Reason Magazine

She’s Back!

2009-11-09T16:30:00-05:00

Ayn Rand, the Russian-born novelist and philosopher, died in 1982. But in this Bush-Obama season of fantastical government growth and encroachment into all areas of human activity, Rand has become a Banquo’s ghost at the banquet of politics, an antistate spirit haunting politicians and commentators who thought her free-market worldview was safely buried by the fall 2008 financial collapse.

Signs of the Rand revival abound. The surprisingly large anti-government Tea Party protests have been chock-a-block with signs such as “Atlas Is Shrugging” and “The name is Galt. John Galt.” Sales of Rand’s classic Atlas Shrugged have soared in 2009, above a level that was already extremely impressive for a 1,000-page, critically unloved, 52-year-old novel. Two major publishing houses brought out new biographies of Rand almost simultaneously this fall. And after decades of Hollywood development limbo, Atlas Shrugged may finally be hitting the screen soon in the form of a cable mini-series starring Charlize Theron.

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), who gives out copies of Atlas Shrugged to departing interns, and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who says Rand inspired his political career, both have said recently that the age of Barack Obama reminds them of the statist dystopia portrayed in the novel. Ryan—who stresses that, as a Catholic, he is not a full-fledged adherent to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, which embraces atheism as well as laissez faire—says that as he looks around Washington these days he can’t help but think he’s seeing a lot of Wesley Mouch, the sleazy lobbyist in Atlas Shrugged who rises through his connections to become a de facto economic dictator.

“What’s happening now is Americans are awakening to see [that] this enduring principle of self-government and individualism is being taken away,” Ryan says. “I really believe the entire moral premise of capitalism is being shaken to its core because of the acceleration of government right now, and that’s waking people up.”

Ed Hudgins, director of advocacy with the Atlas Society, an organization that promotes Rand’s philosophy, says that when he looks at House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and federally owned mortgage lender Freddie Mac, he thinks of another Atlas Shrugged character: banker Eugene Lawson, who in Hudgins’ words “destroys his bank and a good part of the state of Wisconsin because he’s making loans based not on sound business practice but on the basis of need.”

Many political bloggers this year have preferred to invoke one of Rand’s heroes by spreading the idea that more and more people may soon be “going Galt”—that is, following the example of Atlas Shrugged hero John Galt by going “on strike” against an overly statist America.

And it isn’t just Rand devotees who are seeing her shadow across the landscape. As The Economist noted in February, “Whenever governments intervene in the market…readers rush to buy Rand’s book. Why? The reason is explained by the name of a recently formed group on Facebook, the world’s biggest social networking site: ‘Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life.’ ” To Rand’s fans, the U.K. Guardian explained in March, “the Obama administration’s support for beleaguered homeowners and banks…smacks of tyrannical socialism, forcing the strong and successful to prop up the weak, feckless and incompetent.” Everyone seems to agree: Ayn Rand is back, and more relevant than ever.

But will those who are freshly encountering or rediscovering Rand really embrace her radicalism? As important as she remains to the post–World War II American political and intellectual scene, Rand comes with baggage that slows the spread of her ideas, making it difficult for an explicitly Randian political/intellectual movement to gain traction.

More than ever, Rand’s uncompromising and unconservative (though hyper-free-market) vision rubs violently against the realities of contemporary American politics of both right and left. That her ideas are spread mostly via novels, and not nonfiction or polemics, renders reader reaction to her hard to replicate. Despite the obvious signs of a Rand resurgence, from Congress to Tea Parties, from biographies to political chatter, from Main Street to Hollywood, it remains highly unlikely that the author’s ideas will become remotely as successful in politics as they are in publishing. The American Atlas may be grumbling, but he isn’t shrugging yet.

Atlas Shrugged portrays a world reduced to terrifying dysfunction by a government fanatically dedicated to managing and manipulating the economy in the name of fairness and helping the needy. It’s a scenario that many see as scarily similar to America in 2009.

As in Atlas Shrugged, the U.S. is suffering through a shrinking, staggering economy. One of its major transportation industries is falling into the calcifying hands of government management (trains in Atlas, autos now). Pull and connections in the nation’s capital are often more important than productivity in determining whether a business will thrive. The most heeded political voices are calling for one-sixth of the economy to be subsumed by the state in the name of universal health coverage. The political leader of the United States identifies “selfishness” as his own greatest moral failing and says that the country’s biggest sin is not caring enough for the “least.”

For millions of readers worldwide, Atlas Shrugged has generated more than just fondness for a corking and unusual tale; the book commonly inspires a life-changing adoration. But from the beginning it also has met widespread intellectual contempt, even from sources that might be expected to endorse Rand’s free market views. In National Review, for example, Whittaker Chambers famously argued in 1957 that Atlas Shrugged was suffused with “a voice…commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’ ” Also in 1957, Time slammed the novel as a “weird performance…not so much capitalism as its hideous caricature.” More recently, a character on South Park declared, after reading Atlas Shrugged, that “because of this piece of shit, I am never reading again.” The joke works because Atlas Shrugged is widely understood as a cultural totem of bizarre, cultish unreadability, often by those who have never tried to get through it.

While complaints about Rand’s prose and character development are perennial, the nub of Atlas hatred isn’t literary: It’s the idea that Rand’s work is positively evil, celebrating a raw selfishness and glorying in a lack of compassion for anyone who fails to be a heroic producer, or even so much as disagrees with any aspect of Rand’s complicated system of epistemology and ethics. As Gore Vidal wrote in Esquire back in 1961, Rand’s “ ‘philosophy’ is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous.”

When The New York Times made one of its contributions to the copious body of journalism branding 2009 as the Year of Rand, the paper hooked its story to Rand fan John Allison, chairman of a successful Southern bank, BB&T, which had been forced to take federal bailout money. The article went straight to where Rand’s moral rhetoric hits America square in the gut. Allison complained to the Times that if a child fights to defend what’s his against another kid, he’s apt to be told to share rather than defend his property. “To say man is bad because he is selfish,” he concluded, “is to say it’s bad because he’s alive.’ ”

Right there is the Rand her enemies love to hate: the woman who named one of her books The Virtue of Selfishness, who allegedly championed the haves against the have-nots. This year in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait slammed Rand as the fountainhead of the idea that the rich deserve their wealth. This caused him to turn what was supposed to be a review of two serious new books about Rand into a disquisition on the theme that sometimes luck rather than accomplishment earns people wealth in the modern world, which is not a point that Rand would dispute. Neither is it at all relevant to her belief that people deserve whatever they earn, so long as they are not robbing others.

The most concrete indication of the Rand revival is the increasing number of Americans laying down money to live in her world. During one week in late August, for example, Atlas Shrugged sold 67 percent more copies than it did the same week a year before, and 114 percent more than that same week in 2007. According to Kara Welsh of Rand’s imprint, New American Library, the company shipped 25 percent more copies of Atlas Shrugged in the first half of 2009 than it did for all of 2008, for a total so far this year of more than 300,000. That means that only around 40 new novels in 2009 sold more total copies, according to Publishers Weekly sales figures on 2009 bestsellers. Even the hardcover of Atlas Shrugged has sold nearly 20,000 copies this year, a number that would make it reasonably successful as a new hardcover novel, let alone one that’s been available for half a century.

“Certain novels have stood the test of time,” Welsh says, comparing Atlas Shrugged with the likes of 1984 or To Kill a Mockingbird. “Her works stand with those kinds of classics that consistently sell, all the time, regardless of what’s going on in media and going on in the world. This year has seen a big spike in sales, but yes, she’s absolutely an author whose works consistently sell.”

Is this jump in interest for an always popular author a sign of the political zeitgeist? David Boaz, an executive vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, crunched some numbers from the book sales measurement service Bookscan and found that the biggest Atlas Shrugged sales spikes occurred not in reaction to government moves such as bailouts or stimulus spending but in close connection with major media mentions spelling out Rand’s contemporary relevance.

Writing on the Cato@Liberty blog, Boaz fingered a January 9 Wall Street Journal essay by Stephen Moore as the turning point. “The sales in late 2008 are very similar to those in 2007, with a Christmas bump that was higher in 2008,” Boaz wrote. “But sales started to diverge after January 9, suggesting that it was in fact the Wall Street Journal essay that kicked them into high gear.” An “even bigger peak in early March,” he argued, may be “a case of self-fulfilling prophecy and the accumulating effects of media buzz. [The Ayn Rand Institute] put out its press release about soaring sales on February 23.”

Cultural heat is often generated not spontaneously at the individual level but by public discussion. Rand’s publisher Welsh agrees: “The media coverage has driven the consumer to seek these books out more. Media coverage and media mentions are really what’s driving the sales.”

In the gold ribbon of buzzworthiness that is Hollywood, life has been pulsing again in the decades-long saga of getting Atlas Shrugged filmed. With Rand fan Angelina Jolie, long rumored to star as railroad heroine Dagny Taggart, begging off the project, the producers are now preparing to turn Atlas Shrugged into a mini-series on the new cable channel Epix, possibly starring Charlize Theron. (In Hollywood, nothing is fact until the cameras roll—or until after they finish rolling. Atlas Shrugged is not yet at that stage and may never come to fruition.)

In Atlas Shrugged, mystery man John Galt persuades people of great ability and original thought in every important field of business, science, and the arts to “go on strike” from society. They are encouraged by Galt, in Randian parlance, to “remove the sanction of the victim” from a world ruined by overgoverning altruists. These “Atlases” retreat to a rationalist libertarian paradise hidden in Colorado, known affectionately as Galt’s Gulch. In March 2009, popular right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin (who picked up the idea from another blogger, Helen Smith) started reporting anecdotes of Americans “Going Galt,” mostly by keeping their businesses or incomes from growing enough to enter a higher tax bracket.

In a world of runaway regulators, where free markets are blamed for outcomes that are more appropriately pinned on government actions and moral hazard, is Atlas shrugging? Are creators willfully abandoning the weight of the world, which in Rand’s terms requires action more dramatic than limiting your income? A question that would occur to a fan of the novel is: How would we tell? The whole key to “going Galt” is that no one knew you were doing it; in that lay the novel’s mystery.

The Atlas Society’s webpage defines “going Galt” more mildly than what Rand’s characters actually did. Instead of ceasing all productivity to starve statist parasites, the society advocates the intellectual recognition of certain Randian truths. These include “asking in the face of new taxes and government controls, ‘Why work at all?’ ‘For whom am I working?’ ” The Atlas Society also suggests that Rand lovers should start by “recognizing that you’re being punished not for your vices but for your virtues,” “recognizing that you do not need to justify your life or wealth to your neighbors, ‘society,’ or politicians, or bureaucrats,” and “taking the moral high ground by explicitly rejecting as evil the premise of ‘self-sacrifice’ that they sell to you as a virtue.”

While Malkin has come up with a handful of self-reported examples, and blog comment threads on the subject of “going Galt” generally include a person or two who claims she or an acquaintance is deliberately working less, the evidence is anecdotal at best. No macroeconomic indicators, or convincing stories of Rand-level heroes jumping ship from the culture, point to any mass or even significant fringe abdication of productivity for philosophical reasons. And given that most of Obama’s initiatives have been driven by deficit spending, not taxation, it’s unlikely we’ll see any statistically detectable signs of tax avoidance of the sort you’d expect from a Galt-leaning culture.

