PeterfactorsA Jacksonville, County, Florida, sheriff's officer handed Devonte Shipman a $65 ticket for jaywalking when he caught him crossing an intersection against the light. He also gave him a ticket for $136 for not having any his driver's license on him and told him he could detain him for up to seven hours until he could determine who he was. In fact, Florida law only requires someone to have a driver's license on them when they are operating a vehicle.
Joint Chiefs of StaffA new study attributes Donald Trump's victory last year to communities hit hardest by military casualties and angry about being ignored. These voters, the authors suggest, saw Trump as an "opportunity to express that anger at both political parties."
The paper—written by Douglas Kriner, a political scientist at Boston University, and Francis Shen, a law professor at the University of Minnesota—provides powerful lessons about the electoral viability of principled non-intervention, a stance that Trump was able to emulate somewhat on the campaign trail but so far has been incapable of putting into practice.
The study, available at SSRN, found a "significant and meaningful relationship between a community's rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump." The statistical model it used suggested that if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had suffered "even a modestly lower casualty rate," all three could have flipped to Hillary Clinton, making her the president. The study controlled for party identification, comparing Trump's performance in the communities selected to Mitt Romney's performance in 2012. It also controlled for other relevant factors, including median family income, college education, race, the percentage of a community that is rural, and even how many veterans there were.
"Even after including all of these demographic control variables, the relationship between a county's casualty rate and Trump's electoral performance remains positive and statistically significant," the paper noted. "Trump significantly outperformed Romney in counties that shouldered a disproportionate share of the war burden in Iraq and Afghanistan."
The president's electoral fate in 2020 "may well rest on the administration's approach to the human costs of war," the paper suggests. "If Trump wants to maintain his connection to this part of his base, his foreign policy would do well to be highly sensitive to American combat casualties." More broadly, the authors argue that "politicians from both parties would do well to more directly recognize and address the needs of those communities whose young women and men are making the ultimate sacrifice for the country."
The most effective way of addressing their needs is to advance a foreign policy that does not see Washington as the world's policeman, that treats U.S. military operations as a last resort, and that rethinks the foreign policy establishment's expansive and often vague definition of national security interests.
"America has been at war continuously for over 15 years, but few Americans seem to notice," Kriner and Shen write. "This is because the vast majority of citizens have no direct connection to those soldiers fighting, dying, and returning wounded from combat." This has often been cited as a reason that wars don't have much of an impact on elections. The war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, wasn't mentioned as a policy concern in any of the three Clinton-Trump debates last year. The Trump administration's internal deliberations over whether to institute a troop surge have garnered little media coverage.
When President Barack Obama campaigned for reelection in 2012, he bragged that he'd brought the Iraq war to an end and promised to do the same for the war to Afghanistan. In fact, Obama did not end the war in Iraq, a fact he admitted only after Republicans blamed the rise of ISIS on the end of the war, and the conflict in Afghanistan outlasted his tenure. His claims nevertheless received little pushback.
Meanwhile, the principle of non-intervention, when articulated by politicians like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), is often dismissed as unserious. "Simply being pro- or anti-intervention is not a useful way of thinking about foreign policy," Foreign Policy's Paul Miller wrote in 2014.
Paul did not make it far through the 2016 election cycle, though it probably wasn't his antiwar ideas that sank him. His father, the far more radical Ron Paul, performed a lot better in the 2012 Republican primaries, never wavering on the position of non-intervention. Rand tried to stake a position on both sides, hedging his non-interventionism for a base he assumed might not accept it.
As I warned in April 2015, Paul's shift toward Republican orthodoxy risked "driving away the kind of supporters probably no other mainstream candidate could attract" without convincing anyone in the establishment, which continued to call him an isolationist. Trump, meanwhile, slammed George W. Bush for the Iraq war and 9/11 at a debate in South Carolina, a miliary stronghold that nonetheless voted for Trump in its primary. Trump's on-again, off-again skepticism about America's wars led some to believe he might be a non-interventionist, though he was no such thing.
The paper by Kriner and Shen should be ample evidence that there will be space in the 2020 election cycle for a principled non-interventionist not just to run, but to win.
