like ‘the’ price level, which led economists to ignore the way inflation could distort individual prices at the microeconomic level, causing resource misallocation in the process.” Virtually all economists now agree, for example, that the Fed’s low interest rates inflated housing prices earlier in the decade. Yet as the prices of houses went up, few economists worried about inflation because the CPI looked relatively stable, due in part to a decrease in energy prices. When housing started to crash in 2007, many economists thought the Fed should inject still more funds into the system to stave off further declines. They failed to see that the Fed had distorted relative prices in the first place.

As the George Mason University economist Peter Boettke explains, “A problem with the current monetarists is that while they learned from Friedman the idea that we should fight inflation, in practice they learned from his writings on the Great Depression that central banks should fear deflation.” As a result, economists who are theoretically inflation-hating Friedmanites now want to meet every downturn by fighting deflation.

Because of this tendency, bursting government-created bubbles leads to the creation of new ones. The real lesson may be that inflation is not only a monetary phenomenon but also a political one. Which makes it that much more difficult to predict, much less control.

Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy (vderugy@gmu.edu) is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Bernanke’s Philosopher

2009-11-17T07:00:00-05:00

When Ben Bernanke took charge of the Federal Reserve in 2006, the media made a few passing references that suggested he secretly subscribed to libertarianism. “I worked with him for years before I even knew he was a libertarian-leaning Republican,” the former Fed vice chairman Alan Blinder told CNN. The Wall Street Journal reported that Bernanke, “though a libertarian Republican …displays few partisan leanings.”

Last summer President Barack Obama re-nominated Bernanke to another four-year term atop the central bank, a reward for allegedly saving the world from a second Great Depression. Bernanke will arrive at his Senate confirmation hearings this January with an unbeatable recommendation. “As an expert on the causes of the Great Depression,” Obama raved in August, “I’m sure Ben never imagined that he would be part of a team responsible for preventing another. But because of his background, his temperament, his courage and his creativity, that’s exactly what he has helped to achieve.”

“Mission Accomplished,” the banner might have read.

Missing from Obama’s speech was any mention of Bernanke’s economic philosophy. These days, the media have taken to calling him a Keynesian—a believer in fiscal stimulus and the mixed economy. “We are all Keynesians again,” the liberal Washington Monthly headlined a January 2009 feature on the Fed chief.

In reality, Bernanke is following a monetarist depression-prevention model laid out by Nobel laureate and libertarian patron saint Milton Friedman. The Fed chairman has invoked the late economist in support of lowering interest rates to zero and bailing out banks. Trillions of dollars have been staked on the insights of “monetarism,” the economic theory of central banking and inflation-management associated with Friedman and Anna Schwartz. Though Schwartz now distances herself from Bernanke, opposing his reappointment on the grounds that he’s gone too far, the irony remains that a series of Fed policies many libertarians find repugnant are being championed by a man claiming to take his chief inspiration from the most influential libertarian economist of the 20th century.

A Monetary History of Ben Bernanke

The story begins in 1963, when Friedman and co-author Anna Schwartz published A Monetary History of the United States, an opening salvo in what Friedman called a “counterrevolution” against Keynesian theory. Their chapter on the Great Depression was spun off into a stand-alone book, The Great Contraction: 1929–1933, an epic revisionist history that changed America’s understanding of the causes of the Depression. Friedman and Schwartz contended that the Federal Reserve—not capitalism or Wall Street—was to blame for the dismal ’30s.

“The fact of the matter is that it was the [Fed’s] decision to tighten credit policy in 1928 that produced the Great Contraction,” the 93-year-old Schwartz says by phone from her office at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City. The Fed hiked interest rates in 1928 to curb what it saw as rampant speculation on Wall Street—a conflagration of leverage, margin buying, and outright Ponzi scheming fueled in the first instance by cheap credit from the Federal Reserve. (Goldman Sachs’ various pyramid schemes from that era, after they collapsed in 1929, generated losses of $475 billion in today’s dollars.)

Friedman and Schwartz rejected the widely held theory that speculation had been a major problem, or that there had even been a credit bubble in the 1920s. Bad loans and reckless banking practices were a “minor factor,” at most, in the Great Depression, they said. In this narrative, a Federal Reserve paranoid about speculation had needlessly constricted the money supply, imploding an otherwise sound economy.

After the Great Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve drastically cut interest rates from a brief high of 6 percent to 1.5 percent by mid-1931. But during the first few years of the crisis, the Fed occasionally felt forced to abruptly raise rates again in complicated maneuvers to stem outflows of gold into Europe. Friedman and Schwartz blamed these sporadic interest rate hikes for smothering incipient recoveries, opening a vortex of deflation, and transforming a recession into the Great Depression.

“What the Fed had to do was increase the money supply,” Schwartz tells me. “By taking that action, it would have revived the economy. That’s the lesson of the Great Depression.” In The Great Contraction, she and Friedman argued that the Fed squandered its ample latitude to combat deflation. “The monetary authorities,” they wrote, “could have prevented the decline in the stock of money—indeed, could have produced almost any desired increase in the money stock.”

When it comes to his academic specialty, Bernanke is a disciple of Friedman and Schwartz. In 2002, at Friedman’s 90th birthday party at the University of Chicago, Bernanke was effusive. “Among economic scholars,” he began, “Friedman has no peers.” He developed the “leading and most persuasive” explanation of the Depression, whose impact on economics and the popular mind “cannot be overstated.”

At the end of his encomium, Bernanke made a soon-to-be-famous apology on behalf of the Federal Reserve, where he was then president of the powerful New York branch: “I would like to say to Milton and Anna…regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.” (The speech was published as the afterword to the latest edition of The Great Contraction.)

Schwartz was present at the birthday party. “I’m sure he was sincere when he said that,” she says. And Bernanke stayed true to his word. In 2006 he replaced Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan, a self-described “libertarian Republican” who had once been part of Ayn Rand’s inner circle, had engineered an era of low-inflation growth that won Friedman’s endorsement. “There is no other period of comparable length in which the Federal Reserve System has performed so well,” Friedman declared in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2006.

Monetarism and Freedom

When the economy collapsed two years into Bernanke’s watch because of a massive credit bubble, he slashed interest rates to zero and ordered the money-printing presses to full steam. He also embarked on a course of “quantitative easing,” where a central bank convolutedly buys its own government’s bonds with printed money so as to sink interest rates even further.

This approach was not new. Friedman had prescribed quantitative easing, combined with “easy money” and inflation, as a cure for Japan’s 1990s economic slump, which he described as an “eerie, if less dramatic, replay of the Great Contraction.” As he did with the Depression-era Fed, Friedman emphasized that “there is no limit to the extent to which the Bank of Japan can increase the money supply if it wishes to do so.” In 1998, a year after Friedman penned his advice in The Wall Street Journal, Japan introduced monetary stimulus: a cocktail of zero interest rates and quantitative easing. But deflation continued. Today Japan’s exports are down an unthinkable 36 percent from just last year, and prices are plummeting at an all-time record pace.

Stateside, in the shadow of the Fed’s multi-trillion-dollar balance sheet, it has been all too easy to categorize Bernanke simply as a Keynesian supporter of public works projects, socialistic safety nets, and profligate, government-led consumption. While it’s true that the Obama ad-ministration is pursuing Keynesian fiscal stimulus, the Federal Reserve under Bernanke has consciously acted on the Friedman/Schwartz insight that loosening central bank credit is a fundamental tool in forestalling deflation and depression. Understanding that monetarism can mean both the management of low inflation in good times, and the creation of inflation in bad times, has proven too difficult for most of the media.

The New York Times, for instance, has identified Bernanke as “a student if not necessarily a devotee of the British economist John Maynard Keynes.” Actually, Bernanke spent most of his academic career elaborating on Friedman’s Keynes-refuting interpretation of the Great Depression. Athough his research sometimes strayed into nonmonetary subjects, it was always, as he said at Friedman’s birthday party, “an embellishment of the Friedman-Schwartz story…and in no way contradict[ed] the basic logic of their analysis.” In 2003, at a conference honoring Friedman’s Free to Choose, Bernanke said, “Friedman’s monetary framework has been so influential that, in its broad outlines at least, it has nearly become identical with modern monetary theory and practice.” So great was Friedman’s influence that Bernanke compared it with Shakespeare’s contributions to English literature.