Cliff Asness is an investment manager of the Connecticut-based money management firm, AQR Capital Management, and a trustee of the Atlas Society. He has been annoyed enough by Obama to do something corporate executives rarely do: publicly condemn the president’s policies. Despite his intimate connections with many other productive people and their money, several of whom also have Randian sympathies, he has seen zero sign of anyone “going Galt.” Asness adds: “Even if I wanted to ‘go Galt,’ I wouldn’t know how. First I’d have to build a projector thing that makes no one see our valley [as in Atlas Shrugged], and I don’t know how to do that. But if you take an economist’s approach, going Galt would look a lot less dramatic than in the novel. It would look like early retirements, less work, not no work. I don’t think it would look like a bunch of gorgeous geniuses moving to a valley in Colorado.”

Another development marking 2009 as a year of unusual Rand interest is the publication of two serious biographies of her by scholars who are not Objectivists. One is Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press), by the University of Virginia historian Jennifer Burns; the other is Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Nan Talese), by Anne Heller, formerly a fiction editor at Esquire. (See “Ready for Her Close-Up,” page 60.)

Both authors say it’s merely fortuitous that their books have been preceded by a wave of press about Rand. Each tells me she was initially a little nervous about her controversial and much-derided subject. But they discovered that both academia and the New York literary community were filled with curiosity about Rand, if not love for her philosophy and prose.

Burns notes that people often read and love Rand without becoming dedicated warriors for laissez faire and reason. “The fact that people are able to read her without digesting her system is one of her strengths,” she argues. “It makes her acceptable to a broad range of readers rather than a narrow band willing and able to accept her fully integrated philosophical system as a guide to their life.”

But now that the Rand revival story is linking Atlas Shrugged with the contemporary wave of anti-Obama/anti–big government thinking, Burns says, “Atlas is being rebranded more explicitly as a bible of right-wing America. Maybe in the future people will come to that book with that association locked in.” If that happens, the current mania may end up making Rand’s books less appealing, not more.

Heller, the former fiction editor, admires Rand’s command of the 19th-century Dickensian epic melodrama, which was rooted in passionate concerns about society and economics. She notes in the current context that “as Ludwig Von Mises said, Rand writes about bureaucrats better than anyone else. That kind of smarminess of bureaucratic-speak— ‘we’re doing this for your own good’—is very much in evidence these days.” As Asness of AQR Capital Management says, “We still don’t know if Rand’s heroes are realistic. We can debate that. But I’d say these days that the jury is in that her villains are pretty realistic.”

For Rand’s popularity to achieve political traction, Randism will have to move beyond the strange preoccupation of a few politicians and the full-time passion of two specialist think tanks. Her ideas will need to become the guiding principle for a significant voting bloc or politically active movement. And that is a difficult problem for Objectivism, which as an organized movement never managed to convert the millions of cash-paying Rand customers into active “radicals for capitalism,” to use the author’s own self-description.

Rand’s relationship with attempts to turn her philosophy into a political force was ambivalent. When her disciple and lover Nathaniel Branden first started an official lecture series to systematize and spread her ideas in 1958, Rand was at first skeptical, then an enthusiastic helper. Later, after their affair ended badly, she squashed the operation entirely and chose to largely retreat from such efforts.

When you look at the 2009 revival, it seems as if the Republican Party or the right wing broadly conceived would be the natural political home for Rand. The few politicians who talk her up are Republicans. But dating back to National Review’s attack on Atlas Shrugged in 1957, the intellectual gatekeepers of the conservative movement have mistrusted or even hated Rand.

In March, National Review published a series of short reactions to the “going Galt” meme. Most were highly critical. In one, Joseph Bottum, editor of the Christian conservative journal First Things, called Rand “the flotsam and jetsam of ages past” and said that “William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review did the world a favor, all those years ago, by throwing the randy Randians overboard. Do we really have to let them climb back on the ship now?” Hillsdale College historian Bradley J. Birger hit on the most significant divergence between Rand and the right-wing rank and file when he called her “offensive, ignorant, and devoid of faith, hope, and love.” Rand’s militant atheism—and her vision of government’s proper role, which has no room for wealth redistribution of any sort, making almost every GOP politician a looter and moocher—makes it hard to imagine her as a thought leader for the modern political right.

Still, the Atlas Society’s Hudgins perceived signs of a more Randian right at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a modal gathering of young right-wing activists. “Of 1,757 respondents,” Hudgins wrote in a March essay at the Atlas Society’s website about a poll of conference attendees, “a whopping 74 percent said their most important goal was ‘to promote individual freedom by reducing the size and scope of government and its intrusion into the lives of its citizens.’ Only 15 percent answered ‘to promote traditional values by protecting marriage and protecting the unborn.’ And 10 percent at most wanted ‘to secure and guarantee American safety at home and abroad regardless of the cost or the size of government.’ ”

Rep. Ryan thinks the GOP needs to embrace Rand’s particular approach to politics—not merely stressing the practical benefits of freedom but arguing for its moral necessity. “We have an opportunity,” he says, “to make a choice clearly once and for all in the next two elections, and we owe it to the American people to give them a clear choice: Do you want a collectivist welfare state or do you want to get back to being a free market? We need to make a moral, not just practical or statistical, case.” Ryan admits he’s not sure the Republican Party as a whole is ready to make that argument with Rand’s uncompromising passion.

Whatever parallels one can detect between Atlas Shrugged and the current political moment, they are surely not precise. Statist nightmares that afflicted the America of the novel have not afflicted ours. Obama may be managing General Motors, and Goldman Sachs may be thriving through political pull, but nothing like the book’s “Directive 10-289,” which essentially nationalizes the entire economy and freezes everyone in his occupation, has been proposed.

Rand knew, and most of her fans knew, that her point was not to be literally prescient. Rand adored high drama and outrageous gestures, and she delighted in depicting the evil end points where she thought her intellectual enemies’ premises and beliefs would lead.

Political relevance for Rand’s work—translating the message of Atlas Shrugged into something useful in everyday life—is tricky. The Atlas Shrugged devotee who wants to change the world might note with disquiet that in the novel’s world, nothing got better until everything collapsed, with Eddie Willers, Rand’s stand-in for the average right-thinking, good-hearted, but not superbright American, weeping before a stalled train beneath an uncaring night sky.

Rand started as a novelist, and it is as a novelist that she still has the most effect on Americans’ lives. How the hundreds of thousands reading Rand for the first time this year will react to her will be personal, variable, and difficult to quantify; these readers probably will not end up propagating a new wave of small-government politics.

As Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead illustrated, lives worth living and loving can, and ultimately must, be forged in a world whose political and philosophical powers are opposed to individuality and liberty. In a society of ever-growing government where each individual’s ability to move the levers of political power is vanishingly small, that part of Rand’s message will remain the most relevant.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty (bdoherty@reason.com) is the author of This Is Burning Man (BenBella), Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs), and Gun Control on Trial (Cato Institute).

Absolute Immunity on Trial

2009-11-09T15:00:00-05:00

In 2006, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Grayson lined up more than 30 jailhouse informants to testify that they had sold drugs to Church Point, Louisiana homemaker Ann Colomb and her three sons. (I wrote about the Colomb case in the May 2008 issue of Reason.) Grayson had used some of these snitches before, in the trial of a Houston drug kingpin. After the Houston trial, Grayson was notified that several of his informants had lied, and that there may have been an information sharing network and perjury ring inside the federal prison system. No matter. Grayson used them again. Colomb and her sons were convicted, and spent three months in prison.

The Colombs were eventually freed, with all charges dismissed. Grayson's jailhouse snitches had lied again, and this time, federal judge Tucker Melancon ordered an investigation into new evidence that, somehow, portions of Grayson's case file were being distributed through federal prisons in Texas and Louisiana. The Colombs, meanwhile, spent their life savings on their defense, and were never compensated. According to defense attorneys, Grayson said at one point during the trial that it didn't matter if he personally believed his snitch witnesses, it only mattered what the jury believed, a notion he articulated again in his closing argument.

I thought about the Colomb case while reading the transcript of the oral arguments in Pottawattamie v. Maghee, heard last Wednesday before the U.S. Supreme Court (read my previous column on the case here). The case turns on whether prosecutors who knowingly fabricate evidence to convict an innocent person should be susceptible to lawsuits, or if prosecutors should always have absolute immunity from such suits, no matter how bad their behavior.

During the hearing, Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal argued that "if prosecutors have to worry at trial that every act they undertake will somehow open up the door to liability, then they will flinch in the performance of their duties and not introduce that evidence." Katyal made similar statements throughout the hearing: "When someone is introducing evidence at trial, you don't want to chill them in the performance of their duties in any way," and "the overriding interest is protecting the judicial process and not letting information be chilled and not come in." Chief Justice John Roberts underlined that formulation, twice inquiring as to the "chilling" effect of stripping immunity for prosecutors.

It took new Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor to make the obvious point: We want prosecutors to "flinch" before introducing evidence they suspect might not be true. In fact, we want them to not introduce that evidence at all. And there should be a chilling effect on misconduct as egregious as coaching witnesses to lie. If Brett Grayson had known he could be held liable for his parade of lying jailhouse snitches, perhaps he'd have vetted their stories a bit more carefully, or been more vigilant about ensuring that portions of his case file didn't somehow get passed around the prison system.

The amount of liability the would-be plaintiffs in Powattattamie want prosecutors to shoulder is minimal. The Supreme Court has held for 30 years that even prosecutors who knowingly withhold exculpatory evidence in a case that results in the conviction of an innocent person can't be sued for damages. The wrongfully convicted men in Powattattamie aren't even seeking to undo that. They're asking that prosecutors who knowingly fabricate evidence against an innocent person, then use that evidence at trial, be susceptible to a lawsuit. And even there, prosecutors would still be afforded the qualified immunity given to police officers, which means potential plaintiffs would still have a high hurdle to clear before getting into court. (It's worth noting that the prosecutors in Powattattamie weren't sanctioned or disciplined in any way, which is about par for the course in the criminal justice system.)

The problem here is that the Supreme Court has painted itself into a corner. While the Court has always upheld absolute immunity for prosecutors while trying a case, it has ruled that prosecutors who help investigate a case—that is, who act as police officers—should receive the same, reduced qualified immunity given to cops. But here's where it gets messy. At what point is a prosecutor acting as a prosecutor, and at what point is he acting like a cop? The roles have been muddied over the years.

Consider snitch testimony. Under federal law, only a federal prosecutor, and not a federal police investigator, can gauge whether information offered by a jailhouse snitch is useful enough to offer time off the informant's sentence in exchange for his testimony. That means prosecutors are put in the role of interviewing potential informants to determine whether the stories are plausible (or, if they're less scrupulous, merely whose stories are most damaging to the defendant). This is more the role of an investigator than the prosecutor of a case.

Solicitor General Katyal and the attorney for the prosecutors in Powattattamie both made the absurd argument that the actual injury in Powattattamie occured when the defendants were wrongly convicted and jailed, not when the evidence against them was manufactured. Therefore, because the prosecutors were acting in their role as triers of the case when the injury occurred, they should be immune to lawsuit, even though they were acting as investigators when they conjured up the perjured testimony in the first place. Had they passed the evidence off to another prosecutor for trial, they could still be sued. This led Justice Anthony Kennedy to ask, "so the law is the more deeply you're involved in the wrong, the more likely you are to be immune? That's a strange proposition."

