Reason Magazine - Staff > Nick Gillespie

Now Playing at Reason.tv: The Age of American Unreason; Q&A with Susan Jacoby

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:35:00 EDT

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Nice Shot, J.R.

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Let us now pause in somber tribute to the 30th anniversary of a momentous—and shockingly unremembered—turning point in the long twilight struggle between communism and capitalism. An event every bit as important as the Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate, Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down this Wall" speech and Yakov Smirnoff's defection to the West.

We write, of course, about the debut of "Dallas," the 13-year soap opera that shook the world.

Read the rest of this article in The Washington Post.

Soundbite: Monkeys and Money

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a columnist for Scientific American, and the author of, most recently, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (Times Books). Shermer’s new book seeks to explain “how evolution shaped the modern economy and why people are so irrational about money.”

A Ph.D. in the history of science and an adjunct professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University, Shermer lives and works in Southern California. His previous books include Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense, and Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?

In January, Shermer sat down with reason.tv Editor Nick Gillespie to talk about the intersection between evolution and capitalism, trust in a globalized world, and his “Google theory of peace.” What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation; video of the interview is online at reason.tv.

Q: What’s the basic idea behind The Mind of the Market?

A: That trade is the best thing we can do to break down the natural animosities between groups. For trade to work, two individuals have to have a certain amount of trust. We know from game theory that once trust breaks down, subjects begin to defect rather than cooperate. What does it take for them to cooperate? Trust. What does trust take? Trust takes a number of exchanges in which there are no defections.

Q: You’ve called this a “consciousness-raising book.”

A: I’m trying to convince my liberal friends that this evolution stuff they’re already completely comfortable with really applies to the market. That they can accept free market economics as yet another one of these bottom-up self-organizing systems. And I’m trying to convince my conservative friends who already like free market economics that evolution is an OK thing.

I have very little doubt that it will be much harder to convince liberals. I think the cultural embeddedness of the anti-capitalistic mentality on the left is so deep that it’s a long row to hoe.

Q: How do your politics influence your work?

A: I’ve been a libertarian all my life, but I’m mainly a science guy. In The Mind of the Market, I’m allowing myself to say what I actually believe, but not just as a political position that I want to be true. I back it up from what I know about science.

I don’t like the labels liberal, conservative, libertarian. They force people to quit thinking. There are so many different forms of libertarianism. Give me exact points on abortion, on immigration, or whatever. I like the concept of fuzzy sets. There is a set of core beliefs we pretty much share, but on the boundaries there is a fuzziness. Life is way more complex than our linguistic categories allow us.

Q: What’s a good market system to your mind?

A: I differentiate among market systems by asking how we get the most choice for individuals. It doesn’t need to be measured by stock keeping units or gross domestic product. Do people have the freedom to buy and sell and trade as they want without interference from on high?

To that extent, the Internet is the best thing that ever happened. I call this my Google Theory of Peace. Geographic borders are extremely porous because of cyberspace. Open access to all knowledge for all people everywhere will be the end of dictatorships. I love the idea of the $100 laptop for every person on the planet, the Google scanning of every book on the planet. The control of information is the way dictators control their people. Where everyone has access to information, no one person can control it. I think the free market trade of ideas is the key to world peace, prosperity, and freedom.

Tuned Out

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In their cover story for Politics, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie assuage nervous libertarian voters by promising them that a more glorious future awaits us all, regardless of who takes control of the White House, the Congress or even the Supreme Court this fall. Cultural libertarianism, after all, is a growing force in America.

The full article, in PDF format, can be read here.

Where the Votes Are

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In the Los Angeles Times, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch that the party is over for the Democrats and Republicans, who have been leaking market share since the 1970s like a Chevy Nova leaked oil. The most important voting bloc now are libertarians who "like gays and guns, low taxes and free speech. They are pro-globalization and antiwar. They are at the center of American politics. Win them over and you'll win every national election for the next several decades. Here are some smart—and popular—policies that will appeal not only to libertarians but to other centrist voters fed up with budget-busting compassionate conservatives and nanny-state buttinsky liberals."

Gillespie and Welch offer up no fewer than seven (count 'em) policies that appeal to libertarians—
and large majorities of American voters. Read all about them here.

Faith of our Fathers

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Were the Founding Fathers religious? Deist? Apatheists?

In Sunday's New York Post (founded by Alexander Hamilton!), reason's Nick Gillespie takes a look at a fascinating new book about the origins of religious freedom in America, answers thoose questions, gives a shout-out to Moloch, and tips a tricorn hat to James Madison. All in less time than it takes to go to a drive-through Mennonite service.

Read all about it here.

Editor's Note: See You at Reason.tv

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:20:00 EST

Here’s some news that will (hopefully) disappoint some readers and (surely) delight others: After eight years at the top of the masthead, this is my last issue as editor-in-chief of the print edition of Reason.

I started with the magazine back in 1993 as an assistant editor. But in a more profound way, I started with Reason some time in the late 1970s, when my brother John, then attending Rutgers (the same college that Milton Friedman attended), discovered reason at the university bookstore and sent me his old issues while I was in high school. It has been a rare treat to get a chance to helm not just my favorite magazine of all time, but the publication that more than anything else shaped my views on politics, culture, and ideas.

I owe an enormous number of people for that opportunity to steer the ship, especially former editor Virginia Postrel, who hired me, spent years making me a better journalist, and named me her successor; Bob Poole, the founder of the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes the magazine; David Nott, the president of the foundation; and Lanny Friedlander, whom I’ve never actually met but who started reason as a college student back in May 1968.

From my first issue as editor—the April 2000 edition, which featured among other great pieces an interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner and “father of the Green Revolution” Norman Borlaug—to our pathbreaking personalized-cover edition (June 2004) to the copy you hold in your hand (which boasts stories about the promises of nanotechnology, the persistence of workplace drug testing, and the proliferation of luxury goods), Reason has always sought first and foremost to publish top-drawer journalism that explores the full range of “Free Minds and Free Markets.” We’ve always tried to bring a true libertarian alternative to the played-out politics of the conventional right-left spectrum. I like to think that we succeeded some of the time. Or at least had fun trying.

Our iconoclastic, happy-warrior tradition will continue more strongly than ever under my successor, Matt Welch, who worked at Reason with me from 2003 to 2005 before moving to the Los Angeles Times’ opinion section. It’s nothing less than exciting to turn the magazine over to someone with greater talent and skill than my own.

And it’s nothing less than exciting to tell you about my new dual gig: editor of reason online (reason.com) and reason.tv, the videojournalism website we launched in October 2007. Anchored by an ongoing series of documentaries starring Price Is Right host Drew Carey and featuring constantly updated original content, ranging from interviews with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain to exposés of police misconduct to dada-influenced art projects, reason.tv is the next frontier for “Free Minds and Free Markets.” Certainly it promises to be wild and full of fresh air.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Litigating for Liberty

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:30:00 EST

If you’ve seen a case of state-on-citizen injustice become a mainstream outrage from coast to coast, chances are Chip Mellor had something to do with it. Mellor founded the Institute for Justice, arguably the most effective public interest law firm dedicated to property rights and choice, in 1991.

Since then IJ has “litigated for liberty” on behalf of small entrepreneurs and property owners against rapacious City Halls. In its most famous case, it defended homeowner Susette Kelo at the U.S. Supreme Court against the city of New London, Connecticut, which seized her house using eminent domain to clear the way for a big real estate project that never really got off the ground. Although the Supreme Court ruled against IJ’s client, Kelo v. New London was a tremendous political success, triggering a backlash that has rolled back eminent domain abuse in more than 40 states. Which was exactly the point.

“All of our cases,” the 58-year-old Mellor says, “are viewed and deliberately designed as platforms to educate the general public about the importance of what may seem to be unique or even arcane issues and why those issues affect many, many people beyond the particular case.”

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised all over the upper Midwest, Mellor was an anti-Nixon, anti-war activist at Ohio State from 1969 to 1973; discovered the works of the economist Milton Friedman, the anti-communist writer Whittaker Chambers, and the novelist Ayn Rand; and earned his law degree from the University of Denver with ambitions to “change the world.” That led him to the Mountain States Legal Foundation, one of the first non-lefty public interest law firms, where the self-described hippie worked for James Watt, the soon-to-be-despised future secretary of the interior, whom Mellor describes as a “fascinating man.”

In the 1980s, Mellor moved on to the Reagan administration, where he was a deputy general counsel in the Department of Energy. After that he served for five years as director of the Pacific Research Institute, where he helped “develop a strategic long-term…libertarian litigation strategy,” one that would come to full fruition with the founding of the Institute for Justice.

IJ has helped everyone from New York jitney drivers to D.C. hair braiders to New Orleans florists defeat unreasonable, frequently ridiculous legal restrictions that prevented them from earning a living in their chosen trade. In recent years the law firm has branched out to defend free speech against campaign finance laws and school vouchers against teachers unions, earning high praise along the way from the likes of Mellor’s hero Milton Friedman. “The Institute for Justice,” Friedman once said, “has become a major pillar of our free society.”

Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie spoke with Mellor in IJ’s Arlington, Virginia, offices in September 2007.

reason: Let’s talk about the First Amendment and particularly your political speech cases. IJ has traditionally focused on economic liberty issues—the ridiculous licensing of hair braiders and florists, for example. Wading into speech issues is a relatively new initiative.

Chip Mellor: Yes. We’re challenging the stranglehold campaign finance laws pose for vibrant political free speech. We won a case recently in the Washington state Supreme Court in which the state had passed a 9.5 cent per gallon tax increase and some folks organized an initiative to repeal that. Amongst those supporting the initiative were two talk radio hosts. They opposed it and used time on the air to rail against the injustice and insanity of this kind of tax.