Even Bernanke’s nickname “Helicopter Ben” derives directly from Milton Friedman. It came about during a 2002 speech entitled “Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here,” in which he quoted Friedman on the importance of conjoining fiscal and monetary policies. The ideal fiscal stimulus, Bernanke said, was a shower of tax cuts “equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous ‘helicopter drop’ of money.” Friedman had originally used the phrase to counter Keynes’ idea of the “liquidity trap,” in which setting interest rates at zero leads to bank hoarding and leaves the Federal Reserve no room to maneuver. Friedman suggested that countries could escape the liquidity trap by handing out money to consumers, and he explained his argument in a tale about a helicopter unloading cash on a town. Likewise, Bernanke’s Federal Reserve has created special “vehicles” to disburse consumer credit from on high.

In February, Bloomberg News added to the philosophical confusion by reporting that “Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is siding with John Maynard Keynes against Milton Friedman by flooding the financial system with money.” Of course, Bernanke has said precisely the opposite. He’s flooding the financial system with money during a deflationary crisis, he says, because that’s what Friedman would have him do.

On February 10, Bernanke further underscored his allegiance to Friedman in an overlooked Capitol Hill question-and-answer session with Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). Their exchange is worth quoting at length.

“Chairman,” Paul began, “you have written a lot about the Depression. There was a famous quote you made once to Milton Friedman, apologizing for the Federal Reserve bringing on the Depression. But you assured him it wouldn’t happen again.…But the key to this discussion has to be: Was it too much credit in the ’20s that created the conditions that demanded a recession/depression, or was it lack of credit in the Depression that caused the prolongation?…Here we’re working frantically to keep prices up. What’s wrong with allowing the market to dictate this…and prices to go down quickly so we can all go back to work again?”

In response, Bernanke repeated the lesson of The Great Contraction: “Milton Friedman’s view was that the cause of the Great Depression was the failure of the Federal Reserve to avoid excessively tight monetary policy in the early ’30s. That was Friedman and Schwartz’s famous book. With that lesson in mind, the Federal Reserve has reacted very aggressively to cut interest rates in this current crisis. Moreover, we’ve tried to avoid the collapse of the banking system.”

For her part, Schwartz is critical of Bernanke’s application of her and Friedman’s theories. “You don’t have to lower the interest rates to the extent that he has in order to increase the money supply,” she says. “The essential action should be increasing the money supply. That’s the lesson of the Great Depression.” She adds, “There’s nothing contradictory in The Great Contraction with reference to what the Fed should be doing currently.”

Schwartz is alarmed by the enthusiasm with which Bernanke has put “monetary expansion” into practice. She berates the Fed for going too far and predicts that it will have to raise interest rates “in the near future” to arrest inflation. Asked if she sees hyperinflation on the horizon, she exclaims, “Oh, yes!”

In a New York Times op-ed last July, Schwartz criticized Bernanke as a “man without a plan,” warning that his “easy monetary policy is a sin.” She concluded, “He does not deserve reappointment.”

Schwartz also seems to have undergone a late-life conversion to at least some part of Keynesian theory. Asked for her current solution to the crisis, she repeats the ultimate Keynesian maxim: The government should pick up slackening demand in the private sector.

“People are saving, not spending. In order to revive this economy,” she says, hesitating before continuing, “the government will have to resume spending. By spending, the government will require that the current inventory will be depleted and have to be replenished. And that will bring on additional production and jobs.”

Bernanke’s Money Mischief

Ron Paul, like Schwartz and Friedman, is a libertarian, but he embraces the “Austrian” school of economic theory that rejects the very concept of the Federal Reserve. He is critical of what he sees as the Fed’s ongoing monetarism. “In essence,” Paul says in a phone interview, “Bernanke is following Friedman’s advice. He’s a Friedmanite when it comes to massively inflating. Bernanke was able to justify [his policies] by using Friedman.”

Does Friedman’s enthusiasm for inflating the monetary supply in crises flout libertarianism? “Absolutely,” Paul answers. “The monetarists said that you could overcome a natural market correction of a collapsing system by inflation—print money faster! Which contradicts Friedman’s whole thesis. He wanted a steady, managed increase in the supply of money of about 3 percent.” Here Paul is alluding to Money Mischief, Friedman’s 1991 book in which he called on the Fed to grow the money supply at 3 percent annually, presumably forever. “Yet at the same time, Friedman said the Depression could have been prevented by massively inflating.” Paul has kind words for Friedman, whom he praises as a staunch defender of economic liberty, but his final summation is damning: “Friedman’s very, very libertarian—except on monetary issues.”

With Bernanke at the helm, the Federal Reserve has unleashed monetary expansion, the very definition of inflation—and Friedman’s blueprint for averting economic depression. According to Bernanke, Obama, and scores of economists, it’s working. “Prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good,” Bernanke predicted in August.

But with lenders foreclosing on 358,000 homes that month, the commercial real estate market only beginning to collapse, a 20 percent annual fall in railroad freight, and unemployment projected to crack double digits any minute now, the much-vaunted recovery is no given. And if it isn’t working, we might still relapse into recession, or worse.

The total cost of the Fed’s monetarist-inspired program is mysterious. Paul, whose bill to audit the Fed is now co-sponsored by more than half of the House of Representatives, declares: “We don’t know for sure how much the Fed has spent—I’ve heard it could be $6 trillion. But we have no knowledge of what the Fed’s doing. All these dealings are very secret.” A Reuters estimate in late September pegged the Fed’s balance sheet around $2.1 trillion, with $111 billion doled out to banks every day through the Fed’s overnight discount window. Bloomberg News has sued the Federal Reserve for full disclosure, and we may soon find out the exact number. Manhattan Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska has ordered the Federal Reserve to open its books, though the bank has filed an appeal.

Friedman and Schwartz, those champions of low inflation, have helped inspire the greatest monetary expansion in Federal Reserve history, a program of limitless market interventions and tireless money printing whose end game is likely to be a return to the bad old days of inflation that they fought for so long. For two libertarian champions of free markets and limited government, this unintended legacy has the ring of a world-historic irony.

Penn Bullock (penneth@gmail.com) is a freelance writer for Village Voice Media. He lives in Florida.

The Rise of Communist Nostalgia

2009-11-16T19:00:00-05:00

The fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago was one of the most exhilarating events of the 20th Century. No one could fail to be moved by the joy of people who tore down a loathed monument to tyranny. Today, when all that remains of the Wall is a few sections preserved as historical artifacts and graffiti-stained chunks sold in souvenir shops, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe remains a glorious moment but also, in some ways, a bittersweet one.

There are widespread reports that for many eastern Germans, liberation has turned to disillusionment. The British daily, The Guardian, marked the anniversary with an article by an ex-East German academic lamenting the demise of the communist state—which, she asserted, offered "social and gender equality, full employment and lack of existential fears."

But are these lamentations for a lost workers' paradise anything more than the griping of hardcore ideologues or members of the old communist elites who resent the loss of their own privilege? In a recent Pew Research Center poll, only 16 percent of people living in former East Germany took a negative attitude toward German unification; a positive view was taken by 81 percent, though it should be noted that only 31 percent chose the "very positive" option. Moreover, nearly two-thirds—63 percent—say that unification has made their lives better. That's hardly evidence of communist nostalgia.

Yet other findings show a more nuanced picture. In a poll last July, only eight percent of eastern Germans said that the "German Democratic Republic" (as East Germany was officially known) had mostly "good sides" and a better life than today's unified Germany. However, an additional 49 percent agreed that "the GDR had more good sides than bad sides; there were some problems, but life was good there."

According to an analysis in the German magazine Spiegel, what drives this rose-colored view—shared by many young people who barely remember life under communism—is a peculiar sense of pride and humiliation. Many eastern Germans see communist East Germany, for better or worse, as their home or their parents' home, and its history as their legacy. While critical of the communist state's suppression of freedom, they chafe at the idea that it was an illegitimate regime and that the West was their savior. It's the same syndrome that causes many Russians today to whitewash the Soviet past.

There is similar ambivalence in other Eastern-bloc countries included in the Pew poll. Support for the change from state socialism to a market economy hovers barely above 50 percent not only in Russia but in Hungary, Bulgaria and Lithuania, and stands at just 36 percent in Ukraine; in all these countries, pro-capitalist attitudes have declined sharply since 1991. (The highest rates of approval for the transition to capitalism are found in Eastern Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland, at 82 percent, 79 percent and 71 percent respectively.)