It certainly is. Katyal went so far as to argue that even police officers who manufacture evidence used to convict an innocent person may not be liable, so long as they tell the prosecutor ahead of time that the evidence has been faked—again because the actual injury occurs at the time of conviction, and at the time of conviction the state actor inflicting the damage is the prosecutor acting in his role as prosecutor, at which point he has immunity. Kennedy reiterated the problem: "Again, the more aggravated the tort, the greater the immunity."

Katyal went on to argue that there is no "free-standing due process right not to be framed," a striking line that made it around the Internet last week. If you're a constitutional originalist, that statement isn't quite as controversial as it first sounds: An originalist may believe that the Constitution protects us from government overreach, but it doesn't explicitly lay out a method of recovering damages for government violations of our rights; that's left up to Congress.

The problem with the originalist interpretation is that the Constitution’s authors surely would have hoped for and expected at least some relief. The Bill of Rights both establishes a civil courts system to allow citizens to recover damages from one another, and lays out a clear set of rights that government officials aren't permitted to abrogate. It makes little sense to think, then, that the document would be consistent with the notion that government officials could systematically violate two citizens' rights in a way that resulted in significant injury (in this case, 26 years in prison), and yet be wholly immune from those citizens' efforts to collect damages, simply because Congress failed to legislate a path to relief.

One of the notable things about this case is that the pro-law enforcement position was argued by Katyal, an official in the Obama administration, while the pro-defense, anti-executive branch position was argued by Paul Clement, the former solicitor general for the Bush administration. The Obama administration has consistently taken the pro-prosecution side in criminal justice cases since Obama took office, confirming that where the rubber meets the road on issues related to police powers and the rights of the accused, what matters most is not political ideology but who holds the reins of power.

Clement's toughest questioning came from the Court's two Bush appointees, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. But Clement rather brilliantly concluded his time with a direct challenge to the two Bush-appointed justices that probably won't affect either's ruling, but at least ought to make them squirm. Keeping prosecutors immune from liability, he argued, is a classic case of judicial activism.

The phrase "absolute immunity" appears nowhere in the Constitution, nor does it appear in Section 1983, a part of the federal criminal code that provides a way for citizens to collect damages against the government. The Court read absolute immunity into the law in the 1976 case Imbler v. Pachtman because it feared the ramifications of prosecutors being susceptible to lawsuits. As Clement argued, there is "no common law support at all for absolute immunity. And I wouldn't think that this Court was particularly interested in coming up with implied immunities that aren't in the statute and had no basis at the common law, and that's why I think some of the Justices that have looked at this as an original matter have tended to be quite reluctant in recognizing absolute immunity because it lacks support in the text."

So while for most of the hearing the Court and litigants took absolute immunity as a given and debated whether and how to carve exceptions into it, Clement concluded by pulling the sheet back on absolute immunity, period. In doing so, he cleared a path for the justices to revoke absolute immunity altogether, or at least severely limit the concept. That almost certainly won't happen. But it should (but probably won't) give the Court's conservative wing some cover to at least poke enough holes in prosecutorial immunity to discourage the more egregious examples of misconduct.

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

Reason.tv: Dating in the Atlasphere

2009-11-09T12:00:00-05:00

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Remembering the Victims of Communism

2009-11-09T10:31:00-05:00

Our Dangerous Cold War Nostalgia

2009-11-09T07:00:00-05:00

Communism was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, and one of the greatest in human history. Twenty years ago, suddenly and improbably, it fell into its death throes.

The end began the night of Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was opened, allowing East Germans to leave the prison that constituted their country. Throughout Eastern Europe, one Communist regime after another disintegrated. Within two years, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was not only out of power but banned by law. A system soaked in the blood of millions was gone.

It was the most dramatic, life-affirming, and miraculous event of our time. And for those of us in the West, it is one from which we have yet to recover.

The Cold War was often grim and scary. For four decades, we had to maintain vast defenses against a numerically superior enemy that threatened the freedom of our allies and, by extension, ourselves. We lived with the daily reality that, with the push of a button in the Kremlin, we would all be dead in half an hour.

But the "long twilight struggle," as John F. Kennedy called it, was also inspiring. It gave us a purpose greater than ourselves. In those days, most Americans understood it was our national duty to prevent the spread of the most malignant force on earth, lest it enslave us all.

That may sound absurd to anyone who has grown up since 1989. But there were serious people who feared the worst. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher thought that in the 1970s, the West was "slowly but surely losing."

Our unequivocal victory brought joy, but it also created something else: a void in our lives. If upholding freedom and democracy against a global enemy was not our purpose, what was?

In his 1989 essay, "The End of History?" published in The National Interest, Francis Fukuyama celebrated the triumph of liberal democracy over communism. But he feared "centuries of boredom" once the "worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism" was replaced by such dull fare as "the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."

The end of the Cold War left us searching for something to match its gravity, drama, and urgency. Unfortunately, some people have managed to find it.

For conservatives, it has been the war against terrorism. There was terrorism during the Cold War, but we regarded it as a lethal but limited nuisance. After 9/11, though, President Bush said our task was nothing less than to "rid the world of evil."

Before long, he persuaded himself and the country that the effort demanded the invasion of Iraq. The dangers Saddam Hussein and his kind presented, Bush told Czech students, were "just as dangerous as those perils that your fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers faced." That fantasy led us into tragic folly.

The right has also had trouble shaking the fear of totalitarianism. Lacking the specter of Soviet tyrants, they have found a suitable replacement in Barack Obama, who is routinely, and ridiculously, compared to Stalin and Mao.

Liberals are likewise susceptible to extravagant dread spawned by misplaced nostalgia. For many of them, the darkest time of the Cold War was the McCarthy era, when anti-communist fevers spawned abuses of power and persecution of the innocent. The left has spent the past eight years denouncing a new wave of domestic repression that, in reality, never materialized.

It's no coincidence that the film Good Night, and Good Luck, about CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's brave stand against Sen. Joseph McCarthy, came out in 2005. Director George Clooney said it was highly relevant to the present: "We do this every 30 or 40 years; we just sort of, you know, go crazy."

But in the realm of civil liberties the Bush administration, though it often went wrong, did not go crazy. Dissenters were not ruined or jailed. Muslims were not herded en masse into internment camps. While there were instances of indefensible overreaching, there was no reign of terror on the home front.

In reality, we are never likely to face anything comparable to the perils and fears that hung over our heads during the Cold War, and for that we should be immensely grateful. Once was enough. Wasn't it?

What's Wrong With Ayn Rand?

2009-11-06T16:30:00-05:00

Love her or hate her, you can't deny that Ayn Rand, the 20th century's most bellicose/eloquent (select adjective based on political persuasion) defender of laissez-faire capitalism, is experiencing a revival. Sales of her 50-year-old magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, for years second only to the Bible, are soaring even more this year. Two major publishing houses have rushed to release new Rand biographies—by academics, no less—this fall. And there is nary a tea party protest that doesn't prominently splash banners alluding to John Galt, Atlas Shrugged's ubermensch hero.

The latest issue of Reason magazine, with which I am affiliated, has Rand on the cover with a headline proclaiming: "She's Back." GQ echoes the same thing with its own slant, "The Bitch is Back," not to mention a hilariously naughty picture depicting Rand in an S&M outfit standing astride her former devotee Alan Greenspan.

That over 25 years after her death, Rand's persona and ideas command so much attention is testimony to the abiding power of her ideas. Still the question remains, if she is so influential, why are we on the brink of socialized medicine today? Put another way, if Rand were alive, would she be reveling in the renewed attention she is receiving as a measure of her success? Or would she be tearing her hair out in despair at her failure to stop the advancing Big Government juggernaut?

The point is especially powerful if one considers the influence that some of the other great philosophical defenders of liberty have had in the past. John Locke set out to release the individual from the tyranny of religious authorities by enunciating the doctrine of the separation of church and state. Today, this doctrine is the cornerstone of every liberal democracy in the world. Likewise, Adam Smith penned his grand defense of free trade to beat back the mercantilist ideologies that held sway in 18th century Europe. Today, the cause of free trade—notwithstanding occasional bouts of protectionism—is gaining ground worldwide. But Rand's life-long crusade—defeating socialism—which appeared within grasp just two decades ago when the Soviet Union collapsed, now seems to have regressed to the 1930s, when FDR used the economic meltdown to massively intervene in private industry.

Rand's adherents blame this state of affairs on the faulty philosophical principles of society—especially on issues of morality. But replacing false ideas with true ones is precisely what transformative figures do, and certainly what Rand, who firmly believed in the power of reason and truth, was hoping to do. Surely, if she had witnessed the events of last year—the government bailout of banks, the takeover of auto companies, the looming socialization of health care—she'd be wondering where she went wrong. Or, to use her lingo, she'd be "checking her premises."

So where did she go wrong?

Rand's entire project involved liberating the individual from the yoke of collectivism and creating the social, moral, and political conditions in which he could live a fully actualized life. Each individual's own happiness is his highest purpose, she said, and boldly declared selfishness to be a virtue—contrary to what various religious and non-religious (communist, fascist, communitarian) preachers of the ethics of self-sacrifice had been saying for ages.

For people like myself, laboring under the twin tyrannies of tradition and socialism when I first read Rand in my native India, this is heady, empowering stuff. It supplies you with the moral and intellectual ammunition to stand up to those claiming to own a piece of you—family, community, and state—and take control of your own destiny.

But is self-actualization through productive work—the ultimate goal of this liberation for Rand—all there is to a happy life? Two centuries before Rand arrived on the scene, Adam Smith had already written The Wealth of Nations, a powerful treatise demonstrating why self-interest offers a more secure foundation for a rational society than a selfless dedication to the common good. But he also recognized in the very first sentence of the Theory of Moral Sentiments—his brilliantly nuanced, richly observed study of human morality—that: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."

Smith spent his whole life examining and reconciling both the self-interested and the "other-interested" side of human nature. Rand, on the other hand, effectively put these two sides at war—limiting her usefulness in the fight to stop the growth of government in the bargain.

Rand sought to provide an individualistic and moral defense of capitalism—not a practical and collectivist one. She understood better than anybody that by unleashing the productive potential of individuals, capitalism delivers untold social benefits. But these benefits weren't the primary reason to defend capitalism, she insisted. Rather, it is that capitalism frees individuals—especially those with exceptional abilities, the Howard Roarks and the John Galts—to reach their highest potential.

By grounding capitalism and economic liberties in the psychic needs of individuals as opposed to, say, GDP growth, Rand avoided the collectivist trap under which individual rights are dependent for their legitimacy on serving some broader social purpose. However, this great virtue of her approach turns into a great vice in the context of her broader message, which seems to regard anything beyond a perfunctory interest in the well-being of others as vaguely illicit.

Unlike Smith, Rand failed to fully recognize that though human beings are not constituted for self-sacrifice, they have an innate need to see others prosper. Hence, there is something crabbed and withholding in her writings, as if she is going out of her way on principle to avoid giving any assurance that everyone in fact would be better off under capitalism. Other libertarian theorists—Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises—avoided this flaw. But Rand regarded their defense of capitalism as insufficiently pure. And to the extent that it is Rand's—not their—case for capitalism that sticks in the popular imagination, it might enhance—not diminish—the allure of government over free-market solutions to social issues such as health coverage for the uninsured.

