Table of contents for November 2015 in Reason

WHEN DONALD TRUMP first theatrically escalatored down the Trump Tower foyer and into our political lives on June 16, few commentators were predicting that the billionaire reality TV star would spend his summer dominating the Republican 2016 field, let alone driving a sustained debate over one of America’s most intractable policy challenges. No, they were too busy laughing. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump headlined his reaction, “Donald Trump’s spectacular, unending, utterly baffing, often-wrong campaign launch.” National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson was even more withering: “Witless Ape Rides Escalator.” Attracting special scorn was the real estate developer’s incoherent 123-word rant about Mexicans: “When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me.…

What is the state of American capitalism today? It’s easy to be pessimistic. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, thinks it’s a political winner to criticize the “gig economy” that allows people to earn money on their own terms, be it selling homemade crafts on Etsy or ferrying passengers around town for Lyfit. And just behind Clinton in the Democratic race is Bernie Sanders, a self-avowed socialist who likes to say the U.S. should be more like Scandinavia. The idea that free enterprise is on the outs is nothing new. In a speech adapted for the April 1984 reason, William H. Meckling and James E. Gleason argued that capitalism was in dire straits. They were rebutting a 1981 essay by Nobel Prize winner George Stigler, who posited that capitalism was…

WHEN CONGRESS left town for the August recess, it did so without coming to an agreement on a long-term transportation bill. Instead, the president signed a three-month extension that set the stage for another showdown this fall. More than 30 such temporary extensions have passed since the last multi-year transportation bill expired in 2011. The inability of Congress to come together to pass a transportation package has frustrated the myriad special interests whose lobbyists want assurances that the dollars will keep fowing for years, and not just months, to come. And the media, which seldom miss an opportunity to push the “crumbling infrastructure” narrative, treat the matter as just another lamentable example of congressional gridlock inhibiting progress. But the real source of the dysfunction is the fact that Washington is…

Isabel Paterson was a novelist and a literary critic for the New York Herald-Tribune for more than two decades beginning in the 1920s. Her book The God of the Machine was a founding text of the modern libertarian movement as it grew in the ’40s. From her biographer Stephen Cox comes the first volume collecting some of her journalism and letters, Culture & Liberty (Transaction). Watching as she boldly swims against the currents of her time is inspiring. She wrote in 1933 that “we believe in the classic American concepts of a purely political government, which shall not undertake to save people’s souls or provide them an income.” Ayn Rand considered Paterson, a one-time friend, one of the few modern thinkers from whom she’d learned. Even after their estrangement, Paterson…

From 1962 to 1984, KRAB-FM was the strangest station in Seattle. Its “free forum” format featured poetry, comedy, odd interviews, obscure music, and a wide range of opinions. (At one point the John Birch Society and the Socialist Workers Party alternated in the same timeslot.) Once it even aired a live 20-hour group-therapy marathon. The outlet was extremely influential in the small but vibrant world of community radio, where listener-sponsored stations can stake out an identity that is neither corporate nor NPR. And now it can be heard again: The KRAB Archive, online at krab.fm, is full of anecdotes, program guides, and—best of all—recordings of the shows themselves. Whether it’s an interview with a leader of Britain’s Tory Party or an interview with a guy who lives in an old…

“Junk Science and Campus Rape” (page 32) tracks reason Staff Editor Robby Soave’s investigation into the man who made conventional wisdom out of the idea that most sexual assaults against college students are committed by dangerous repeat offenders. Soave, 27, began focusing on higher education issues while writing for his university’s newspaper, The Michigan Daily. “This niche has only grown more fascinating over time, as so many college campuses ramp up their efforts to curtail free speech and due process,” he says. “It’s really fulfilling work—students (and their families) are very grateful that someone is telling their stories.” A Ph.D. student in history at Berkeley and a fellow at the Independent Institute, Anthony Gregory specializes in American legal institutions and theory. “I’ve always been fascinated by the Constitution and legal…

“Oh, you played a prostitute in a movie? I played a nurse in a porno. Does that qualify me to talk about working conditions in hospitals?” —tweet from adult film actress Stoya, responding to a celebrity campaign against decriminalizing prostitution, July 26 “Children only are being put in more danger when marijuana is kept illegal.” —part of pro-legalization text accidentally posted to the D.A.R.E. website, July 27 “[Banning foreign condoms] will simply make one more disciplined, more strict and discriminating in choosing partners, and maybe will do a favor to our society in respect to solving demographic problems.” —former Russian health chief Gennady Onishchenko, commenting on a proposal from that country’s Industry and Trade Ministry to ban all condom imports, The Moscow Times, August 5 “Unborn black lives also matter.”…

Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law was supposed to reduce violent conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) by imposing a de facto embargo on tin, tungsten, and tantalum —the so-called 3T minerals—mined in militia-controlled territories. But a working paper from University of Wisconsin economist Dominic Parker suggests the actual outcome of the legislation in the two years after it was passed in 2010 was very different. In July, Deputy Managing Editor Stephanie Slade talked with Parker about his research. Q: In a nutshell, what did you find? A: We found statistical evidence that Dodd-Frank backfired. Our latest estimate suggests that Section 1502 tripled the frequency of looting incidents and attacks against civilian populations. Q: Tell me about the analogy between militias in the DRC and…

A MAJORITY OF people—54 percent—surveyed in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom believe there’s a risk of 50 percent or more that our way of life will end within the next 100 years. Even more ominously, some 25 percent of respondents in the same poll believe it likely that we’ll go extinct in the next century. Americans were the most pessimistic, giving those answers 57 percent and 30 percent of the time, respectively. And younger respondents tend to be more gloomy about the future than older ones. These results were recently reported by the Australian futurists Melanie Randle and Richard Eckersley in the journal Futures. The authors also document that cultural pessimism is increasing. Polls taken in 2005 and 1995 asked young Australians to choose between two…

JUST ONE DAY before the Supreme Court ruled that states must recognize same-sex marriages, Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz took to the website of The Advocate, a venerable national gay publication, to remind readers about the long history of libertarian support for gay rights. The Libertarian Party, Boaz noted, has called for decriminalizing gay behavior and treating gay people equally under the law since the organization was founded in the early 1970s. Many other libertarian organizations (including reason) have been taking such positions for just as long or even longer. And since then, the United States has seen the abolition of sodomy laws, the end of officially sanctioned government discrimination against gay employees, and now—with the Obergefell v. Hodges decision in June—the end of government non-recognition of same-sex…

Receiving a shipment of product from Cartel del Café has a certain illicit appeal: Pulling aside the packaging reveals bulky white oblongs wrapped in faux duct tape, giving the initial illusion that the box may contain something a bit stronger than mere caffeine. The bricks do contain an agricultural product from Nicaragua—coffee beans, not cocaine. Founder Noel Salinas says the drug-infected branding is intentional. He hopes customers will take a minute to wonder, “What really is the difference between coffee and any other controlled substance that inevitably comes from the same earth?” Noting that coffee itself has gone through periods of prohibition and legalization, Salinas says his primary goal is to make good coffee. But he and his co-founders also hope “to bring this thought to light without being so…

The newest addition to the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History is an exhibit called “America Innovates.” The Mars Hall of American Business (namesake: the sponsoring candy company) now houses an ode to capitalism through the ages. Beginning with the “merchant era” of the late 18th century and moving on to the “corporate era,” then the “consumer era,” and finally the “global era” starting in the 1980s, the exhibit highlights such libertarian-friendly values as entrepreneurship, invention, competition, and mass production. There’s even a station celebrating the “everyday things that changed everything”— including the refrigerator, the television, the washing machine, and ready-to-wear clothing. Concerns about rising consumer debt and stagnating wages in recent decades also feature prominently. One sign plays up the wonders of unionization, which it credits with fnally allowing workers…

TO UNDERSTAND the moral and literary power with which Robert Conquest wrote, consider the second sentence in his book Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, a study of the 14.5 million deaths that resulted from Joseph Stalin’s murderous takeover of his nation’s agricultural sector: “We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.” As Conquest’s friend, the British novelist Martin Amis, would later observe with a palpable shudder, “The sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long.” The math is too terrible to contemplate. Conquest, who died of pneumonia on August 3 at the age of 98, was many things:…

The death of Sandra Bland Three Days in Jail Ed Krayewski BLACK LIVES Matter activist Sandra Bland was found dead in her jail cell in Waller County, Texas, in July, three days after being arrested during a traffic stop over her alleged failure to signal a lane change. The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officer who pulled her over, Brian Encinia, accused Bland of resisting arrest. Dashcam video of the incident showed Encinia arresting her after she refused to put out a cigarette. Authorities say Bland committed suicide, hanging herself using a garbage bag and privacy partition. Her family is skeptical of that, saying she had just traveled from her home in Illinois to Prairie View, Texas, to start a new job at a college there. Her death garnered…

