Reason Magazine - Staff > Brian Doherty

Power From the People

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Here’s one way to get electricity: First, find two old metal tanks, of varying widths and heights—the kind used to contain compressed gases will do. You might have a few lying around, at least if you hang out in junkyards or machine shops chockablock with working metal sculptors.

Then take your angle grinder—you’ve got an angle grinder, right?—and smooth down the surface of the smaller tank, slicing off any protruding pieces with its palm-sized circular saw. The grinder will get them—just put a little muscle behind it. It’d be good to have a box of replacement discs around, as they wear out quickly.

Now put a different blade on the grinder and cut around the entire circumference of both tanks to get yourself cylinders of the desired height. Really, anyone can do it. I’m no trained metal worker, but I was able to perform the grinding and slicing OK when I had to. It was even sort of fun.

My circumference cut was uneven, though; if you’re an amateur, get someone with a better eye and steadier hand to even it out for you so you can get something close to a seal when you put a lid on top of the wider one. Nestle the smaller cut tank inside the other, attach a grate to its bottom, then funnel carbon-based waste into the top. It can be wood, paper, walnut shells, even coffee grounds. All that matters is that it has some carbon bonds that can break down to make heat and burnable gases.

Get a fire going inside the first cylinder to heat that carbon-based waste, without quite burning it. What you want is to start a process called pyrolysis, in which the carbon-based stuff gets warmed up in an oxygen-poor environment, releasing volatile gases that aren’t fully incinerated. The carbon then becomes char.

Keep heating those released volatiles over the char until you’ve reduced the output gas to mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen; that gas will “live” in the space between the inner and outer cylinder, and can ultimately be sucked out via a hole in the top, through tubes, to run into a generator engine, which will burn them like it burns any other fuel to operate. The byproducts will be carbon dioxide and water.

This technique can also run the engine in your car, which is what the one I helped build in an Oakland metal-worker warehouse last August was intended to do.

As with any biofuel, this process is in essence carbon-neutral, since it only releases back into the atmosphere the carbon that had been taken out by the raw-material plants as they grew. Had that bio-waste not been burned, it would have eventually released the carbon back into the atmosphere through decomposition anyway. Burning fossil fuels, by contrast, introduces new carbon into the atmosphere that was previously sequestered underground.

The chemical and technical realities behind this fuel generation have been very much simplified in the above description, but a workable machine to manufacture usable, carbon-neutral energy really can be constructed in a single afternoon. What you have just built is a jury-rigged version of a “gasifier.” While gasifiers haven’t been widely used in America for decades, it’s not a new technology. In Europe during World War II, when liquid fuel was hard to come by, these generators were adopted as an impromptu way to get many thousands of cars moving.

Most of us, thankfully, have other ways to acquire energy. To light your living room, you can flick a switch on your wall, completing a flow of electrons that began at a giant (usually coal-powered) plant hundreds of miles away. To start your car, you can drive to a station likely within a few miles of wherever you live and pump in a dense, energy-rich, ready-made liquid fuel.

Even in this era of rising energy prices, the costs of electricity and gasoline are still manageable. It requires around 15 cents a mile to move at typical gas prices and mileage, so you can travel more than 35 miles for one hour at minimum wage. In Los Angeles, it costs me about 50 cents a day to illuminate every room, keep a stereo and a computer running pretty much all day, charge iPods and cell phones, run a refrigerator, and keep a microwave oven, toaster, and George Foreman grill all at the ready.

Lately, however, concerns about depleting oil supplies and global warming have convinced many Americans that the easy, nearly free energy ride is over. From Oscar-winning movies to the Nobel Peace Prize, from government to industry, anxiety over climate change has unleashed a lot of heavy thinking about devising new systems to power our lives. Even giants in the energy industry are beginning to reconsider the top-down broadcast model that has dominated the provision of power for most of the past century. Under that legacy system, faraway plants burning coal or natural gas zip electrons out to all of us at the end point of the network, losing nearly 70 percent of the energy in the process through waste heat and line loss.

Many of the policy ideas being generated amount to wealth-reducing restrictions, such as higher taxes on fossil fuels and mandatory caps on emissions. But a growing number of venture capitalists, small businesses, and government regulators are asking a provocative question: What kind of efficiencies could be realized if power was created by, or at least much nearer, the end user instead?

Experiments in such “distributed generation”—where power is produced by multiple sources through multiple methods, much closer to the point of final use—are happening on industrial scales, via such means as combined heat and power (CHP) and solar. But they are also possible on a smaller scale, as part of a burgeoning “people power” movement. Lots of distributed generation thinking is based on the already old-fashioned solar panel model. But in Berkeley, California, a group of artists and gearheads is exploring more complicated ways to turn the old electricity model upside down without a single dollar in subsidies or a giant power plant.

Their trials, tribulations, and occasional flashes of glory make a compelling case study of how something as emblematic of the machine age as energy production can become intimate and personal. These innovators imagine a transformation similar to the evolution of computers over the past 40 years: from a mainframe model in which consumer interaction was both unwanted and enormously difficult, to a networked personal laptop model where both hardware and software are widely accessible and, for those interested, adjustable to your personal and creative choices, circumstances, and whims—remaining all the while deeply intertwined with an industrial mass-production system.

Their experiences also indicate that industrial creativity has a hard time co-existing with current urban regulations—and that the old model of generating and distributing electricity, with all its flaws, is unlikely to be knocked off its perch any time soon.

The Shipyard vs. the State
During the summer of 2007, I was introduced to a new way of thinking about personalized power as I watched a group of bohemian machine-artists grapple with gasification, trying to master it, teach it, and ultimately transform it into a huge art project.

The effort was spearheaded by Jim Mason, a Berkeley artist I knew through Burning Man, an annual festival held in Nevada’s Black Rock desert. Mason was forced to think about self-generated power by the city of Berkeley, which cut off his electricity during a dispute over building code violations.

In 2001 Mason rented a couple of buildings on a big lot in a mixed-used, quasi-industrial part of town to start what he called the Shipyard, an artists’ workshop. It officially covered two addresses on two streets, filling about a third of a block. It had lots of outdoor space for art projects and parties. For storage and more indoor work space, Mason championed what he thought was a quintessentially Berkeleyesque solution: repurposed, recycled shipping containers that he scrounged from Bay Area ports, stacked two high.

Mason and his collaborators threw elaborate art parties. One, celebrating Ernest Shackleton’s disaster-plagued Antarctic expedition of a century ago, featured meals of faux penguin served on ice plates to dozens of guests crammed into a shipping container kept below freezing, with fire effects pumping up through columns of ice all around them. A “How to Destroy the Universe Festival” combined extreme industrial noise acts with fire (and meat) art. The Shipyard artists were self-consciously bohemian, charmingly aware of their own absurdity. During one of my interviews with Mason, I noted a dry-erase board in their shop on which someone had scrawled a list of “tools needed,” starting with “14" chopsaw blade” and “pile of money.” The crew created self-mythologizing slogans: “Shipyard: When Overkill Isn’t Enough,” “Shipyard: When Biblically Huge Machines Have to Be There Overnight.” The artists genuinely believed they were providing a service to Berkeley, a city with a reputation for liberalism and creativity.

But Berkeley Deputy Fire Chief David Orth didn’t see it that way, especially after receiving unexpected calls about 40-foot propane fire jets (typical Shipyard entertainment) in the air over his city. Joan MacQuarrie, the woman in charge of building inspection at the city’s planning department, found nearly everything about the situation troublesome. “No use permit,” she recalls. “They moved cargo containers onto the lot, which constitutes building, without any building permits. There were other safety violations. The cargo containers, some of them were occupied or appeared to be occupied. Fire hazard issues. Exiting issues.”

Mason thought Berkeley was flouting its heritage by being so picayune about his attempts at innovative recycled living. “All the issues came down to trying to solve liability problems,” he says. “Their first thought always seemed to be ‘We must act to cover our ass’ so no one can come back to them over injuries. There was this inordinately high valuation of a culture of safety, even in a city whose reputation is founded on experimentation, creativity, and innovation.”

Filled shipping containers stay stacked, often nine high, on rolling ships; institutions ranging from traveling art shows to specialized communities in Europe had been using them for housing for years. But the containers didn’t fall under any existing building codes and thus there was no standard way to certify them as safe building materials, especially in a city that is seismically active.

The containers could eventually be folded into an existing code, says Orth (who has resigned since being interviewed), but they probably would have to be encased in frames or transformed in some other way to qualify as buildings, thus eliminating the whole point of the Shipyard’s experiment in cheap recycling. “They know they need structural engineering,” Orth says. “It’s not going to be inexpensive to create buildings out of these containers. It’s gonna cost as much as it takes to build a building.”

That New-Car Smell
Regulatory problems soon led to electrical problems. In March 2002 the city government decided that one way to deal with these stubborn artists was to cut off their power. Power generation suddenly became more than just an intellectual curiosity for Mason. Looking around at the existing world of people trying to live without plugging into the existing power grid, he was disappointed, seeing mostly the sort of 1960s mentality that figured if you had solar panels on the roof to heat your herbal tea, you were living a properly low-impact life.

“I wanted to take up power not from a Luddite ‘the world is being destroyed’ mentality that we should all do nothing, sit in a corner, and not consume at all, or since we can’t, just do a little and feel guilty anyway,” Mason says. “I wanted to take it up as a culture of potential abundance, of doing and engagement.”

So he and some of his pals experimented with living large off the grid. Tea, shmea; they needed to operate three-phase industrial power tools. So they scrounged transformers and off-the-shelf generators from junkyards, bought inverter arrays on eBay, assembled solar panels and switching stations. It took them many months and many failures along the way, but they ended up cobbling together a system that successfully supplied their workshop with electricity, controlled by a snazzy computer program that made it possible to trace all operations online. Though it tended to trip out at least once a day, Mason hopes eventually to offer a version of the power system bundled together in one shipping container as a “powertainer” for off-grid use in the Third World and elsewhere.