Most people read Rand when they are young and are deeply moved by her, only to outgrow her by mid-life. Her adherents like to blame this on the moral pusillanimity and irrationality of the readers. But the real problem is perhaps with Rand herself: Her ideology of self-actualization speaks much more to the concerns of the young than the mature—again, because she ignores the "other-interested" side of human nature.

Consider what she wrote in her essay "The Ethics of Emergency": "The proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one's own rational self-interest and one's own hierarchy of values: The time, money or effort one gives or the risk one takes should be proportionate to the value of the person in one's own happiness." This statement certainly doesn't preclude helping others so long as they are important to us. But it doesn't tell us whether we should make them important to us in the first place.

For example, under Rand's schema would a person who abandons some passion in order to look after an elderly parent have a higher or lower moral standing than someone who doesn't (assuming that the parents are equally worthy)? Will the former be happier? More at peace? Rand gives us no real reason to believe so. In fact, the distinct impression one gets from her work is that an individual's first duty is to cultivating his own passions rather than nurturing his interest in the flourishing of those around him (with the possible exception of one's romantic partner). No surprise then that the virtue of generosity or benevolence, though it has pride of place in the work of Aristotle—the only philosopher to whom Rand acknowledges any intellectual debt—occupies a second-class status in her own work.

The fact is that Rand gets harder to take as one grows older and concerns about those around us become more important than our own personal project of self development. The relentless, single-minded dedication to one's passions that Rand seems to favor requires a coldness of the soul, a narrowing of one's humanity—the natural interest in the fortune of others that Smith alludes to—that most people find is not exactly conducive to their happiness.

This has profound and unfortunate political consequences. On the practical level, it makes it difficult to build a strong and growing anti-government movement based solely on Rand's philosophy, because the older cohort of her followers is falling off on a regular basis. On the theoretical level, Rand's ideas offer no real possibility of developing robust civil society responses to address the needs of those down on their luck. It is difficult to imagine a Randian qua Randian, say, volunteering in a soup kitchen to feed the hungry, or even founding the Fraternal Order of Fellow Randians to provide free health coverage and housing to jobless and homeless Randians. Since misfortune and distress are a normal part of the human condition, a philosophy that offers no positive, private solutions to deal with them will just have a harder time making the case against government intervention stick.

Rand's resurgence is certainly a welcome antidote to the Big Government onslaught that the country is experiencing right now. In the age of bailouts, the world certainly needs to hear—loud and clear—her message of personal freedom as well as its corollary, personal responsibility. But if Rand is going to play a starring role in the long-term battle to defeat statist ideologies, rather than making episodic, cameo appearances, her work will require a radical overhaul. Ultimately, the best way to honor her is by making her cause succeed—even if that means jettisoning some of her intellectual baggage.

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

Social Science in the Drug War Zone

2009-11-06T15:00:00-05:00

The Mexican city of Juarez, on the U.S. border at El Paso, Texas, has been suffering from wild waves of drug war-related violence in the past few years. Howard Campbell, a professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, just realeased a book, Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juarez, shedding light on the background of what he calls the "drug war zone" that binds Juarez and El Paso, Mexico and the United States.

The book is composed of a series of personal testimonials of sorts, stories told to Campbell in his field studies from over a dozen people involved in various areas of the drug trade. His characters include dealers ranging from tough Mexican women to anarchist American students, innocent witnesses of drug war violence and threatened journalists reporting on it, as well as assorted drug warriors, including a Juarez cop trying to stay on the up-and-up and an undercover American narc.

These detailed stories paint a vivid on-the-ground picture of the futilities and failures of the attempt to prevent people from legally selling and using certain drugs, and the personal and civic tragedies that result. Senior Editor Brian Doherty interviewed Campbell by phone earlier this week.

reason: What inspired you as a sociologist and anthropologist to study the world of illegal drugs on the Juarez-El Paso border?

Howard Campbell: Two factors caused me to write this book. One was living in Mexico for many years and realizing that the drug business was so huge, and there was quite a bit of information publicly known in newspapers, yet the government didn’t seem to do much; the underworld lifestyle and control could go on undeterred. Then I moved to El Paso and began to realize as the drug war accelerated how damaging to local society it was—mainly because of the violence. Drug abuse can be a problem but the overarching problem was the violence associated with illegal drug trafficking. And it was easy to research and write because I knew so many people who knew the drug trade from the inside.

reason: Many of your subjects—particularly Francisco, who was murdered by the Carrillo cartel and Mexican investigative reporter Rafael Nunez—present a very dangerous world, one where saying too much to the wrong people can be fatal. Was this a frightening topic to research and write about?

Campbell: It is a dangerous world, but I was really more worried about the safety of my informants than myself. They have more at stake. So I disguised their identities as much as possible so they’d be protected. I found people surprisingly open to talking about these issues, maybe because the drug trade and drug war are such an everyday part of life in their communities. In El Paso and Juarez people are not as shocked at drug issues as people tend to be farther in the interior. Another factor is that many people I interviewed I have known for a very long time and had already established strong bonds of trust.

reason: Why has the drug war violence situation in Juarez gotten so insanely out of control in the past few years?

Campbell: The big Mexican cartels have been around roughly for 30 years, and for the first 20 years they operated freely and there was not really a high level of violence and public insecurity connected with drug trafficking. There were murders, but they were internal to the cartels; the people being killed tended to be part of the underworld.

Mexico had been controlled by PRI, a well-connected populist party well organized at every level of Mexican society, but very corrupt. It lost favor among the people and PRI lost power in 2000 to PAN, a more free-market American-style party, but PAN lacked the political skills to keep a lid on drug problem. The more corrupt government did more to manage the drug trade. Mexico might be a more democratic country now and booming in free trade to some degree, but all of that created more freedom for cartels to expand business. The old mechanisms used to keep cartels under control broke down when PRI was thrown out. There was more competition between drug organizations and hustling to create new alliances with people in government and the police.

So since 2000 the violence has really been heating up, and from 2006 onward it’s been a somewhat anarchic situation. With the old relations of patronage and corruption between the cartels and government, the cartels were kept under control to a degree. But those mechanisms broke down and they had a freewheeling situation in which big cartels tried to expand.

The Sinaloa cartel run by "El Chapo" Guzman tried to take over the border and that critical transit point for drugs into the U.S. The Sinoloa cartel tried to overpower the Gulf cartel in the state of Tamaulipas and city of Nuevo Laredo; there was a drawn out fight from 2004-06, and the Sinaloa group lost that battle. The Gulf cartel maintained power and control, and that’s really critical because that’s the area that connects to the I-35 into the heartland of the U.S.

So Sinaloa switched its focus to Juarez in the middle of the Mexican border and again confronted a powerful, deeply entrenched cartel, the Juarez cartel [run by Amado Carrillo Fuentes]. In 2008 a war started, really a civil war, with fighting like in Baghdad between two cartels, Sinaloa coming from outside trying to take over Juarez.

The violence increased a by magnitude of 10-20. Homicide rates had been 100-200 a year but as of 2008, there were 1,600 homicides in Juarez and so far this year more than 2,100. This war is ongoing daily; now in Juarez every day there’s at least one homicide except on October 29. That was a rare day no one was murdered; “no one killed yesterday” was the rare headline. Juarez has become the most dangerous city in the world for murders and kidnappings, with war in the streets, back and forth massacres with as many as 20 murdered in one spot; lots of victims often decapitated or tortured.

A lot of kidnappings are by organized crime groups that may be part of the cartel or may be policemen or former policemen; the kidnapping is mainly a business just to make money. With law and order broken down, opportunistic crimes like bank robbing or any crime has increased in Juarez. Consequently the federal government in Mexico sent up 10,000 soldiers and 2,000 federal policemen, a major force patrolling the city. That effort was effective for only one month, March 2008. After that violence increased and has increased to the present, a steady acceleration of violence with no end in sight in spite of the massive militarization of the city. This raises questions about what is the military doing? The average person in Juarez would say it’s making the problem worse because it’s very corrupt and lots of Mexicans think the military is allied essentially with the Sinaloa cartel.

reason: Has all the violence spilled over significantly to El Paso?

Campbell: You hear a lot of discussion in the U.S. about the spillover of Mexican drug violence but El Paso is amazingly safe when it comes to violent crimes, like 10 for Juarez’s 2,100. And if it wasn’t for the international border, they’d be one city, they are absolutely back to back; it’s a river and border dividing one city.

I have two theories why: El Paso is heavily militarized and fortified, we have Fort Bliss, the El Paso Intelligence Center, the DEA, border patrol, various police agencies. A second factor is that El Paso is a city of immigrants from Mexico, and people learned to avoid trouble; it’s almost a way of life [for these immigrants] to keep their head down and stay out of trouble so people here tend to be very law abiding. I should add, at least 50 American citizens have been murdered recently in the drug war in Juarez that happened to be born in El Paso and maybe lived in Mexico; quite a few people from El Paso end up murdered in Juarez.

reason: How much of that sort of official corruption you write about on the Mexican side is in effect on the U.S. side?

Campbell: I suspect lots more on the U.S. side than we realize. How else do Mexicans so easily bring in hundreds of tons [of drugs] each year? It’s partly that they are good and creative at bringing drugs across, but surely there’s more corruption than we know about. It’s dangerous and scary to think agents of the U.S. feds are bought off and on the payroll of cartels and we can’t say how many, but one can surely suspect more than we realize.

reason: Your studies of this world have led you to believe the current war on drugs is futile and pointless. You interview in your book Terry Nelson, a former Border Patrol man who now works with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, who agrees. How many of the people on the drug supply side of your “drug war zone” do you find agree that public policy regarding drugs should change?

Campbell: I suppose traffickers would scoff at the idea that the war on drugs is winnable as they personally find it so easy to bring drugs into the U.S. I was surprised at the extent people who work for the U.S. government informally would tell me they don’t think it’s winnable either, so I really do think we are at the point where there will be changes in drug policy if people look at the facts. I hope my book contributes to a more complicated way of thinking about the issue, to recognize we are not going to wipe out drug consumption and trafficking. So let’s focus on the most harmful effects of these drugs of abuse, and the most harmful part is the violence, and second the harm done by addiction to heroin and cocaine. We have so many people locked up in prison for drug crimes and they become criminals for life.

We had a conference about a month ago in El Paso examining 40 years of the war on drugs. The second in command of the DEA Anthony Placido spoke, and his perspective was, they are doing a great job. Of course they don’t catch it all, but they are doing the best they can. The anti-drug effort is internally contradictory; they have to justify big budgets, especially now that they are competing with terrorism problem [which impels them to hype the problem], and they also have to show effectiveness, which is an incentive to produce busts in these huge quantities. I don’t know how much you trust DEA [statistics on size and value on big busts]—I guess as much as you trust the CIA or any other branch of the federal government. As citizens we have to be very cautious and very critical of government, and the main issue should be, not do they grab big piles of drugs, but does the policy work? And that should mean whether [our drug policy is] having a positive impact on American society, and I would argue it is not.

reason: Any fresh efforts to combat or innovate in the elaborate system of drug smuggling tricks that your interview subjects detail?

Campbell: Apparently the main way coke comes through now is hiding it in 18-wheeler trucks, especially in Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, and Juarez. We have lines of hundreds, thousands of trucks crossing every day and the U.S. can’t inspect every one without destroying free trade; these things are sensitive, the trucks are getting parts to places on time so cars can be built, so there are consequences to holding them up.