The election commission there slapped them with a cease-and-desist order on the grounds that the time they had spent on the radio advocating against the tax constituted an in-kind contribution to the anti-tax campaign.

reason: And we can guess that had they been talking about how great the tax increase was, they wouldn’t have been fined for political speech.

Mellor: Right. A twist on this is that the law firm doing the enforcement activity had direct ties to the city and would benefit from the gas tax increase because of the work it did.

These campaign finance laws get very complicated and very technical very quickly, so many people don’t understand them very easily. Something like in-kind contributions might not sound that bad. But the practical reality is that here the limit is $5,000 per campaign or per cycle for in-kind contributions. That’s about five minutes on talk radio.

reason: What happened?

Mellor: We won. That part of the law was invalidated. They were able to keep talking up to a point, but there was a period of time when they had to do that at risk. They were brave enough to do it, but other folks might not be, so it has this chilling effect that even when you fight back, you’re in this limbo not knowing what the ultimate outcome is going to be.

reason: What are some of the other problematic campaign finance laws?

Mellor: One perverse aspect of McCain-Feingold and Buckley v. Valeo, the predecessor case, is that both allow legislators wide latitude to pass laws limiting political speech for the purpose of avoiding the appearance of corruption. That standard—the appearance of corruption—is obviously so vague and so much in the eyes of the beholder or the politician that it allows virtually unfettered discretion and potential for abuse. You see that playing out in McCain-Feingold with the restrictions on advertising 30 or 60 days before an election. Unions and corporations are not allowed to express advocacy for or against a candidate 60 days before a general election and 30 days before a primary. What that basically means is you can’t take out paid advertising and make your position known.

reason: It has the explicit intention of limiting the amount of information that would be available to voters.

Mellor: Yes. On the express assumption that this is somehow corrupting the political process and this is somehow beleaguering voters with information that might make them make a bad choice.

reason: If the AFL-CIO or Bechtel can just throw an unlimited amount of money saying that George Bush is a bastard or John Kerry is the greatest thing since sliced bread or whatever, why shouldn’t that be regulated?

Mellor: The whole notion of democracy is the ability to persuade others to adopt the views that you have in voting for the candidate or the issue that you prefer. That’s true of the AFL-CIO or John Doe on the street. Reaching large numbers of people often requires the enlistment of media or of an extensive advertising campaign. It just goes hand in glove with making your views known. In the early days it was pamphlets; today it’s TV.

Two things will always happen. One is that money will always find its way into elections. The problem isn’t too much money in politics; it’s too much power in government. I think that’s absolutely correct. As long as government has the favors to dispense and the power to dispense, people will find ways to get the money to it. It’s a fool’s errand to try to just limit the money.

Second, as long as America is a democracy, you’re always going to have people trying to make their views known. And that’s as it should be. So the attempts to limit this and to impose these increasingly complicated obstacles are doomed to failure and at the same time are going to increasingly create incentives for cynicism, for all sorts of intermediaries. You have to hire lawyers, accountants. You have to do all these sorts of things, and it will serve the interests of the entrenched political establishment because it will be the most able to adapt to them. It will paralyze outsiders and insurgents because it will be harder for them to organize and penetrate these increasingly complicated and arcane rules.

One good example of that is a case we have in Colorado. In Parker North, which is not too far from Denver, a neighborhood found out that it was going to be annexed. Parker North was suddenly going to become part of Parker. That carried with it increased taxes and other obligations that the residents of Parker North were not interested in, so several folks got together and just started talking among themselves in their backyards and said let’s fight this, let’s organize against it. So they began posting yard signs and organizing a bake sale and that sort of thing to increase interest among the residents in their community to vote against the annexation. Partway through the campaign they were served with a cease-and-desist order saying they’d violated the campaign laws of Colorado because they had spent more than $200 simply to influence the outcome of an election and they failed to account for every penny of that, from bake sales, on yard signs.

These are feisty folks. They didn’t give up, but others might, and it’s still in trial.

reason: Will they win?

Mellor: I think we’ll ultimately win, but the fact that we’re in trial, that it’s not a slam-dunk victory for us, should tell you something.

reason: How do you feel about mandatory disclosure laws?

Mellor: Mandatory disclosure laws are often viewed as a painless way of accommodating some degree of regulation of campaign financing such that people at least know who is backing whom. I think that oftentimes people overlook problems created through disclosure, and we ought to consider those problems and determine if those costs are worth bearing. Any time you have to disclose, you’re in essence putting your vote on record. You may feel perfectly comfortable saying, “I back Ron Paul,” but other folks may be in a position where coming out visibly for a candidate or an issue could compromise them in their community, in their workplace, in their church or synagogue, or some place like that, and they may be very reluctant to have their name appear not just in some obscure filing in a city hall file cabinet but on the Internet.

reason: What was the first case that IJ took on?

Mellor: The first case was in 1991 and involved a wonderful entrepreneur here in Washington, D.C., named Taalib-Din Uqdah and his wife, Pamela Farrell. They were entrepreneurs seeking to braid hair but had the misfortune of doing so without a license to practice cosmetology.

Hair braiding is a means of both artistic and cultural expression as well as personal preference for the way that hair is styled, particularly in African-American and Caribbean communities. It is widely practiced and very popular. It’s often practiced in the home and passed on from mother to daughter in sort of an informal apprenticeship, because it is a very elaborate means of styling hair. But Taalib-Din had opened a salon. It was in a home, but one where they’d converted the first floor to a salon. He employed about a dozen people.

He actually received a knock on the door from the D.C. cosmetology police informing him that he was practicing cosmetology without a license, and he had to cease and desist immediately or face a fine—I believe it was $1,000 a day—and possibly even imprisonment for the crime of braiding hair and employing people. And when he went down to get a license, of course, he found that it was much harder than one would expect because it required that you actually attend cosmetology school for a couple of years, that you have thousands of hours of training learning skills that have nothing to do with African hair braiding. Adding insult to injury, it required you to demonstrate your proficiency by showing that you could, on a practical exam, style women’s hair in finger waves and pin curls, which were the hair styles popular with white women in 1938, when the law was passed.

reason: What happened in the case?

Mellor: We lost at the U.S. District Court and were moving it up through the appeal process when we were successful through both media and other efforts in getting it deregulated in the D.C. City Council.

reason: How did the media respond?

Mellor: All of our cases are deliberately designed as platforms to educate the general public about the importance of what may seem to be unique or even arcane issues and why those issues affect many, many people beyond the particular case, both in terms of the situation and also in terms of the constitutional principle involved. Here we had a wonderful media response from everybody. They picked up on several things: 1) the inherent injustice involved; 2) the compelling story that the clients had to tell; and 3) the way in which the law was really rigged against what could otherwise be a totally legitimate and productive activity.

The principle of law there is applicable whether it’s hair braiding or cab driving or casket retailing or flower selling or any number of entry-level occupations that are subject to arbitrary regulations.

reason: Could you talk a little bit about that type of case?

Mellor: In economic liberty cases, the standard of the law today is so abominable that the government virtually gets a free pass to regulate any activity it wants in almost any fashion. The legal standard is literally that any reasonably conceivable set of facts will suffice to justify an economic regulation, even if those facts weren’t present or considered by the legislature when the law was enacted.

For instance, look at the 2003 case we had in Louisiana involving flower retailing. There anyone who arranges flowers—which means, by law, putting two flowers together—and then sells those flowers for any amount of money has to be a licensed florist or work for a licensed florist.

reason: Who does the licensing? Is it a state board?

Mellor: Yes, it is. Of course, it’s comprised of florists. These restrictions were all made out of Public Choice 101 usually.

reason: Meaning that a cartel or a politically savvy group of people get together to limit marketplace entry.

Mellor: Right.

reason: When did the Louisiana law go into place?

Mellor: In the 1940s. There was a proliferation of these licensing laws in the Progressive Era and an explosion of them after the New Deal. They’ve just continued to increase as the number of occupations has grown and enterprising people have created more niches.

In Louisiana, once they set this law in place, it was regulated by the floristry board that was comprised of florists. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, the passage rate on the practical exam—where you arrange flowers and show your proficiency—was about 35 percent a year. It was utterly subjective. They’d just say things like, “It doesn’t have the proper sense of balance. It doesn’t have the proper perspective. It’s not artistic enough.”

There was no appeal from it, no standard of review. You were basically stuck. Many more people passed the bar exam in Louisiana than passed the floristry exam.

The state was arguing that you could create a corsage in such a way that someone could prick their finger on the pin, and that this was a public health and safety rationale sufficient to uphold that law. That’s literally what they were arguing.

In Oklahoma we had a case where individuals were seeking to sell caskets without having to be fully licensed funeral practitioners. Bear in mind that the fully licensed funeral directors have to go to school for two years, have to embalm bodies, have to do all sorts of things that have nothing to do with selling what amounts to a box.

And you can only go to a funeral director for a casket. Markups of 100 to 600 percent are routinely imposed on casket buyers in the funeral home context.

The court said that Oklahoma had a legitimate interest in protecting the funeral home industry from competition. That opinion should chill everyone who believes in free enterprise, because it says dispensing favors is the national pastime of state legislatures. Economic protectionism is a sufficient ground alone to justify this kind of practice.

reason: But in other areas of commercial activity that have long been regulated, things seem to be going in the other direction. You can buy mail-order dentures now. You have 1-800-CONTACTS. Before you would go to an eye doctor, you would get a prescription, and then often you would go to a captive optician to buy your contact lenses, your glasses, etc. That seems much more open now. In certain areas where things were tightly regulated, it seems to be loosening up.