Hearing Mason explain it all, the Shipyard’s multiyear experimental electricity generation project sounds absurdly Fitzcarraldan—nothing that any normal person would confuse for a suitable replacement for flicking a switch. While the power system he developed for the Shipyard was ultimately a jumble of solar, batteries, and biodiesel generators, while immersing himself in interesting ways to self-generate power, he did stumble upon a simple old technology—gasifier engines—that, he imagined, could help people rethink energy at a profound level, especially when it came to moving vehicles.

Mason and friends built their first gasifier, similar to the one described at the beginning of this article, in one day. Feeling evangelical about this weird old tech, they installed the engine in the bed of a truck owned by the San Francisco artist and 2007 mayoral candidate Chicken John Rinaldi. The gases produced by the contraption were sucked into the engine on its downstroke via old vacuum-cleaner hoses. Rinaldi began preaching the wonders of gasification on city streets and in the parking lots of Silicon Valley tech conferences, explaining how a car could run on coffee grounds. They dubbed the vehicle the Café Racer.

For Mason, gasification demonstrated the potentially wide range of individual choice in power. He began imagining eco-power stores where you could choose what you burned in your gasifier based on the scent you wanted in the exhaust. At the same time you’d be solving an environmental problem by burning for fuel what would otherwise be waste. Thinking further, Mason figured out a way to link gasification to one of the decade’s biggest concerns: carbon footprints.

The Mechabolic Hypothesis
The key in making a 21st century environmentally friendly process out of an old 20th century machine is the char left over after gasification. In the Amazon rain forest, scientifically mysterious processes create a charcoal known as terra preta (“black earth”) or “agri-char,” which has been used for thousands of years to enrich the soil and boost agricultural productivity. More recently, it got a glowing write-up in Scientific American in May 2007 and made Wired’s “JargonWatch” this March.

By taking the leftover carbon char and plowing it back into the ground, gasification might do more than the mostly carbon-neutral act of burning biofuel. The process is potentially carbon-negative, keeping most of the carbon in the ground rather than the atmosphere while helping plants grow faster, which takes still more carbon out of the atmosphere.

At the 2007 Burning Man gathering, for which the art theme was “green man,” Mason planned to unveil a huge sculpture illustrating the potential of gasification and its terra preta byproduct. He called it the “Mechabolic,” after what he had started to call the Mechabolic Hypothesis.

“Whether food or fuel, animals or engines, it is the same chemical process, partaking of the same inputs, exhaling the same exhausts,” he says. “Fuel, machines, and fire are the synthetic forms of food, body and respiration.” All involve putting together and breaking apart carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It’s important to be mindful of the complicated interconnections of it all; the carbon in anything is going to remain in the entire bio-economy in some form, whether burnt or composted or eaten. But some ways of transforming it, such as gasification, are better in terms of greenhouse gases than others. Plain composting, for example—an environmentalist favorite—if done without proper aeration during the process, produces methane, a particularly heinous greenhouse gas, worse than carbon dioxide.

The 120-foot-long Mechabolic was meant to resemble a huge mechanical slug, with a “mouth” that mulched waste and a “stomach” that gasified it. The gas would be used to run an old dragster engine that would propel the sculpture, as well as flame effects. The excretion would be terra preta, which would be fed to edible plants attached to the sides of the moving sculpture. When the Mechabolic was little more than an idea, it was already gaining respectful attention in The New York Times, Business 2.0, and other prominent publications.

Around the time those stories started to appear, in May 2007, Berkeley officials decided enough was enough. The city gave the Shipyard a three-day order to vacate, citing 32 code violations and threatening fines of $2,500 a day. Mason began a counterattack through blogs and the press, ginning up dozens of emails and calls to city officials in his defense.

The tone of some of them is captured well in an email the Shipyard artist Ryon Gesink circulated among friends. Gesink wrote movingly about having to remove huge containers and several years’ worth of art, of seeing his dream of a space to create and innovate squashed. The headline on his account: “Small communist California city to shed 1,000,000 pounds of excessively interesting culture in days; City leaders ensure self righteousness, boredom to be restored shortly.”

While pressuring city officials to back down through mockery and public jousting, Mason also did attempt to address some of their concerns. He disconnected the shipping-container power system. (The system had alarmed Orth, the fire chief, because of the non-professional wiring and all the batteries, and potentially flammable battery acids.) Mason hired an architect to negotiate with the city a way to bring the shipping-container structures up to code, and in the meantime he removed most of them from the lot.

Although the artists were not legally permitted to do anything at the Shipyard, the Mechabolic and other gasifier-powered art vehicles were nonetheless constructed on the site throughout that summer. As late as November 2007, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates was bringing people by the facility to show off the ingenuity happening in his city, even though it was illegal.

In January 2008 city officials began meeting again with Mason and his team. MacQuarrie, the building inspector, said in January that she was pleased with the signs of cooperation she had seen thus far and that she hoped the innovative art space and its power experiments can maintain a happy home in her city. Just as long as Mason and his friends obtain the proper permits and meet all use, zoning, building, and safety regulations. In February, the Shipyard officially received a use permit and legal power at one of its two addresses, and is on track to make the other legal as well.

Still, Mason feels crushed by the conflict—and radicalized. While others on his team are more optimistic that it will all work out, he thinks experimental living in a highly regulated context might ultimately be hopeless. Never any kind of libertarian, he was shocked to discover that “giving someone the right to shut down a physical site is no less a significant power than giving someone the power to arrest me. The lives of 30 people have been stopped, and there is no immediate review of that decision.

“I live life in economies based on what is interesting,” he adds. “I’ve found no matter what the rules or processes, in the end the thing that’s interesting somehow gets chosen. But getting beat down, I realized that is completely irrelevant. They will not listen or make consideration for interest in anything. They only care, what does the letter of the code say, and does that completely encapsulate the conditions they determine are sitting in front of them? It’s an impossible set-up in which to engage the messy flux of the world.”

Local Power
Mason is inspired by the cultures of hot-rodding and hacking, areas where control over one’s machines, life, and pleasure is small, personal, and imaginative. He’s not out to replace one big power system with another, or to convince the world that we all need to run our cars on wood chips.

But every time John Rinaldi would take the gasified Café Racer out to demonstrate how gasification could turn trash to fuel with techniques anyone could potentially execute in an afternoon, something would happen, he says. After a few seconds of interested delight, someone would ask: How does this scale up?

The questioner would seem a bit disappointed when he’d say, it’s not meant to scale up. It’s supposed to change your whole view of how power can be generated and distributed: not top-down but bottom-up, not adding unpleasant waste to the world but eliminating it.

Colorful experiments like the Café Racer are below the radar of the larger distributed generation community. A growing number of policy intellectuals, activists, and entrepreneurs see systematic, not merely personal, benefits from relying less on big power plants. A 2006 monograph by the environmentalist Avory Lovins, called Small Is Profitable, neatly sums up the arguments for distributed generation, from efficiencies of scale to lower greenhouse emissions to an energy infrastructure more resistant to terrorist attacks. The journal Distributed Energy exudes a worldview far removed from Mason’s unregulated, do-it-yourself mentality. It’s a world enmeshed in, and seeking help from, either government or the existing big utility system at every turn, from subsidies to changing local regulations that delimit or complicate pumping self-generated power back to the grid.

Some people excited about the Mason model think it can become something bigger than a passion for hobbyists. Charlie Sellers, a member of Mason’s Mechabolic crew, brings gasification-based cooking and heating technologies to off-the-grid areas of the Third World.

Tom Price is a 20-year veteran of environmental policy wonkery who worked for Burning Man this year as their liaison to the environmental and energy communities. He helped organize a corporate gift of desert-based solar panels that after the event began supplying free solar power to nearby Nevada communities. He has spun that project off into a company called Black Rock Solar, looking to repeat the experiment in other high desert locales. He’s been talking up the Mechabolic project to people in the enviro-tech community, and says “the consensus opinion is Jim Mason is six months ahead of the curve.”

When Price and Rinaldi took the Café Racer to the CleanTech 2007 convention in Santa Clara, California, last May and “explained how we were making hydrogen out of junk, we ended up surrounded by CEOs and [venture capitalists] who were flabbergasted. I’ve been working on environmental issues for 20 years on the policy side, and I had always assumed like many people that the best solutions came from large institutions set up specifically for this purpose.

“We have in this country both a tradition of independence and a tradition of machines bringing ever increasing levels of comfort. And the latter has been in the ascendant. But there is in our cultural DNA this idea that we can provide for ourselves without any outside help.” When it comes to the potential of gasification, Price says, “only a few hundred or a few thousand technically understand what we are talking about today. But I suspect the number will increase exponentially in very short order.”

The Ride of the Mechabolic
Maybe. But Americans who are not convinced for reasons of ideology or identity that the top-down, flick-a-switch, pull-up-to-the-pump model of power distribution is passé might contemplate the travails of the Mechabolic project and decide there’s no reason to rush into any big changes.

Constructing the monstrous slug involved months of legal fighting, last-minute entreaties for cash injections from the far-flung Burning Man community, and weeks of all-nighters. Then everything had to be taken apart and moved in shipping containers and trucks to the Black Rock Desert, where the crew reassembling it faced a punishing sun, toppling and blinding windstorms, and the sinking morale that comes from realizing you’ve bitten off much more than you can comfortably chew.

Through the week of Burning Man, Mechabolic remained a work in progress. The curious sight of the 120-foot-long metal skids topped with mulchers, shiny engines, gasifier hoppers, and vegetable and spice plants, including radishes, zucchini, and sage, with fewer than half of the ribs that were meant to give the sculpture the shape of a slug, made people stop and ask what was up. Thus Mason got to do what he liked most: explain the potential of gasification and terra preta for humanizing and diversifying our relationship with power while reducing our carbon footprint.

Shortly after sunrise on Sunday, September 2—the next-to-last day of the event—it came together. I was around through sheer luck. I had been up all night, Burning Man–style, listening to a singer playing banjo and ukulele, and I wandered by the Mechabolic work site to find Mason finally turning over the engine. Some other up-all-nighters and I helped to get the machine moving by pushing it, and the loudly throoming engine barreled the monster through the playa dust that had built up around its wheels. It was moving! And shaking! Bottles of homemade wine passed from person to person crouching on the beast’s skids, grinning and whooping. The air was thick with the joy of the improbable and absurd achieved.