Most startling, attitudes toward the adoption of a multiparty system follows a similar pattern: multiparty democracy is now favored by just 55 percent of Hungarian and Lithuanian respondents and an abysmal 30 percent of Ukrainians.

This is not, as some on the left think, an indictment of capitalist democracy and a vindication of socialism. It is noteworthy that support for markets and democracy is strongest in countries that have made the greatest strides toward the market economy. Partly, as well, the problem is generational, with older people most likely to favor the old order. Nonetheless, far too many countries on the road to freedom have found themselves mired in corruption, mismanagement, graft and political turmoil.

Twenty years ago, the revolt against communism was about as black-and-white an issue as it gets: the human desire for freedom, opportunity, and a good life pitted against a tyranny that erected a wall in the middle of a city to keep people from escaping, and killed those who tried anyway. (Whether a regime makes prisoners of its own citizens is a good litmus test of whether it deserves to exist.) Today, the liberated countries face hard questions of how to build a good society, and shades of gray abound. Meanwhile, the main adversary of Western democracy is no longer communism but radical Islamist terrorism. It is, in some ways, a far more complex conflict that involves an amorphous, diffuse and unpredictable enemy, as well as questions of religious and cultural identity and debates about drawing the line between legitimate religion and religion-based totalitarian ideology. In some ways, the Cold War seems simple by comparison.

Communist nostalgia is overrated. But, recalling the fall of the Berlin Wall, one does feel nostalgia for a time when one could celebrate an uncomplicated victory of good over evil.

Cathy Young writes a weekly column for RealClearPolitics and is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. She blogs at http://cathyyoung.wordpress.com/. This article originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.

Kiss Your Freedoms Goodbye If Health Care Passes

2009-11-16T18:00:00-05:00

Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights. If this health care bill becomes law, America, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, and privacy as you have enjoyed it will cease to be.

Last week the House of Representatives voted on a 2,000 page bill to give the federal government the power to micromanage the health care of every single American. The bill will raise your taxes, steal your freedom, invade your privacy, and ration your health care. Even the Republicans have introduced their version of Obamacare Lite. It, too, if passed, will compel employers to provide coverage, bribe the states to change their court rules, and tell insurance companies whom to insure.

We do not have two political parties in this country, America. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms.

Think about it. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is your power and ability to follow your own free will and your own conscience. The government wants you to follow the will of some faceless bureaucrat.

When I recently asked Congressman James Clyburn, the third ranking Democrat in the House, to tell me "Where in the Constitution the federal government is authorized to regulate everyone's healthcare," he replied that most of what Congress does is not authorized by the Constitution, but they do it anyway. There you have it. Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights, it doesn't care about the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, it doesn't even read the laws it writes.

America, this is not an academic issue. If this health care bill becomes law, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, privacy as you have enjoyed it, will cease to be.

When Congress takes away our freedoms, they will be gone forever. What will you do to prevent this from happening?

We Can't Sit Back and Allow the Loss of Our Freedoms

We elect the government. It works for us. As we watch the Democrats' plans for health care take shape, we can only ask how did our government get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives?

On Saturday November 7, at 11 o’clock in the evening, the House of Representatives voted by a five vote margin to have the federal government manage the health care of every American at a cost of $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years.

For the first time in American history, if this bill becomes law, the Feds will force you to buy insurance you might not want, or may not need, or cannot afford. If you don’t purchase what the government tells you to buy, if you don’t do so when they tell you to do it, and if you don’t buy just what they say is right for you, the government may fine you, prosecute you, and even put you in jail. Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost. The privacy of your communications and medical decision making with your physician will be gone. More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal of federal bureaucrats.

It was not supposed to be this way. We elect the government. It works for us. How did it get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives? Evil rarely comes upon us all at once, and liberty is rarely lost in one stroke. It happens gradually, over the years and decades and even centuries. A little stretch here, a cave in there, powers are slowly taken from the states and the people and before you know it, we have one big monster government that recognizes no restraint on its ability to tell us how to live. It claims the power to regulate any activity, tax any behavior, and demand conformity to any standard it chooses.

The Founders did not give us a government like the one we have today. The government they gave us was strictly limited in its scope, guaranteed individual liberty, preserved the free market, and on matters that pertain to our private behavior was supposed to leave us alone.

In the Constitution, the Founders built in checks and balances. If the Congress got out of hand, the states would restrain it. If the states stole liberty or property, the Congress would cure it. If the president tried to become a king, the courts would prevent it.

In the next few weeks, I will be giving a public class on Constitutional Law here on the Fox News Channel, on the Fox Business Network, on Foxnews.com, and on Fox Nation. In anticipation of that, many of you have asked: What can we do now about the loss of freedom? For starters, we can vote the bums out of their cushy federal offices! We can persuade our state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care—where the Constitution gives the Feds zero authority. We can petition our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, return the selection of U.S. senators to state legislatures, and nullify all the laws the Congress has written that are not based in the Constitution.

One thing we can’t do is just sit back and take it.

Judge Andrew Napolitano is Fox News' senior judicial analyst. This article originally appeared in two parts on FoxNews.com.

Are Tea Parties Racist?

2009-11-16T16:30:00-05:00

In retrospect, I suppose I should be surprised it took as long as eight months for someone to accuse me of racism in my criticism of Barack Obama. After all, by September 11, when Salon Editor in Chief Joan Walsh wrote that my “strange slur” against the president was a textbook example of “the racial nuttiness that Obama faces,” just about every person loudly opposing the administration’s economic policies had already been tarred with the same brush.

It started in early August, as members of Congress began facing their unusually restive constituents in a series of town hall meetings. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, citing not one shred of contemporary sociological evidence, asserted that “the driving force behind the town hall mobs” is “cultural and racial anxiety” on the part of the “angry white voter.” Within a month, that bit of omniscient whitey baiting was perilously close to conventional wisdom.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne warned that the town hall protests exemplified “the politics of the jackboot,” comparing them directly to “lynching” and concluding that “it is profoundly troubling that firearms should begin to appear with some frequency at a president’s public events only now, when the president is black.” (There have been exactly two Obama appearances at which protesters outside the venue openly carried handguns. In both cases the acts were legal, and in one of them the gun-toting protesters included a black man.)

After Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouted “You lie!” during Obama’s September 9 address to Congress, Krugman’s page mate Maureen Dowd wrote, “Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.” She added, “Fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!”

Generally speaking, when key evidence is “unspoken,” and in fact imagined by the prosecution, it’s a good bet that the overall case is weak. The same goes for relying on explanatory sociology dating from the early 1960s. During the summer, racism baiters such as New York Times columnist Frank Rich (“the atmosphere keeps getting darker”), Newsweek’s Susan Jacoby (“This toxic brew of racism and class resentment is rooted in anti-rationalism”), and Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez (“the first black president, as well as the deep economic recession, have challenged Americans’ sense of self”) cited the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (which is not primarily about race). “The biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism,” Rich wrote in a typical passage, “remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change.”

Hofstadter’s essay was published in November 1964. At the time, it was still illegal for blacks to marry whites in 19 states. Black professional football players were still denied service in posh New Orleans hotels and restaurants. Discriminatory poll taxes and ballot box literacy tests were still widespread. In short, race relations have changed quite a bit since then, as illustrated by the fact that we now have a black president.

But in a genuinely curious turn of events, Obama’s race—after failing to provoke any significant appeals to white fear or resentment during the long 2008 campaign—has now become a central factor in the eyes of people frustrated by the volume and effectiveness of the opposition. So Salon’s Walsh, after having previously complained about “GOP zealots” who were blocking health care reform, read between the lines of an online column I wrote about the president’s September 9 speech and declared that it would “go down in history as one of the dumbest white-boy outbursts in the history of covering Obama.”

My racist slip? In a throwaway line and hyperlink, I had compared Obama’s warning to those spreading lies about his health care plan—“We will call you out”—to the chorus of a new Snoop Dogg song I’d been listening to in heavy rotation: “We will shut you down.” Where my mind registered the similarity of two five-syllable phrases containing three of the same words, Walsh’s projection of my mind saw “totally gratuitous racial imagery” and the implication that Obama emulates gangsta rappers.