Mellor: Obviously, the Internet has had a profoundly beneficial effect on commerce and on the choices available to consumers. At the same time, though, people who are active in their communities providing goods or services in those communities as entrepreneurs are increasingly subject to licensing and permitting requirements that range from annoying to impenetrable. That’s the real burden, and that’s what we’re trying to stop. These burdens fall most heavily on folks who are really the aspiring entrepreneurs at the entry level, trying to break in for the first time or move up the next notch.

reason: So it’s the flower arranger seeking to go out on her own in New Orleans.

Mellor: Or the cab driver, the jitney driver. Virtually every city in the country has some degree of entry control and monopolization with the cab market. At the same time, cabs have provided a wonderful means of entry-level opportunity for entrepreneurs, often immigrants. They provide flexibility. They provide an opportunity to work as hard as you want and earn as much money as you can or as little as you want.

It’s one thing to say that under the police power of the government they can require safe vehicles and insured vehicles and competent drivers. But they start creating monopolies, limiting the number of cabs that can enter a market, regulating rates. We’ve worked in Denver, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and New York to open up transit markets. We’ve had success, but we have a lot yet to do.

reason: Give an example of a success.

Mellor: Maybe you’ve been to Queens or Brooklyn and seen the commuter vans that operate there. These are wonderful community-based transportation options for folks who prefer them over public buses, which are usually woefully inadequate; cabs, which are nonexistent; or private cars, which are either unaffordable or inconvenient. In the mid-’90s, when we took on the case, there were about 60,000 people a day using these otherwise illegal vans to get from point A to point B because the vans ran on a fixed route.

reason: You would show up at a particular place and get in and pay a certain amount of money.

Mellor: One buck. They were called dollar vans. They’ve since changed a little bit, but at the time it was a dollar and you got on and went as far as you wanted with that dollar. They were efficient and safe, yet they were illegal, because the city council had passed a law at the behest of the transit workers unions and the public bus companies that limited the number of vans.

We fought against that with a lawsuit and the media. The Giuliani administration was actually supportive of our efforts, and we got the arbitrary procedures ruled unconstitutional. The vans are allowed to operate and have flourished since.

reason: Talk a little bit about the wine case.

Mellor: It’s a little different in that it was under a different provision of the Constitution, not the 14th Amendment but the Commerce Clause. It involved a woman who unfortunately just passed away, Juanita Swedenburg, and Swedenburg Winery out here in Middleburg, Virginia. She, like so many winemakers around the country, was subjected to a law that made it illegal to ship her wine to individual purchasers in other states. These were protectionist laws that were set up in various states to favor in-state wineries.

reason: Obviously, you could ship your wine to wholesalers.

Mellor: Yes. The wholesalers were really the 800-pound gorillas in this whole thing. They were the middlemen who were profiting—and still are profiting in some states—by the constraints imposed through these protectionist laws. They were very powerful and influential lobbies.

We took Juanita’s case to the Supreme Court and won. That has freed up wine shipment and the ability to get wine around the country. Because of the way states have authority to regulate wine or alcohol under the 21st Amendment, there are still some barriers that can be set up, but this removed a big one.

reason: Eminent domain has been a huge issue for you. How did it present itself as an area that demanded IJ’s attention?

Mellor: It’s a property rights issue. Eminent domain abuse had been of concern to us since our earliest days, but we really didn’t take it on until the mid-’90s, when we came across this situation in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Donald Trump, who owned a casino, had obtained the authority of eminent domain to condemn and tear down the home of an elderly widow right across from his casino in order to build a limousine parking lot to provide what Trump called a proper sense of arrival for his clients. We won that case in court and got tremendous media attention in the process, and that resulted in a deluge of inquiries and approaches to us from folks around the country who were suffering from similar plights.

Frankly, we had not realized just how widespread this phenomenon was until then. It was a terrible under-the-radar-screen tyranny that was sweeping the country. Once we became aware of it, though, we formed a strategic plan to escalate it to national attention and ultimately to the Supreme Court, which we did in the course of the next seven years.

We percolated several cases through the court system, all of which were wonderfully suited to bringing this issue to the U.S. Supreme Court. One of them involved Susette Kelo and several of her neighbors in New London, Connecticut, whose homes were being taken to provide what amounted to amenities for the new Pfizer plant being constructed there. High-end condos or a hotel or an office complex, a variety of things that would purportedly increase the tax revenue for the city and give a more amenable neighborhood for what Pfizer wanted there.

reason: For eminent domain to happen, you have to condemn a property.

Mellor: Yes. As the Supreme Court has done in tragically far too many instances, the words in the Constitution were interpreted or twisted to mean something entirely different from what they were intended to mean. The Constitution says “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation,” and those words “public use” were twisted in a 1954 case to mean public purpose.

reason: That was in the context of urban renewal?

Mellor: That’s right. They razed a slum in Washington, D.C., to put in public housing and other developments. They said clearing the slum was a public purpose, and that was sufficient to do it.

reason: The difference between purpose and use here is that public use had traditionally meant a school, a hospital, possibly a publicly funded hospital, a library.

Mellor: It’s what common sense and historical practice would lead you to believe it was. Something owned and used by the public.

reason: Why wouldn’t a housing project fit into that context?

Mellor: Number one, that was never envisioned by the founding fathers. Number two, it’s not the typical public property ownership where you’ve got it available to the public in an open and even way.

reason: So even though it’s publicly owned and operated, it’s not like you can go into anybody’s apartment.

Mellor: Right.

Once this practice was blessed by the Supreme Court, it ushered in an entirely new practice in urban redevelopment which had a horrible legacy for cities across America and the people who live in them. Entire neighborhoods were razed. People, especially in minority neighborhoods, were displaced, and horrible new public housing projects were created.

The practice went from slums to blighted areas to not-so-blighted areas and ultimately to perfectly fine neighborhoods. A “public purpose” was deemed to be anything that increases a city’s tax base and creates more jobs by tearing down whatever was in one spot and replacing it with something deemed more appropriate—usually at the behest of, or certainly for the benefit of, private developers.

reason: How many of the original affected homeowners in New London sold out at the first opportunity? Originally they were given market value.

Mellor: Some did sell out, many of them under protest. What happens—and this is a very standard operating procedure under eminent domain—is you’re basically approached by an agent for the developer and informed that they’re there to make you an offer, which usually comes as a surprise to most people because they don’t have their houses for sale. They’re told that we’re here to make you an offer, we think it’s a fair offer, in fact we think it’s a generous offer. However, if you don’t agree, we’re going to have to go to the city, and they’re going to condemn your property and, you know, we just can’t guarantee you’ll get this much money. You may get less.

reason: What did Kelo and her co-defendants do?

Mellor: They said no. Susette Kelo said that she was not going to move, that she had bought that home with hard-earned money and had restored it lovingly. She was living there with her husband, and this is where they wanted to stay. It wasn’t a matter of money. This was their home.

We knew we had an uphill fight in the Supreme Court. Sandra Day O’Connor had written one of the worst opinions on the issue back in 1986, and William Rehnquist had joined her, so that made it tough to figure out how we were going to get five votes. Nevertheless, we were there and we were going to make the best case. By this time, we had also developed a national campaign of public awareness in the media, and that was working pretty well.

When we got into court, the good news for us came when O’Connor leaned forward during the argument of the opposing side, the city council side, and said, “Stop a minute, counsel. Let me see if I understand. Do you mean to say that it’s your position that the City of New London could take a Motel 6 and give it to Ritz Carlton?” And he said what he had to say. He said yes, that’s my position, and she had a look of utter disbelief on her face. She sat back, and we knew at that moment we’d reached her.

She wrote a wonderful dissent, but sadly it was a dissent. We lost 5-4, with Kennedy coming in with a very unfortunate concurrence that purported to set some limitations on eminent domain.

reason: There’s a bizarre coda to all of this, right?

Mellor: Yeah. The development’s not going to happen. It’s utterly at the end. It’s not a viable effort at all.

Susette’s house, though, is going to remain standing. They moved it from where it was located to another spot in town. It will stand as a symbol for property rights for the future.

reason: After Kelo you kept litigating this issue.

Mellor: We announced a national campaign to take this to the states, because the one ray of hope in the majority opinion was that the states could do more to protect property rights if they chose. So it was our duty, our opportunity, to go to the states and get greater protection.

reason: Can you talk briefly about how that played out in Ohio?

Mellor: Sure. We had a situation outside of Cincinnati where a neighborhood was being condemned to expand a shopping center. Some wonderful clients there had homes, or in one case a business, that they cherished. We were up against an enormously powerful developer and the city, who were determined to take this property

The law in Ohio was not very good. They’re allowed the condemnation of property if it was declared blighted, and to be declared blighted there was a list of subjective standards that could fit just about any neighborhood, such as diversity of ownership or cul-de-sacs. This neighborhood had, in fact, been declared blighted under those highly subjective standards.

We argued the case in the year after Kelo, and one thing that was evident during the argument was that the court was very, very sensitive to the outrage that was evident around this issue throughout the country. In the days after the Kelo decision, poll after poll after poll was showing astonishing opposition to that decision—70, 80, 90 percent against the government and in favor of property owners.

We won a unanimous decision at the Ohio Supreme Court level. This is the kind of decision lawyers live an entire career for and rarely get. Not only was it unanimous, not only was it in our favor, but this decision quoted Richard Epstein, Bernie Siegan, John Locke, spoke of natural rights—I mean, all of these wonderfully important authors and concepts woven into an unabashed defense of property rights and striking down, among other things, these utterly subjective notions of blight, recognizing them for the sham that they are.

reason: This is an example of where you lose in the U.S. Supreme Court but you generate a huge backlash.

