Table of contents for October 2015 in Reason

ONE OF THE MOST rightly celebrated books of the early environmental movement was New Yorker writer John McPhee’s 1971 page-turner, Encounters with the Archdruid. The quasi-religious figure referenced in the title was naturalist legend David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of a half-dozen other environmentalist organizations, including Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters. McPhee’s concept was elegantly simple: Send Brower out into environmental no-man’s lands with his antagonists—a mining magnate in the Glacier Peak Wilderness area, a golf-loving real estate developer on Georgia’s Cumberland Island, and United States Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy on the Colorado River, which Dominy had recently helped disfigure with the Glen Canyon Dam. Brower was a larger-than-life figure, by turns prickly and pragmatic, conversational…

Brevard County, Florida, has fired firefighter and paramedic Kenneth Hallenbeck after he was caught on video dumping a cancer patient from a gurney to a hospital floor. Hallenbeck had asked the man to get out of the gurney, but the patient refused because a bed wasn’t ready for him. This apparently angered Hallenbeck. In Florida, Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Mark Mahon has banned any speech on Duval County courthouse grounds that might “degrade or call into question the integrity of the court or any of its judges.” Mahon’s order also covers passing out literature. Over the past year, faculty leaders in the University of California system have undergone training in how to avoid offending students and each other. The training teaches that certain phrases can be considered “microaggressions.” Among them:…

TESTIFYING BEFORE the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, FBI Director James Comey argued that data should never be transmitted or stored in a way that frustrates government snooping. Comey warned that encryption is a boon to criminals and therefore must be designed so that law enforcement agencies can decode it when the need arises. As a panel of computer security experts pointed out in a report issued two days before that hearing, Comey’s argument founders on the practical difficulties of facilitating access by government officials without facilitating access by “bad actors.” Another problem: Sometimes the bad actors are government officials. Comey’s insistence that the world be arranged to make his job easier recalls the debate over encryption controls during the Clinton administration, which wanted telecommunications companies to incorporate a wiretap-enabling…

The infamous 1971 experiment in prison dynamics conducted by Philip Zimbardo has symbolized the authoritarianism in the human psyche ever since. A new film—that portrays Zimbardo (Billy Crudup) placing 24 student volunteers into a mock prison and dividing them into correctional officers and inmates—doesn’t challenge the resulting conventional wisdom about the situational nature of morality and the banality of evil. (The guards quickly become abusive and the makeshift cells unsanitary.) But a skeptical modern viewer of The Stanford Prison Experiment will see the chaotic, flawed experimental design. The project was called off after a mere six days, thanks to the objections of a fellow academic. The competent retelling, which hews closely to footage and transcripts from the actual event, quietly conveys the genuinely horrifying behavior from subjects and scientist alike.…

Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, by Jacob T. Levy, Oxford University Press, 322 pages, $49.95 IN THE 2000 film The Patriot, Mel Gibson’s character asks an advocate of American independence: “Why should I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?” The line was borrowed from a real-life historical figure, the loyalist Boston clergyman Byles Mather (nephew of Cotton Mather), who reportedly made the remark in the perhaps less than tactful context of watching the 3,000-strong funeral procession for the victims of the 1770 Boston Massacre. Mather’s skepticism would have been shared by John Stuart Mill. “Any despotism is preferable to local despotism,” Mill wrote in “Centralisation,” an 1862 essay. “If we are to be ridden over by authority,” he continued, “if our affairs are to be…

IN A VIDEO posted this spring at Newsweek.com, a third-generation almond farmer in California’s Central Valley explains how the state’s longstanding drought has necessitated a shift in strategy. “We have land, we have lots of sunshine, but we have no water,” he says. “So we better think of something else to use the asset for.” The answer he came up with was solar farming. As the camera pans a dusty array of photovoltaic (PV) panels, the man notes that almond orchards and solar farms have similar lifespans of around 20 to 25 years. “When it’s up, you can pull it out,” he says of the latter. “If we have water at that time, and an almond orchard is still viable, we can replant that, or some other kind of crop.…

RONALD BAILEY is reason’s award-winning science correspondent. In “The End of Doom” (page 20), an excerpt from his recently released The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century (Thomas Dunne Books), Bailey, 61, explains that fears about cancer rates, overpopulation, biotech crops, global warming, and mass animal extinctions are all wildly overblown. “Back in the 1970s, I believed the prophecies of doom made by the founders of ideological environmentalism,” he says. But by the early 1990s, it was clear those predictions had “utterly failed.” Yet decades later, “doom continues to be preached.” Thus his decision to write this book. “The doomsters are still wrong,” he says. “Why? Human ingenuity.” “Two Liberalisms” on page 60 is Roderick T. Long’s review of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (Oxford University Press). Long,…