Contra Walsh, history basically ignored my “outburst,” but a fat new target marched into view the very next day, when roughly 100,000 protesters descended on the National Mall to demonstrate against Obama’s economic policies. “It was a Klan rally minus the bedsheets and torches,” William Rivers Pitt, a former spokesman for Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), wrote at Truthout.org. “It’s obvious to anyone who has eyes in this country,” comedian/political activist Janeane Garofalo said on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, “that teabaggers, the 9/12ers, these separatist groups that pretend it’s about policy, they are clearly white identity movements; they are clearly white-power movements.” And in the biggest endorsement of the “racial anxiety” hypothesis yet, former President Jimmy Carter fired this warning shot across America’s bow: “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American,” Carter told NBC Nightly News three days after the protest.

So were these nightmarish descriptions of the 9/12 protest accurate? Was the “overwhelming portion” of demonstrators motivated by racism? Unlike any of the critics mentioned above, I actually attended the rally. And despite looking specifically for white-boy outbursts during four hours and across dozens of conversations, I didn’t see any.

This is not to say they weren’t there. Thanks to the magic of ubiquitous digital cameras, motivated partisans, and the Internet, I was able to ascertain after the fact that there was a poster featuring Obama with a bone through his nose, another showing the president in Robin Hood get-up with the charming headline “Robbin’ for the Hood,” and a scattering of Confederate flags.

But if there was anything “overwhelming” about the protest it was the percentage—which I would place well above 90—of signage and conversation specifically referring to government spending, economic policy, and creeping federal interference into various areas of life. I saw nothing about affirmative action, nothing about welfare, nothing about illegal immigration, almost nothing about hot-button social conservative issues, and very little on foreign policy. If race played a central role, 100,000 people did a good job of hiding it.

Yes, there were many, many placards hyperbolically comparing Obama’s policies with those of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, proving once again that Americans of all stripes continue to despise the two worst totalitarian (and murderously racist) systems yet attempted. And the protest’s single biggest celebrity endorser (see Greg Beato’s “Glenn Beck’s Experimental Melodrama,” page 14), did create a stir earlier this year with an asinine comment that Obama has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” But even that sentiment was not visible to my naked eye on September 12.

So is the Tea Parties = racism meme a sincere expression of anxiety about resurgent racist violence? A knowingly inaccurate attempt at political marginalization? Whatever was behind this summer’s hysteria, it seems reasonable to assume that the next three or seven years will feature more of the same.

Call me an incurable Californian, but I see reasons to hope otherwise. President Obama himself smothered much of the rhetoric by telling David Letterman, “I think it’s important to realize that I was actually black before the election.” Jimmy Carter, no doubt under pressure from the administration, backpedaled on his racism claims two weeks after he made them. And most hopefully of all, the kind of overt or thinly coded appeals to white racial resentment and nativist paranoia that have stained generations of American politicians have been marginalized in right-of-center politics. Whether Jimmy Carter will get around to noticing how much America has changed for the better remains to be seen.

"It Opened Our Eyes"

2009-11-16T15:00:00-05:00

Earlier this month, Wayne County, Michigan Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny threw out the murder conviction of Dwayne Provience, who had been convicted for a 2000 drug-related murder in downtown Detroit. After nine-and-a-half years in prison, Provience was released on $500 bond. Prosecutors are now deciding whether to retry him. Provience's mother watched from the courtroom as Kenny announced his decision. She was overcome when she realized her son would be freed. "It's already Christmas," Vonzella Battle told a local television station. "It's the holidays for me right now."

There was another elated parent in the courtroom that morning as well. Steve Cheolas, 54, made the trip into the city from the suburban town of Harper Woods to watch his son Nick, a third-year law student at the University of Michigan, help win Provience's release as a volunteer for the school's Innocence Clinic. The younger Cheolas handled the clinic's investigation of the police and prosecutors who worked on Provience's case, a critical component to Provience's argument for a new trial. "I've always been proud of Nick," the elder Cheolas says. "But I'm particularly proud of the work he's doing for the Innocence Clinic. To see those family members with joy written all over their faces, well, it just made me feel good."

The two families couldn't be more different. Provience is black, and comes from a poor family in downtown Detroit. The Cheolases are white, an upper-middle class family from the suburbs. But a shared experience put the two parents in the courtroom that morning: Both have felt the brunt end of a flawed criminal justice system. It was after witnessing his own parents' five-year battle with local law enforcement that Nick Cheolas developed an interest in criminal law. That moved him to get involved with the Innocence Clinic after enrolling in law school. And that's how, with his dad looking on, he had the opportunity to help deliver Vonzella Battle's early Christmas present.

"I had always been brought up to be trusting of authority, trusting of the criminal justice system," Nick says. "Anyone who has the sort of experience my family had will never trust it again. And it's one thing for it to happen to my family. These weren't felonies, and we had the resources to fight back. But when you think about the people most in need of police protection, how it can happen to them. When they can't trust law enforcement, the criminal justice system as a whole fails."

It all began on April 24, 2004, when Steve and Candice Cheolas, 58, threw a surprise birthday party for their 15-year-old daughter. The family says that several of the teens smuggled alcohol into the party without their knowledge. One girl became intoxicated, eventually requiring hospitalization. Her parents called the police.

"The actual encounter with the police that night was about as uneventful as something like that could be," says Nick, who was a freshman in college at the time. "Everyone was friendly. It was a couple weeks later, when we started seeing the police reports with obviously false statements in them, that we realized we were going to have problems."

Steve and Candice Cheolas were charged with controlling a social gathering where alcohol was consumed by minors, a crime that requires both knowledge and acceptance of the minors' consumption. They were also charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Additionally, Candice Cheolas was charged with obstructing a police officer.

"If you look at the depositions, none of the kids said my parents knew there was drinking going on," Nick says. "They said they snuck alcohol in their pants, or were hiding in the bathroom to drink. The police said my parents were drunk and smelled of alcohol. That's just a lie. My parents don't drink in the home, except for maybe a glass of wine with Christmas dinner."

The Cheolases eventually discovered that the police officers who came to their home that night had written two sets of reports, and there were major discrepancies between the two drafts. The second drafts included damning information about the Cheolases that was nowhere to be found in the initial reports. They also discovered the officers were wearing microphones on their uniforms that connected to the dash cam on their patrol cars. The audio recordings captured by those microphones would eventually vindicate the family in court.

"The police reports attributed 28 separate statements to my mother that made her seem drunk, belligerent and confrontational. Of those 28, only one benign statement actually shows up in the audio. Everyone lied after the fact. The police, the paramedics, the parents of the girl who got drunk. The tapes show that," Nick says. The police reports also allege that when officers attempted to enter the home, Candice Cheolas repeatedly screamed at them and blocked their access to the doorway—the reason for the obstruction charge. But the audio tapes show she wasn't even outside when the officers entered the home, and bear no evidence of screaming. All of which is why the prosecution took the unusual step of trying to prevent the police department's own audio tapes from being admitted into evidence.

Why would police produce false reports when they know the entire incident was recorded? "I really don't know," Nick says. "I guess they figured they're cops, so what the hell is going to happen to them? And you know what? They're right. They've gotten away with it."

Candice Cheolas was finally tried in January 2006. The prosecution called 28 witnesses. When the state rested its case, Macomb County District Judge Walter Jakubowski, Jr. ordered a directed verdict in favor of the defendant. Candice Cheolas didn't even need to put on a defense.

Directed verdicts are rare, issued only in cases where the state has utterly failed to make its case. But anyone who listened to Judge Jakubwoski during the trial might have seen it coming. Jubowski was openly scornful of the prosecution throughout the trial, at one point stating that he was "infuriated" and "fed up" with the state's tactics. When the city prosecutor tried to recall a police officer to the witness stand to clarify after he'd been shown to have given false testimony, Jubowski sarcastically asked if the state planned to have the officer go home "to polish his testimony" first. He once asked the prosecutor if his aim was to "crucify" Candice Cheolas. At another point he bluntly asked the city attorney, "There's prosecution, and there's persecution. Which are we doing here?"

Candice Cheolas' victory in criminal court gave the family some vindication, but they still chafe at the lack of accountability. "No one involved in all of this has ever been sanctioned or punished in any way," Nick says. Steve adds, "They could do it again if they wanted. And they'd get away with it again." The Cheolases estimate that the ordeal has cost them just under a million dollars. Last month, a federal district court judge threw out their civil rights lawsuit against the city, the police, and the prosecutors. They plan to appeal. The city, meanwhile, has since filed a motion asking the court to force the family to pay the city's legal expenses.