Mellor: Without the Kelo decision, business would have continued as usual. Business as usual meant a complete drift in the direction of greater government authority with eminent domain, less protection for private property rights. Today that’s profoundly different. Forty-two states have enacted laws that change the status quo that was in existence at the time of Kelo in a way that to some degree provides more protection for private property rights. Some of those are modest and minor degrees; some of them are profoundly important degrees; some of them are kind of in the middle. But all of them are better than what existed before.

reason: What are your areas of greatest concern looking into the future?

Mellor: First, I’m worried about the fact that there’s a lot yet to be done on the areas that we’ve carved out. We’ve made measurable, notable, and I think significant progress in those areas since we started, but we’re a long way from the rule of law we need for a free society.

I think those are going to be compounded by the challenges we face in the coming years in the realm of the war on terror and the war on drugs.

reason: How so?

Mellor: There’s no question that we are on a precipice over which we could easily tumble, especially if there’s another major terrorist development whereby the state, at all levels, will gain greater authority. The presumption in favor of state authority will escalate dramatically and that will bleed over into all sorts of activities that we take for granted today, whether it’s financial transactions, whether it’s property ownership and use matters, whether it’s education, whether it’s travel. The liberties that are in the fabric of everyday life could be chilled and then perhaps profoundly restricted.

reason: Do you think we’re more free or less free in that kind of big-picture sense? Are we more free or less free than we were in, say, 1975?

Mellor: I think that we’re more free. The proliferation of new media, the availability of new mechanisms for investment and financial transactions that have dispersed and created wealth for vast numbers of people, property ownership, access to information—all those are wonderfully exciting new developments.

But I think the potential for being less free is far greater, along the lines of what I was talking about with the war on terror and the war on drugs. That whole effort to give government the benefit of the doubt when it comes to its exercise of authority is the real problem that we face. More and more people are willing to do that in more and more areas, and as that happens, as that becomes the prevailing way of thinking, then naturally government will expand into those new initiatives.

What we really face is a Zeitgeist of assumptions. It’s the accumulation of many years of repetition of collectivist thinking, and it allows people to accept as a given things that they would have questioned or been outraged about years ago.

They Said What?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:21:00 EST

Here’s a history test no currently breathing American citizen should fail: Name a president whose “only reading materials were government documents and Bible scriptures” and whose tenure was linked to an increasingly unpopular war started under geopolitically murky, if not clearly phony, circumstances.

That would be James K. Polk, who pushed for war with Mexico in 1846 after the Mexican army killed American soldiers in disputed territory along the Rio Grande River. A key question was whether U.S. forces were on foreign soil at the first moment of engagement. As recounted in You Said What? (Harper Paperbacks), Polk “began to prepare his declaration of war, at no time recognizing that…the attack had occurred in disputed land. By not addressing the point, he was able to make the strongest case possible to a skeptical Congress.” Among the doubters was Abraham Lincoln, then a Whig representative from Illinois, who voted against war, demanding that Polk “Show me the spot!” on which U.S. blood had been spilled.

Polk lied through omission, a common sort of deception among the “lies and propaganda” campaigns gathered in this volume by editor Bill Fawcett. One hundred and twenty years later, another president, Lyndon Johnson, took advantage of the fog surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident to ratchet up the American military presence in Vietnam. What’s more, Johnson systematically pursued what his spokesmen called a “policy of minimum candor” when discussing U.S. aims and troop commitments. “He left office branded a liar because he could not tell the whole truth about the war,” You Said What? reminds us. And then there’s the current president, who like his fellow Texan has failed to explain fully the causes and costs of war—and has dismal approval ratings to show for his efforts.

Fawcett, whose previous collections include You Did What?: Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters and How to Lose a Battle: Foolish Plans and Great Military Blunders, proceeds from the useful premise that “the lies told in an era give us some real insights into history.” Short but well-researched entries by various contributors cover topics from the legendary Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s invention of assassination plots by hippies at the 1968 Democratic National Convention to Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer Prize–winning invention of an 8-year-old heroin junkie to the tobacco industry’s varied and insidious attempts to convince the public that cigarettes were harmless. The section on Watergate lays out the disorienting and disturbing machinations of the Nixon White House in clear detail. That’s no small task, You Said What? notes, as “the biggest scandal in American history began with a lie and contained so many different lies told by so many different people that it’s almost impossible to keep track of who wasn’t lying.”

There’s a refreshingly libertarian edge to much of the material, especially regarding the ways in which governments baldly manipulate the truth in wartime. “In war,” Winston Churchill is quoted, “truth should be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies.” The Food and Drug Administration comes in for well-deserved abuse for putting politics ahead of science, as it did in the case of t-PA, a “clot busting” drug that was kept off the market in the 1980s for no good reason. The perpetrators of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, who monstrously withheld treatment from hundreds of infected black men, are similarly taken to the woodshed. Joseph Stalin, who garners more ink than any other individual in the collection, is aptly named the “greatest liar in history…the man whose lies and paranoia caused at least thirty million deaths.”

Even when the topics are as feather-light and superficial as Eric Clapton’s “undying but temporary passion for Patti Boyd-Harrison”—he wrote “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight” for her, but their marriage didn’t last—You Said What? performs a public service. We’ve got more access to more information today than ever before. That can be incredibly liberating—no one has a monopoly on knowledge anymore—but it also demands that each of us be far more careful about the information upon which we rely. Never before in human history has a bullshit detector been more necessary. By reminding us of past episodes of dissembling, manipulation, and even good-natured idiocy, You Said What? edifies even as it entertains.

Fawcett’s collection also reminds us that sometimes liars get their comeuppance. The Whig Party, which had opposed James Polk’s “unnecessary war,” took the White House after Young Hickory refused to stand for re-election. Polk “passed away 103 days after leaving office, the shortest post-presidency on record.”

Nick Gillespie (gillespie@reason.com) is editor-in-chief of Reason. A version of this originally appeared in the New York Post.

Ex Marks a Spot

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Featuring essays and fiction from contributors as varied as talk show satirist Stephen Colbert, former US senator and consort to Linda Ronstadt and Debra Winger Bob Kerrey, and "black humor" author Bruce Jay Friedman, Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me seeks to find ponies in mountains of emotional manure. Edited by Ben Karlin, a former editor of The Onion who also worked on The Daily Show and co-created The Colbert Report, the anthology is "about that salient something men take away from failed relationships."

Unfortunately, based on the preponderance of the evidence presented here, that salient something amounts to little more than frat-boy-level chuckles about unrequited middle-school crushes, frustrating games of telephone tag in the pre-cell days, how "dirty girls make bad friends" (to quote the title of one contribution), and the realization that even boys who grew up wearing "husky" jeans can at least occasionally get the girl.

Of course, you don't go into a book with a foreword by the editor's mother ("My son is a real catch and shame on any girl who's ever thought otherwise") expecting Saul Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak (which hypothesized that love gone wrong killed more people than all the wars and famines in human history). But the collection's persistent glibness - don't inadvertently involve your pets in autoerotic activity, counsels one section - doesn't just undercut the occasionally funny lines, it helps explain why these guys might have dumped in the first place.

That most of them, including the popular novelist Nick Hornby, who contributes an introduction, seem to be ensconced in happy relationships trowels on an extra layer of smugness that is every bit as off-putting as passing gas during intercourse.

There are memorable pieces, to be sure. Kerrey's account of a secret crush he never met and who died in a plane crash is haunting and artfully intertwined with the tale of an octogenarian friend who reconnected with an early love late in life. Marcellus Hall's comic strip, "The Sorrows of Young Walter: Or the Lessons of a Cyclical Heart," is wry in its transparently phony insistence that "every heartache was unsolicited." Advice columnist Dan Savage's memory of the older woman who initiated him into sex—and unintentionally convinced him he was gay—is funny, raunchy, embarrassing, honest and moving in the way the best relationships are.

Alas, those pieces—and a couple more—are few and far between. Which means this collection, like the amorous relationships it describes, fails far more often than it succeeds. It's not clear there's much of a lesson in getting dumped, though one of editor Karlin's insights is well worth remembering: "Everybody gets crushed. For the lucky ones it only happens once."

Nick Gillespie is editor of Reason.tv This story originally appeared in The New York Post.

Editor's Note: A Better Choice

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:00:00 EST

My first experience with voting in a presidential race was enough to turn me off the whole process pretty much for good. It was 1968, and I was in kindergarten in suburban New Jersey, about an hour’s train ride from New York. For some reason, my teacher insisted that her tiny charges cast a ballot for one member of the trilogy of terror then vying to become leader of the Free World: Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace. Faced with such choices, each uniquely wretched in his own way, I like to think I uttered my first adult curse word that day.

Since we couldn’t write, she assigned each candidate a different color and instructed us to draw a circle in crayon in the corresponding hue on squares of paper. We folded the squares and then put them in a shoebox with a slot cut through the top. The result—a landslide for Wallace—visibly upset my teacher, who happened to be African American. But it wasn’t because we were pint-sized segregationists, it was simply that we all loved the color green.

I’ve never had much faith in electoral politics since then. The only time I’ve cast a vote for a major party’s presidential candidate was in 1984, the first time I was legally eligible to do so. (I pulled the lever for the sad sack Walter Mondale, for reasons as obscure to me now as his “Norwegian charisma” was then to the American voting public.)

This month’s cover story is about Ron Paul, the one person running for president who just might restore my faith in politics. In “Scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution” (page 22), Senior Editor Brian Doherty follows the 10-term Texas congressman to Iowa and reports on a candidate who actually talks like this: “I don’t want to run your life.…I don’t want to run the economy.…I don’t want to run the world.” Such talk is energizing donors—in November, Paul set a single-day GOP online fundraising record by hauling in $4.3 million—and is pulling people into politics who never cared before. As of press time, he’s climbing in the polls and is likely to have a significant effect on at least the early primaries.