Related: Check out Reason's special foreign policy issue.
Bill Petrocelli doesn't look like someone routinely engaged in illegal activity by the jovial smile on his face as he greets customers around the San Francisco location of Book Passage, a small chain of stores that he co-owns in the Bay Area. But since the beginning of 2017 he's been routinely violating California's newly expanded law regulating autographed items. Small bookstore owners like Petrocelli now must adhere to a laundry list of requirements that threaten their livelihoods and restrict First Amendment rights.
"This law—it's like dropping a bomb," says Petrocelli, "it's terrible."
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We're fickle about entrepreneurs, at least if they actually become successful. Whether or not they add value to society is beside the point.
When they're handsome and charismatic entrepreneurs are "innovators" and "game changers." They get invited to sex parties in Davos. If they're homely or awkward, they are merely wealthy drivers of inequality, and thus, evil.
That's because our culture simultaneously hates rich people but loves celebrities. When entrepreneurs manage to become celebrities, they are exempted from socialist tirades. I made this diagram to help:
Richard Branson epitomizes this. His charisma is so potent it could derail a train. He amassed a fortune in the music industry (cool) and airlines (fun) and was prescient enough to name both companies "Virgin" which reminds us of sex. When a photo once surfaced of Branson windsurfing with a topless model, our collective reaction was "What a fun dude!"
Had Mark Zuckerberg done that we would have said: "What a jerk! Here we are hard at work while that plutocrat cavorts with models." This is because we believe Mark Zuckerberg to be a dork, whereas Richard Branson is an Aryan shampoo ad come to life.
None of this collective ire is rooted in anything substantial. Zuckerberg helps millions of Americans skip their high school reunions by using his free online service to see our old classmates fall to pieces and blimp up remotely. It used to be when we got bored at work and wanted to zone out we'd take smoke breaks. Now we can just dawdle on Facebook and avoid the cancer. I'm perfectly fine having Zuckerberg make billions from this great idea, but lots of folks resent him.
I'm also glad we've come around to acknowledging the good in Bill Gates, but that's a new development. Back in the 1990s, when Microsoft was propelling mankind forward in some kind of new Industrial Revolution, the media portrayed Gates as the boss of an ominous multinational conglomerate.
What changed? Did we come around to appreciating his technological contribution to Planet Earth? Did we notice his subsequent philanthropy projects that make the United Nations look like a high school prom committee?
No. Steve Jobs died.
If you recall, prior to his death Steve Jobs was way, way cooler than Bill Gates. Both revolutionized computers and made them available to the average consumer. But Jobs beat out Gates because he had:
However brilliant, Gates can't pull off a chic turtleneck. America just couldn't warm up to him until Jobs kicked the bucket. Only then did Gates become the Silicon Valley icon. Why was Jobs so much more deserving of borderline religious adulation? Because he was a celebrity.
The next time one of your friends pops off about thieving Wall Street traders and evil hedge fund managers, politely ask him if he'd grab a pitchfork and go looking for Warren Buffet. Pay attention to the mental gymnastics. What, attack the Prophet of Omaha? He's cute. He says the right things. He might be the old guy from "Up!".
Many Americans do not view wealth as something created by individuals, but as a naturally occurring, spontaneously generated resource unfairly hoarded by capitalists. Successful entrepreneurs are dark forces in this worldview, because they took so much more, presumably from other people.
But you don't build a prosperous society demonizing success. Doling out exemptions based on celebrity is evidence of a shallow culture. We revere George Clooney and not Jeff Bezos, but who is going to make sure you get your best deal and the free shipping? George has never once been known to beam entire libraries into a Kindle.
What we should value most as a society, of course, is people who write pithy political satire with a pro-liberty slant. But we should also revere men and women who push technology forward, make goods cheaper, services faster, create jobs, and invent things like fidget spinners. The staples of modern life, from smart phones to Netflix, come into existence because of entrepreneurs.
Maybe we'll get to a point where the people who add value to society are our celebrities. Until then, I'm going to go kite surfing with naked models as often as I can. When success comes, I'll be ready for it.