About a minute later, with a ferocious cough of transmission fluid all over Mason, the Mechabolic groaned to a halt. It had moved about 68 feet—nearly one for every $1,000 spent on the project, Mason mordantly noted with a smeared smile.

I had assumed, at that moment of triumph, that the Mechabolic was running off pyrolized waste matter. I was mistaken. It turns out the gasification system was only providing gas to burn for fire effects, and powering a generator for lights. When you’re trying to get a car to run via gasification, it works best to start it off with a standard fuel and then ease it over to the gasified junk. So for that minute of motion, the Mechabolic actually was running on off-the-shelf motor fuel. The dream still had some bugs.

The Homebrew Power Club
The costs in time and sanity borne by Mason and his crew were apparent. They were also far beyond what most of the non-art-obsessed will want to pay. But so were the innovations that arose from, say, the Homebrew Computer Club of Silicon Valley, that mid-’70s gang of PC enthusiasts—including a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak—dedicated to DIY computer making. Yet from the homebrewers’ irrational enthusiasms arose the modern world of personal computing.

We haven’t reached the point where flicking a switch for coal-fired power from far away seems as inadequate as the five-mainframes-for-the-nation computer vision that the proto-hackers of the ’70s were rebelling against. But Mason notes that all sorts of human endeavors, from our computing to our food to our transportation, have evolved away from bare resource economizing. They’ve become instead arenas for play and assertions of identity—or, as Mason likes to think of it, areas in which there is at least some opportunity to impress girls.

“We can turn power into something experiential, expressive, personal,” he says. “Not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to be explored, like the cultural movement in food from a thing you eat for raw energy to food as an idiom of pleasure, creativity, and expression, an excuse for gathering friends and family.

“Computing had a similar transformation. It wasn’t until the computer became an idiom of personal expression that it exploded into something ubiquitous as clothes on our body.

“So much of our energy dialogue is still about how big corporate players can do better things, or forcing carmakers to do more reasonable things by taxing the bejesus out of oil so the government can smartly fund new research.…There isn’t enough faith that things can come up meaningfully from the bottom, that through a culture of hacking and play there could be broad, self-realized solutions.”

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This Is Burning Man (BenBella) and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement
(PublicAffairs).

Need to Know

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:41:00 EDT

When officials in the Bush administration want to stop a plaintiff from obtaining evidence, they often simply declare that evidence a state secret. They have called on this option some 25 percent more times each year than any previous administration since the U.S. Supreme Court first recognized the state secrets privilege in 1953. Recently, Bush officials have used it to block lawsuits accusing the government of violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including an American Civil Liberties Union suit challenging the warrantless interception of U.S. citizens’ communications with people in other countries.

In January, responding to fears that this practice harms citizens’ rights, Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) introduced the State Secrets Protection Act. The problem with the state secrets doctrine, a press release from Kennedy’s office explained, “is that sometimes plaintiffs may need that information to show that their rights were violated. If the privilege is not applied carefully, the government can use it as a tool for cover-up, by withholding evidence that is not actually sensitive.”

The Kennedy-Specter bill would require federal courts to review any invocation of the state secrets privilege in a civil suit, looking not just at government affidavits but at the evidence underlying them. (As state secret law is now practiced, court review is generally not required.) It would also require the attorney general to report to both the House and Senate on any civil case in which the government invokes the privilege. As of early February, the bill was being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Artifact: Castro Shrugged

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:56:00 EDT

“I tried to understand the essence of this new world,” the now-retired Cuban dictator Fidel Castro said last September. “How did we get here?” He was discussing what he gleaned from former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan’s memoir The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.

Fittingly, some interpreted El Jefe’s talk of Greenspan as merely a means to ensure people knew the ailing Castro was still alive and aware, not merely appearing in a pre-recorded scam. (Greenspan’s book had been published that month.) No one had any reason to expect honesty from the world’s longest-lasting totalitarian leader.

But Castro was being unexpectedly truthful. By hewing for decades to the communist faith in a centrally managed economy and society, he failed to understand the forces of economic liberalization that Ayn Rand’s acolyte Greenspan endorsed in his book and supported at least rhetorically throughout his career as both economic advisor to presidents and Fed chief. Castro’s failure to comprehend meant decades of material misery for the Cuban people.

Now America’s longest-lasting enemy is officially out of power. The Bush administration’s reluctance to change its ill-conceived embargo against Cuba, even post-Fidel, shows that Castro isn’t alone in misunderstanding “the essence of this new world” or the role of relatively unrestricted international trade in spreading wealth and liberty.

Mint Condition

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:46:00 EST

In November the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the Indiana offices of the company that sells the privately minted metal coins known as Liberty Dollars, an alternative currency beloved by those who think U.S. paper money is inherently inflationary. Later that month, G-men hit the Idaho company that mints the coins. In both instances, the government took all the coins it found, along with computers and other records.

According to an affidavit filed by an FBI agent with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina (where the investigation was based), the FBI conducted “undercover operations to determine the legality of the American Liberty Dollar currency” from August 2005 to July 2007. It decided that Liberty Dollars were essentially fake U.S. currency, seizable for being “involved in, or traceable to, money laundering” and mail fraud.

Neither Liberty Dollar President Bernard von NotHaus nor any of his employees have yet been arrested or charged with any crime, although the feds so far have kept what they’ve seized. Many of the coins had already been purchased by customers and were awaiting shipment when police took them. Von NotHaus is asking those customers to join a lawsuit to get the coins back. He continues to sell already-minted Liberty Dollars donated by well-wishers as “Arrest Dollars,”
with special handcuff marks added.

The Cost of a Free Lunch

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:50:00 EST

Guns for D.C.?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:54:00 EST

In March the U.S. Supreme Court plans to hear oral arguments in its first significant Second Amendment case since 1939.

The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, involves the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit overturned on Second Amendment grounds in March 2007. In doing so, it became only the second federal appeals court to adopt the position that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.

The last time the Supreme Court directly addressed the Second Amendment, in the 1939 case U.S. v. Miller, it upheld convictions for moving sawed-off shotguns across state lines. The Court based its decision on the premise that the Second Amendment applies only to weapons suitable for militia use. Since it focused on the type of weapon, it didn’t settle the question of whether the right to keep and bear arms belongs to individuals or merely to state-organized militias. This ambiguous ruling has contributed to decades of debate among legal scholars, judges, and the public about the meaning of the Second Amendment.

If the Supreme Court endorses the individual-right interpretation in Heller, it won’t be the death of all gun regulations, although it may rule out laws as strict as D.C.’s. According to the D.C. Circuit, “the protections of the Second Amendment are subject to the same sort of reasonable restrictions that have been recognized as limiting, for instance, the First Amendment.” As Robert A. Levy, the libertarian lawyer who organized and funded the D.C. gun ban challenge, told Mother Jones, “there are some restrictions that are permissible, and it will be the task of the legislature and the courts to ferret all of that out and draw the lines.”

The Impossible Dream of Energy Independence

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

In his forthcoming book Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence” (PublicAffairs) Robert Bryce, managing editor of Energy Tribune and author of Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego and the Death of Enron, grapples with what he detects as a growing belief, both among policy elites and the public, in “energy independence.”

That’s the notion that America should disengage from world energy markets and seek self-sufficiency in energy production. To Bryce, this is not only impossible, but dangerous to even attempt. As he writes in the book’s introduction, the quest for energy independence “means protectionism and isolationism, both of which are in opposition to America’s long-term interests.”

Some of the myths of energy independence Bryce takes aim at are summed up in this January Washington Post op-ed. They include the false belief that U.S. energy autarky can curb terrorism; that government investment in “alternative fuels” can end our use of foreign oil; that we can starve evil petro-regimes of money by refusing to buy their oil; and that less reliance on foreign energy sources can make our energy supply more secure.

Like any decision to isolate ourselves from the free international market, the search for energy independence would, Bryce demonstrates, lead us to waste our money and, yes, our energy doing things more expensively than they can be done by taking advantage of the international division of labor and flow of capital.

reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, author of This is Burning Man and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (PublicAffairs), interviewed Bryce by phone last week.

reason: While “energy independence” has soared to fresh public prominence in this era of soaring gas prices and Mideast wars, it’s not a new idea, is it?

Robert Bryce: The first president to promote the idea was [Richard] Nixon in the wake of the oil embargo in 1973. In his State of the Union address in 1974, Nixon said that he was aiming for energy independence by the end of the decade. He hoped that by 1980 the U.S. would not be importing any oil. And every president since Nixon, in one way or another, has espoused a similar idea. But if you look back at the data, the U.S. was a net crude oil importer [as early as] 1913 and ever since we’ve been a net crude importer with a handful of years [as exceptions]. It’s remarkable how much the rhetoric about “energy independence” has had no connection with reality.

reason: What do its proponents think we can get out of energy independence?

Bryce: The main talking points for those who promote energy independence are, one, that if we were just more tech-savvy we can develop lots of new jobs, and that would be great—we can build windmills, solar panels, whatever nifty new whizbang tech is going to replace oil, and that will stimulate the economy.

Second, they love biofuels. We can just grow the fuels we need to replace imported oil and it will be great for farmers and the rural economy. Third, [energy independence proponents] conflate oil and terrorism. Those arguments really came to the fore since the 9/11 attacks. We buy imported oil, some of our suppliers are Islamic petro-states, some Islamic petro-states send some dollars to support radical Islam, therefore oil equals terrorism and “energy independence” is anti-terror.

The idea is that if we could isolate the oil-exporting countries that in theory support terror we’d cut off its lifeline. The connections of Saudi Arabia to the 9/11 terror attacks are real, I’m not denying that. But you cannot, given the complexity and enormous size and interconnectedness of the global crude oil market, separate one actor from another.