Nick Cheolas sees parallels between his family's case and Provience's. "In both cases you have police and prosecutors making major mistakes, and not by accident. People messed up, and they messed up on purpose. In Dwayne's case, they not only had evidence that he was innocent, the same prosecutor's office argued in a separate case that two other men committed the same murder. They never told Dwayne's attorneys."

But Nick's father emphasizes that the similarities end there. "What we went through pales in comparison," Steve says, referring to Provience's nine years in prison. "I'm just saying it opened our eyes. I was always of the mindset that it was okay for the police to do a little wrong in relation to very bad people. And I think that's a pretty common thought. I now fully understand how even little wrongs are simply wrong, even when they're done to bad people. Once you start there, where do you stop?"

Steve says though his friends in Harper Woods believe his family was railroaded, many of them still retain his own old mindset when it comes to how police and prosecutors deal with less savory people—people like Dwayne Provinciel, who after all had a couple of drug convictions on his record at the time he was charged with murder. "I try to tell them, it's the other way around. If it can happen to us, can you imagine how easy it is for them to do it to people who have already made mistakes, or who don't have the resources to defend themselves?"

His son certainly can.

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

Why You Should Support Reason: Al Sharpton Edition

2009-11-16T12:01:00-05:00

Gay Marriage Lost, But It's Not Losing

2009-11-16T07:00:00-05:00

Opponents of same-sex marriage waxed triumphant recently when voters in Maine rejected a measure allowing gays to wed. Maggie Gallagher, head of the National Organization for Marriage, crowed, "This victory in Maine interrupts the cultural narrative that was being manufactured, that somehow American opinion is shifting on the gay marriage issue."

But she and her allies are the political equivalent of a Minnesota Vikings fan, gazing upon Brett Favre's middle-aged gridiron wizardry. They had better enjoy it now, because it's not going to last.

What got overlooked on Election Day was the victory for gay rights on the other coast, in Washington state—where the electorate extended to homosexual couples all the privileges and responsibilities enjoyed by heterosexual couples. That measure, known as "everything but marriage," passed with 52 percent of the vote.

Why did it succeed while the initiative in Maine failed? Simple: Washington calls this new option "domestic partnership" rather than "marriage."

As it turns out, it's not the idea of treating gay couples equally that bothers most Americans. It's the name of the legal arrangement. Call same-sex marriage by another term—civil union, domestic partnership, everything-but-marriage, Qualcomm Stadium, Death Cab for Cutie—and they're fine with it.

Traditionalists take heart that same-sex marriage has lost every time it's been on the ballot, and that a decisive majority of the public rejects it. The latest poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press finds 53 percent of Americans are against, with 39 percent in favor.

But anyone who denies that "American opinion is shifting" inhabits a fool's paradise, whose walls are sagging noticeably. Opposition to gay marriage is shrinking. In 1996, 65 percent took a negative view. Since then, support has fallen by about one percentage point a year. Put another way, one out of every eight Americans has gone from opposing the concept to endorsing it.

Time is on the side of gay marriage. The heaviest opposition comes from people over 65. Among those under 30, by contrast, supporters predominate—and by a hefty 58-to-37 percent margin. Ask any actuary where this disparity will lead.

The opponents of same-sex matrimony are in ever-worsening straits. Civil unions and domestic partnerships, which provide some or most of the accouterments of marriage, have been provided to gay couples in nine states and the District of Columbia, according to Lambda Legal. Once radical, these are seen today as the sensible compromise between giving gays the right to sacred matrimony and giving them a sharp stick in the eye.

Offered a middle-of-the-road option between Perez Hilton and Pat Robertson, Americans have flocked to it. Eight years ago, Pew says, only 45 percent were in favor of civil unions. Today, it's 57 percent.

Washingtonians approved the most expansive version, and they knew exactly what they were doing. The ballot said, "This bill would expand the rights, responsibilities and obligations accorded state-registered same-sex and senior domestic partners to be equivalent to those of married spouses, except that a domestic partnership is not a marriage."

Why is it not a marriage? Not because it is legally different under Washington state law, but because … well, because it is not called marriage. But it's an identical twin.

The advantage of this bashful euphemism is that it accommodates gays on the most important issues related to family—legal recognition and rights, protection for children, access to pension and insurance benefits—while avoiding the weighty symbolism of calling this arrangement by a name that carries religious connotations.

In time, though, it will be apparent that granting same-sex couples substantive equality has none of the calamitous consequences imagined by gay-rights opponents. At that point, some of them will find themselves saying: Tell me again why we don't let them get married?

Many gay-rights advocates reject anything short of full access to marriage as a disgraceful revival of the old "separate but equal" policy—which was anything but equal for African-Americans. But you don't get across a broad river in a single leap. You get there by building a bridge that allows you to travel across one step at a time.

As a destination, civil unions leave a lot to be desired. But as an avenue, they're hard to beat.

The Case Against Twitter

2009-11-14T07:00:00-05:00

Not long ago, Meghan McCain, maverick progeny and rising media star (because, no doubt, of her impressive intellectual gifts), posted a cleavage-intense picture of herself on her Twitter account.

"For years," the 25-year-old would lament later, "I have struggled to accept the fact that the way I look in a tank top comes off more 'sexual' than a flat-chested woman."

First, let's all agree on the obvious: A nation that fails to deal with the deep-seated struggles of busty young blondes is a nation that fails us all.

Then feel free to wonder why an intelligent young woman feigns astonishment when her candid shot creates a hubbub online after she disseminates the shot to 76,000 followers. Isn't that the point of posting on Twitter? Highlighting everything? Even your socio-political thoughts on cup sizes?

Twitter's popularity and usefulness are mysteries to me. Pressed by personal, professional, and cultural forces, I sporadically deploy short missives for fear of becoming one of those cantankerous technophobes who is too dense to recognize the miracle of letting "followers" know he hates raisins or that he loved the finale of Mad Men.

Now not only am I expected to transmit this minutiae mere seconds after I think it but also some 20-year-old in California has decreed that I must do it within the brevity of 140 characters. This need for conciseness, in fact, induces normally articulate friends of mine to write in Prince lyrics—recklessly using "2" and "4" and "U" as words.

To this point, I've found Twitter so aggressively worthless that I was forced to research exactly what I am missing. In the process, I stumbled across a useful New York Times tech column penned by David Pogue that clarified all. The headline read, "Twitter? It's What You Make It."

In summation, like your beloved pet rock, Twitter is useful only in your imagination.

Despite this, I can't begin to add up how many times, as a member of the media, I've been instructed that I need to tweet by people who have absolutely no clue what tweeting means. How Twitter helps journalism is yet to be determined.

But the deepest mystery of Twitter is why celebrities and elected officials take part. After all, we all know they can't write their own lines.

Now, admittedly, Twitter can be entertaining on occasion, as it turns out that 140 characters offers a great chance to be misunderstood—and an even greater chance one will expose his inner troglodyte.

In these past few weeks alone, a clueless Colorado state Sen. Dave Schultheis tweeted, "Don't for a second, think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let's Roll." NFL running back Larry Johnson took time out from his busy day of stinking at his job to ridicule his coach and question the heterosexuality (crudely) of a critical tweeter. He lost his job.

So you see, though only a reported 11 percent of Twitter's users are actually teenagers, nearly everyone who participates may end up sounding like one. (Young people have the good sense to head to MySpace, where they freely can post sexually provocative pictures—with music!) I certainly have no cleavage to ratchet up my "follower" numbers.

As a blogging, Facebooking, texting American who values the explosion of democratic user-generated Internet content and its contribution to intellectual debate, political activism, government transparency, entertainment, access to data, and community, I can safely say I still see no reason to tweet.

Naturally, this phenomenon is growing by approximately 1 million percent yearly. Maybe this is just where I get left behind by technology. Still, I'm sticking with Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, who called Twitter the "poor man's e-mail system"—and considering e-mail is completely free and allows you to form complete sentences, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Denver Post and the author of Nanny State. Visit his Web site at www.DavidHarsanyi.com.

Dave Bing's Last-Second Shot

2009-11-13T18:00:00-05:00

On November 3, voters in Detroit trudged to the polls and re-elected 65-year-old Mayor Dave Bing, giving him five new city council members to accomplish a mission impossible: bring Michigan's biggest city back from near death. There's no clear prescription that will work, and Detroit's recalcitrant public-employee unions will resist the fiscal therapy that will necessarily be a part of any recovery.