There’s zero chance that Ron Paul will be the Republican nominee for president. And I must say that a number of his stances—his dogged support of “sound money” and a border wall, to name a couple—perplex me from a specifically libertarian, “Free Minds and Free Markets” perspective. But here’s hoping that many of the positions he’s taking—such as his principled opposition to an interventionist foreign policy, the PATRIOT Act, and the federal government’s drug war—have a major influence on how Campaign 2008 unfolds.

Certainly it is bracing to witness a candidate who takes the U.S. Constitution seriously and who draws support from evangelical Christians, aging punk icons such as Johnny Rotten, antiwar college students, and even exotic dancers (hence the group “Strippers for Ron Paul”). Lord knows I could have used another choice in kindergarten. As we move full steam ahead into that quadrennial disaster known as the race for the White House, Americans could use another choice now.

'You Can't Turn Back the Ocean'

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:07:00 EST

Kurt Loder has been chronicling cutting-edge culture in the United States since the 1970s, first with the defunct rock magazine Circus and then during a legendary stint at Rolling Stone. Along the way, he co-authored Tina Turner’s memoir, which became the basis for the hit movie What’s Love Got To Do With It. In 1988 Loder joined MTV as a news anchor and now, among other tasks, serves as the channel’s film critic. His weekly reviews, available online at mtv.com, are as broad in their selection of films as they are incisive in their analysis.

Consider Loder’s take on Michael Moore’s health care documentary Sicko. “As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can’t be solved by government regulation (that would be the same government that’s already given us the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles),” wrote Loder, a military veteran, in June. “What’s the problem with government health systems? Moore’s movie doesn’t ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they’re inevitably forced to ration treatment.”

Born in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1945, Loder is unabashedly libertarian in his politics and optimisticin his cultural outlook. As part of the October conference “Reason in D.C.,” Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie interviewed Loder on the impact of technology (liberating), the rise of celebrity culture (noxious), the growth of the nanny state (really noxious), and the future of mass media (grim, but that’s a good thing). What follows is an edited transcript, with audience questions mixed directly into the discussion for readability. The full interview can be viewed at reason.tv; comments should be sent to letters@reason.com.

Reason: Major record companies complain they’re losing market share and revenue. Major daily newspapers say the same thing. Broadcast networks still command a huge audience, but it’s much smaller than before. The big outlets don’t seem to have the monopoly on audience they once did. Is the decentralization of audience, of culture, a good thing?

Kurt Loder: We’re better off with new technology. Music is proliferating in a way it never has before. CDs are over. DVDs will soon be over. You’ll download this stuff. I think it’s a good thing. Record companies will change. They’ll have to.

Copyright is going to be the big change. I think creators should be paid for their work. I’m on that side of the debate. If you make a record, you should be paid for it. Record companies do pay artists for the music they make, eventually. It’s remarkable how little
they pay them—initially, especially. If you’re a young band, you’re going to make nothing originally. Maybe on your third record, you’ll start making money. It’s pretty amazing.

We used to live in a command-media world. You had no choice but to look at NBC, CBS, ABC; there was nothing else. If you wanted big stories, you went to The New York Times or The Washington Post. I think blogging and the Internet have changed that entirely. They’ve shattered the monopoly on information.

To give just one example: The “Baghdad Diarist” in The New Republic [a soldier who wrote an article describing alleged bad behavior by U.S. troops in Iraq] was a total fraud. It was exposed by military bloggers who came out and said this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago.

Reason: As a journalist, how do you feel about the audience fact-checking you? And having direct access to you?

Loder: Some people are always going to call you an idiot. Some people are going to say you’re great or you’re an asshole. You have to get used to that. But that’s good too. It’s good to hear directly what people think. It’s good to get rid of filters. I think we live in a great, hopeful age for media. I think it’s the best of all possible times.

Anybody can be heard now. You put something out into the ocean of the Internet, and it bounces all over everywhere because things can be passed on so well. It’s a great time to be a filmmaker because the technology we have allows you to make films and upload them, and people can see your work. You can make digital music and upload it, and people will hear it. This is the golden age of communication.

Reason: One of the great bogeymen of contemporary media discourse is the consolidation of media ownership. MTV itself is part of a giant conglomerate. Why shouldn’t fewer companies owning more outlets be worrisome?

Loder: MTV is part of Viacom, which controls Paramount, and so on and so forth. It’s the evil empire, right? But these giants—Time Warner, Viacom—are facing an upstart culture now. Things are coming from the ground up, and they can’t really deal with it all. They’re very upset about their content being taken and simply uploaded on [the video sharing site] YouTube. Viacom has a billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube.

They can’t really fight it. They have to become part of it. They have to buy part of it.

Reason: Should we worry about attempts, whether legal or technological, to clamp down on culture?

Loder: You can’t turn back the ocean. I don’t think there can be a clampdown. You can’t go back to three channels and two or three national newspapers. It’ll never happen again. There’s too much good journalism online. I love newspapers and magazines, but I think they’re on the way out. And that may not be a bad thing.

Reason: Do you worry about the fragmentation of culture? Some critics worry about what’s lost from the time when we all had to listen to the same stuff or see the same stuff.

Loder: I think one reason that things are so fragmented is that there’s no talent that can unify the world like the Beatles did. The Beatles appealed to everybody, even old people. Nowadays, you can talk about bands where they are always compared to something else. “It’s like nu-metal, but it’s death metal with touches of ska”—that sort of thing.

But as long as you don’t have this monolithic critical culture defining what things are, you’re going to have to go and seek out music for yourself. Things will be a little splintered until something comes around that is unifying. We’re still waiting for that day, but in the meantime there’s still lots
of good music around. But you have to go look for it. It’s not just going to be force-fed to you, although God knows people will try to do that.

Reason: Some of the same technology that allows us to express ourselves more freely also means the state can surveil us more easily and effectively. You’re very outspoken in your opposition to the rise of surveillance cameras in your hometown of New York.

Loder: [New York Mayor] Michael Bloomberg wants more and more surveillance cameras. There are already quite a few, but he’s inspired by London. Britain is so ahead of us in terms of surveillance and the nanny state. Bloomberg was recently in London, talking to his opposite number, Ken Livingstone, and he was thrilling to all the surveillance cameras. There’s one on every corner, on every bus, on every subway. Bloomberg said, and I quote, “We’re way behind. We do have to catch up.”

This is a scary guy. I understand the fear of terrorism, but people don’t seem to fully understand what would happen if this surveillance regime passed into the hands of less benign people. You have to look ahead to that, and no one does. There are 4 million surveillance cameras in Great Britain. We’re heading in that direction.

Reason: Why is that scary?

Loder: I don’t want people watching me.

Reason: That’s a curious statement coming from a guy on MTV.

Loder: Very well. I don’t want the government watching me. There are cameras that issue tickets if you’re going through [yellow] lights. Soon they’ll be able to tell if you’re smoking in your car or using a cell phone. You’ll be getting tickets for this. It’s already happening in Europe. Do we want it to happen here? I don’t think so. You always have to keep an eye on the state.

Reason: How do you feel about other nanny state issues? Smoking bans, trans fat bans, you name it; these are all part of reality in Bloomberg’s New York and, increasingly, other parts of the U.S. and the West.

Loder: Bloomberg most recently started a crackdown on Mister Softee ice cream trucks in the city. Now if you want to sell ice cream, when you pull your truck over to the curb, you’re not allowed to ring your bells. What can you say about this sort of thing? It’s amazing that people don’t rise up with pitchforks.

You can just go on and on and on. Calabasas, California, has become a city where you basically can’t smoke. The whole secondhand smoke thing is ridiculous. I understand people not liking smoke. But there should be places where, if the owner doesn’t mind you smoking in his bar or restaurant, you should be able to do that. What’s wrong with that?

There are really interesting contrasts. I think San Francisco just started its first injection room, where the city will provide people with nurses to shoot people up with heroin. So you’ll have a clean environment to get high in, but it’s still illegal to smoke in bars. I just don’t understand.

Reason: How do you define yourself politically?

Loder: I think people should be free to do what they want to do. I think it’s very simple. I don’t think anyone puts faith in the Republicans or the Democrats. You know, Warren Beatty once said something very good. Seriously. Somebody asked him if we needed a third party in this country, and he said, “I think we need a second one.” I think that’s true.

Reason: Where did your politics come from?

Loder: I grew up on the Jersey Shore, on a little barrier island. The Atlantic Ocean was on one side, the bay was on the other. Everyone there hunted and fished and clammed and got crabs out of the bay. And one day my brother told me someone had come down from the Bureau of Petty Harassment or something and they measured the temperature of the water and had decided it was a little too warm and a certain type of bacteria might incubate in it and there was a chance that might harm the clams. And so, from now on, no one was supposed to take clams out of the bay anymore. Which everyone ignored. And no one died. That was before the government got tenacious about this stuff. So I thought that was pretty stupid right there.

Later I got a draft notice, which focused my thinking.

And then one day, I was working for a newspaper in New Jersey and this flyer came across my desk from the local Libertarian Party. At the top, it said, “Free Love and Free Markets.” And I thought, “That’s some pretty interesting territory.” And that’s pretty much where I am.

Reason: How’s your ideology received at MTV?

Loder: I don’t go around preaching it. I mean, people know what I think. People in the media are sort of liberal. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. It’s a liberal world. I don’t know why that is. Maybe they all go to the same school or something. As [ABC News’] John Stossel says, this is the water they swim in, and they don’t even notice it. But not everyone in the media is liberal. Apparently at The Wall Street Journal, there are a lot of Democrats on staff.

Still, they let me do what I want to do. I’ve got to give them that.

Reason: How do your views play with your younger colleagues at MTV? What political trends do you see among the kids who watch MTV?