S. Fred Singer [of the Science and Environmental Policy Project] came up with the best analogy. He described the global oil market like a big bathtub. All the oil production is dumped into one bathtub and all consumers have straws sucking oil out. [For all economic purposes] it’s like we’re all sucking from the same common pool. To say you are not gonna buy Saudi oil, or Algerian oil—it’s crazy. For example, the U.S. hasn’t purchased a dime of Iranian oil—except for a small amount in the early ‘90s, but for the most part no Iranian oil since 1979. And that hasn’t stopped Iran from supporting Hezbollah.

reason: Can increased energy efficiency help us achieve the goal of “energy independence”?

Bryce: To answer that, you need to understand the “Jevons paradox.” In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons published a book, The Coal Question, which projected that Britain was on the precipice of disaster because it was running out of coal. Sound familiar? But it still hasn’t happened. Jevons’ discovery was that energy efficiency doesn’t decrease demand—it increases it.

We’re told that if we just push more efficient technologies like fluorescent light bulbs and drive Priuses that energy use will decline. It’s just not true. There’s a graphic in my book that shows the decline in the number of BTUs consumed per dollar of GDP [from 19,000 BTUs consumed per dollar of GDP in 1950, to a projected 9,000 BTUs in 2010], but energy consumption continued to grow.

Efficiency can be a great thing for its own sake. It can mean good things for the economy and for people, but it doesn’t mean we’ll use less energy overall. We’ll use more. And not just the U.S., but the Chinese, Vietnamese, Pakistanis.

One anecdote that illustrates the principle: I had a friend who bought a Prius tell me the other day how he used to take the train to New York to see the opera. But now they have a car that gets 40 miles per gallon, so they just drive. It becomes more efficient on a mile per gallon basis, but on a total BTUs consumed basis, no.

reason: How about domestic renewables as a solution to dependence on foreign oil?

Bryce: I’m not opposed to renewables. I have 3,000 watts of solar panels on the roof of my home. I understand the economics of renewables. But an incurable problem for both solar and wind is intermittency. The sun doesn’t shine at night. I like to have lights and TV at night. Unless we come up with some incredibly efficient method of storing large amounts of electricity, it’s not a viable source because we can’t store it.

It’s the same problem with wind. I consider wind the electric-sector equivalent of the ethanol hype. At a conference recently I asked a wind guy, “Without subsidies, how many projects now under way [regarding wind] would make economic sense?” He said maybe 30 percent.

reason: You sound skeptical about ethanol as well.

Bryce: The ethanol scam is the longest running robbery of taxpayers in American history. Some recent news reports, which I don’t discuss in the book, include a report showing [that] corn-based ethanol releases [more] greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. That’s just one indictment of the inefficiency of the whole process. It’s also fiscal insanity—providing 51 cent per gallon subsides for making fuel from what’s already the most subsidized crop.

In 2005 federal corn subsidies approached $9.4 billion, which is around the entire budget of the Department of Commerce, with 39,000 employees. It also takes orders of magnitude more water to make corn ethanol than [is used for] gasoline production. Given the problems in the West and Southwest with water, it’s insane to think we’re going to be able to produce sufficient ethanol to make a dent in gasoline use when the amount of water needed is so high.

reason: What about the promise of changes in foreign policy in the Mideast if we could wean ourselves off their oil?

Bryce: People like to think that if only we bought less oil we wouldn’t need to be in the Persian Gulf. It sounds appealing. The reality is the U.S. gets 11 percent [of its oil] from the Persian Gulf. From a strategic point of view it was a big mistake assuming militarism is better than markets. The key adjustment is to make markets trump militarism when it comes to the Persian Gulf. We’re not the most reliant [on Persian Gulf oil]—it’s the Japanese, the French, the rest of Europe, China. If we want to have stability in the Persian Gulf, it’s not just for the U.S. It’s good for the whole world, so the U.S. needs to understand that it shouldn’t be its burden alone.

reason: I thought what you had to say about Saudi Arabian energy independence was interesting.

Bryce: The Saudis in 2005 imported 83,000 barrels of gasoline per day. Here is a country with the single largest oil deposits on the planet and they are importing gasoline. Iran too is importing 40 percent of its gasoline, because it doesn’t have enough refining capacity. Iran has the second largest reserves of natural gas and is importing natural gas to northern Iran because its gas reserves are in the south. Do we need better examples of energy interdependence? If even Saudi Arabia and Iran are energy interdependent, why wouldn’t we be?

It isn’t like energy is the only vital thing we aren’t “independent” in. I have a chart in the book which shows, using data from the U.S. Geologic Survey, some mineral commodities. We import 100 percent of more than a dozen—fluorspar, yttrium, strontium, vanadium, arsenic among others. These are industrial commodities we need to power our economy—yttrium in televisions, microwaves, ceramics; strontium for nuclear fuel; manganese in steel and iron. These are things we have to have, and we import 100 percent of them.

The only energy source with zero carbon emissions in electric power is nuclear. And that’s another example of interdependence. We import 83 percent of our uranium. There are other countries like Kazakhstan with much larger reserves of uranium than the U.S. which can mine it more cheaply.

“Energy independence” would dictate that if we use nuclear power we must produce our own uranium to fire those reactors. Why would we wanna do that if someone else is a lower-cost producer? If we get to [obtain a resource] for less, why wouldn’t we do that? We do it with shoes, iPods, cell phones, watches, fresh flowers, you name it. We rely on global commercial markets for all kinds of things—what’s wrong with relying on it for uranium?

reason: What did you think of the recent energy bill in the context of your book’s concerns?

Bryce: If I could tell Congress one thing, I’d tell them to forget about doing anything for the energy business. They’ve done enough damage, don’t do any more. The bill is unfortunately named the “Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.” It’s got 300 pages of blather about ethanol and biofuels that does nothing for energy independence or security. They mandate 36 billion gallons of biofuels for every year by 2022. It’s pure fantasy, the idea that we can hit that target.

Every presidential candidate has talked about energy independence and every one conflated oil and terrorism, except for Ron Paul. Paul as far as I can tell was the only presidential candidate who dared to say something to the effect of, when it comes to energy, we need to let the market work, that supply and demand and prices should make decisions about [how and from where we get energy].

reason: Do you think the current fears about “peak oil” feed into the craze for energy independence?

Bryce: Some time the world will reach a limit in the amount of oil [produced] per day and a decline will start. But the decline is likely to be shallow, not skiing down a steep decline. As we get closer [to peak oil], prices will rise, and as prices rise a pool [of oil] that’s previously unecononomical gets worth drilling.

I consider myself a liberal mugged by the laws of thermodynamics, but all [interest in my thesis] has so far come from the [free-market] right. The left doesn’t seem to care. They just hate fossil fuels. To me, I see we had huge government support for ethanol mandates, and how has that turned out? Modern leftists [who question the value of freer markets in energy] don’t seem to know, for example, the history of the Synfuel Corporation or how the prohibition on using natural gas for electricity worked, or how price controls made for gas lines. With all those government interventions, if the market had been allowed to work, the outcomes would have been a lot better.

Lost in Political Philosophy

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:20:00 EST

ABC's TV series Lost, whose fourth season premieres tonight, has multileveled mysteries and a cruelly withholding storytelling style that inspires passionate love and passionate frustration.

The love comes from the show's fascinating and compelling adventure-intrigue-SF storytelling. The scenario: plane crashes on an uncharted island. Some passengers, most with a fair amount of dark intrigue in their past, survive and try to forge a workable civilization—and to escape. Previous inhabitants of the Island bedevil them. Everything ensues.

The frustration comes from the fact that halfway through the show's entire six-season arc, the viewer can be certain of very little—neither what lies ahead nor precisely what's already happened -- and certainly not the meaning of what's happened.

The search for meaning bedevils characters and viewers. No element of the show is as suggestive and aggravating as its heavy reliance on political philosopher references.

The show stars a John Locke, which initially just seemed a curiosity. But as the show progressed, we were introduced to a Danielle Rousseau, a Desmond David Hume, a Mikhail Bakunin, a Richard Alpert, and even an Edmund Burke.

But what does any of this mean?

IN THE CASE of Locke, obvious references and ironies abound. Like the philosopher, he stands for political and personal liberty within a civic context.

Locke "leads" generally through service to the commonwealth—yet sometimes acts imperiously and dangerously, pursuing a personal vision of what is best for them all, in a disturbingly Filmerian manner.

He claims to be an empiricist—a real "meat and potatoes" guy—but comes to a seemingly mystical belief in the island's power. Complicating his role as the "man of faith" in the island is that his mysticism is based in his experience of healing from the island, and his personal encounter with the smoke monster—so character and philosopher might be able to get along as fellow empiricists.

Most significantly Lockean is island John Locke's mantra: "Don't tell me what I can't do," the cry of the man who despises paternalism and unjust government. (In what is probably more an in-joke, Locke's evil father is "Anthony Cooper," after philosopher Locke's mentor, the first Earl of Shaftesbury.)

Lost fans love clues, and if Locke's name is one, it likely suggests that what Locke thinks he has empirical evidence for, he probably does.

DANIELLE ROUSSEAU'S link with her philosopher is obvious: she is the lone savage on the island, separated—by choice—from the human societies available to her. Her primary skills are sheer survival and the trapping and killing of animals and other humans.

Her personality is more stunted and weird than the apotheosis of human capabilities and sensibilities her namesake seems to promise from the "noble savage." Her being "Rousseau" is both obvious and ironic. If it's a clue, the viewer can wonder whether Danielle had her child taken from her, as she claims, or abandoned it, as the philosopher did with his five children.

The philosopher Mikhail Bakunin believed in a socialist anarchism, freely-organized worker federations controlling the social order. Lost's Mikhail Bakunin has an uncanny ability to survive fatal injuries, and is a brutal enforcer for his boss Ben (the sinister leader of the "Others").

If the name is anything more than the creators having fun, the clue may be that, as with Bakunin's rivalry with Karl Marx over taking over the existing state, the show's Bakunin might have a serious difference of opinion as to how their community should run with his "master" Ben.

The real Richard Alpert, former Harvard partner to Timothy Leary, represents using modern science to achieve religious transcendence, and later, renaming himself Baba Ram Dass, going straight for the religious transcendence.