Mexico is much more deeply affected by all this. I was in Austin giving a talk over the weekend and how few people even heard about the situation in Juarez surprised me. The United States as a whole remains insolated, even though it’s right on the border. But in Mexico this is the single most important issue. The country is in chaos; there’s no safe place anymore and there’s a tremendous pressure on the president and the system to do something to lower violence. There was a decriminalization of certain possession of small amounts but that won’t change the larger international drug trafficking business at all. But when it comes to illegal drugs I guess I don’t look for utopian answers. We need to start with incremental changes to improve, and surely decriminalization of possession is part of that.

Reason.tv: Goddess of the Market Author Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand

2009-11-06T12:00:00-05:00

Friday Funnies

2009-11-06T07:00:00-05:00

Baby Barnum

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

Film fans rejoice: You can now receive a refund if a movie doesn't live up to its hype. Or at least you can if the picture is aimed at an audience of infants.

The movies in question are the videos made by Baby Einstein, a brand associated with gentle, plotless pictures for the cradles-and-diapers set. These were initially sold as self-improvement tools for tots: The company promised "educational content," "a rich and interactive learning experience," even "greater brain capacity." Today it's a bit less exuberant about its products' potential. In 2006 the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood complained to the Federal Trade Commission that "no research or evidence exists to support" such claims; Baby Einstein's corporate parent, Disney, responded by ceasing to describe the DVDs as educational. Thanks to that and related changes on the Baby Einstein website, the commission decided "not to recommend enforcement action at this time," though it left the door open to a more muscular response down the road. That wasn't enough for the Campaign, which felt the brand carried an implicit claim of intellectual uplift, with the programs' very titles—Baby Einstein, Baby Mozart, Baby Da Vinci—reinforcing the idea that the discs didn't merely entertain the youngsters but were good for them.

So the group organized a class action lawsuit. Disney settled, and in September it announced it was offering its customers a refund. From now through March, households can return up to four Baby Einstein DVDs for $15.99 apiece. You need only send in the videos to get the money: You don't have to provide a receipt, and you don't have to demonstrate you bought those DVDs with their alleged educational value in mind.

That last point is more significant than it might sound. The history of cinema is littered with pictures that pretended to offer some redeeming social value (a morality play, an avant-garde experiment) though both the industry and the audience understood that the main appeal was something less ennobling. In most cases, the not-so-secret second agenda was to look at naked people. With the Baby Einstein series, it's to keep the tots transfixed for a bit while the parents take a break. In a TV-free home, this might be accomplished by putting the baby beneath a mobile. With a DVD player, the baby can watch a mobile, a puppet, or some other toy cavorting on a screen.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is aware of this additional motive. Indeed, its original complaint to the FTC included quotes from customers whose frank comments once appeared on the Baby Einstein site: "thanks to you, I get to take a shower every day" and "It has given opportunities to tidy around the house - or just a breather" and "while I shower or wash the dishes, I can just pop in a video and he is completely glued to the television for the whole duration of the show." Now, thanks to the settlement, those parents can send back the DVDs, which the kids will have outgrown by now anyway, and get a little cash for their trouble. Progress!

Not that I have anything against a parent who wants half an hour to clean the kitchen and take a bath. Indeed, I have more sympathy for those ordinary human needs than for the fantasy that you're giving your one-year-old a leg up by showing her a movie of some puppets marching around to a synthesizer performance of "Wellington's Victory." When my daughter was born, I quickly came to dislike Baby Einstein and its imitators, with their No Child Left Behind approach to the playroom: They seemed to prey on the angst of nervous middle-class parents who see every loose statistical correlation that gets mentioned in the news as a diktat establishing the sole scientifically approved approach to raising a child.

But the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood feeds the same sort of fears. (Any choice you face as a parent, from breastfeeding to the optimal number of siblings, will produce an battery of buttinskis on both sides, all eager to explain why their preferences are the One Best Way.) The Campaign's co-founder, Susan Linn, tells parents that "TV viewing interferes with cognitive development, language development and regular sleep patterns," warns that a "preschooler's risk for obesity increases by six per cent for every hour of TV watched per day," and announces, "Research also suggests that the more time babies spend in front of TV, the less time they spend engaging in two activities that really do facilitate learning: interacting with parents away from screens, and spending time actively involved in creative play." Such scholarship is real, though its conclusions aren't as settled as Linn might think. But the reasonable reactions to the research are all modest and commonsensical: Play with your kids, watch what they eat, and don't park a baby in front of a television for hours. It's much less sensible to fret that you're damaging your six-month-old for life if you let him stare at a pair of sheep exchanging baaaas while you take a short shower. Children are individuals, not statistics, and the context and quantity of their TV intake surely matters much more than whether they watch television at all.

Meanwhile, it isn't clear why courts and regulators should be involved in the issue. False advertising is a crime, but usually we allow some latitude when the product being pitched consists of speech. There are advice books out there whose suggestions are actively pernicious, but no one would dream of calling the FTC on the publishers for categorizing them as "self-help"; the First Amendment problems would be obvious. But 57 years after the Supreme Court ruled that the Bill of Rights protects motion pictures, moving images still seem to be held to a different standard.

Or at least they are when tiny children are involved. Hollywood can breathe easy: As of yet, there's no sign that anyone will be forced to pay a refund when a grown-up viewer discovers that An American Carol is not actually "an ingenious comedy" or that G.I. Joe is not in fact a film in which "evil never looked so good." The studios may even continue to get away with that hoariest of movie lies, "based on a true story"—but that phrase has a whiff of educational worth, so who knows?

Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason magazine.

The Double Standard About Bias in Journalism

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

I made The New York Times last week. It even ran my picture. My mother would be proud.

Unfortunately, the story was critical. It said, "Critics have leaped on Mr. Stossel's speaking engagements as the latest evidence of conservative bias on the part of Fox."

Which "critics" had "leaped"? The reporter mentioned Rachel Maddow. I wouldn't think her criticism newsworthy, but Times reporters may use MSNBC as their guide to life. He also quoted an "associate professor of journalism" who said my speeches were "'pretty shameful' by traditional journalistic standards." All this because I spoke at an event for Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a "conservative advocacy group."

It is odd that this is a news story. In August, AFP hired me to do the very same thing. I give the money to charity. The Times didn't call that "shameful."

But in August, I worked for ABC News. Now, I work for Fox. Hmmm.

It reminds me of something that happened earlier in my career.

I was one of America's first TV consumer reporters. I approached the job with an attitude. If companies ripped people off, I would embarrass them on TV—and demand that government do something. (I now regret the latter—the former was a good thing.)

I clearly had a point of view: I was a crusader out to punish corporate bullies. My colleagues liked it. I got job offers. I won 19 Emmys. I was invited to speak at journalism conferences.

Then, gradually, I figured out that business, for the most part, treats consumers pretty well. The way to get rich in business is to create something good, sell it for a reasonable price, acquire a reputation for honesty, and keep pleasing customers so they come back for more.

As a local TV reporter, I could find plenty of crooks. But once I got to the national stage—20/20 and Good Morning America—it was hard to find comparable national scams. There were some: Enron, Bernie Madoff, etc. But they are rare. In a $14 trillion economy, you'd think there'd be more. But there aren't.

I figured out why: Market forces, even when hampered by government, keep scammers in check. Reputation matters. Word gets out. Good companies thrive, and bad ones atrophy. Regulation barely deters the cheaters, but competition does.

It made me want to learn more about free markets. I subscribed to Reason magazine and read Cato Institute research papers. Then Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Aaron Wildavsky.

My reporting changed. I started taking skeptical looks at government—especially regulation. I did an ABC TV special, "Are We Scaring You to Death?" that said we TV reporters often make hysterical claims about chemicals, pollution, and other relatively minor risks. Its good ratings—16 million viewers—surprised my colleagues.

Suddenly, I wasn't so popular with them.

I stopped winning Emmys.

I was invited on CNN's media program, Reliable Sources, to be interviewed by The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz and an indignant Bernard Kalb. They titled the segment, "Objectivity and Journalism: Does John Stossel Practice Either?" It was in big letters over my head.

Apparently, I had broken the rules.

On the air they told me that I was no longer objective. I was too stunned to defend myself effectively. I said something like: "I've always had a point of view. How come you had no trouble with that when I criticized business?"

In hindsight, I wish I'd said: "Look at the title on the wall, you hypocrites! It shows you have a point of view, too. Many reporters do. You just don't like my arguments now that I no longer hew to your statist line. So you want to shut me up."

But I didn't.

So I'll say it now: Reporters who think coercive government control is generally good and I, who thinks voluntary market forces are generally better, both have a point of view.

So why am I the one called biased?

I like what "Americans for Prosperity" defends. I'm an American, and I'm for prosperity. What creates prosperity is free and competitive markets. That means limited government.

And I will speak about that every chance I get.

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: Reason Foundation Co-Founder Tibor Machan on Ayn Rand

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

America Only Seems Polarized

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

Barack Obama held out hope of overcoming partisan divides, lowering the temperature, and bringing Americans together. How's that working out? Not well, it appears. One year after he was elected, Americans look more polarized than ever.

In a special House election in upstate New York, a Conservative Party candidate, backed by Sarah Palin, took on a moderate Republican whom his supporters called a "radical leftist," forced her to withdraw, and then lost to the Democrat. It's entirely possible that in the Senate, not a single Republican will vote for an administration-supported health insurance overhaul.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), laments that "it makes news when Democrats and Republicans do something of substance together and that truly is a shame." From cable TV news channels, you get the impression of a country not so much politically divided as verging on civil war.

Here's a solution to that problem: Stop watching cable TV news channels and listening to politicians. Using them as a gauge of how divided we are is like using the National Hockey League to estimate the level of violence in America.

Most Americans aren't rabid liberals or fanatical conservatives. Gallup recently found that more people call themselves conservative than liberal or moderate. But other polls contradict it. According to a 2008 survey by the National Opinion Research Center, when you give them more options—extremely liberal, liberal, slightly liberal, moderate, slightly conservative, conservative, or extremely conservative—you find that the largest ideological group is moderates, with 37.3 percent compared to 34.5 percent for the three conservative groups combined.

Add up the moderates and those who are only slightly liberal or slightly conservative and those who don't know—those clustered in the middle of the road—and you've got about two-thirds of the citizenry. As political scientists Morris Fiorina of Stanford's Hoover Institution and Samuel Abrams of Harvard put it, "the American electorate in 2008 is much better described as centrist than polarized."

Moreover, they note in a forthcoming paper, the public is not getting more polarized. "In terms of their ideological orientations," they note, "the American electorate looks about the same as it did when Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Republican Jerry Ford in the not very polarized 1976 election"—Carter being conservative by Democratic standards and Ford moderate by GOP standards of the day.

So why does everything feel so bitterly divided? One reason is that the elected officials of the two major parties have definitely gotten more ideologically uniform. A generation ago, we had liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, two species that are nearly extinct. In 1965, half of House Republicans voted in favor of creating Medicare. No such mass crossover this time.

Among ordinary people who identify with one party or the other, however, there is far more diversity of views than among either party's leaders. Gun owners and evangelical Christians are supposed to be repelled by elitist liberal Democrats, but Fiorina and Abrams report that nearly 40 percent of gun owners voted for Obama, along with more than a quarter of white evangelical Protestants. Though Republicans are the anti-abortion party, one-third of Democrats are closer to the GOP position than to that of their own party.