Loder: It’s hard to generalize about younger people because they’re all different. I think you’d be surprised at how many people are not entirely, screamingly liberal. When I reviewed Sicko, you’d be surprised at the number of people in my company who emailed me and said, “You know, you got that exactly right. I’m glad somebody finally said that about this guy.” You never know where support is going to come from.

Reason: Rock and roll has always been viewed as an instrument of rebellion. Yet it seems that performers are increasingly establishment in their views, and unapologetic about inflicting their politics on their audiences. They’ve gone from saying “Don’t trust anyone over 30” and “Down with the man” to defending Social Security and pushing for national health care. What do you think about that?

Loder: I don’t remember Elvis Presley telling us what to do about global warming. Nobody should ever expect millionaire celebrities to save the world. I don’t know if you remember the Time magazine that had Bono on the cover and asked, “Can Bono Save the World?” Well, the answer is no.

All these people seem to have an opinion. I find it boring myself, but if you’re 15 years old, you might find it rousing. I have no need for it.

I think we should realize that rock and roll is something that happened, and it’s over, like the folk music period. There’s rock, which is something different, which is something that is usually taken to be what happened after the Beatles became more self-conscious. Today, when kids who are 19 have a band, they walk into the room and sign a record contract; they arrive with lawyers and publicists and all the stuff. It’s hard to be rebellious with that. Bands will say they want to change the world and “down with the man,” and they’re working for Time Warner.

Again, don’t trust anything celebrities say. They’re not going to save anybody’s world. Not even their own, often.

Reason: You’ve suggested reasons for concern about freedom. But you’re optimistic about the future, about American life and American culture. Why is that, if some things seem so dire?

Loder: You have to be optimistic about the human endeavor, I think. There are always creative people. I think the only thing we have to worry about is people who would oppress us, which would be the government. Only the government can censor us. Only the government can take from us. I’ve never really believed in government. I don’t think you can. I believe in people, and the good they’ll do.

Congress Strong-Arming the Steroids Issue

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 07:45:00 EST

Read this article in the Washington Post.

2007: The Year in Videos

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:06:00 EST

It's the first day of 2008, and outside of Iowa and Pakistan there's not much news and not much to worry about. Kick back and click the "play" button as reason editors and friends of the magazine remember the most striking, funny, historic, stupid, or impactful videos of 2007.

Update on January 2: Due to an editing error, some video picks were not included in the original posting of the article. Submitted for your viewing pleasure are three new selections:

Radley Balko
reason senior editor

I'm nominating the lot of police brutality and taser videos. The most popular this year were probably the "Don't Tase Me, Bro" video from a John Kerry event in Florida (see below) and a Missouri teenager's recording of an abusive police officer who had pulled him over. The genre as a whole is the result of the mass democratization of technology, and represents an important shift toward transparency and accountability in law enforcement. More than a few abusive police officers have lost their jobs after a video went viral, which likely wouldn't have happened were we still in the pre-Internet age. Mass watching of the watchers is a good thing, and we ought to be encouraging more of it, both to weed out bad cops and to protect the good ones from frivolous claims of abuse.

Ronald Bailey
reason science correspondent

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' weekly television talk show, Alo Presidente, infamously runs on for hours. In September, 2007 viewers were treated to more than eight hours of presidential bloviation. Chavez' hero, the notoriously long-winded Fidel Castro, has never even gotten close to that record.

In November at the Ibero-American Summit, Spain's King Juan Carlos told Chavez, "Why don't you just shut up!" Juan Carlos' words have been turned into a popular ring tone. I nominate it as the "best" video of 2007 because it was way past time that someone told Chavez to just zip it.

Nick Gillespie
reason editor-in-chief

I continue to laugh every time I watch the meeting of minds between singer-songwriter John Mayer and Justin Long (the Apple Computer guy) outside an L.A. nightclub. Mayer--drunk on booze or maybe just strict construction of the Constitution?--goes on a pro-Ron Paul rant that is magical not just for its intensity and heartfeltness but for its very existence in the first place. Years ago in reason, we excerpted Tyler Cowen's What Price Fame?, a study in how contemporary celebrities are impotent puppets we pay astronomical amounts to entertain us (Cowen's piece is not, alas, online). This is true, even when we agree with them. It's a great world where this sort of footage is widely available.

Katherine Mangu-Ward
reason associate editor

This mashup of the classic Apple 1984 ad and Hillary campaign footage ends with Obama's website address but wasn't approved by his campaign. When the maker's identity was feretted out by the Huffington Post, he said: "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed." Ne'er were truer words spoken in 2007.

Jeff Taylor
reason online columnist

A perfect creation of ad hoc media -- found it via Fark.com, builds on a previous YouTube upload of Hubble telescope images set to the Tool song Lateralus -- and adds immense value, meaning, and insight, all because some guy -- philriehl -- decided to do it. The 9:24 vid -- that number is important -- illustrates and explains a Fibonacci number sequence clearly enough for everyone to feel their inner gnostic stir. Beautiful, powerful, and inspiring.

Jesse Walker
reason managing editor

Who is the YouTube candidate? It might be Ron Paul, thanks to his ability to inspire hundreds of homemade videos, some of them gloriously weird. But Mike Gravel is the guy who makes weird videos, or at least sends them out with his stamp of approval. My favorite is this Lennonist rap featuring psychedelic animation and clips from Duck and Cover.

Matt Welch
incoming editor-in-chief of reason

I can never tell whether this surrealist attack on/celebration of John "Walnuts" McCain was based on any particular knowledge or point of view, or whether it was just a one-time burst of inspired guesswork, but I do know that it only gets better -- and creepier -- on the 200th viewing. "I want to help people... in their lives" may yet go down as one of the most chilling predictions of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Tyler Cowen
author of Discover Your Inner Economist

The best video clip I saw this year was John McLaughlin playing "Cherokee."

David Harsanyi
author of Nanny State

My favorite video of the year:

Markos Moulitsas
netroots paterfamilias

The Huckabee parody ad. Nothing captured better the absurdity of the GOP's entire field.

Brendan O'Neill
editor of Spiked Online

Mia Farrow in Second Life talking about Darfur: It's not my favourite video of the year. But in capturing the naked narcissism of celebrity activism, it's one of the most startling. Mia Farrow's young-looking, sexy avatar addresses a virtual audience of students, activists and lizards in Second Life. Like most Save Darfur activists Farrow says precisely nothing about the politics driving the conflict in Sudan; instead she describes horrific occurrences and shows photos of distressed Darfurians. As Mahmood Mamdani wrote in the London Review of Books (Essay of the Year), activists like Farrow "obscure the politics of the violence and position [themselves] as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer." It's fitting that Farrow's speech takes place in the cartoon world of Second Life, since the aim of Darfur activists is not to get to grips with the reality on the ground in Sudan but to create a virtual plane of moral superiority that they can occupy. Darfur is a "defining moment for the human family," says Farrow. She's so vain she thinks somebody else's war is about her. Watch this vid to glimpse Kipling's colonialism updated: the Web Surfer's Burden.

Remembering 'The Forgotten Man'

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:15:00 EST

With the possible exception of the Civil War, no event has transformed American politics more fully than the Great Depression. From the stock market crash of 1929 through U.S. entry into World War II, the country’s economy floundered tragically, with the unemployment rate typically in the high teens. First under the misguided and generally ineffective policies of President Herbert Hoover and later under those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the federal government became increasingly interventionist, at times attempting to dictate all aspects of economic production.

When accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1932, Roosevelt proclaimed “a new deal” for the American people. Once in office, he began radically transforming the federal government while seeking to ameliorate the nation’s woes. He pushed subsidies for farmers, changed the banking system, and created the National Recovery Administration, which regulated many aspects of business until it was declared unconstitutional in 1935. Through the creation of the Social Security system and related programs, Roosevelt vastly expanded the scope and size of the federal government and created the political world in which we live. The shift was so complete that even as vocal a foe of big government as Ronald Reagan, who started his political career as a New Deal Democrat, approvingly wrote to Congress in the early 1980s of the “nation’s ironclad commitment to Social Security” and praised FDR’s visionary leadership in creating the program.

In her meticulously researched new history of the Depression, The Forgotten Man (HarperCollins), journalist Amity Shlaes describes the received catechism of the era: “Roosevelt made things better by taking charge. His New Deal inspired and tided the country over. In this way, the country fended off revolution of the sort bringing down Europe. Without the New Deal, we would all have been lost.…The attitude is that the New Deal is the best model we have for what government must do for weak members of society, in both times of crises and times of stability.” But that conventional account, she writes, fails to capture “the realities of the period.” Shlaes shows how both Hoover and Roosevelt “overestimated the value of government planning” and intensified and prolonged the very problems they were seeking to fix.

Told in a rich narrative style, The Forgotten Man follows dozens of historical figures through the Depression, weaving the stories of people as varied as American Civil Liberties Union co-founder Roger Baldwin, Alcoholics Anonymous creator Bill Wilson, power utility magnate (and failed presidential candidate) Wendell Willkie, and African-American evangelist Father Divine into a rich human tapestry. In this, the book calls to mind one of the Depression’s landmark literary texts, John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy (1930–36).

Shlaes is a columnist for Bloomberg and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A former member of the editorial board at The Wall Street Journal, she is also the author of The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do About It (2000) and Germany: The Empire Within (1991).

In June she was interviewed on C-SPAN’s After Words program by reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie. What follows is an edited transcript of that program, which can be viewed online at reason.tv. Comments can be sent to letters@reason.com.

reason: Your book is subtitled “a new history of the Great Depression.” What’s new about your take?