The character Alpert is seemingly ageless. If his name is meaningful, it could relate to the apparently religious mission of his group—the "Others"—compared to the almost parodically scientistic pre-crash Dharma Initiative that they seem to have superseded.

ALL SUCH SPECULATION is hazardous, however, since Lost almost asks not to be trusted. It loves season openings and closers deliberately designed to confuse the viewer as to what he's seeing, where and when.

Lost's constant use of the number "23" indicates a love for the fiction of Robert Anton Wilson. The philosophical science fiction novelist celebrated "guerrilla ontology"—wild techniques to make people question the nature of the reality they are perceiving.

Despite all the political philosopher namedrops, Lost doesn't show much of a functioning society, and definitive answers, both narrative and philosophical, continue to slip away. Ultimately, the show sells classic sociopolitical anxiety: the world is mysterious and strange, with inexplicable forces that might save your soul or might kill you, and you'll never know why; scientific planners and religious fanatics alike have complicated plans in which they use humans as pawns; the wealthy and powerful pursue secret agendas that may either save or destroy us.

By naming characters after philosophers, Lost reminds us that the conflicts of ideology, power, and social relationship are timeless, perhaps "eternally recurring"—like character Desmond Hume's re-cycling through his own life, like the seeming series of "powers" rising and falling on the island (from the creators of the 4-toed statue to the Black Rock crew to the "Hostiles" to Dharma to the "Others" to...?).

With its echoes of everything from Homer's The Odyssey to O'Brien's Third Policeman, Lost's intricate webs of meaning and suggestion make it not only an exciting example of post-modern referential bricolage, but also the most significant pop adventure tale of our time.

Even in a "state of nature" on the island, its flashback-strewn storytelling reminds us that none of us have a Lockean "blank slate." Our past choices, failures, sins and obsessions will always shadow and influence our present. Built the heart of the viewer's relation to the show's mysteries is a faith that its writers, our "leaders"—the gods of the fictional universe we are watching—are careful, caring, omniscient and omnipotent, that not a plot thread or mysterious reference is dangled that they won't ravel together with care.

We may be saps to believe it—but Lost fans know that attitude makes experiencing the show more delicious.

Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason magazine and author of the books This is Burning Man and Radicals for Capitalism. This article originally appeared in The American Spectator.

Cut Taxes and Spend

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:45:00 EST

From Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan, fiscal conservatives have hoped tax cuts could keep government from overspending by denying it revenues—a theory dubbed “starving the beast.” A new study by University of California at Berkeley economists Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, indicates that the beast is thriving despite the tax cuts of the last three decades. Government spending seems to march on regardless of revenue or tax rates.

The economists studied the effects of four major legislated changes in U.S. tax rates and policy since World War II, choosing episodes where the “starve the beast” motivation was most conspicuous. After looking at the data every which way, with multiple regressions and time lags, and accounting for wars and military spending, they found that the one thing most clearly connected to tax cuts was not spending cuts but future tax increases.

“Although a tax cut leads to a sharp fall in revenues in the short run, it does not have any clear impact on revenues at horizons beyond about two years,” the economists write. “Between one-half and four-fifths of the tax cut is offset by legislated tax increases over the next several years.”
And spending cuts? “In no episode [of postwar American tax cuts] was there a discernible slowdown in spending following the tax cut,” the economists conclude. “Indeed, in all of the episodes, there was an acceleration of spending.” The beast finds its food, no matter what.

Scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:15:00 EST

Note: Watch reason editor Nick Gillespie debate Bill O'Reilly on Ron Paul's candidacy at Fox News.

On the morning of October 30, a large group of people gathered outside The Tonight Show’s Burbank studio. According to GloZell, a local eccentric who attends every taping of the show, only the lines attracted by Hollywood heartthrobs such as George Clooney, Justin Timberlake, and Daniel Radcliffe had ever come close to matching the crowd’s size and enthusiasm. But this throng had gathered to cheer Ron Paul, a 72-year-old obstetrician and Air Force veteran turned Texas congressman. Paul was there to hawk not a movie or a record but his long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

During the broadcast, host Jay Leno respectfully attended to Paul’s calls for hard money, withdrawal from Iraq, and a flat income tax of zero. Offstage, Leno got Paul to autograph his copy of the congressman’s recent book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship.

Later in the show, while performing “Anarchy in the U.K.” with a reunited Sex Pistols, punk icon Johnny Rotten gave Paul a thumbs-up and a “Hello, Mr. Paul,” later adding, “When are we getting out of Iraq?” In between, more ambiguously, he waggled his ass in Paul’s general direction. But he shook hands with the congressman afterward, and according to Paul supporters on the scene he expressed respect to him privately. Paul, watching the broadcast with supporters at a Hollywood Hills fundraiser that evening, shook his head at the aging punk’s antics, noting, well, we do promote tolerance.…

That day encapsulated Paul’s surprising campaign. It featured a powerful show of grassroots support, respect from unexpected places, and an infiltration of radical ideas into American mainstream culture. There was the aging iconoclast Rotten, mixing the anarchy he stood for as a kid and the market capitalism he lived out as an adult (the Pistols had reunited to help promote the video game Guitar Hero III), symbolizing the range of liberties Paul represents to a movement that includes both Christian homeschoolers and heathen punks. And there was the question so many Americans want answered, the question central to Paul’s campaign as the only Republican candidate opposed to the war: When are we getting out of Iraq?

When the Paul campaign began, most of the political cognoscenti considered it a quixotic joke. Now it’s one of the hottest stories of the season. The reason for the turnaround is money. On November 5 alone, Paul took in a gigantic haul of $4.3 million. His third quarter 2007 draw nearly matched that of the far more famous John McCain, and his net cash on hand going into the primaries exceeded that of everyone but front-runner Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson (though millionaire Mitt Romney has his personal reserves to fall back on). As of press time, in the fourth quarter of 2007, Paul had collected $10.7 million, generally in amounts well below the legal $2,300 maximum for individual donations.

By November, Ron Paul was getting respect from surprising and prominent places. Conservative bigthinker George Will called Paul “my man” on ABC. Texas singer-songwriter-novelist Kinky Friedman told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Paul is “probably telling the truth.” Singer-songwriter John Mayer was caught on video informing a pal that “Ron Paul knows the Constitution, and I’m down with that.” Even Eleanor Clift, conventional wisdom on the hoof, said on The McLaughlin Group that “Ron Paul with his antiwar libertarian message will be the story coming out of New Hampshire for the Republicans.”

Paul is also the wonder of the Internet, with campaign mojo fueled almost entirely by his shockingly large number of fans on Meetup.com, a website that allows people with a shared interest to find one another and meet offline. Paul has more than 67,000 Meetup followers, about 20 times more than his nearest competitor, Barack Obama. That virtual presence has translated into more than just donations. Five thousand Paul supporters showed up at a November rally in Philadelphia, and his poll numbers in New Hampshire reached 8 percent in a mid-November CBS/New York Times survey—exceeding both Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson.

If news is the unexpected, Ron Paul’s rise was the news of the presidential campaign last fall. But Paul himself is not news. He’s been pushing his libertarian values, derived from his love of the U.S. Constitution and the Austrian school of free market economics, through all of his 10 terms in Congress and in between. (He has served in Congress three times: from 1976 to 1977, from 1979 to 1983, and from 1997 to the present. He ran for president as a Libertarian in 1988.) What’s news is the self-styled Ron Paul Revolution—his mass of self-coordinating supporters. The candidate’s critics invented the term “Paulistas” to mock those supporters as wild-eyed radicals. Many of them then claimed the word for themselves, adopting it as a badge of honor.

Four years ago, Howard Dean’s Democratic campaign offered an earlier example of a grassroots mass movement that came pretty much from nowhere, beholden to no power structure, decentralized in how it got information and in how it organized itself to act. But the Ron Paul Revolution adds a twist: This movement is passionately dedicated to a smaller, less activist government.

As this is written, before a single primary vote has been cast, it’s difficult to predict this movement’s future, especially when you remember how Dean’s campaign imploded after the Iowa caucus. But Paul’s backers are confident their man will at the very least be a new Goldwater. He might not win the presidency, they say, but he will reignite excitement about small government in his party and his country, and thus might help reverse the last half century and more of government growth and activism in both domestic and foreign policy.

In the last weekend of October, after months of following Ron Paul action on the Internet and locally in Los Angeles, I tagged along with the Ron Paul road show in Iowa. Over the course of just 24 hours stretched over two days, I saw Paul talk to more than 500 college kids in Ames, more than 700 assorted Des Moines citizens, hundreds of state GOP activists, and a dozen Des Moines area pastors. I saw a skilled politician with a diverse and disproportionately young band of backers—supporters who stretched far beyond a traditional Republican Party base, who loved their man and his message with an enthusiasm undaunted by whatever his electoral prospects turn out to be.

‘Dr. Paul Cured My Apathy’
On the Friday evening before Halloween, Paul is scheduled to speak at Iowa State University in Ames. To get from Des Moines to Ames, I hop on the Constitution Coach, a former school bus owned by Dave Keagle, a Christian homeschooling father of seven. Keagle’s wife, Christa, and their children are on board, along with a dozen or so other Paul supporters. The bus is painted red, white, and blue, with slogans summing up Paul’s message: “Taxpayer’s Best Friend.” “No Amnesty.” “No NAFTA.” “No National ID.” “No Patriot Act.” “Pro-Gun Owner.” “Life.” “Liberty.” “Freedom.” Christa tells me Paul is the first candidate her family has ever been able to get behind 100 percent, with no reservations. She was also impressed with how Paul was able to relate to and remember the names of all her kids on a previous Iowa campaign swing.

I talk to John Carle Jr., a 43-year-old self-employed CPA who dabbles in real estate, and his wife, Meredith, a Korean orphan brought to America as a child. Like most of the Paulistas I meet, he’s fresh to politics, with no history of activism or enthusiasm for any candidate from any party. He’s not a part of any existing Republican base: He’s a disaffected independent who thinks he’s finally found a politician who “oozes integrity” and “is inspiring the best in people.” Paul’s the only candidate he trusts on post-9/11 civil liberties issues. “If they can pick anyone off the streets and send them to a secret camp,” Carle says, “I don’t wanna be part of that country.”