Police in Merseyside, England, have agreed to pay £5,000 to settle a false arrest claim by George Wilson. Wilson was arrested for giving a homeless man £1 by a police officer who thought it was a drug deal. Albuquerque frefighter Matthew Sanchez has resigned after snapping at a 911 caller trying to keep a teenage shooting victim alive. Sanchez was working as an emergency dispatcher at the time. The caller got angry when he repeatedly asked if the boy was breathing. “He is barely breathing, how many times do I have to [expletive] tell you?” she said. “OK, you know what ma’am? You can deal with it yourself,” Sanchez responded. Then he apparently hung up the phone. The victim later died. The state of Georgia has sued Carl Malamud, owner…

DYLANN ROOF, the man charged with murdering nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June, faces execution or life imprisonment if he is convicted in state court. A federal indictment announced in July threatens him with the same penalties, although you can’t kill a man more than once or lock him up for more than a lifetime. What looks like a redundant prosecution is actually something worse. It is an unconstitutional attempt to federalize a crime that South Carolina’s courts are perfectly capable of handling, for the sake of sending a message that the criminal law should not be used to send. The New York Times reports that “Justice Department and F.B.I. officials have said the Charleston shooting was so horrific and racially motivated that…

“SEX TRAFFICKING of Americans: The Girls Next Door.” “Sex-traffcking sweep nets arrests near Phoenix truck stops.” “Man becomes 1st jailed under new human trafficking law.” Conduct a Google news search for the word trafficking in 2015 and you’ll find pages of stories about the commercial sex trade, in which hundreds of thousands of U.S. women and children are supposedly trapped by coercion or force. A few decades prior, a survey of “trafficking” headlines would have yielded much different results. Back then, newspapers recounted tales of “contemporary Al Capones trafficking illegal drugs to the smallest villages and towns in our heartland,” and of organized “motorcycle gangs” trafficking LSD and hashish. “Many young black men in the ghetto see the drug trade as the Gold Rush of the 1980s,” the Philadelphia Inquirer…

“INTELLECTUALS HAVE always disdained commerce,” says Whole Foods Market co-founder John Mackey. They “have always sided with the aristocrats to maintain a society where the businesspeople were kept down.” Having helped create the global grocery chain intellectuals arguably like best, Mackey has evolved into one of capitalism’s most persuasive champions, making the moral, practical, and even spiritual case that free exchange ennobles all who participate. More than any other retailer, Whole Foods has reconfigured what and how America eats. Since opening its first store in Austin, Texas, in 1980, the company has helped its customers develop a taste for high-quality meats, produce, cheeses, and wines, as well as for information about where all the stuff gets sourced. Mackey, 62, continues to set the pace for what’s expected in organic and…

The new feature documentary FrackNation demolishes the anti-fracking claims made in Josh Fox’s Emmy-winning film Gasland. In a work funded by a Kickstarter campaign, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney investigate the claims that fracking has contaminated private well water so badly that hapless residents can set their faucets on fire (it hasn’t), that it so polluted air in a Texas town that it boosted cancer rates and caused brain damage (it didn’t), and that it causes damaging earthquakes (it doesn’t). Anti-fracker Fox nervously and amusingly ducks many attempts by McAleer to get information about the evidence for his assertions in Gasland. One highlight is when a litigant claiming that fracking contaminated her well threatened both to shoot and to sic Natural Resources Defense Council lawyers on McAleer. An EPA video…

Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, by Susan Southard, Viking, 416 pages, $28.95 WHEN THE U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War, Yoshida Katsuji was horrifically injured. “Like everyone else in Nagasaki that day,” Susan Southard writes, his “immediate survival and degree of injury from burns and radiation depended entirely on his exact location,” the direction he faced, his clothing, and which buildings and natural structures stood between him and the blast. Half a mile away from the explosion, Yoshida saw the skin from his arm “peeled off and was hanging down from his fingertips.” “Blood was pouring out of my flesh,” he recalls. Do-oh Mineko’s story is even more gruesome. The “whole left side of her body was badly burned, a bone…

MAN CANNOT live by Tinder alone. “A ton of my male clients have said that it’s really easy for them to find sex, but it’s really hard for them to find someone to cuddle with,” says Samantha Hess. Hess is the proprietor of Cuddle Up to Me, a Portland, Oregon, cuddling studio where Hess and three other comfortably but fully clothed women platonically embrace humanity for $1 a minute (with a 15-minute minimum). Over the last half dozen years or so, professional cuddlers have been putting the squeeze on isolation and loneliness in San Francisco, London, Rochester, and many other cities. Hess herself started in 2013, first on an outcall basis, meeting clients at parks, movie theaters, and their homes, then opening up a retail storefront in November 2014. While…