Amity Shlaes: One of the important things about the existing argument is that it’s all about Keynesianism, about whether government spending can cure the economy when it’s ill. Scholars have overlooked the cost of uncertainty in an economy, what we would now call the “unknown unknowns.” Both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations (but especially the Roosevelt administration) were so unpredictable. That hurt the economy very much, and when I went back and saw the extent I was astounded. Uncertainty is a factor that I thought needed to be explored. There were lots of people who said, “I will not invest ’til I know what’s going to happen.”

During the Depression, you heard the phrase “bold, persistent experimentation” all the time. We’ve been taught that was good. Somebody had to do something, was what we learned. But what I saw was this enormous cost, especially during the second half of the 1930s.

There’s a second thing too. I look at the government’s action using the lens of public choice theory. Very simply, public choice says that government is no better or worse than a business, it’s a competitor. Sometimes I use a crustacean image; The government is like a lobster. It will eat anything, it wants to survive, it will compete with anything, and it can be a cannibal. When you look back at the ’30s using the public choice lens, what you discover is the extent to which the Depression wasn’t about a virtuous government and bad business people. Rather, it was about people in office competing with the private sector for power. Much of the struggle described in the book literally inhered in the power business: utilities. There’s something about power that attracts strong people. And of course the government wins and the private sector loses in the form of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was created in 1933.

reason: Where does your title, The Forgotten Man, come from?

Shlaes: In 1932, on a radio program called The Lucky Strike Hour, Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech that was written in part by Ray Moley, his adviser. Moley was a man you’d want to have at your dinner table today. He was a wonderful, wonderful man. In that speech Roosevelt spoke of the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Moley wrote to his sister that he wasn’t quite sure where he had gotten the phrase, but it was in the air.

In the late 19th century, there was a book, a collection of essays, called The Forgotten Man and a famous lecture called “The Forgotten Man.” The author was a Yale professor called William Graham Sumner, who had quite a different forgotten man in mind. He put it algebraically. Sumner said a wants to help x, with x being the man at the bottom. And b wants to help x too. That’s our philanthropic impulse, we want to help. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all have that impulse to provide charity. It becomes a problem when a and b get together and pass a perhaps-dubious law that coerces c into funding their maybe-good project for x. In Sumner’s original version, c is the forgotten man, the man who pays, the man who prays, the man who is not thought of.

That phrase meant a lot to people at the time, and when Roosevelt people debated Hoover people they were all familiar with William Graham Sumner. So [Roosevelt’s supporters] said, “You have the wrong forgotten man! The forgotten man is the man waiting for the recovery that you are not delivering or that you are preventing.”

I think Sumner’s concept of the forgotten man also has to do with today. When you talk about the upcoming presidential election, you see great powerhouses, the Democratic powerhouse (Hillary Clinton) and the Republican powerhouse (maybe McCain, maybe someone else). And the individual voter says, “Where do I fit into this? I feel like the forgotten man.” There’s something very un-fun about this election as it’s beginning to unfold. Given our challenges with the funding of entitlement programs, the forgotten man in the future will be the generation who will pay for what Roosevelt created during the Depression.

reason: You note that there were similarities between Hoover and Roosevelt, at least in the early stages of dealing with the Depression. Obviously, FDR was a lot more successful as a politician, but he and Hoover shared certain types of mentalities and even certain policy inclinations. Talk about what Hoover did wrong and how Roosevelt built on that.

Shlaes: Hoover was a good man, and electing him was like electing Bill Gates or Mike Bloomberg, or electing some other capitalist figure as president. In 1928 the country said, “We want a businessman to rationalize our country.” There was nothing wrong with some aspects of that, but Hoover had the wrong temperament. He had been Coolidge’s secretary of commerce and he did have an enormous talent for organizing humanitarian efforts, such as the relief effort for the Great Flood of 1927, which ravaged areas along the Mississippi River. Before that, he’d been very successful in business. The voters thought, “Let’s get somebody from the private sector as president and bring that success to government.” But government is a different animal than the private sector. Hoover was an engineer. He was a control freak. He would rather have control than do what was right. That’s a harsh thing to say, but you see it happening over and over again.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, he did some bad things. One was he called business leaders together and said, “Don’t drop wages or prices.” He didn’t give business a free rein to handle the downturn. In 1930 he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which raised tariffs to historically high levels. That sent a terrible international signal.

It was in the Republican Party’s platform to like tariffs; Republicans liked tariffs at that point. It was wrong, but they did. They thought a high tariff was good for business. It’s not good for business generally; it’s just good for the certain businessman who has the influence with politicians.

Hoover probably knew better. He had lived in London; he had lived in Asia. He was a man who had generated significant economic growth in his businesses. He had a thousand professors—even some from his own university, Stanford—write to him saying, “Don’t sign this tariff; it’s bad.” And yet he signed it.

Hoover does get blamed for something that he doesn’t deserve. People today say, “Oh, he ought to have spent as a Keynesian would, and the government would have made the economy grow.” We want to remember that the government was very small when he was president. The federal government was smaller than state and local governments at the time. It spent something like the equivalent of 2 percent or 3 percent of gross domestic product. Now it’s 18 percent to 20 percent.

reason: What was happening at the Federal Reserve?

Shlaes: The Fed was young. It had only been founded in the 1910s. They didn’t really know what they were doing. Neither Roosevelt nor Hoover understood that the country was in a deflation, that they were having a money drought. Bank problems were a large factor too. I don’t think they really understood what was going on with money or that you could create more money. They were in the gold standard culture. But there was a professor whom I came to know and like in the period, Irving Fisher. He would go around and say, basically, “There must be more money!”

Some towns realized this. They made their own money. They manufactured it. In the book, you can see pictures of the scrip that they created. It often had a moral component. In Salt Lake City, they had a currency called the “valor.”

The Fed should have made money easier to obtain. The concept that we have today—much of this book is history, not economics—of open market economics, where the government buys bonds or sells bonds to soak up money from the economy, was not especially developed at that time. And the gold standard functioned differently anyhow. If you want to make an argument against the gold standard, this is the example. The Depression was the Hurricane Katrina of gold standard policy. The absolute worst picture you can get of the gold standard is this period, because people did go hungry.

reason: Hoover had a terrible four years and got smoked in the ’32 election by FDR, who, among other things, also lifted Prohibition.

Shlaes: Right. That was part of the sale, the knowledge that Roosevelt would do that. He always had a gift for the voters. In the ’32 election, he gave liquor. (And there were significant revenues that came with legalizing liquor.) In the ’36 election, he gave spending.

He also created the Securities and Exchange Commission, which I’m generally in favor of. This is not a totally libertarian book. I think it’s OK to have the Fed and OK to have the SEC and OK to have clear rules in the game.

reason: Because they limit the uncertainty, which in the end is worse than even a bad policy that’s certain?

Shlaes: Yes. But there were other things that he did in his first 100 days, and that was the problem. Central to it was changing the economics of agriculture and saying, “We will pay you not to produce. We will limit supply, either by plowing under or limiting acreage”—that sort of thing.

reason: Where did his farm policy come from? FDR always talked about helping people, but what he did was actually set price floors at a time when people were going hungry. This isn’t exactly what the typical FDR devotee fully understands.

Shlaes: Well, the interest group was the farmers. Roosevelt was elected in part by the farm vote. They wanted the kind of high prices they had had before World War I. They had a significant drop in their prices, something on the order of 30 percent to 40 percent. Looking back, we might say that more of America should have moved to the city faster, which is what they did eventually anyhow.

He put Henry Wallace, a figure they knew, in as agriculture secretary. The administration made a bunch of rules. They put in a tax on middlemen, on the theory that that would help the farmers and that middlemen got in the way of efficiency rather than helped efficiency, which is what we think today.

Then there was an analogous beast in the business sphere called the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created the National Recovery Administration and which had a whole bunch of philosophies behind it, copying a little bit from Britain, copying definitely the German cartel system, and copying what Stalin was doing.

Roosevelt’s advisers didn’t know Stalin was a monster, or at least not so much, and very naively they copied him. In the book I trace how some of the characters go to the Soviet Union in 1927 and are bowled over by Stalin. They get six hours with him and they come back and you see them, especially [former Columbia University professor] Rex Tugwell, implementing things they learned from fascist Italy or from the world of Stalin. The influence of these European entities from Russia to Italy was not parenthetical. These people were not working for Moscow, but they were influenced by Moscow.

One of the members of the junket was a very well-known writer named Stuart Chase, an accountant who wrote about economics. He wrote a book called The New Deal, and it appeared in 1932, and that’s where Roosevelt got the phrase. The last sentence of Chase’s book is, “Why should Russians have all the fun remaking a world?” So you see the continuity.

There was a romance with the economy of scale, and not just in America. FDR’s advisers said that having so many different states and so many different ways of doing things was inefficient. If you had 50 flowers blooming, as federalists would have, they bloom differently and it makes for a messy garden. There was this sense that the economy couldn’t grow further unless there was rationalization, standardization. Even now you’ll see businessmen fighting for standardization: “Just make the rule!” they say.

reason: You follow Tugwell, who was born in 1891 and died in 1979, through the book. In many ways, he emerges as the paradigmatic New Dealer. Tell his story.

Shlaes: I liked Tugwell very much because he was honest. He loved Roosevelt and Roosevelt loved him, but The Forgotten Man is also a book about policy agony. It’s about what happens when you go into government and you do your best and you’re not appreciated and the thing that you produced is not what you planned and nobody cares.

Tugwell worked in the Department of Agriculture. He became part of something called the Resettlement Administration, where they moved people around—as described by John Steinbeck in various works. Tugwell saw a lot of poverty, the Dust Bowl, and so on. He saw that a lot of the projects weren’t really working. Some worked: Fertilizer worked, and so did money so farms wouldn’t have to be sold or closed. But a lot of it didn’t work and he had a lot of ambivalence.