Carle, who has a firm grasp of the candidate’s positions, explains his love for Paul in measured terms. He gets emotional only once, choking up for a beat as he repeats his favorite of the fan-made signs you see at Paul rallies: “Dr. Paul Cured My Apathy.”

The talk at Ames draws an overflow crowd of more than 500 college kids. There are a few longhairs, a few punks, but it’s overwhelmingly a conventional gang of well-groomed Midwestern youth who happen to be wearing hundreds of “Ron Paul Revolution” T-shirts. The event got no free local or campus press. The crowd was gathered almost entirely through Meetup and Facebook, another online social networking site.

“I hear you’ve got a revolution going on,” Paul begins, “and it’s being led by the young people.” Then he recites his first big applause line: He’s not much for passing laws, but he might consider one requiring the next election to be held on the Internet.

Those are the only explicit nods to the crowd’s youth and online activity. From there on, it’s all classic Ron Paul: Get rid of the income tax and replace it with nothing; find the money to support those dependent on Social Security and Medicare by shutting down the worldwide empire, while giving the young a path out of the programs; don’t pass a draft; have a foreign policy of friendship and trade, not wars and subsidies. He attacks the drug war, condemning the idea of arresting people who have never harmed anyone else’s person or property. He stresses the disproportionate and unfair treatment minorities get from drug law enforcement. One of his biggest applause lines, to my astonishment, involves getting rid of the Federal Reserve. Kids have gathered, not just from Iowa but from Wisconsin and Nebraska, in classic hop-in-the-van college road trips, to hear a 72-year-old gynecologist talk about monetary policy.

He wraps up the speech with three things he doesn’t want to do that sum up the Ron Paul message. First: “I don’t want to run your life. We all have different values. I wouldn’t know how to do it, I don’t have the authority under the Constitution, and I don’t have the moral right.” Second: “I don’t want to run the economy. People run the economy in a free society.” And third: “I don’t want to run the world.…We don’t need to be imposing ourselves around the world.”

Paul does not mention abortion or immigration—areas where his views are more conventionally conservative and not of great appeal to this age group. He’s against abortion and thinks the fetus is a human life deserving of state protection, but he also thinks that like all such crimes against persons, abortion is a matter for states to decide without federal interference. He thinks that border defense is a legitimate function of government, and that government has been doing a bad job of it. He wants tougher border enforcement, including a border wall; he wants to eliminate birthright citizenship; and he wants to end the public subsidies that might attract illegal immigrants. Paul’s style of libertarianism includes a populist streak of distrust for foreign forces overwhelming our sovereignty, whether through the United Nations, international trade pacts, immigration, or a feared “North American Union” between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

On the ride back to Des Moines, I meet, among other Paul fans, Bryan Butcher, a 50-year-old high school teacher and part-time drummer for a belly dancing troupe. He’s a pony-tailed former Marine who had thought of himself as a “social liberal” and an Obama fan. “I feel we do need to take care of people,” Butcher says. But Ron Paul has helped him see that “the socialist idea of government taking care of people hasn’t helped, that people need to take care of people, and that’s the smart way to go.”

The Paulistas delight in their independence and fervor. At a press conference after the Ames talk, a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter asks the candidate about all the Paul signs he sees around Pittsburgh. “You guys must have a big operation there,” he says.

“If we do,” Paul says with a small smile, “we don’t know about it.”

‘You Are Friends for Life’
Iowa and New Hampshire, which hold a caucus and a primary respectively in January, are the early-voting states where the campaign is concentrating most of its unexpected largess and where the unaffiliated revolutionaries are concentrating their energy. But more New Hampshire than Iowa. Iowans are perhaps too staid for the revolution.

I’m on Des Moines’ downtown drinking strip after Paul has spoken at a state GOP dinner, sitting with two Paul staffers and two Paul fans. A tipsy young Romney supporter approaches us. She actually likes Ron Paul, she grants. She could even call him her second choice. But Ron Paul fans? They’re outside agitators, she insists, almost scary in their intensity. Iowans don’t appreciate their shouting, chanting style of campaigning, or their insistence on sticking their huge, silly “Ron Paul Revolution” signs in places they do not belong, often violating both propriety and the law.

I ask Jan Mickelson of WHO-AM, a leading Des Moines talk radio host who describes himself as a Christian libertarian and a Paul admirer, where the classic Iowa Republican “values voter” stands on Paul. He first notes, with a mixture of admiration and disquiet, that Paul partisans are “crawl-over-broken-glass zealots. Fiercely devoted. Passionate. Wherever he appears they appear, wherever he’s on TV they watch, whatever poll they can participate in, they respond. If you get on their right side, you are friends for life. If you nuance even a little bit your support for him, they come at you.”

Iowa Republicans, Mickelson says, have “two impulses” toward Paul. “They find the limited government message very attractive,” he says. “They find his war policies confusing and irritating. They don’t understand how you can be a constitutionalist for limited government and be against the war and not be aiding and abetting both Al Qaeda and Moveon.org.”

So New Hampshire is where the Paulistas are hoping for a surprise victory. It’s happened before for radical outsiders with populist appeal: Pat Buchanan scored the state in 1996. (And see what it got him.)

Vijay Boyapati, an Australian immigrant, was a software engineer for Google who was running a 100-member Google-internal pro-Paul listserv. (Paul filled two rooms to overflowing at a July talk on Google’s campus in Mountain View, California.) Boyapati quit his job in November to devote all his energy to his project Operation: Live Free or Die. His goal: Recruit a thousand Paul supporters to relocate to New Hampshire for a weekend or even for weeks—he plans to rent a house and give up a whole month himself—doing retail canvassing and campaigning to push Paul over the top there.

The official campaign has ponied up more than $1 million for TV commercials in the Granite State. The three ads focus on Paul’s personal integrity, on his opposition to national ID cards and other civil liberties violations, and on his support for a noninterventionist foreign policy. In one spot he notes that “both parties have put their pet schemes ahead of our rights”—a direct blow against his own party.

In the age of Bush Republicanism, Paul barely qualifies as a party man in good standing. But in New Hampshire independents can register and vote in the Republican primary on Election Day. And in the Iowa caucus, any legal voter can show up and vote for Paul. That’s good news for a campaign that must rely on support beyond the Bush-era GOP faithful.

‘We Want to Have a Peaceful Revolution’
The inventor of the phrase “Ron Paul Revolution,” and the designer of the T-shirt logo in which the evol in revolution looks like the word love backward, is 46-year-old Ernest Hancock, a longtime activist in the Arizona Libertarian Party and a radio host. The logo recycles an image he developed for his own (losing) 2006 bid for secretary of state in Arizona. “We want to have a peaceful revolution, so the love is effective in portraying a revolution, but not violence,” says Hancock, known among Libertarian Party activists for always staking out hard-core, no-compromise stances. The logo, which is not an official campaign symbol, is immensely popular among Paul fans, dotting the nation wherever Paulistas can show up in T-shirts or put up stenciled signs or banners.

Hancock says that when he first heard rumors that Paul might be running, back in January 2007, “I called [campaign chairman] Kent Snyder and said, ‘All I need to know is if this is for real.’ When he said yes, I said, ‘Thanks, have a nice day, you’ll never hear from me again.’ ”

Hancock spends most of his time these days crossing the nation, showing locals how to make Ron Paul Revolution signs economically, how to find used banners and billboard pieces for cheap or free and print on the back. He advises activists on how and where to hang them. Hancock’s an anarchist, but he has learned to love the federal highway system for the opportunity to reach a captive audience on the cheap by hanging banners off overpasses.

And if the banners get torn down within hours? “So freaking what?” he says. “Two hundred thousand people saw it.” And, uh, is any of this illegal? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t care.” Well, Ron Paul is on record as supporting civil disobedience.

Hancock’s crusade is not the only guerrilla effort on Paul’s behalf. Meetup groups are organizing a campaign to send thousands of handwritten pro-Paul letters to Iowa voters. A strange variety of viral videos infects YouTube, many of them featuring unofficial Ron Paul campaign songs. The range of styles in these Ron Paul ballads reflects the eclecticism of the Ron Paul Revolution: from wan old-school folk to ’90s-style jazzy trip-hop, from sprightly garage rock to straight Sinatra steals. Some lyrical samples, from the trip-hop number: “We need Ron Paul/For the long haul/Cause he’ll stop all the wars/Where the bombs fall.” From the garage pop tune: “Ron Paul!/He’s got brains and he’s got balls/Ron Paul!/Who you gonna cast your vote for next fall?/Ron Paul!”

An Eclectic Revolution
As a very successful politician, Ron Paul knows how to sell what’s appropriate at any given moment, within the bounds of his principles. This talent helps forge a movement that appeals across gaps that standard political analysts might think unbridgeable, such as the one between pot-smoking libertine college kids and evangelist pastors.

When Paul speaks to those pastors in Des Moines, he talks about border security, sovereignty, and the North American Union, topics missing from the college talk. He tells of witnessing a casual abortion in medical school, and how much it disturbed him. But even to this audience he stresses that preventing abortion must ultimately be a cultural, spiritual, and family matter, not something solvable through top-down federal action.

Afterward, a couple of pastors tell me they’re “less libertarian” than Paul but plump for him anyway. The “leave us alone” message has wide appeal; as Nate Howe, an L.A.-area computer security worker in the banking industry and an organizer with the local Meetup group, tells me, a recent Hollywood fundraiser found “Ron Paul talking to someone who’s very accomplished in business and then a kid next to him with a Mohawk, and both are saying, ‘I like this guy; he’s saying go live your life, and if you don’t hurt anyone, the government shouldn’t bother you.’ ”

I hear variants of this from many Paulistas. They recognize their scene’s eclecticism but see no reason that, whatever your personal values or lifestyle, you can’t get behind the man who wants to leave you alone.

There’s one strain of the Paul movement, though, that often alienates his other supporters and potential supporters. Ranging from John Birchers to 9/11 Truthers, they’re the type whose distrust of government is enmeshed in elaborate, complicated, and implausible conspiracy theories. To the extent those people have a favorite candidate, it’s apt to be Ron Paul. One big reason: He shares their refusal to believe the government always has good intentions.

