Inhaltsverzeichnis für April 2016 in Reason

FOUR DAYS BEFORE Rand Paul dropped out of the presidential race, I watched a frustrated reason subscriber ask Sen. Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.) to explain something about the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. Why, Bryan Elliott wanted to know, had a unified GOP Congress colluded with President Barack Obama in late 2015 to produce a last-minute omnibus spending package that put the country on pace to run up trillion-dollar annual budget deficits by 2022, three years earlier than the Congressional Budget Office had previously predicted? “What did you get in return for busting the sequester and putting us on that kind of deficit [trajectory]?” Flake, who voted against both the December omnibus and the October two-year budget deal that removed the Budget Control Act caps on federal spending (colloquially known as “the…

In November 1979, reason ran an excerpt from the book Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out. The authors described the illegal surveillance, searches, and raids that would be required for effective handgun control and said liberals were “increasingly coming to oppose the prohibition of handguns for civilians” because of the massive civil liberties violations that would necessarily come with it. Thirty-six years later, we’ve recently seen a long lull in major pushes for gun control—a lull that lasted more than a decade. But now liberals are bringing the issue back into the national spotlight. While violent crime has dropped by half since the 1990s, a series of highprofile mass shootings, from the 2012 Newtown elementary school massacre to the 2015 attack at a San Bernardino civic center, have provided…

In a fit of nostalgia, I recently watched You’ve Got Mail with my 11-year-old daughter (don’t judge me!). For those who haven’t seen the 1998 chick flick, it tracks the first antagonistic, later tender, interactions between an independent bookseller (Meg Ryan) and the owner of a corporate bookstore chain (Tom Hanks) that just moved in across the street. As movie fate would have it, Ryan and Hanks develop an anonymous Internet romance even as his megastore is putting her little shop out of business. To the modern eye, the technology in the film appears almost comically outdated: dialup Internet connections, phones attached to answering machines, people getting their news from actual newspapers. In fact, the movie’s plot wouldn’t make sense today, given the plethora of online dating services and applications…

THE ACCUSATION STUNNED wartime Washington. In July 1943, numerous newspaper columnists blamed one specific federal employee for the intelligence failures that led to Pearl Harbor. His name was James Lawrence “Larry” Fly, and he had been coordinating all civilian and military telecommunication since 1940. While chairing both the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Defense Communications Board (DCB), Fly had accrued significant political enemies simply by fulfilling his responsibilities. With so many critics, the smear stuck. Fly knew immediately who had planted the rumor. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had secretly approached Fly in September 1940 with an urgent request. The bureau wanted permission (and access) from Fly’s FCC to secretly wiretap various unnamed Americans and foreign nationals within the United States. Fly, who possessed a remarkable command of media…

Murder on TV Making a Murderer, a 10-episode Netflix documentary series, follows the twisted legal saga of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin native who served 18 years in prison for the sexual assault and attempted murder of Penny Beerntsen. Avery was exonerated in 2003 but rearrested in 2005 and convicted of a totally different murder after a byzantine sequence of legal maneuvers. Similar to the hit podcast Serial, the show gains its spellbinding power by delving ever-deeper into the ordinary, messy, ruined lives of those who run, and run afoul of, the criminal justice system. The result is a thrilling—and ambiguous—look at a part of American life typically shrouded in secrecy. When the series debuted in December, it fed into a growing national conversation about cronyism and corruption in America’s judicial…

Batman vs. Cops The Dark Knight III: The Master Race (issue 5 of 8 will be out in April) continues the story that began in Frank Miller’s legendary ’80s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, featuring an aging, bitter Batman returning to action. But its themes are torn from today’s headlines. The series begins with the first new sighting of Batman in three years—as he saves a black teenager from pursuit by cops. “now he’s on r side?” a friend to whom he relays his Batman encounter via text asks. “figure he’s always been dumbass,” the teen replies. The young man took some photos on his phone, which go viral and bring out the typical police apologist voices in media. The first issue ends with what appears to be Batman…

Future Foreseen Faster-than-light travel or communication, A.I., humanoid android companions, time travel, force fields, and teleportation all continue to elude real-world scientists and engineers, despite what we were promised as 20th century readers of science fiction. (As for cyborgs and cloaking devices, we seem to be getting there.) Brian Clegg’s Ten Billion Tomorrows (St. Martin’s) is subtitled How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future, but it ends up being more about how reality frequently fails to catch up to science fiction’s core concepts. Clegg’s breezy, newspapercolumn style only scratches the surface on both the science and the science fiction. But it delivers a fun contemplation of our attempts to model the inherently unpredictable future, and it suggests that even escapist fiction has independent value beyond preparing us…