He made planned communities, such as Greenbelt, Maryland, and he cozied up to Eleanor Roosevelt. They drank champagne made in New York state, which Roosevelt thought was awful and it probably was.

And then they kind of threw him out. But not before he had laid the plans for his own little Soviet farm, which was in Casa Grande, Arizona. He put settlers in to make a town; he gave them houses. There were people like the migrant workers in the photographs. These were people with nothing. They signed up for the town, and they were supposed to work together and have economies of scale and just one tractor they could share.

What’s wonderful is that Tugwell was honest about it and admitted it wasn’t working. Later, he discovered that the settlers in the little farm hadn’t worked together, that they had fought, that they had trashed the community house. They wanted milking machines, for example, which is a completely rational thing to want since it increases productivity. But the authorities didn’t want them because part of the thesis was that you should be creating jobs, and you take away a job when you have a machine.

All these fallacies were underlying everything, and Tugwell saw that too. He tried to go back to Columbia and they wouldn’t have him, even though he had an apartment on Riverside Drive. So he kind of went around in the private sector and eventually did get his reward: He became governor of Puerto Rico, where he encouraged land reform that had too much of an aspect of appropriation for my taste. And then he spent a lot of years trying to rewrite the Constitution, because he concluded the New Deal had failed because of the Constitution. If only we had a more modern constitution, he thought.

reason: You write that an economist of the time lambasted the NRA as the National Retardation Affair. It was also often derided as Nuts Running America. Effectively, it was an attempt to oversee virtually all aspects of the economy. How did it play out?

Shlaes: With Roosevelt in the White House, America was supposed to be about the little man, the forgotten man. But this was a cartel arrangement, or close to it, where big companies wrote codes that made it hard for little companies to survive.

In the ’30s a right-wing think tank had a look at the NRA, which was a whole bunch of rules in every state, a sort of mixture of government and industry where industry was supposedly self-governing but not really. And this big right-wing think tank concluded after a thousand pages that the NRA was retarding recovery. The name of that think tank was the Brookings Institution. Roosevelt had people from all quarters telling him that this isn’t working, and it was eventually challenged in the Supreme Court, lost, and had to be disbanded. The rules for agriculture, of course, are still with us.

In retrospect it was wonderful that the Supreme Court said no National Recovery Administration for the business sector. Parts of it were reincarnated later. Many of the labor components, for instance, came back as the Wagner Act. But the governing-the-economy-by-rules thing didn’t come back quite the same way.

reason: One of the most important stories you tell is about the family butchers who helped kill the NRA.

Shlaes: The Schechter brothers ran a small chicken slaughter business; they were kosher butchers in Brooklyn. They were prosecuted by the Justice Department under the NRA. They were the case that was picked by the government to go to the Supreme Court to prove the constitutionality of the NRA. I thought that this was a wonderful story, and we never learned it in school because it was against FDR. But it was an important, important story.

The Commerce Clause limits what the federal government can do in the states. The laws have to pertain to interstate commerce. What is interstate commerce, and did the NRA breach that? Everyone knew there needed to be a test. So this chicken business was picked because in another case chickens had been defined as interstate commerce.

The Schechters were prosecuted very nastily, for a lot of sins. Lowering prices, that was illegal. Working too many hours, that was bad, bad. Competing. What I liked about them was that they were furious. They realized that what the government was saying was wrong. To them it seemed probably like the czar’s Russia, where their family had come from.

The government’s lawyers talked down to them. The lawyers kept saying things like, “You’re not an economist; you don’t have any agricultural economics.” And they would say, “No, I don’t have much school; I barely speak English”—their English was mocked. But when they got to the Supreme Court, their argument won because of the logic.

Their lawyer said, “One of the rules of the NRA is that the customer may not pick his chicken. America’s about customer choice.” This was a time when there was still tuberculosis and no antibiotics. Picking your own chicken was important for health reasons. You didn’t want a sick chicken—their case is known as the “Sick Chicken Case”—and the justices sided with the Schechters. They said, “This is delegation run riot, what about the Commerce Clause,” and so on.

There was a lot of discussion around that, and it was an enormous event because if the NRA had stood, we’d have the same kind of intervention in business as we have in agriculture. So it shifted America forever.

reason: What do we gain from a study of the Depression, particularly a revisionist understanding of it?

Shlaes: One lesson is that you do not need to mess with the economy for it to recover. In fact, messing with the economy can retard recovery. You do not need to go into war mode—the NRA was headed by an actual general, Gen. Hugh Johnson—when there is a downturn. The economy has a lot of inherent strength, and there’s plenty of evidence that it would have recovered much sooner—maybe by 1936—had Roosevelt not asked for the mandate of “unimagined power” to change everything in his second inaugural address.

reason: It wouldn’t go over well today to say that as president you want “unimagined power.” At least, not so openly. Isn’t there a strange paradox at work in American politics? We have a much better understanding of economics and of how government interventions often have unintended, and usually negative, consequences. Free market ideas really triumphed in the second half of the 20th century. Yet as a percentage of the economy, government spending is far greater than it was during the Depression.

Shlaes: That challenge of two opposing ideas is one reason I wrote the book. The most important thing for our generation is that the New Deal will come back to bite our children when they pay yet higher payroll taxes because we did not dare to reform Social Security and other entitlements. There are not enough people to pay for Social Security, and Social Security is set up so that you can’t fix it just by growing the economy.

This is a moment of choice for us, our generation and the younger people. We have to look again at Roosevelt. Roosevelt was inspiring. He was right on World War II, but we do not have to have false nostalgia for his wrongheaded policies in the ’30s. We should warn our children and help to change Social Security, but you don’t see that in the presidential candidates. You don’t see daring on Social Security.

I’m an old-fashioned liberal, and a lot of this book is about the death of that kind of liberalism—liberalism in the European sense. I’m the sort of liberal who cares a lot about the individual, the forgotten man; I emphasize that rather than the group or the aggregate. My very first job was at The New Republic, where I wrote an article that parents shouldn’t know when girls under 18 had abortions. It was called “The Squeal Squad.” That was the liberal in me. It was, “Leave me alone, even if I’m a child.”

I have great faith in the individual, and I think it’s time for a re-evaluation of the [term] liberal in America. The Republicans were wrong to try to smear Democrats with that word. Ronald Reagan was right when he said it is a good word. Democrats and Republicans should both use it, and we should re-examine traditional liberalism if we can.

Editor's Note: Free to Move

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:28:00 EST

Like many—maybe most—Americans I come from a family of migrant workers. My grandparents left Ireland and Italy in the 1910s for the United States, chiefly for the opportunity to work long hours and be treated as second-class citizens—a definite step up from the fate that likely awaited them in Old Europe. For a good chunk of his adult life, my father commuted close to 100 miles a day. I’ve moved from central New Jersey to New York City to Philadelphia to Buffalo to Los Angeles to small-town Texas to Ohio to Washington, D.C., all in pursuit of jobs—or the education that would give me and my loved ones access to more and better jobs.

It’s tempting to take such mobility for granted, especially in a country where the most difficult adjustment is likely to be getting used to a new time zone. The freedom to move is ultimately the freedom to enrich yourself, your future, your family. It’s never a simple decision, and it is made a thousand times more difficult when it involves crossing national borders. That latter point is driven home in this month’s cover story, “Guests in the Machine,” for which Senior Editor Kerry Howley traveled to Singapore to report on migrants toiling in one of the most schizophrenic guest worker programs in the world.

Due to chronic labor shortages and hyper-nationalist sentiments, Singapore simultaneously welcomes foreign workers and disrespects them. Almost 43 percent of the population there was born elsewhere (compared to about 13 percent in the U.S.), but guest workers are systematically denied citizenship, due process, and even the right to have children. That disturbing compromise allows Singapore’s economy to flourish even as nativists are appeased.

Despite the hardships they endure, guest workers keep coming because Singapore offers them a good deal relative to the opportunities in their home countries. A guest worker who spent two horrific years battling false charges of theft in hostile courts told Howley she plans to return to the city-state as soon as she can. Why? It’s the fastest way to earn the capital needed to start a
business in her home country of Indonesia.

Surveys suggest that up to 80 percent of Americans support some type of guest worker program. The failure to hammer out details on such a plan was one reason “comprehensive” immigration reform legislation went nowhere in Congress last year.

While guest worker programs are no substitute for open borders, they may represent the best hope for increasing legal migration to our shores. As Howley writes, the programs are an “alternative to prohibition. In a political environment. In a political environment where full mobility is as unlikely as full drug legalization, such incremental change may be the only alternative to stasis.”

That’s a far and shameful cry from the freedom of movement Americans have long taken for granted. And as Howley notes, “host countries are right to worry about the moral complexities of a legally divided society.” But if such programs allow poor people to make themselves much better off, they are certainly worth looking at very closely.

Artifact: TSA-Inspired Art

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 09:46:00 EST

In the last year, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the widely reviled agency responsible for snagging verboten lotion bottles and other contraband from air travelers, confiscated some 8 million items, including guns, knives, soda cans, nonbutane lighters (and many butane models too), and much more.

When it comes to knives and scissors, items with blades shorter than four inches are supposed to be allowed, but individual agents have wide discretion to ban anything they feel might present a safety threat. As a result, there are thousands of ostensibly OK scissors that end up in the TSA equivalent of Gitmo.

The D.C.-based artist Christopher Locke buys confiscated scissors that belong in the “grey area between what should be allowed on the plane, and what wasn’t allowed” and refashions them into strangely disquieting spiders and bugs, viewable online at heartlessmachine.com.

They look ready to attack, their animus piqued no doubt by their arbitrary fate in a post-9/11 world striving for moral and political clarity. Had another agent handled them, those scissors might have already landed in Hawaii.