Last year, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick headed off to prison for using city funds to cover up an affair with a staffer. After a few months of an interim mayor, Bing stepped in to finish Kilpatrick's remaining time in office neither out of political ambition (he's announced he won't seek two terms) nor to get rich (he is donating his salary to the police department). The former Detroit Piston basketball legend who later made a fortune as an auto supplier genuinely wants to use his business acumen to save the city. But Detroit is much closer to the brink than many people acknowledge.

Detroit has been in trouble for decades. It has the highest taxes in Michigan, the highest murder rate in the country, and a dreadful public school system. Only 25 percent of high school students graduate each year. Its tens of thousands of abandoned homes offer safe haven to drug dealers and criminals. All of this has produced an exodus of businesses—there is no longer a single major department store in the city—and residents. Detroit's population is less than half of its peak of two million in the 1960s.

With the collapse of the auto industry over the past year and a half, things have gotten a lot worse. Unemployment is now touching Depression levels of around 30 percent—three times the national rate. Businesses that depend on the auto industry are shutting down and more residents are hitting the exits. This is accelerating the erosion of the city's tax base, producing a fiscal crisis that seems impossible to escape. The city's accumulated deficit is currently somewhere between $300 million and $400 million. No one knows for sure because the city has yet to submit its 2008 audit; its annual budget is about $3 billion.

Joe Harris, a former chief financial officer of Detroit, notes that when Bing took office this summer, the city had enough cash on hand to make payroll, pay vendors and meet other day-to-day needs for about 11 days. To make ends meet, Bing is planning to issue "tax anticipation" notes to lenders to raise $94 million against expected tax revenues. This money, along with the biannual property taxes that the city collected in August, might keep Detroit running through the end of the fiscal year next June.

But that won't address the underlying fiscal imbalances. For that problem, Bing wants to squeeze $5 million in savings every month by asking the city's roughly 13,000 workers to take a 10 percent pay cut, a 10 percent benefit cut, and a 10 percent staff cut. He also wants to privatize or outsource many city services and consolidate various departments. "Our people [city workers] need to understand that entitlement is gone," Bing told the Detroit News in August. "There are people who think we are job providers. We're service providers."

Bing is going to have a very hard time making the city's entrenched unions play ball. John Reihl, president of the American Federation of State, Council and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 207, regards Bing's talk of cuts as a personal insult. "It is just a way to mess with the unions," he told the Detroit News in July. "It's not our role to give anymore concessions."

So far Bing has shown little indication that he'll stand up to the unions. For the third time on Friday, Bing backed off on his threat to lay off more workers if unions don't accept a wage cut. Yet a recent study by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy found that if state and local government employee benefit packages in Michigan were limited to what is typical for Midwestern private sector workers—including those in unions—taxpayers would save as much as $5.7 billion annually.

The fiscal mess puts Bing in a Catch-22. He can't cut the city's taxes because the short-term hit to cash flow would leave the city unable to pay its bills. But without tax reform the city can't lure businesses back.

Detroit may simply not be viable in its current form. Political and economic leaders need to rethink the notion that the city can regain its former status as a major American metropolis capable of luring large companies with tax breaks—which was Kilpatrick's failed strategy.

Detroit now more closely resembles a frontier town that needs not flashy stadiums and art institutes but basic services: police, firemen, and good schools. Bing needs to confront the hard reality that the city needs to pare back its liabilities, identify infrastructure it can no longer afford to maintain, and (though this is anathema to Detroit's political class) perhaps auction off portions of its 140 square miles to neighboring counties, shrinking to a size that its diminished population base can support.

Short term, Detroit's best hope may be to go bankrupt. However, given Michigan law, which has never been tested because no city has ever filed for bankruptcy, it's unclear if even bankruptcy will fully release Detroit from the clutches of its unions and allow it to start over. The only thing certain is that fate is not kind to a city that allows unions to run amok.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and lives in metro Detroit. This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

The Ayn and Only

2009-11-13T16:30:00-05:00

It's not hard to imagine Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, at the Tea Party rallies that swept the nation this summer. She'd be smoking, of course. Stalking around in a cape and sensible shoes, this avatar of individual liberty and rationalism would accost cheerful, tubby Midwest Republicans and baffle them with her favorite greeting: "What are your premises?"

Perhaps the anti-tax, limited government Tea Partiers would recognize the stocky, intense philosopher/novelist with the large dark eyes as one of their own. She could even clamber up to the podium to address the crowd in her strong Russian accent. "Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution," she might say, for she was fond of quoting herself. "The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off."

Ayn Rand is no longer around to mingle at political rallies, but she is increasingly present in current political debates, as her readers find parallels between 2009 America and the world of Atlas Shrugged, in which the creative thinkers and entrepreneurs go on strike, refusing to work in a totalitarian near-future dystopia where they are forced to labor for masses that hate and fear men of genius. A small but visible cluster of bloggers and businessmen are threatening to "Go Galt"--a reference to the book's striker-hero John Galt, who simply vanishes one day, taking an ever-larger number of the socially useful with him as the global economy crumbles.

At the Tea Parties, banners blare "Atlas Is Shrugging," and there are undeniable parallels between the current political scene and the scenario described in Atlas. In both cases, major transportation industries are being nationalized, government infrastructure is falling apart, unemployment is high, and protectionism is in the air. Rand's books, which have shown consistently impressive sales for decades, tallying almost 25 million copies in print, are suddenly experiencing a spike in demand. In 2008, sales of Atlas hit an all-time annual high of 200,000 copies sold. That would be a more-than-respectable showing for a new book; it's almost unheard of for a 50-year-old tome.

An additional sign of the Rand revival: the release of two new Rand biographies. Despite the fact that she has been famous for well over a half-century, these are the first biographies produced by impartial scholars. Both books follow Rand as she leaves behind a difficult childhood in revolutionary Russia (and her birth name Alisa Rosenbaum) for sunny, materialistic California. She wins a gig as a screenwriter after a memorable encounter with Cecil B. DeMille and meets her handsome husband. They chart her flirtation with politics, many missed book deadlines, and her rise to national fame with The Fountainhead in 1943. As she works to cement her place in history with Atlas Shrugged, a movement grows up around her. She begins to write nonfiction and names her philosophy of individualism and rationality: Objectivism. She conducts a clandestine affair with her much-younger intellectual heir, Nathaniel Branden, browbeating her husband and Branden's wife into assent and oaths of secrecy which they maintain until after her death in 1982. Rand dies famous, under an avalanche of hundreds of thousands of fan letters, yet bitter over broken personal relationships and unrealized political and philosophical ambitions.

Before continuing, it's worth noting that Ayn Rand would hate both of the new biographies. But she would be wrong to hate them, because both books are very good. Journalist Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made personalizes Rand, offering gossipy details about Rand's life and loves without the usual dose of malice that taints the memoirs of Rand's onetime inner circle and designated heirs. Historian Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market--the stronger of the two--situates Rand in the 20th-century American political scene, painting her as an influential advocate for capitalism and freedom.

Both biographers are interesting women who chose to write about Rand, in part, because she was an interesting woman. Neither author--and this would be the real killer for Rand, who was not tolerant of dissent--is an adherent to Rand's philosophy. In fact, neither book treats Rand as a philosopher, a title she preferred in later years, or offers literary analysis of Rand as a novelist. Rand would say that they are missing the point. But in a way, it was Rand who failed to see her own significance: "Rand's Romantic Realism has not changed American literature, nor has Objectivism penetrated far into the philosophy profession," writes Burns. But "for more than half a century Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right."

If William F. Buckley Jr. is the father of the modern conservative movement, Ayn Rand is the worldly aunt. While Buckley was busy providing for the future and setting rules for postwar conservatism, Rand breezed in, scattering cigarette ash and dollar bills everywhere. When she parted ways with the movement in disgust, she left a trail of crumpled stockings, fur-lined handcuffs, and ideological confusion in her wake. While willing to get on board with her principled and thorough denunciation of communism, conservatives have long had an uneasy relationship with Ayn Rand. Buckley more or less booted her and her growing contingent of followers out of the movement in the late 1950s. And Whittaker Chambers's review, published in National Review in 1957, contained the most famous (and most quotable) condemnation of her novels: "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard . . . commanding: 'To a gas chamber--go!'"