Strictly ideological parties mean most people have little choice but to vote for ideologues. Faced with a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican, write Abrams and Fiorina, voters "tend to vote for the candidate on their side of the spectrum, although they might well have preferred more moderate choices."

Another reason for the acidic climate is the rise of cable TV networks that thrive by taking ideological sides, day in and day out. Twenty years ago, they didn't exist. Today, watching Fox News, you get the impression that huge numbers of Americans regard Obama as a Stalinist. Switch on MSNBC, and you would assume that most people want Dick Cheney sent to Guantanamo.

You would be mistaken. Fox News averages just 2.6 million viewers on a typical weeknight, or less than 1 percent of Americans. MSNBC does even worse, with 831,000 per night. The three major network newscasts, which offer less overt bias, pull in a combined total of more than 20 million viewers each evening.

The average American citizen, contrary to myth, is neither very angry, nor very far to the left or the right, nor inclined to treat anyone with different opinions as a mortal enemy. In a cluttered media environment, the most extreme voices tend to attract so much attention that it's easy to forget something important: Most people aren't listening.

A Politically Charged Lightning Rod

2009-11-04T16:30:00-05:00

Sarah from Alaska: The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a New Conservative Superstar, by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, PublicAffairs, 301 pages, $26.95

The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star, by Matthew Continetti, Sentinel, 226 pages, $25.95

No recent political figure has ignited the fury of the chattering classes like former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Shortly after she injected signs of life into the zombified McCain campaign with a rousing speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention, the little-known figure was dissed by Salon's Cintra Wilson as a "power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty" whose conservative ideology made the liberal, feminist writer "feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism."

Martin Peretz, the editor in chief of the New Republic, sniffed that the candidate "was pretty like a cosmetics saleswoman at Macy's" and that it was "good to see that the Palin family didn't torture poor Bristol [unmarried, pregnant and 17 at the time], at least in the open."

The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, a self-identified conservative who calls his Daily Dish "the most popular one-man political blog site in the world," persistently claimed that Trig Palin, the governor's then-4-month-old baby with Down syndrome, was not Sarah's biological child and requested the full release of her obstetrical records, stopping just short of demanding he be sent the placenta for genetic testing. (If President Obama is hounded by a small group of reality-challenged "birthers," who doubt he was born in Hawaii, Palin is certainly the only politician to have given rise to what might be called "after-birthers," who doubt that she delivered her own children.)

Even Palin's defenders had issues with modulation and mental balance. Watching last year's vice presidential debate, National Review's Rich Lowry squealed that Palin's smile "sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America."

Two new books—hitting stores just weeks before Palin's own Going Rogue memoir will come out to record-setting advance orders—attempt to explain why the hockey mom from Wasilla, Alaska, drives both detractors and fans alike to something approaching insanity. Each is serious, well researched, and well written, but neither quite fully explains the oversize reaction to Palin.

As its title implies, The Persecution of Sarah Palin, written by Weekly Standard staffer Matthew Continetti and publishing Nov. 12, is flatly sympathetic to Palin, whom he paints as the victim of a conspiracy as vast and punishing as the Alaskan landscape. "When they weren't mangling facts," he writes, "the press did their best to undermine Palin's accomplishments."

The core of her immense appeal to jes' plain folks, he says, is also the core of upper-crust contempt for her: "The American meritocratic elite places a high priority on verbal felicity and the attitudes, practices, and jargon that one picks up during graduate seminars in nonprofit management, government accounting, and the semiotics of Percy Shelley's 'To a Skylark.' " Palin, he notes, "speaks in a different patois."

This is more than a little plausible. Indeed, I can remember college-professor friends of mine confessing that, in addition to Palin's pro-life bona fides, it was ultimately her accent, University of Idaho BA, and flute performance in the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant that made them "horrified" by her.

If Continetti helps to explain the unbelievable vitriol of many on the left, he fails to grapple with a more moderate but more widespread sense that Palin was simply not up to the task of being vice president. Certainly, high-profile conservatives such as David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, and Kathleen Parker ended up as Palin critics not because she was populist or anti-abortion but because she came across as manifestly unqualified for the position of vice president. If her résumé (small-town mayor, short-term governor of a low-population state) was thin upon nomination, her performance in key moments was often cringe-inducing. "Palin's recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate," wrote Parker in 2008. "Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League."

Indeed, even Continetti acknowledges that Palin flubbed the Couric interview, which was packed with such softball questions as "what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this [job]" and what Supreme Court cases did she find particularly important?

Given the compressed public schedule of the campaign because of the last-minute nature of the pick, Palin needed to score high every time she appeared. She didn't do that, in part, for reasons explained by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe in Sarah From Alaska. Conroy and Walshe covered the Palin campaign for CBS News and Fox News Channel, respectively. "Palin is neither an unblemished victim of fiendish, unpatriotic forces nor a preposterous dolt worthy only of a smirk," they write. She is "outwardly confident but frequently shows signs of profound insecurity" and is "hypersensitive to criticism and naysayers." That confidence and hypersensitivity often got in the way of the preparation that might have helped her survive what is surely the very toughest gantlet in politics, a long-shot presidential campaign conducted in the midst of two unpopular wars and an economic panic.

Palin's penchant to shade the truth, even on trivial matters, is also far from endearing. One of her biggest applause lines on the stump was that she had said "Thanks, but no thanks" to federal money for the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" at Gravina Island. In fact, she supported the project until it became controversial and, after it was killed, she refused to return the federal funds and constructed what Conroy and Walshe call a "Road to Nowhere" that leads to where the bridge would have been.

As both books underscore, despite (or maybe because of) the intense animosity she has called forth from opponents, Palin will be a key player in attempts to re-brand the GOP as something other than the loser party in 2010, 2012, and beyond. Her surprising resignation as governor of Alaska bespeaks an impulsiveness that would undercut the sort of discipline and strategy for a long-haul role. But her ability to draw massive crowds (and fundraising dollars) and to start a national conversation via Facebook and the Wall Street Journal about "death panels" in health-care reform legislation suggests she has a strong grip on many Americans' anxieties and hopes. If Richard Nixon could come back from a famously non-mediagenic presidential run, a humiliating gubernatorial defeat, and the most god-awful retirement speech in history, there's no reason that Sarah Palin can't. Or at least won't try.

Nick Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.tv and Reason.com. This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.

Can It Be? A Party for Capitalism?

2009-11-04T15:00:00-05:00

For perhaps the first time in American history, seemingly rational adults will sit down and spend significant time dissecting the off-off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York's much-discussed 23rd Congressional District.

Naturally, a consensus will emerge:

The angry, hard-right, radical, insane (etc.) conservative base has hijacked the Republican Party and, in the process, further alienated a beleaguered nation—a nation that apparently is hankering for tripling deficits and government takeovers of the health care, energy, banking, and car industries.

Like Democrats, I, too, hope Republicans suffer. By focusing on needless culture wars, nurturing government centralization and growth, and spending without restraint, the GOP has downgraded fiscal conservatism to nothing more than election-time rhetoric over the past decade. And not surprisingly, Republican identification is also at an all-time low.

So how is it, some wonder, that a recent Gallup Poll claims that "conservative" remains the dominant ideological group in this nation—with between 39 and 41 percent of voters identifying themselves as either "very conservative" or "conservative"?

The percentage of independents describing their views as "conservative" has also grown, to 35 percent from 29 percent in just one year.

What does it mean to be conservative these days? I mean, "conservative" happens to be the default self-identifying ideological designation of nearly every Republican politician (and some Democrats, too); so in Washington, at least, we know it means very little.

In the real world, I imagine many non-ideologically inclined voters tend to see themselves as conservative, as well. And with a president who has yet to meet an industry he doesn't believe needs to be managed by the loving but firm hands of Washington, this increasingly must mean fiscal conservatism.

The rise of free-market populism in this country finally has manifested in an election. And judging from the hyperbolic reactions, you know it's a political movement with staying power.

When tepid, traditional conservative candidate Doug Hoffman knocked off liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava—a candidate who was supported by nearly every boogeyman in the GOP handbook—you might have thought that the rabble had stormed the Bastille.

Sophisticated New York Times columnist Frank Rich called the event "a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war" and compared the conservative surge to a murderous Stalinist purge. (Remarkably, the esteemed wordsmith failed to unleash similar histrionic language when one-time-Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman met the same fate.)

Purging moderates is indeed a self-destructive strategy for any national party. But running a party without any litmus tests on the central issue of the economy seems to be similarly self-defeating.

The most impressive trick played by Rich and other liberals, though, is creating a narrative wherein the ones attempting to fundamentally reconfigure the American economy are cast as the moderates.

The nearly powerless who stand in their way? Well, they play the part of Stalinists.

Now, I'm not nearly as smart as Frank Rich, but I do know that the single ideological bond that holds together all factions of the right is a belief in capitalism and economic freedom. Or, at least, it should be.

In fact, as Arthur C. Brooks, American Enterprise Institute president, summed it up, "there is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it's not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise—the principle at the core of American culture."

The next few elections will tell us whether this tenant of American culture has staying power—and whether there will be a political party to champion it.

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: Reason Foundation Co-Founder Manny Klausner on Ayn Rand

2009-11-04T12:00:00-05:00

Obama’s Hidden Fees

2009-11-04T07:00:00-05:00

President Obama’s promise to raise taxes only on the wealthy was easy to make and easy to break. He broke it barely two weeks after taking office, and he will break it again if Congress passes the health care legislation he wants. But Obama has come up with a strategy to avoid the fate of George H.W. Bush: Although he will raise your taxes, he will never admit he is raising your taxes.

Campaigning in Dover, New Hampshire, in September 2008, Obama declared: “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

Five months later, Obama signed a bill that more than doubled the federal cigarette tax, which falls especially heavily on the poor. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs argued that it didn’t really count, because “people make a decision to smoke.” Similarly, White House spokeswoman Linda Douglass says financial penalties for failing to obtain medical coverage are not taxes because “a fee would only be imposed on those few who could afford to purchase insurance but refuse to do so.”

Yet the fact that you can avoid a tax by changing your behavior does not mean it isn’t a tax. You don’t pay gasoline taxes if you don’t drive, you don’t pay property taxes if you don’t own real estate, and you don’t pay income taxes if you don’t earn income. In this case, people are subject to the “fee” simply by virtue of living in the United States and choosing not to buy something the government thinks they should.

Douglass likens the individual health insurance mandate to state requirements that drivers have liability insurance and that parents educate their children. But people who violate such laws are subject to criminal penalties. Neither the House nor the Senate health care bill would establish criminal penalties for refusing to buy health insurance, presumably because due process requirements would make it hard to impose them.

Instead the bills would establish a “tax on individuals without acceptable health care coverage” and an “individual responsibility excise tax,” respectively. “If you put something in the Internal Revenue Code and you tell the IRS to collect it,” a tax expert told the Associated Press in September, “I think that’s a tax.”

The president disagrees. “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” he insisted during a squirm-inducing September 20 exchange with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “You can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase.” Stephanopoulos responded by literally getting out the dictionary to demonstrate that “a charge…imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes” is commonly considered a tax.

If Obama can deny that a charge is a tax even when it’s collected by the IRS and identified as a “tax” in the legislation creating it, he surely sees nothing tax-like in the money people are required to spend if they want to avoid that charge. Yet forcing people to buy insurance they do not want so their premiums can subsidize other people’s health care looks a lot like a tax-funded welfare program, even if the money does not flow through the public treasury.