My friend Phil Blumel has been active for the last decade in Florida GOP politics and has been following Paul closely for two decades.

He’s a big Paul supporter and has been encouraged at how many rank-and-file Republicans seem open to his message. He understands Paul’s appeal to the conspiratorial types, though he doesn’t share their interests, and doesn’t think Paul really does either. “I’ve heard him speak 40 times, and you can never really tell that he actually believes in any particular conspiracies,” Blumel notes. “But he speaks in a language such that conspiracy nuts believe that he does. Me not being a conspiracy nut, he speaks vaguely enough that I can listen and it doesn’t sound like he really buys it.

“That’s a political skill,” Blumel jokes, “triangulating between the sane and the insane and keeping them both on board.” As an enthusiastic supporter of the campaign who nonetheless disagrees with Paul’s stances on immigration and sovereignty, Blumel has been pleased that as the campaign has gained traction, Paul has emphasized issues with more mainstream appeal: war and the economy.

With that traction has come a wave of “Who Are the Paulistas?” media stories. The ultimately dismissive, if often amused, spirit of many of them is summed up by an anecdote in one of the articles. After noting some Paul fans’ penchant for wearing costumes, including colonial era garb, Time’s Joel Stein describes how, after a New Hampshire rally, a staffer for fellow GOP candidate Tom Tancredo “walked up to a guy in a shark costume and asked him if he was a Ron Paul supporter. ‘No. They’re all nuts,’ replied the shark. ‘I’m just a guy in a shark suit.’ ”

While left-leaning writers such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon and John Nichols at The Nation have been Paul defenders, the right-wing press has frequently featured bitter animus against him. For example, the conservative columnist Mona Charen scoffs that Paul “might make a dandy new leader for the Branch Davidians.” At The Weekly Standard’s website, Dean Barnett writes, “If you’re the kind of person whose neighbors call you a crank, you probably see Ron Paul as a kindred spirit. And chances are he’s with you on the subject for which you’ve achieved your notoriety in crankdom.”

In my interviews with dozens of Paul supporters from across the country, I encountered not a single nut or dedicated conspiracy theorist. In fact, they all evinced a general belief in free markets and the Constitution that should, in theory, make them welcome members in good standing of the American right.

The Revolution’s Future
Most of the current Ron Paul Army has mustered in only with this campaign. Most of them had never heard of him, or thought of themselves as libertarians, before six months ago. The predominance of newbies bothers Jorge Besada, an economics fan in a Hayek shirt who shipped in from Nebraska to hear his man talk in Ames and Des Moines. Without a solid grounding in the verities of Austrian economics, Besada worries, Paul supporters won’t be optimal sellers of the freedom message. Too many of Paul’s positions, whether his hard-money stance or the larger questions of how free markets and free people will function and achieve social goals without constant government management, require a sophisticated economics background to really get, he fears.

There are no survey data about the Paul movement, but certain rough generalizations seem valid. They are not an unwashed rabble of weirdos, as Paul’s right-wing critics like to say; most are either college students or adult professionals, though usually not rich. They generally support Paul all the way. (Those with Libertarian Party backgrounds are likely to differ on immigration and abortion.) The war issue is important to them, but so are the larger matters of civil liberties and fiscal conservatism. They imagine themselves continuing the fight for these ideas in some capacity after the election, but they often aren’t sure how. Many, though, promise that any future candidate for any office pushing the Paul line will have their support. And some promise to be those future candidates.

Some Paul fans with more political experience, both Republican and Libertarian, are working to keep the revolution alive even if their candidate fails to take the nomination. In Florida, Paul partisans are encouraging their comrades to join county GOP executive committees and reshape the party from the bottom up in Paul’s image. In Alabama, a Paul organizer sees single-issue freedom-oriented grassroots groups already arising from the activists Paul has energized, including campaigns dedicated to gun rights and to fighting a national ID card.

There is a lot of clamor among Libertarian Party higher-ups and activists to get Paul (who remains a lifetime member of the party) to seek its nomination if he fails to get the Republican nod. Many insiders agree that it would be his for the taking at the party’s May convention. One downside for the L.P., which most seem willing to overlook, is that laws in a handful of states (including Paul’s home state of Texas) would bar him from the presidential ballot because of his campaign in the GOP primary. Paul continually denies that he’ll make a third-party run, but his denials are always couched in terms of not thinking about it or planning it, as opposed to categorically denying that he would ever under any circumstances do it.

Whatever his future plans, Paul insists this revolution is about his message, not him. But small hints of a cult of personality hover around some of his fans’ devotion to the candidate. Almost all the supporters I talk to stress their trust in him and often assume he’s probably right about most things, even issues they haven’t put a great deal of thought into.

These Paulistas are what hopeful libertarians have fantasized about for decades: a disaffected but engageable mass of Americans, many of them hidden among the 45 percent or so who tend not to vote. They support an argument advanced by David Boaz of the Cato Institute and David Kirby of the America’s Future Foundation, who estimate, based on detailed polling data, that 9 to 14 percent of Americans hew to a roughly libertarian political ideology—and that this group has been shifting away from the GOP during the current Bush administration.

Such Americans represent a deep, natural well of libertarianism waiting to be tapped. And Ron Paul has hit a gusher in a year when every other Republican stands for big government and war, and when YouTube and Meetup are a private, self-selected national TV network and town hall for 24-hour Ron Paul. But when he’s gone?

I ask Paul, as he shakes hands and chats with every one of the 100 or so fans in his hospitality suit after the Iowa GOP dinner, about the future of the Ron Paul Revolution. First he admits to being as shocked as anyone by what’s happening. For years, he resisted calls to run again for president. He thought it was too early in the long-term libertarian educational project for such a campaign to get anywhere.

“Even if I said, ‘OK folks, we didn’t make it, let’s all go home’—I don’t think it would happen,” he says. “I’ve been laboring in these fields for 30 years and wasn’t reaching many people and thought maybe my role is only to lay the foundation with a few speeches, voting the right way, setting a standard. I don’t know what will happen. Something amazing could happen in Iowa and New Hampshire, and that will decide a lot. But many of my supporters indicate they will be running for office. They understand my positions, and it would be pretty neat to see a bunch of new members go to Congress with these views.”

If something like that happens, Paul’s connection with Johnny Rotten and punk rock may be deeper than it first appears. It has often been said that early punk precursors like the Velvet Underground and the Ramones may not have sold many records themselves, but that everyone who bought one formed his own band to carry on the spirit. Even if Ron Paul doesn’t get that many votes, his voters may end up running for office themselves. It would be a fitting legacy for a very do-it-yourself political movement.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is the author of This is Burning Man (BenBella) and adicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (PublicAffairs). He first wrote about Ron Paul for The American Spectator in 1999.

Iraq 2011

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:42:00 EST

Losing Our Initiative

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:11:00 EST

Three political activists face criminal charges for trying to put a taxpayer’s bill of rights on a state ballot in 2005. Oklahoma, which prohibits out-of-state residents from collecting signatures to put an initiative on the ballot, has indicted Paul Jacob, Susan Johnson, and Rick Carpenter for conspiracy to defraud the state by helping organize outsiders to collect signatures.

The taxpayer’s bill of rights was unpopular with a wide range of political forces in Oklahoma, from public employees’ unions to big business. Jacob thinks the campaign’s controversial nature caused an enforcement double standard. In a previous case involving a petition against cockfighting, an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision allowed signatures collected by people with no other proof of residency beyond affirming that they were residents and listing an Oklahoma address.

Oklahoma’s law on signature collection is being challenged by the group Yes on Term Limits, which lost its first round and has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. For Jacob, who was imprisoned in the 1980s for refusing to register for the draft, Oklahoma’s ban on out-of-state petitioners is “a malevolent law designed to do against petition rights and the initiative process what folks in Mississippi in the 1950s and ’60s wanted to do against freedom riders coming into the state. It’s a law designed to stop us from helping each other control our government.”

Real Libertarianism

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:54:00 EST

Michael Kinsley rightly marks libertarianism as being "useful and undervalued" in American political discourse—and this historian of the movement says thanks. However, Kinsley tries not to go too far. He thus misunderstands some of the reasons libertarians advocate what they advocate and the advantages of their line of thinking.

To read the rest of this article, go to LATimes.com.

Bloomberg's Folly

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:11:00 EST

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was angry that guns bought outside his city were used to commit crimes inside it. So in 2006 he sent private eyes to entrap gun store operators in five other states. His agents tricked the stores into going along, on hidden camera, with “straw purchases,” in which one person fills out the legal paperwork required to own a gun while clearly planning to hand the weapon off to someone else.

As a result of its successful stings, the city filed civil suits against 27 gun stores, charging them with negligence and creating a public nuisance. Fourteen of the stores settled. They agreed that New York can send in snoops to examine their records and inventory, videotape all activities, and instruct the stores’ employees in proper gun sale behavior. They also had to post a bond covering the fines they’ll be liable for if New York’s agents catch them violating any aspect of the agreement.

But Bloomberg has gotten some blowback for his attempt to hold stores responsible for the actions of gun-toting criminals, most of whom get their weapons in the black market, not directly from stores. Two stores have filed countersuits.

Jay Wallace, a dealer in Smyrna, Georgia, is suing various parties associated with the action against him for $400 million for defamation and interference with his legitimate business practices. Larry Mickalis of Summerville, South Carolina, has filed a similar suit. New York City tried unsuccessfully to get both suits, which were filed in federal courts based in the respective states, moved to a federal court in New York. The cases have not yet gone to trial.

However those suits are resolved, Bloomberg already has lost some momentum on this issue. The U.S. Department of Justice refused to prosecute any of Bloomberg’s targets. It told Bloomberg in February that his actions lacked “proper law enforcement authority” and opened agents he sent out on such stings to “potential legal liabilities.” Virginia, one of the states hit by Bloomberg’s sting, passed a law in July threatening future stingers with felony charges.