But no matter how many times Rand is thrown out of political movements, she always comes back. Her followers can be found at nearly every large gathering on the right; long after communism is a dead letter, Rand keeps showing up at conservative parties. And even when she's refused admission at the front door for her obnoxious atheism, her utopian tendencies, or her insistence on her own greatness, she turns up inside anyway, smuggled in by the many people she introduced to ideas of liberty and personal responsibility.

Of course, the disdain between conservatives and Rand was mutual, as Burns ably chronicles in her book. Her imperious style, borrowed a bit from Nietzsche in the early years, and her tendency to give the cold shoulder to Objectivist apostates, made her hard to love. Rand denounced the conservative-friendly classical liberal economist Friedrich Hayek as "pure poison," primarily for his limited concessions to state planning in certain sectors of the economy. And she had harsh words for Milton Friedman as well: His casual use of the economic term "rationing" to mean "allocation" infuriated her, as did his preference for pragmatic argumentation over appeals to moral absolutes of individual liberty and reason. (Ludwig von Mises, a founding economist of the pro-market Austrian school, called Rand "the most courageous man in America," which delighted her immensely.) Her demands for ideological purity extended to atheism as well. The first time Rand and Buckley met face to face, she casually mentioned that he seemed far too intelligent to believe in God. She denounced Christianity as "the perfect kindergarten for communism." Rand's fondness for including kinky sex scenes in her novels--and her excoriation of altruism--didn't do much to endear her to Christian conservatives, either.

But there was a moment when American politics inspired Rand. The 1940 Wendell Willkie presidential campaign, which took place while she was missing one of the many deadlines for The Fountainhead, unexpectedly brought out her political fervor. A fierce opponent of Franklin Roosevelt, Rand became a Republican campaign stalwart, going door-to-door with a Willkie button pinned to her coat. She even went to movie theaters where Willkie newsreels were airing, and then stayed behind to answer questions.

"I was a marvelous propagandist," she later recalled.

Before her days as a Willkie volunteer, Burns writes, "Rand was suspicious of both democracy and capitalism, unsure if either system could be trusted to safeguard individual rights against the dangers of the mob." This was the moment when Rand became part of the American political scene, crossbreeding her self-generated individualist philosophy with the uniquely American understanding of individual rights and personal freedom. After the campaign was lost, diehards organized into grassroots-style Willkie Clubs, not unlike the Tea Parties. Rand had high hopes for the clubs as a way to keep the ideas of individualism and freedom alive. But after organizational scuffling, fundraising difficulties, and personal conflicts, she dropped out of practical politics. (Rand broke this rule only once later in life, when she was briefly enamoured with Barry Goldwater, though he soon disappointed her as well.)

With FDR back in office for a third term, Rand threw herself back into finishing The Fountainhead. When it was released in 1943 there was one positive and insightful review--in the New York Times--but most early notices were critical and dismissive. "Anyone who is taken in by [The Fountainhead] deserves a stern lecture on paper rationing," sniped Diana Trilling in the Nation. In fact, Rand was battling wartime paper rationing: She signed her contract days before Pearl Harbor. If negotiations had taken another week, Rand's editor later told her, such a paper-intensive project would probably have been junked. Rand trimmed out a subplot or two--something she never would have done in later years--to get the book down to 754 pages. But she still had to figure for more than her "fair share" of paper. The irony was not lost on this crusader against centrally controlled economies and egalitarianism that both were arrayed against her in a fight to convey her words to the public.

Worse still, many reviewers were complimentary for the wrong reasons. When it was released, Americans bought The Fountainhead in droves. But nearly everyone seemed to think it was book about architecture. Heller writes that it took "half a decade before most readers of The Fountainhead consciously noticed that it was a tract as well as a story," which Rand found baffling because, as she told a friend, "it's practically in every line." But appreciative letters from fans who cottoned to Rand's message came in steadily, and eventually Rand won recognition for the heavy lifting she was doing to link freedom and self-actualization to capitalism in the American mind, offering a principled and appealing alternative to the New Deal before the war, and socialism/communism afterwards.

Rand was always confident in her own talent, predicting sales of 100,000 copies for The Fountainhead. As it turns out, however, she was far too modest. Yet her confidence was also the reason she was shocked and hurt by the pointed way academic reviewers failed to welcome her works. Heller is particularly adept at capturing the novelist's heartache as the negative reviews poured in, and her elation at discovering the book's slow ascent to bestsellerdom.

The months after she finished The Fountainhead were probably the lowest ebb of Rand's elitism. Her books are about supermen, heroes operating on an epic scale. But in The Fountainhead, she makes a place for the common man. In a climactic courtroom scene in which the hero, architect Howard Roark, makes a speech defending his decision to blow up a housing project, the jury consists of "two executives of industrial concerns, two engineers, a mathematician, a truck driver, a bricklayer, an electrician, a gardener, and three factory workers." The jury hears Roark's explanation of why he blew up the project--his vision had been corrupted, and it was his right as creator to also be destroyer--and acquits him. This particular crowd sounds like the folks you might see at a Tea Party--and the post-Fountainhead Rand might have felt at home among them after being rejected by the leftist academic elite and the gatekeepers of intellectual conservatism.

Rand wasn't alone in feeling alienated by both the left and right. The American libertarian movement of the 1960s and '70s was made possible, in part, by a generation of Rand readers looking for an individualist alternative on the American political scene. But she didn't take a shine to her strange capitalist hippie offspring, and soon returned to her previous skepticism about politics, equally scorning the unphilosophical and irrational elements of the libertarian and conservative movements.

By the 1957 publication of her second novel, Atlas Shrugged, Rand was showing evidence of her pessimism about the state and the masses. She was never one to say that commercial success indicated true worth: Her heroes are often in financial trouble because the world fails to recognize what they are offering as superior. Wealth is just as often a signifier of corruption as achievement. Financial success came to Rand herself late in life, thanks in part to her decision to build an alternative delivery system for her philosophy, outside the usual worlds of academia and politics. Rand authorized her sometime lover Nathaniel Branden to establish a newsletter-publishing operation and lecture series, which proved decently profitable and supplied Rand with a steady stream of converts. After their falling-out--Branden was keeping a girl on the side--Rand passed the mantle to another follower, who has been overzealous in his protection of her papers and name.

And yet--despite critical PR blunders and excoriation from both sides of the political aisle--Ayn Rand endures. People keep buying her books and, perhaps more important, giving them to each other. Republican congressmen Paul Ryan (Wis.) and John Campbell (Calif.) give out copies of Atlas Shrugged to their staff. So does the head of BB&T bank, John Allison. Talk about a film version of Atlas has gotten louder in recent months. The same force that made Rand a cult phenomenon in her own time still sends people into the streets with Atlas Shrugged banners 50 years later. Her strange blend of populism and elitism continues to leave its mark in the right-wing world, like it or not.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a senior editor at Reason. This article originally appeared in The Weekly Standard on November 9, 2009.

Putting a Stop to Congressional Overreach

2009-11-13T15:00:00-05:00

In early September, Fox News host Andrew Napolitano asked Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, precisely what part of the Constitution authorized Congress to enact health care legislation. "There's nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do," Clyburn replied. "How about [you] show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this?"

It was a rare flash of honesty from an elected official, revealing not only Clyburn’s ignorance of the Constitution but his overt hostility to the document’s system of checks and balances. And Clyburn is hardly alone. In legislation dealing with everything from crime to education, Congress routinely oversteps its constitutional bounds. As Napolitano later remarked, Clyburn seems “to have conveniently forgotten that the federal government has only specific enumerated powers.”

Later this term, the U.S. Supreme Court will have a great opportunity to remind Clyburn and his colleagues of those limits when it hears oral arguments in the case of U.S. v. Comstock. At issue is the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which empowers federal officials to order the indefinite civil commitment of "sexually dangerous" persons who have finished serving a federal sentence, or who are currently in the custody of the attorney general because they were found mentally incompetent to stand trial. In other words, the government isn’t willing to let these people back on the streets.

In its brief to the Supreme Court, the government argues that Congress possesses this authority under the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause, which grants Congress the power "to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States."

Yet as the text itself clearly specifies, any law passed under the Necessary and Proper Clause must also be tied to a specifically enumerated constitutional power, either one of the "foregoing powers" listed in Article I, Sec. 8, or one of the "other powers vested by this Constitution." As James Madison told the Virginia ratifying convention, the Necessary and Proper Clause "only extended to the enumerated powers. Should Congress attempt to extend it to any power not enumerated, it would not be warranted by the clause."