Furthermore, when businesses buy government-required health insurance or pay a penalty for failing to do so, that money comes at the expense of employee compensation. “An employer mandate should therefore be labeled an employee mandate,” says the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon.

“What we are saying,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) explained last week, “is everybody will contribute…to making sure that health care options are available to all of our citizens.” So we're talking about a legally required contribution that will be used to provide a government-arranged benefit. If only there were a shorter way of expressing that concept.

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

SuperFreaking Out Over Climate Engineering

2009-11-03T16:30:00-05:00

“What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?” ask the Freakonomics duo Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, in their new book SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. Their answer: “Al Gore and Pinatubo both suggest a way to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart.” Al Gore wants to cool the planet by drastically cutting back the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide people are emitting into the atmosphere. In 1991, the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines cooled the planet when it blasted millions of tons of sulfur particles into the stratosphere where it formed a global haze that lowered average temperatures by about 0.5 degrees Celsius.

In their controversial chapter on global cooling, Levitt and Dubner describe how a bunch of researchers and entrepreneurs at Intellectual Ventures have devised a “garden hose to the sky” method for cooling the planet. The firm, founded by polymath and former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold, proposes the use of an 18-mile hose with helium balloons and pumps every few hundred yards injecting liquefied sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to mimic the cooling produced by the Pinatubo eruption. The group estimates that setting up five sulfur injection base stations would cost a mere $150 million and cost $100 million per year to operate.

Meanwhile, the costs of deep reductions in carbon dioxide emissions—the strategy currently in vogue—are highly disputed. Global warming alarmists tend to minimize the costs and global warming deniers maximize them (I use the derogatory terms each side calls the other with full malice aforethought). So let’s use as an approximation the latest estimates from British economist Nicholas Stern. Stern, admittedly, inhabits the alarmist camp. He recently asserted that it will take spending 2 percent of global GDP (currently about $64 trillion) to prevent catastrophic climate change. That would amount to spending about $1.2 trillion per year. The money would be spent on developing and deploying a variety of energy efficiency improvements and low carbon energy technologies. That’s the Gore way to cool the planet. Levitt and Dubner conclude by contrasting $250 million versus $1.2 trillion.

Despite their rather breathless presentation of the options for a technical quick fix, these climate engineering schemes are not all that innovative. In fact, similar schemes, including a sulfur sun screen, were outlined in a 1997 article in Reason by physicist and sci-fi writer Greg Benford. In September, the Royal Academy issued a study, Geoengineering the Climate [PDF], evaluating comparable proposals. On November 5, the Science and Technology Committee in the House of Representatives will hold a hearing on the feasibility and risks of climate engineering, including the stratospheric sulfur shield. Clearly, Levitt and Dubner are not making novel proposals, they are popularizing marginalized ideas that have been around for a long time—that's their stock in trade.

Levitt and Dubner acknowledge that the objections to the stratoshield project are “legion,” and indeed they are [PDF]. They note that Myhrvold is not recommending that the stratoshield or other climate engineering schemes be deployed immediately, but that they be “researched and tested so they are ready to use if the worst climate predictions were to come true.” If manmade warming is worse than currently projected, such a shield would also give humanity time to invent and deploy a new no-carbon energy infrastructure.

Yet despite a variety of caveats and cautions, Levitt and Dubner have provoked a firestorm of criticism among ideological environmentalists and their fellow travelers. Why? Because the global warming debate is politicized from top to bottom. Levitt and Dubner breezily stepped into the climate science and policy debate and violated the environmentalist taboo on discussing geoengineering proposals in public.

“The primary reason there has been so little debate about geoengineering amongst climate scientists is concern that such a debate would imply an alternative to reducing the human carbon footprint,” write British climate researchers, Peter Cox, professor of climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter, and Hazel Jeffrey, head of strategic management at the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council in Physics World. Or, as Levitt and Dubner acknowledge in their chapter, geoengineering might be seen as “an excuse to pollute,” luring the public into climate change complacency.

In this political fight, accusations of bad faith are the coin of the rhetorical realm. And it doesn’t help that Levitt and Dubner elided over or mischaracterized some research and policy prescriptions. For example, they note that carbon dioxide emissions are being absorbed by seas causing ocean acidification which threatens shellfish and corals, but do not mention that the Pinatubo cooling plans would do nothing to solve that problem. In the policy realm, they cite Harvard economist Martin Weitzman’s argument that the uncertainties surrounding future temperature projections suggest the possibility of catastrophic climate change. However, they fail to note that Weitzman concludes that the remote possibility of total climate disaster justifies spending a lot of money now on efforts to avoid it. And let’s not get into the argument over what recent global temperature trends portend.

In the end, it is not at all surprising that Joe Romm, one of the more apoplectic climate alarmists, who writes the ClimateProgress blog over at the liberal Center for American Progress, dug deep into his rhetorical coffers and accused Levitt and Dubner of bad faith. Stanford University climatologist Ken Caldeira was a participant in the discussions at Intellectual Ventures that Levitt and Dubner report. Caldeira has been seriously researching the implications of geoengineering as a backup plan for cooling the earth for many years. Blogger Romm, in his self-appointed role as enforcer of climate change policy taboos, was horrified that Levitt and Dubner were citing Caldeira in favor geoengineering proposals.

In high dudgeon, Romm apparently emailed Caldeira: “Lines about you like (page 184) 'Yet his research tells him carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight' seriously abuse your reputation and your extensive publications and warnings about the threat of ocean acidification.” Romm then solicited Caldeira’s help, explaining, “I want to trash them [Levitt and Dubner] for this insanity and ignorance.” Romm, self-importantly but accurately, added that “my blog is read by everyone in this area, including the media.” He outlined just the sort of thing that he wanted Caldeira to say: “I’d like a quote like ‘The authors of SuperFreakonomics have utterly misrepresented my work,’ plus whatever else you want to say.”

A rattled Caldeira emailed Romm back and complained: “So, yes, my representation in the Superfreakonomics book is damaging to me because it is an inaccurate portrayal of me. The problem is the inaccurate portrayal, not my actions or statements.” Caldeira especially objected that he would never have said carbon dioxide is “not the right villain in this fight.” Romm then published his attempt at debunking Levitt and Dubner. The headline alone reads:

Error-riddled ‘Superfreakonomics’: New book pushes global cooling myths, sheer illogic, and “patent nonsense” – and the primary climatologist it relies on, Ken Caldeira, says “it is an inaccurate portrayal of me” and “misleading” in “many” places.

Romm’s column provoked a flood of condemnations. Levitt and Dubner asked Caldeira what was going on and he responded, “I do think there are a bunch of things in the chapter that give misimpressions.” However, Caldeira also said to other journalists, “I believe the authors to have worked in good faith. They draw different conclusions than I draw from the same facts, but as authors of the book, that is their prerogative.” In any case, a somewhat rueful Caldeira explained, “I was drawn in by Romm and Al Gore’s assistant into critiquing other parts of the chapter. Rather than acting deliberately, I panicked and commented on things that I now wish I would have been silent on. It was obviously a mistake to let myself get drawn into this, and I learned a quick and hard lesson in public relations.” Indeed. Levitt and Dubner say that they will take out the offending “villain” quotation from subsequent editions.

Romm himself mischaracterizes Levitt and Dubner’s chapter as advocating a “geo-engineering-only solution.” Levitt and Dubner make it pretty clear throughout that their Pinatubo cooling proposal is a backup plan, just in case humanity can’t or won’t cut back on its carbon dioxide emissions. For example, Myhrvold notes, “It’s a bit like having fire sprinklers in the building. On the one hand, you should make every effort not to have a fire. But you also need something to fall back on in case the fire occurs.” Myhrvold adds, “It gives you breathing room to move to carbon-free energy sources.”

A year ago, in a roundtable on geoengineering in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Ken Caldeira argued, “Prudence demands that we consider what we might do if cuts in carbon dioxide emissions prove too little or too late to avoid unacceptable climate damage.” What should we do? “We need a climate engineering research and development plan.” Caldeira warned, “We cannot afford a new period of Lysenkoism and allow political correctness to pollute our scientific judgment. Scientific research and engineering development should be divorced from moral posturing and policy prescription.” He was right then and he’s right now.

Although flawed, in SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner have done citizens and policymakers a real service by breaking the taboo on discussing the feasibility and risks of climate engineering in public.

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

The Secret Message of Stimulus Spending

2009-11-03T15:00:00-05:00

The idea behind the $787 billion stimulus bill is that government can create jobs by spending money. For now, let’s ignore fact, history, and economic theory and assume that government spending can actually create jobs.

In that case, we should expect the government to invest relatively more money in the states that have the highest unemployment rates and less money in the states with lower unemployment rates. So let’s check the data.

Using numbers from President Obama’s website Recovery.org and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this chart plots the amount of stimulus funds spent per person in each state and the corresponding unemployment rate in that state. The solid blue line shows what the allocation of funds should look like if the administration was allocating relatively more money to the states with higher unemployment rates.

Yet, with a few exceptions, the data show that this is not the case. Many higher-unemployment states are getting far fewer stimulus dollars than lower-unemployment states.

Take Michigan, for instance. Michigan’s 15.2 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the country. So far, it has received $403 per person in stimulus funds. That’s above the average stimulus per person across all states ($326). However, it’s lower than the $409 per person that the state of Vermont, a state with relatively low unemployment (6.8 percent), has received so far. Michigan's per-person take is also much lower than the $707 per person the District of Columbia received. D.C.'s unemployment rate is 9.9 percent.

Now look at the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the country: North Dakota. It’s getting $253 per person with a 4.3 percent unemployment rate. Many other states are receiving roughly the same amount of stimulus funds per person despite much higher rates of unemployment.

Which suggests that stimulus funds are being allocated without thought to the level of unemployment within states. If government spending could in fact create jobs, then the problem of unemployment could be mitigated by distributing funds to states based on their relative unemployment levels.

But that's not being done at all. Instead, funds are being distributed randomly, as quickly as possible, among the states. That in turn suggests something else: Even the federal government doesn't believe the myth that government spending can actually create jobs.

Veronique de Rugy is an economist at The Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a columnist for Reason.

Reason.tv: Reason Foundation Co-Founder Bob Poole on Ayn Rand

2009-11-03T12:00:00-05:00

Read Our Complete November Issue

2009-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

Briefly Noted: A Pirate Road Movie

2009-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

In 1996 Jeff Pearson attended the Media & Democracy Congress in San Francisco, where he was disappointed to find a lot of "one-way talk...as in they talk, you listen." The only benefit: He met a pirate radio broadcaster, who excited him with the idea that you could fight media consolidation not with numbing conferences but by making some media of your own.

So Pearson and Mary Jones made Pirate Radio U.S.A., an engaging, visually inventive documentary now available on DVD. Shooting it meant crisscrossing the country from Iowa City to Tucson and from Seattle to D.C., encountering people (including me) who had launched unlicensed radio outlets and/or were fighting to make such stations legal. While I don’t always agree with the filmmakers’ take on the topic, they’ve done an excellent job of capturing the community’s culture and the do-it-yourself ethos that animates it. The film is infectious and fun—everything a lackluster political conference is not.