The Cost of a Free Lunch

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:25:00 EST

David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer-winning New York Times reporter. His latest book, just out this week, is called Free Lunch: How The Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves At Government Expense (and Stick you With the Bill). It’s valuable from a small government perspective because of its detailed stories of government attempts to manipulate or adjust the market, leading—predictably, a libertarian might say—to benefits for the well-off and well-connected rather than the disadvantaged or the masses.

Free Lunch is full of sharp, heavily reported takedowns on eminent domain, expensive special favors for sports teams, legislative deals that put taxpayers on the hook for private train company’s crimes and errors, giveaways from small towns to attract big-box stores, and how heavily government-managed markets in areas such as power and health care can enrich some at everyone’s expense.

While almost every depredation recorded in Free Lunch can be traced back to government actions or decisions (generally combined with some individual or company’s decision to act like a bit of a creep), Johnston engages in a fair amount of rhetoric along the lines of how “the ideology of blind faith in markets” is somehow implicated in this or that crime or ripoff.

Still, he often uses sound free market arguments to make his case—for example, noting how some government action places on everyone an often-unnoticeable little burden in order to give a big special benefit to a few. Unfortunately, he’s apt to forget that sort of argument when he, say, condemns outsourcing of jobs overseas, or trucking deregulation.

As Johnston tells me, he’s not selling any consistent ideology about government. He sees himself as an investigative reporter, looking for interesting untold stories. In this interview, conducted by phone on Thursday, Johnston is nonetheless aware his book has a distinct moral message.

reason: What is the theme of Free Lunch, and what made you write it?

David Cay Johnston: Ronald Reagan famously asked Americans if we were better off than we were four year ago; Americans said “no” and elected him. This empowered a great change, supposedly, in government. It was supposed to lead to less government, more market solutions, and lower taxes.

What I’m asking in Free Lunch is: Are you better off than you were a generation ago when Reagan was elected? Government is just as big, there are vastly more regulations, and as I show, we have many new rules and regulations that handcuff the invisible hand of the market and instead, in subtle, sometimes hidden, ways, extract money from the pockets of the many and funnel it to the politically connected few. It’s the very thing that Adam Smith said would ruin the benefits of markets. I would think libertarians would like everything in the book, except for the parts about health care [where he calls for nationalized health care, European-style].

reason: Which of the many stories you tell sums up your book’s message best?

Johnston: I tell in detail the story of a little merchant [Jim Weaknecht] with lower prices than his bigger competitors, like Cabela’s, in the business of selling fishing and outdoor gear, who was run out of business in his little town [of Hamburg, Pennsylvania] because of $32 million in subsidies [provided by local government] to Cabela’s. That’s $8,000 for every man, woman, and child in town, equal to the entire budget of the little town for a decade. Imagine that you are that competitor, with some big outside competitor getting a huge leg up, one that’s essentially worth doubling their profits as a practical matter, so they can run you out of business.

On the brighter side, I do tell a story about Gander Mountain [another big company in the hunting/camping/fishing business] that actually employs a lobbying firm to fight against [special favors and subsidies] for [their competitors] Cabela’s and Bass Pro. Cabela’s was actually praised by Bush and Cheney as models of enterprise.

It’s not surprising Bush would praise a company like Cabela’s though. His own fortune, as I show from the public record and from interviewing his friends and from his own tax returns, derives from a subsidy that was derived from a tax increase! There’s an irony—George Bush got rich from a tax increase [a sales tax passed by voters in Arlington, Texas] that was funneled into his pocket inefficiently. The people who had to pay the tax got no benefit—most of them were not baseball fans—from this subsidy to build a stadium for the Texas Rangers [baseball team Bush owned].

You might think that companies that get subsidies would make bigger profits than normal. But Adam Smith told us that subsidies bring in brash adventurers who often end up making no profit, and the evidence is that Cabela’s doesn’t appear to be particularly profitable. Cabela’s in fact, in its first three years as a publicly traded company, had $223 million in profit, and subsidy deals worth $293 million. I argue that they are not in the business of selling sporting goods; they are in the business of reeling in subsidies.

reason: Why do you think these practices continue if the towns and cities that agree to them are getting reamed?

Johnston: When I ask town burghers why they indulge in this practice, they generally say, “Excuse me, if we don’t they’ll build in the next town over and we lose that business; we have to do this.” I think, “Excuse me, what happened to the notion that it’s part of your duty to protect the pockets of the people you represent?”

Stores [getting subsidies] promise that if we build a store, they will come [promising tourist and business benefit beyond the store itself]. They promise people will come driving a whole day to buy a fishing reel or hunting rifle—which you can buy out of a catalog. So an analyst for Gander Mountain and a reporter went and counted cars in parking lots for the Cabela’s that put Jim Weaknecht out of business. To have as much business as Cabela’s said [they’d attract] they’d need to be bringing in 4,100 cars a day. They found just 308 cars, and only 68 with out-of-state plates. These subsidy deals are premised on promises of all this business and money they will attract to town, but the information is not real, and there’s no follow up and in many cases no disclosure. It’s government money being given away in secret with no one checking to see if the promised performance is made.

reason: There are times in the book where you use language in a way that some libertarians might find misleading: you don’t often distinguish, for example, between a tax break and a pure giveaway when discussing subsidies.

Johnston: I’m not an ideologue; I’m a practical reporter. I don’t think in those terms. Money is money is money. In some of the subsidies that I explain, no dollars change hands, but value changes hands. If government is taking from you to give someone else money that’s very clear, like if the government is forcing you to pay a tax and then gives that money to a rich person. But when the government says to a rich person, you don’t have to pay taxes, and you’re in business [competing with them], then that business gets to compete with an advantage against others who do pay taxes. And it’s not fair, it’s not level.

reason: Barron Hilton, Paris’ grandfather, was in the news today for something related to a story in your book which discussed how he gained much of his fortune—in your reading, because of unconscionable appeals court decisions in California.

Johnston: Barron Hilton announced that he’s giving 97 percent of his fortune to charity, and it got mostly uncritical press about his generosity, and poor Paris being shortchanged. Now, the Hiltons knew my book was coming and that its official publication date was [Thursday]. I can’t prove it, but I think the timing of this announcement is connected with [my book]. I asked in Free Lunch, what kind of family produces a young woman as brazen and shameless as Paris Hilton?

The answer is, a family that derived its fortune not from hotels but by snatching it from poor children. [Paris’ great-grandfather Conrad Hilton] left his fortune to the poor [via a foundation]. He left his son Barron a tiny, itsy bitsy sliver of fortune. Barron started scheming, and set in motion within days of [Conrad’s] death to deny all that money to the poor and to take it from the charity through a complicated legal argument [having to do with the percentage of the hotel chain that could legally be owned by the Hilton family and the Hilton Family Foundation that Conrad wanted to leave most of the hotel stock to] and lost at every turn. Finally one set of judges gave him a favorable ruling not in accord with 400 years of common law. He negotiated a deal to get 60 percent of his father’s fortune. He may be turning that money back over to charity when he dies, but he diverted hundreds of million to his own pocket in the meantime.

reason: At times you go out of your way to traduce unfettered markets, but aren’t all the practices you condemn in Free Lunch the result of government actions or decisions?

Johnston: Markets are the very best mechanism to determine the price of things, but all markets have rules. I show in many of these market established under the guise of deregulation, particularly energy, the new rules are rigged in favor of one group or another. See for example just this month big manufacturing companies, chemical firms, and industrial firms including automakers joined together with their nemesis Ralph Nader to file a petition with the Federal Electric Regulatory Commission (FERC) that said excuse me, electricity markets are not real markets. [The petition Johnston refers to urges FERC to open a nationwide probe into whether wholesale electricity prices are "unjust and unreasonable.”] Enron got the laws written the way they wanted them written; Enron’s gone but those rules are still costing people enormous sums every month.

So, I don’t think of myself as a progressive, a liberal, or anything else. In addition to being a reporter I also run a business--I’m chair of a small hotel management company that my son and I own. I’ve had plenty of practical experience. I’ve been an investigative reporter since I was 18. What investigative reporters have in common is we become interested when things are not as they appear to be.

reason: It seems to me Free Lunch goes beyond an investigative reporter “just the facts” attitude. You do seem guided by a principle more or less like, if something seems to benefit the rich, you’re against it….

Johnston: There is definitely a moral tone to the book. I cite Adam Smith, Andrew Mellon, and the Bible at length on the proposition that one of the most morally offensive things is to take from those with less to enrich those already rich. The Bible again and again tells us that is a road to ruin. But I have no objection to people getting wealthy. Just get wealthy off hard work and enterprise, not getting government to pass rules no one knows about that reach into my pocket and take money out of it.

reason: You present a variation on campaign finance reform in your conclusion, something you think can address the problems of government being overly solicitous of the wealthy and well-connected, that I hadn’t heard before.

Johnston: For 35 years we tried to reform the government through campaign finance reform, and it hasn’t worked, and the Supreme Court is hostile to it. So I suggest we try something new—politician finance reform. I was inspired by the franking privilege. Have all the costs and expenses of being a member of Congress be publicly funded—an unlimited expense account essentially, but with complete disclosure including who they met with and the substance of the conversation—not every detail but generally what they were talking about.

Then there would be a rule that says, now that we paid all costs, including for keeping up two households, if you take so much as a free shot of whisky, you go to prison. Zero tolerance for politicians. If we approach this idea of paying the full real cost of Congress then I think perhaps we can get closer to a system where members of Congress are not thinking about what donors want.

reason: I’m curious if you ever get to the point, studying example after example of how government works to prop up the powerful, where you just throw up your hands and decide that it’s government itself that is inherently the problem here...

Johnston: When people say a problem is intractable, I think that’s the most un-American thing you can say. The whole idea of America is that we will solve our own problems. We recognize people abuse power, so we limit it—put in checks and balances. We will solve these problems when people decide they care enough to solve them. I think a big problem is many Americans are giving up on democracy. I never throw my hands up about these problems, and if I did, that would be saying that I don’t think this ingenious idea, the Constitution, can work, and I do.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty (bdoherty@reason.com) is author of This is Burning Man and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.