“Knowing what we know now, I would have not engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq.” r —former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on the stump in Arizona, reversing himself after telling Fox News’ Megyn Kelly that he would have authorized the Iraq War, May 14 “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” —Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is running for the Democratic nomination for president, on CNBC, May 26 “This is a moment when we can say that that fag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state.” —South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, in a press conference calling for the removal of the…

LIBERTARIANS LIKE to complain that things are going to hell. And they do have some evidence for the claim. The U.S. is six years into a recovery that’s worse than most recessions, for example, even as many of the most burdensome new government programs, such as Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, have yet to be fully implemented. But there’s a different story to tell about what’s happening in the world, one in which libertarian ideas have subtly entered mainstream thinking in a number of important but overlooked ways. We may or may not be living through a “libertarian moment,” as Robert Draper suggested in a prominent New York Times Magazine cover story last summer. But we certainly exist in an era that has been shaped to a surprising extent by a philosophy…

HERE IS A LIST of things that are thicker than a typical plastic grocery bag: A strand of hair. A coat of paint. A human cornea. High-density polyethylene is a miracle of materials science. Despite weighing less than 5 grams, one bag can hold 17 pounds, well over 1,000 times its own weight. At about a penny apiece, the bags are cheap enough for stores to give away and sturdy enough to carry home two gallons of milk in the evening and still be up to the task of scooping Cujo’s poop the next morning. Yet almost as soon as grocers started offering their customers the choice of “paper or plastic?” these modern marvels became a whipping boy for environmentalists, politicians, and other well-intentioned, ill-informed busybodies. Plastic bags for retail…

ON JUNE 27, 2014, the body of 20-year-old Andrew Sadek, a promising electrical engineering student at the North Dakota State College of Science in Wahpeton, North Dakota, was pulled from the Red River bordering North Dakota and Minnesota. Missing for two months, Sadek was found shot in the head, wearing a backpack filled with rocks. The grisly death of a college kid in one of the safest towns in the state did not lead to a sweeping investigation. In fact, police immediately said they did not suspect foul play. Instead, they tried to convince Andrew’s grieving parents that their son, who had never shown depressive tendencies, had killed himself. What the police knew but would not reveal until forced to almost a year later by the state attorney general was…

Just outside the heavily fortified campus of the National Security Agency in Annapolis Junction, Maryland, sits a museum highlighting the work of that agency’s employees. But how much is the mysterious intelligence outfit willing to reveal? Plenty. From original Enigma machines to an exhibit on the Soviet attempt to steal the Manhattan Project’s secrets to a replica “cypher wheel” designed by Thomas Jefferson, the National Cryptologic Museum offers a surprisingly meaty assortment of cryptography artifacts. The run-down building is even looking to grow. A sign announces that an exhibit on “information assurance” will open soon, and an ongoing capital campaign will eventually result in a new (and largely privately funded) 87,000-square-foot home for the museum. There’s no mention of the domestic spying efforts brought to light by Edward Snowden. But…

Deutschland 83, a sly and creepy Cold War spy thriller/coming-of-age drama airing on SundanceTV, is the first German-language television show to run on a commercial American channel, and one of the first works of entertainment available here focusing on those grim years in Germany. The show’s protagonist is a young Stasi officer who, after being assured that his ill mother will receive expedited medical care, agrees to be sent across the border to pose as a West German general’s aide-de-camp. There, he spies on negotiations with the U.S. military to station nuclear warheads on German soil. Never lacking for cloak-and-dagger intrigue or a healthy amount of cynicism, some of the eight-part series’ most enjoyable elements include its lovingly chosen electro-pop soundtrack, as well as the dry comedy of spies from…

Gay marriage legal Law of the Land Scott Shackford ON JUNE 26, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the 14th Amendment requires states and the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages, bringing to a close one of the most significant modern public debates over the way the U.S. treats its gay and lesbian citizens. In the majority ruling, Justice Anthony Kennedy didn’t focus significantly on legal precedents or the level of scrutiny the justices should use when analyzing whether bans on same-sex marriage recognition were discriminatory. Instead he focused on principles of liberty, including the right to personal autonomy and intimate association with others, in determining that the government must treat these relationships the same as it treats heterosexual relationships. As with interracial marriage, Kennedy said, the right to marry…