Briefly Noted: After the Bomb, the Museum

2009-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

In her new biography of the physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer, Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens (Houghton Mifflin), science writer K.C. Cole says it was a "blessing" that "Ella and Julius [Oppenheimer] never lived to see the cruel hand history was later to deal their sons." Frank and his older brother Robert were mugged by history-both victims of guilt over their wartime work designing the atomic bomb, both victims of the Red Scare that ruined so many lives in the postwar years.

Robert, forever tarred as Father of the Bomb, spent the remainder of his unhappy days trying to atone for his atomic sins. Fate was more merciful to Frank, and Cole ably describes his new career as a science educator. The Exploratorium, Oppenheimer's museum of hands-on experiments in San Francisco, represents a very different kind of science than atomic weaponry-science as a life-affirming process of exploration, not a quest for better means of destruction.

Briefly Noted: Battlestar Philosophica

2009-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

When Ronald D. Moore’s re-imagined version of the hokey ’70s TV series Battlestar Galactica wrapped up this year, it all but abdicated responsibility for many of its major plot threads, leaving many fans lost in space. But despite its baffling finale, the four-season show, now available as a complete series on DVD, had a lot to offer.

The premise was your basic post-apocalyptic robots-chasing-humans story, but the show was more complicated than that. At its best, it investigated with care and intelligence the institutions that define a strong, moral civil society: the rule of law, markets, religion, military capability, representative democracy. Do they work? How? And what causes them to break down?

The show’s key idea seemed to be that, for a people on the brink of being wiped out, simply running away was never enough. Once a society has decided that it wants to live, it still has to figure out how.

Briefly Noted: Commie Art

2009-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

You don’t read Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (Tate) for the words, or even for its semi-accurate rendering of the Soviet Union’s bloody 74-year history as refracted through the visual arts. David King’s coffee-table-sized collection of arresting propaganda posters peters out long before the Leonid Brezhnev era, which, King rightly notes, “was generally as dull and sluggish on the visual front as it was politically.” A more historically faithful book would show communism’s spirit-crushing—and logically inevitable—tedium. It would also look like crap.

Instead, Red Star Over Russia delivers colorful, propagandistic eye candy mixed with less interesting documentary photography. Here you see reminders not only that early Soviet Russia teemed with artistic talent but also that genuine energy bubbled behind the earliest political sloganeering in home-grown communism. That enthusiasm initially ranged much further stylistically than the half-hearted Socialist Realism that followed.

Briefly Noted: Tom Paine, Drawn

2009-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

Tucked away in a gray-brown room, across a white marble hall from statesmanlike portraits of Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, is “One Life: Thomas Paine—The Radical Founding Father,” an exhibition appearing at the National Portrait Gallery from August 7 to November 29. The exhibition, part of a surge of renewed interest in Paine, follows the author of Common Sense as he flees England for America in 1774, joins the French revolutionary cause, and tries unsuccessfully to bring the more radical age of revolution to his native land.

When Paine finally made it back to America, after a near-guillotining in France, the man who wrote this country into revolution found he had been written out of the Founders’ pantheon for his anti-church tract The Age of Reason. Museumgoers will learn that today’s politics are downright civilized compared with those of Paine’s day. Cartoons show the man drunk on brandy and embraced by the devil, tarted up in French revolutionary garb, and crucifying Jesus.

Lights Out

2009-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996, intended the warm incandescent bulbs in his 1993 installation Untitled (Strange Music) to burn out and be replaced, part of a cycle of expiration and renewal. To substitute long-lasting, environmentally friendly compact fluorescent bulbs would change the piece beyond recognition. But that’s just what the European Union expects gallery owners, curators, and contemporary artists to do.

European Parliament Directive 2005/32/EG banned the sale and importation of 100-watt incandescent bulbs starting September 1, with lower wattages phasing out over time. There is no exception for artists or museums, and getting caught selling wasteful old-style bulbs brings a whopping $70,000 fine.

Sales of incandescent bulbs were up 150 percent in the E.U. in August, but hoarding isn’t a viable option to protect the bulb-intensive works of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller, Jorge Pardo, and the many others joining Gonzalez-Torres on the endangered list.

The E.U. has stood by the total ban, with spokesman Ferran Tarradellas boldly overstating his case in ArtForum: “It’s utterly ludicrous to ask the commission for the sake of art to leave a product on the market that could be dangerous for the environment, health, and the consumer. Otherwise exceptions could be asked for when an artist wants to use antiperson [sic] landmines, enriched plutonium, or CFC.”

Katherine Mangu-Ward (kmw@reason.com) is a senior editor at reason.

Iranian Rebellion Grows on the Web

2009-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

In the August/September 2004 issue of reason, Marc C. Johnson described online expatriate opposition to the Iranian regime. Spread across the globe and connected by the Internet, Iranian students used chat rooms, anonymous email accounts, proxy servers, and websites to agitate for reform and to communicate with dissenters inside the Islamic Republic. Following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election on June 13, 2009, Iranians at home showed the world they were just as capable of using the Net to fight for freedom, tweeting and blogging their discontent by the thousands.

The microblogging site Twitter, founded in 2006 and therefore young even by Internet standards, has become a forum for protesters who have few other means of safe communication with the outside world and each other. CNN and other news organizations relied heavily on Twitter for information about what was going on inside the closed country as protests against the regime turned into violent clashes between police and protesters.

In 2004 Johnson depicted Iran’s expat dissenters as a “fractious electronic vanguard” with organizational troubles. “The only times in recent memory that the expatriate opposition has even gathered around the same table,” he wrote, “have been during periods of major crisis for those still in Iran—when the regime has cracked down on dissent.” June’s election was just such a crisis. Overseas sites like those run by the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (daneshjoo.org) and the secularist Marze Por Gohar Party (marzeporgohar.org) have become clearinghouses for information, pictures, and videos about the protests and the regime’s bloody suppression of political opposition and public assembly.

Some overseas dissidents were actively engaged in the uprising: Marze Por Gohar’s Roozbeh Farahanipour, who was interviewed by Johnson, snuck into Iran in early July to participate in the protests. “I am proud of our people,” he told the conservative webzine FrontPage. “They have reached their boiling point and will not be kept down any longer.” Rather than fomenting revolution from without, expatriates like Farahanipour have found themselves supporting and chronicling an indigenous wave of political discontent—an uprising aided by 21st-century tools, against a regime with a medieval disdain for self-government and liberty.

Driven Crazy

2009-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

The libertarian journalist and satirist P.J. O’Rourke is a correspondent for The Atlantic, the H.L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a contributor to magazines ranging from Rolling Stone to The American Spectator, and the best-selling author of 12 books, the latest of which is Driving Like Crazy: 30 Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending (Atlantic Monthly Press). The new book touts itself as “celebrating America the way it’s supposed to be—with an oil well in every backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in every carport, and the chairman of the Federal Reserve mowing our lawn.” In June, reason.tv’s Ted Balaker spoke with O’Rourke at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California. Video of the interview can be seen at reason.tv.

Q: Does it bother you when you hear people say we’re “addicted” to automobiles?

A: It doesn’t bother me. I want to strangle them. It’s a little bit beyond bother. I want to stuff them in their Prius and lock the doors. They just don’t know what they’re talking about. Americans were able to create the life that we have in America by being able to get out of the big cities. Can you imagine New York in August before the car was invented? Whatever you may think about smog, can you imagine what New York smelled like with traffic as heavy as it is today, but it’s all horses? Can you imagine the stink, the flies, the disease of that place?

And it wasn’t just the urban environment that we were battling with the cars. It was the corruption of the urban political machines, lousy public schools, insane municipal bureaucracies. The reason we live in the suburbs is because we were able to escape those things. And the reason we were able to escape those things—it wasn’t the train. It was the car that allowed us to get far enough away from that stuff to build a decent life.

Q: Do you think there’s a danger that the American love affair with the automobile could be replaced with a love of trains?

A: Yes, there’s something romantic about the train. But try getting the tracks to come to your house. When it’s time to unload the groceries, the romance with the train disappears immediately. Try taking the train through the drive-in window at the In-N-Out burger. It makes a big mess.

Q: Maybe it’s just the politicians who love trains.

A: Why do politicians love trains? Because they can tell where the tracks go. They know where everybody’s going. It’s all about control. It is all about power. Politics itself is nothing but an attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit. That is the definition of politics. Politicians hate cars. They have always hated cars, because cars make people free. Not only free in the sense that they can go anywhere they want, which bugs politicians in the first place, but they can move out of the political district that the politician represents.

[New York Mayor] Mike Bloomberg pointed this out, when they were trying to raise taxes on the very rich in Manhattan. He pointed out that the whole budget of New York City is based on about 30,000 super-high-[income] taxpayers. And Bloomberg said: They can move. They’re not in businesses with bricks and mortar. They don’t have any production lines with any huge, big, heavy machines. They can just get in their car—their BMW—and drive to Greenwich and live there. And then what are you going to do?

Q: Do you think it’s patriotic to buy an American car?

A: Of course not! In the first place, most American cars aren’t actually American cars. There’s no such thing as an American car; all cars are international cars now. On the other hand, the To-yota you buy may be made in the United States. The Honda you buy definitely would be made in the United States. The BMW you buy would be made in the United States. Volkswagens too. So you don’t know whether you’re buying an American car or not. Just buy a good car. Buy the car you want, and to heck with the rest of it.

Brickbats

2009-11-03T07:00:00-05:00

A police officer in Haverford Township, Pennsylvania, put some fear into seven youngsters selling lemonade. He accused them of peddling without a license and asked the mother of four of them to put a stop to it. But it turns out the law requiring a license doesn’t apply to vendors under 16, so the business was perfectly legal. Deputy Chief of Police John Viola said the “officer would have no way of knowing this on the street.”

The British government has told communications companies to keep track of all Internet contacts anyone makes—including email messages, website visits, and use of social networking sites—and organize them in case law enforcement agencies need the information. The government says people should not worry because the databases will merely record contacts, not the content of communications.

Law enforcement officers across Massachusetts regularly use the state criminal records system to snoop on celebrities, according to a state audit. For example, officers have looked for information on Patriots quarterback Tom Brady 968 times.

British officials say they will provide data collected by their planned national ID cards to tax authorities. That will allow tax officials to know each time the card is used to make a large purchase, open a bank account, or complete some other transaction that requires identification.

After Hollywood, Florida, police officer Joel Francisco rear-ended Alexandra Torrensvilas’s car at an intersection, he radioed for backup. Three more cops arrived, and they quickly began discussing ways to pin the accident on Torrensvilas and charge her with DUI. They were so eager to set her up, one of them forgot to turn off the audio on his dashboard camera and accidentally recorded the conversation.

New Zealand officials made a small error in their response to an elderly Indian man’s immigration application. The man had indicated he had atrophied testes, so immigration officials asked him to consult an astrologist to see if the condition would require treatment. They say they meant to tell the man to see a urologist.

The Swedish government has barred a family from giving their new daughter the middle name Michael, in honor of Michael Jackson. Officials say giving a girl a boy’s name is inappropriate.

A broken road reflector ripped a hole in one of the tires on Paul Holden’s car, so he filed a claim with the state of Ohio and paid the $25 filing fee. The state denied Holden’s claim. He figured he was out $25 and the cost of a new tire. Wrong. The state billed him an additional $22 for the investigation and $6 for the postage for the letters it sent him. And just in case he didn’t get the point, it sent him a letter saying it would garnish his wages and bank account, seize his personal property, and foreclose on any real estate he might own in order to recoup the money if he didn’t pay.