AEON SKOBLE, 51, is a professor of philosophy at Bridgewater State University. His work, though, is very practical: “I mainly work on ethics and political philosophy, so it’s grounded in the lived world and isn’t the stargazing of popular stereotype.” In this issue, he reviews Hayek’s Modern Family, a new book that applies the Austrian Nobel laureate’s ideas to the evolving institution that is the family (“Libertarian Family Values,” page 52). Skoble is the author of Deleting the State: An Argument about Government (Open Court) and co-editor of the best-selling The Simpsons and Philosophy (Open Court). Since Staff Editor ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN joined REASON in 2015, she has made a name for herself reporting on sex policy, gender issues, and the criminal justice system. But health and nutrition, which she’s…

“The rhetoric got way ahead of the policy making.” —former Obama administration State Department official Michael Posner, on Obama’s willingness, despite claims he makes in speeches, to work with oppressive foreign governments when it suits his national security goals, Politico, January/February 2016 “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73....it never goes away.” —tweet from Juanita Broaddrick, a former nursing home administrator who in 1999 accused the then-president of raping her in 1978, January 6 “The enforcement strategy that the administration has articulated is not going to change.” —White House press secretary Josh Earnest, asked in a press briefing whether raids against illegal immigrants in the United States will continue, January 8 “To me, the…

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked and a columnist for reason.com. O’Neill, who calls himself a “Marxist libertarian,” writes about free speech, environmentalism, and other issues at the nexus of politics and culture. In December, Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie sat down with the 41-yearold Londoner. Q: What do you think is the biggest enemy or opponent of free speech today? A: I don’t think it’s the state. It used to be the state—it would smash its boot down on any ideology it thought was dangerous. That still happens, particularly in Europe. We have hate speech laws which have seen religious people being arrested and critics of Islam being fined. But the real threat, I think, is conformism and cowardice. A reluctance among ordinary people to have the debate out,…

WHEN A PRINCETON University study released last fall found that the mortality rate for midlife non-Hispanic whites is rising, my thoughts turned immediately to McDowell County, West Virginia. My family hails from that county, which is known for having the lowest male life expectancy in the United States. (Female life expectancy is only the second lowest in the country, at 73 years; the lowest is found in nearby Perry County, Kentucky.) Men in McDowell County live an average of 63.9 years, compared to a national average of 76.3. In Fairfax County, Virginia, the average American male’s lifespan is 81.7 years—nearly 18 years more than in McDowell. During the post–World War II coal boom, the population of McDowell County swelled to nearly 100,000. (My father’s family decamped from coal country to…

SINCE REP. JUSTIN AMASH (R–Mich.) first entered Congress in January 2011, there have been more than 3,500 roll call votes in the House of Representatives. Amash hasn’t missed a single one. When former Speaker of the House John Boehner—whom Amash helped push out of his leadership role last fall—used to preside over “pro forma” sessions during which most members were away from Washington, the libertarian-leaning congressman would always attend, just to make sure Boehner didn’t try to sneak a voice-vote extension of the PATRIOT Act. “Trust but verify,” the Michigan maverick would say, quoting Ronald Reagan’s famous line about the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons negotiations. Yes, Amash speaks of his own party the way Reagan spoke of the Russkies. There is ample reason for such a skeptical approach. In mid-December,…

“I HOPE THAT LAW students today are having to watch Butters sing ‘What, What (In the Butt)’ in their classrooms. I hope that’s the legacy in this case,” says Parker Higgins, director of copyright activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). For 19 seasons, South Park has provided cutting cultural commentary centered around the foulmouthed adventures of elementary school students Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman. But the raunchy cartoon has also helped establish an important legal entertainment precedent that expands free speech rights. “When anybody creates anything, basically, that thing automatically gets copyrighted and for the most part it can’t be used in certain ways without permission,” explains Higgins. “But there are some really important exceptions to that rule, and there are some really important places where we say, ‘Actually,…

Moral Hazard and The Big Short If you’re struggling to imagine how watching people holler at each other about synthetic collateral debt obligations could be a fun way to spend two hours, you probably haven’t seen The Big Short. The film, based on Michael Lewis’ book of the same name, features an all-star cast—Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt—and a seemingly impossible mandate: Derive a mass-market hit from a story about a cadre of financial professionals orchestrating the purchase of huge sums in credit default swaps. Director Adam McKay (of Anchorman fame) succeeds by wrapping the story in comedy, with celebrity cameos spliced in to explain otherwise inaccessible concepts in plain English. It’s a populist tale of criminal greed on Wall Street and regulators who can’t be bothered—…

Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy”and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers, by Steven Hill, St. Martin’s Press, 326 pages, $27.99 I’VE WORKED FOR Travis Kalanick for more than a year, but I’ve never met him. Technically, he’s not my boss and I’m not his employee. I’m one of North America’s 400,000 independent “1099” contractors with Uber, the company Kalanick co-founded and runs. In 2015, working in Pittsburgh three or four nights a week, I made nearly 2,200 Uber trips, carried more than 4,500 passengers, and put about 20,000 scratch-free Uber miles on my wife’s 2013 Honda CRV. Subtracting expenses for gas and wear and tear on Pittsburgh’s infamously potholed roads, I netted about $15,000 for the year. This is the best part-time job I’ve had in a career of…