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. President Barack Obama has called for raising it to $10.10 per hour. Seattle and Los Angeles are both in the process of raising their minimum wages to $15 per hour, while several other cities are debating proposals to raise their wages to levels between $10 and $15. 1 RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE COSTS THE ECONOMY JOBS. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would result in 500,000 fewer jobs. 2 THIS MAKES IT ESPECIALLY HARD FOR LOW-SKILLED WORKERS TO FIND JOBS. Employers might choose to invest in robots and automation rather than hiring new workers. When they do hire workers, employers will likely choose applicants with skills and work experience. People without a college…

Joel Kotkin is executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism, which aims to spell out how cities can drive increased opportunity and social mobility for the bulk of their citizens. In May, Reason TV producer Alex Manning sat down with Kotkin, who is also an urban studies specialist at Chapman University in Orange, California, to discuss the structural causes of the state’s water crisis. Q: What is the current state of water in California? A: The water situation in California is pretty bad. You have to understand that we haven’t built any new infrastructure for the last 20 years. This, by the way, is not unique to water. It’s roads, it’s schools, it’s an unwillingness to invest in the future because we spend all our money in government…

“I ASSCENDED TO the top of the cutt bluff this morning, from whence I had a most delightfull view of the country,” wrote famed explorer Meriwether Lewis on April 22, 1805, as the Corps of Discovery journeyed westward through the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. “The whole of which except the vally formed by the Missouri is void of timber or underbrush, exposing to the first glance of the spectator immence herds of Buffaloe, Elk, deer, & Antelopes feeding in one common and boundless pasture.” The objective of the American Prairie Reserve (APR) is to recreate an untamed landscape in Montana so that 21st century Americans can similarly be exhilarated by the sight of thousands of wild bison, elk, deer, and antelope roaming free over vast areas of unfenced, native prairie.…

IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court compares the long-term actions of the federal government to the misdeeds of the Soviet Union. But it happened on April 22, 2015, when the Court heard oral arguments in the case of Horne v. United States Department of Agriculture. At issue was the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) attempt to force a pair of California raisin farmers named Marvin and Laura Horne to surrender a portion of their annual crop (or its cash equivalent) to the federal authorities for the ostensible purpose of creating an “orderly” domestic raisin market. “These programs go back to the 1930s, when the agricultural industry in this country was in serious trouble,” Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler told the Court. He implored the…

ON A RECENT TRIP to London, I stood outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221B Baker Street for three and a half hours in the rain. (I do understand the concept of opportunity cost, I swear. The wait wasn’t just worth it; it turned out to be part of the fun. And this from someone who usually approaches long lines with all the zen of a Chihuahua on its third espresso.) Just ahead of me, a Japanese mother and teenage daughter adjusted their deerstalker caps and stood their ground with firm determination while the rest of their party appeared periodically to try to tempt them away to other sightseeing. Just behind me, a family from the North of England served as a patient audience while their youngest member, a tween…

The second season of HBO’s brooding cop anthology series True Detective trades the mystical nihilism of the first for a grim libertarian fatalism: The whole system is rigged, and there’s nothing to be done about it. The story, insofar as it can be determined, revolves around a scam put on by the City of Vinci—modeled after the real-life California city Vernon, which was set up to bilk taxpayers and benefit a small band of municipal hoodlums—to enrich city employees and their crony-capitalist pals as a new high-speed rail line is installed. The show snidely references Hollywood’s use of film tax credits, pokes fun at psychiatry and New Age self-fulfllment, sneers at workplace sexual harassment training, and offers barbed asides about the impossibility of destroying vice markets for drugs and prostitution.…

Two themes thread through the work of the historian, novelist, and screenwriter Bill Kauffman: He celebrates the eccentric textures of American life, and he condemns the imperial institutions, from city planners to conscription boards, that threaten to rub those textures out. Poetry Night at the Ballpark (Front Porch Republic Books) collects some of Kauffman’s best articles in both modes, from his mid-’80s days as a reason staffer to the present. Here jeremiads against empire and the corporate state mix with tributes to the many faces of a flourishing regional culture: poets, painters, amateur scientists, irregular old holidays, minor-league baseball squads. The title alludes to the evening the author persuaded his town’s team, the Batavia Muckdogs, to fill the gaps between innings with sandlot-themed stanzas by Charles Bukowski, Grantland Rice, and…