So where among the "foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution" did Congress happen to find an explicitly enumerated power to indefinitely detain "sexually dangerous" prisoners?

The answer is: Nowhere. The Constitution provides no such authority. Indeed, as a superb friend of the court brief filed in the case by Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett makes clear, "However well intentioned Congress may have been, it had no power to legislate for the purpose of protecting the public from dangerous persons....The Necessary and Proper Clause is not an independent source of Congressional power."

Nor may Congress rely on the Commerce Clause—another favored source for sweeping federal power. Under that clause, which the government has briefly raised as a justification in the case, Congress possesses the authority "to regulate commerce...among the several states," a power the Supreme Court has controversially extended to cover intrastate commerce as well as commerce "among the states." Most recently, in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Court permitted the federal government to regulate the local cultivation of medical marijuana in California on the extremely dubious grounds that such cultivation also affected the nationwide market.

Yet the law at issue in Comstock fails to meet even the Court’s notoriously generous Raich interpretation—something the Barnett brief is careful to explain. As Justice Antonin Scalia held in his Raich concurrence, "Congress may regulate noneconomic intrastate activities only where the failure to do so 'could...undercut' its regulation of interstate commerce." Since overturning the law in Comstock would in no way undercut any legitimate federal regulation of commercial activity, neither Raich nor the Commerce Clause apply.

Which brings us back to Rep. Clyburn and his colleagues. With so many members of Congress either unwilling or unable to abide by the clear limitations imposed by the plain text of the Constitution, the time has come for the Supreme Court to rein them in. Enforcing the Necessary and Proper Clause is a great way to start.

Damon W. Root is an associate editor at Reason magazine.

Reason.tv: The Enduring Power of Ayn Rand's Ideas

2009-11-13T09:30:00-05:00

Friday Funnies

2009-11-13T07:00:00-05:00

Glenn Beck's Experimental Melodrama

2009-11-12T16:30:00-05:00

In late September, President Barack Obama conducted a series of five one-on-one White House interviews with reporters from CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and Univision. For some reason—perhaps he’s housing a secret civilian security force in the Roosevelt Room and doesn’t want any fair and balanced reporters snooping around—the president didn’t invite Fox to participate. For Glenn Beck, the host of the hottest show on cable news, this Oval Office slight offered an opportunity to provide some trenchant perspective. “Does the president consider Fox some sort of enemy?” he exclaimed, chortling with amiable resentment. “I mean, no, it can’t be that, because, no, he’ll sit down with our enemies. He’s even offered to sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And that guy, I mean, you call me nuts?”

The bit was Beck at his best: shrewdly self-marginalizing, bitingly funny, and executed with perfect timing. A radio veteran who got his first job in the business at the age of 13, Beck, it turns out, is also a TV showman on par with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. But while America’s favorite fake newsmen have clear-cut identities as comedians, the question of how to categorize Beck is more perplexing.

When Beck was 8 years old, his mother gave him a record of old radio programs that included Orson Welles’ famous performance of War of the Worlds. Apparently the fictionalized news report of an alien invasion became a foundational text for him, an archetypal example of how you could create crazy, vivid, apocalyptic drama out of mere words. To pay tribute to Welles’ work, Beck starred in a live version of War of the Worlds that aired on his syndicated radio show on Halloween night in 2002. Shortly thereafter, an heir of the radio play’s author sued Beck and his producers for copyright infringement and won an injunction that prevents Beck from ever performing the play again.

The injunction, however, doesn’t prevent Beck from spinning his own doomsday visions every day. In January he jumped from CNN Headline News to the Fox News Channel and began experimenting in earnest. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show had paved the way by showing you didn’t have to stick to the same old tried-and-true conventions when presenting the news. Anchormen could be more expressive. You could use music and graphics and video clips more creatively. And if you could do so in pursuit of comedy, why not also in pursuit of melodrama?

In February, while discussing what it’s like to be angry and enfranchised in America, legislated to the edge of Armageddon, Beck introduced a new visual technique: His image appeared simultaneously in two windows on the screen, one a typical headshot, the other a close-up of his eyes, the better to showcase his distressed but strong sincerity. On April Fool’s Day, as Beck kicked off a segment on America’s drift toward fascism, his image started shrinking until he was just a tiny torso at the bottom of the screen, looking over his shoulder at World War II footage of marching Nazis. “Enough!” Mini-Beck shouted. Then the screen went black behind him, dramatically framing his shrunken head and body as he continued his soliloquy. It was news commentary as expressionist theater.

Beck’s subjects became equally avant garde. On one show, experts tutored the host on how to survive the kind of financial meltdown in which shopping centers were ghost malls and streets were crawling with functionally illiterate meth-heads. A week later, he started investigating the rumor that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was building concentration camps around the country. When that didn’t pan out, he set about exposing the secret communist artwork adorning Rockefeller Plaza and other buildings in New York.

Whatever the subject of any given episode, a common theme always unites it with every other installment of the show: Something isn’t right with America. The country is changing somehow, subtly but surely, right under our very noses, and hardly anyone else is noticing.

In August, Beck turned his attention to the mysterious entities—alien invaders, you might say—who had infiltrated the White House with barely any scrutiny at all: Obama’s czars. Van Jones, Obama’s adviser on green business initiatives, was a former member of a communist group and a self-described revolutionary, Beck reported. Next, he aired video footage of Mark Lloyd, diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission, praising Hugo Chavez’s “incredible revolution” in Venezuela. The Van Jones episode garnered Beck’s highest rating in weeks, attracting nearly 800,000 more viewers than his previous show had. The Mark Lloyd episode, boosted by an endorsement from Sarah Palin to her Facebook followers, did even better, attracting slightly more than 3 million viewers, according to the Nielsen Company.

It was the first time Beck’s program had broken the 3 million barrier, an incredible achievement for a cable news show airing at 5 p.m. After Beck unveiled more information about Jones, including the fact that the adviser had signed a petition that suggested high-level Bush administration officials may have deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur, Jones resigned from his position at the White House. Beck followed up with revelations about a National Endowment for the Arts conference call in which artists were encouraged to create works promoting President Obama’s political agenda, and suddenly it seemed as if the crusading New Canaan populist might single-handedly save America from the attacking hordes of progressive pod people armed to the teeth with stimulus dollars.

Not everyone gives Beck’s efforts positive reviews, even on the right. New York Times columnist David Brooks accused him of “race-baiting” after Beck said Obama is “racist” toward white people. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum called one of Beck’s many vettings of a White House appointee (Cass Sunstein in this case) “beyond sloppy, beyond ignorant, proceeding straight toward the deceptive.” “How on earth did this crackpot get a national TV show?” asked Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher.

In Dreher’s question we have what is perhaps the most concise history yet of media in the Internet era. With every new technological breakthrough, it gets easier and easier to push unregulated information into the national discourse, potentially exposing millions to misinformation masquerading as news. As President Obama exclaimed in a September interview with the Toledo Blade, it sometimes seems as if we’re moving toward a future where there’s “no serious fact checking” and “no serious attempts to put stories in context.”

In theory, a charismatic paranoiac like Beck is the poster boy for this dystopian future. He’s got a very loud megaphone. His communication skills are world-class. He’s ideologically driven (even if no one can quite figure out what that ideology is). And he’s willing to entertain some pretty dubious notions. But look at his track record so far. He couldn’t sell FEMA death camps because the facts weren’t there to back the story up. His exposé of communist art at Rockefeller Plaza went nowhere because even Beck’s viewers realize an old relief of a naked farmer holding some wheat isn’t much of a threat. The Van Jones story had legs, by contrast, because most of its facts were solid. With a change in background music and a few minor edits, in fact, Beck’s first long piece on Jones could have served as an advertisement for the activist’s achievements—in part because its script closely followed a 2005 newspaper article that was written as a positive portrait of Jones.

Context, meanwhile, is Beck’s forte. He is constantly urging his viewers to connect the dots and look at the big picture, even when the picture exists only in his head. He is forever advising them to consider stories not as transient, random, isolated phenomena, as most newscasts do, but as parts of a larger, ongoing narrative that grows more and more meaningful (and menacing) the longer you study it. In a fractured, distracting mediascape, where thousands of outlets vie for our attention, it’s a smart approach that others are sure to copy. Legally barred from re-enacting Orson Welles, Beck may have to settle for being the 21st century’s answer to Edward R. Murrow.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato (gbeato@soundbitten.com) writes from San Francisco.