America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve, by Roger Lowenstein, Penguin Press, 368 pages, $29.95 CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT the creation of the Federal Reserve System abound. Typically they give a prominent place to a now infamous but then-secret meeting in November 1910 at an exclusive Georgia resort on the secluded Jekyl Island (at that time spelled with only one l). Organized and chaired by the powerful pro-business and pro-tariff Sen. Nelson W. Aldrich (R–R.I.), the small conclave included such prominent New York bankers as Frank A. Vanderlip of National City Bank and Paul M. Warburg of Kuhn, Leob & Co. Together the group hammered out a proposal known as the Aldrich Plan. Introduced into Congress with minor modifications in January 1912, the plan become a template for…

Good news for Americans with a fetish for safety goggles: If certain California activists get their way, we could be seeing a lot more of them in erotic videos, along with more condoms and dental dams. While Los Angeles County and the porn industry are at a legal deadlock over a county condom requirement, barrier protection in porn is now set for a statewide vote in November. The L.A. law, known as “Measure B,” was approved by voters in 2012 and has been embroiled in legal challenges ever since. Constitutional lawyer Paul Cambria Jr. and his colleagues are representing porn giant Vivid Entertainment in its lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Health Department. Measure B’s two main mandates are that porn performers must wear condoms for scenes involving sexual intercourse…

Defying a ban; free-range win; faith overruled; a family reunited; work killer; cop killers; jobs gamble; small town, big deal; is it ‘natural’? Cop exploiter Officer Busted Robby Soave A D.C.-AREA police detective whose job was to investigate Internet sex crimes against children committed suicide in December moments before cops could arrest him—on charges of sexually exploiting kids. That was just one of the lurid ironies of the law enforcement career of David Edward Abbott, who worked for the region’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. Abbott had been the lead investigator in a 2014 sexting case in which a 17-year-old was accused of sending pictures of his naked body to his 15-year-old girlfriend. In order to prove the photos were authentic, authorities sought and obtained a warrant to drive…

DURING THE REPUBLICAN presidential debate on January 14, Ted Cruz said it’s “really quite clear” he is eligible to run for president even though he was born in Canada, because his mother was a U.S. citizen. His rival Donald Trump insisted “there is a serious question” as to whether Cruz qualifies as “a natural born citizen,” one of the constitutional requirements for the presidency. Here is a sentence I never thought I’d type: Donald Trump is right. Cruz sees a consensus that does not exist. The Texas senator is not alone. In a 2015 Harvard Law Review essay, Neal Katyal and Paul Clement— solicitors general under Barack Obama and George W. Bush, respectively— say “there is no question that Senator Cruz has been a citizen from birth and is thus…

DAVID BOWIE was weird, even for a rock star. From his first burst of fame in the late 1960s, when he hit the big time with a song narrated by a barely-keeping-it-together astronaut, he acted like an emissary from our increasingly hyper-personalized future, goading us to try new and different looks, styles, and thoughts. By the time he died January 10 at the age of 69, we had pretty much caught up to him, which is as great a tribute as can be imagined. The world we live in is much less formal, buttoned-down, and uniform than it was before Bowie strutted onstage as the mythic rock star Ziggy Stardust, “with screwed-up eyes and screweddown hairdo, like some cat from Japan.” Like Bob Dylan, Bowie was a relentless shape-shifter and…

Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions, by Steven Horwitz, Palgrave Macmillan, 313 pages, $120 FOR THE ECONOMIST Friedrich Hayek, there are two sorts of institutions: designed ones, which have a blueprint in place from the moment of creation, and organic ones, which do not. Change in the first sort of institution (sometimes described as “top-down”) is typically managed by a designer and happens in big chunks; change in organic (“bottom-up”) institutions tends to be unplanned and gradual. The National Football League is top-down: If the rules committee decides it would be a good idea to allow a 2-point conversion after a touchdown, the game changes accordingly. The English language is bottom-up: No planner decreed that “verily” would disappear and “I can’t even” would emerge. The…

Retro Sci-Fi Technically, Amazon’s latest original series, The Man in the High Castle, is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s award-winning novel of the same name. As in the book, the series takes place in an alternate history in which the Axis powers won World War II; the Nazis and the Japanese occupy the East and West coasts of the United States, respectively. In fact, the series relies much more on the novel’s setting than on the particulars of Dick’s narrative, and in many ways it feels more like a conventional spy thriller dressed up in retro-sci-fifittings. But the show also sketches out the ways in which the global social and political order might have been unstable for decades following an Axis win in WWII. And its MacGuffin—a series of…