Last year California voters passed Proposition 63, a measure that amounted to a mass confiscation of firearm magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds. The new rule was supposed to take effect on July 1, but at the last minute a judge delayed the crackdown while a suit to stop it proceeds.
Bill Wilt/FoterAn earlier law, passed in 2000, banned such products but grandfathered in any magazines that Californians already legally owned. The new law would have prohibited those as well, requiring everyone owning such magazines to get rid of them.
If they still had them after July 1, they'd be guilty of "a misdemeanor punishable by a fine not to exceed one hundred dollars ($100) per large-capacity magazine, by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by both that fine and imprisonment." (Active or former law enforcement officers, as is so often the case, would be exempt from the law.)
Last week, in the case of Duncan v. Becerra, U.S. District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez granted a preliminary injunction on the part of the people and organizations suing to overturn the law. For now, California is legally bound not to enforce the expanded ban, awaiting a final resolution of the lawsuit.
Judge Benitez's reasoning? He starts by pointing out what a mess California's gun laws are in terms of a citizen's ability to understand how they interact to restrict his or her actions:
In California, the State has enacted, over the span of two decades, an incrementally more burdensome web of restrictions on the rights of law-abiding responsible gun owners to buy, borrow, acquire, modify, use, or possess ammunition magazines able to hold more than 10 rounds. The language used, the internally referenced provisions, the interplay among them, and the plethora of other gun regulations, have made the State's magazine laws difficult to understand for all but the most learned experts.
At a hearing before Benitez, the judge notes,
the attorney for the Attorney General, although well prepared, was not able to describe all of the various exceptions to the dispossession and criminalization components of § 32310. Who could blame her? The California matrix of gun control laws is among the harshest in the nation and are filled with criminal law traps for people of common intelligence who desire to obey the law. Statutes must be sufficiently well-defined so that reasonably intelligent citizens can know what conduct is against the law.
Benitez believes that the plaintiffs are likely to win the case on the merits. His decision points out that 9th Circuit (in which this case is being heard) Second Amendment analysis tends to be more complicated than the relevant precedent in 2008's groundbreaking Heller case would indicate.
Heller says that commonly used firearms for home defense use cannot be utterly banned. "Under the simple Heller test," Benitez reasons, this California law is "highly suspect...because they broadly prohibit common pistol and rifle magazines used for lawful purposes....Magazines holding more than 10 rounds are useful for self-defense by law-abiding citizens. And they are common. Lawful in at least 43 states and under federal law, these magazines number in the millions."
Benitez also believes the ban in question does not provide a "reasonable fit" to any articulated goal of the state of California's:
The State's preliminary theoretical and empirical evidence is inconclusive. In fact, it would be reasonable to infer, based on the State's evidence, that a right to possess magazines that hold more than 10 rounds may promote self-defense—especially in the home'and would be ordinarily useful for a citizen's militia use. California must provide more than a rational basis to justify its sweeping ban on mere possession...
The government's evidence that the ban is well suited to a compelling state goal "often seems irrelevant," Benitez adds. It largely consists of random news stories involving guns causing harm; many do not even mention magazine size.
Even the most supposedly thorough empirical data the state brings forward do not, in the judge's read, support the state's belief that there is a reasonable fit between its goals and this magazine ban:
of the 92 mass killings occurring across the 50 states between 2013 and 2009 [in a Mayors Against Illegal Guns study used by the state in this case], only ten occurred in California. Of those ten, the criminalization and dispossession requirements of § 32310 would have had no effect on eight of the shootings, and only marginal good effects had it been in effect at the time of the remaining two shootings....
On this evidence, § 32310 is not a reasonable fit. It hardly fits at all. It appears on this record to be a haphazard solution likely to have no effect on an exceedingly rare problem, while at the same time burdening the constitutional rights of other California law-abiding responsible citizen-owners of gun magazines holding more than 10 rounds.
The state claims the ban is aimed at halting "gun violence," but as Benitez notes,
violent gun use is a constitutionally-protected means for law abiding citizens to protect themselves from criminals. The phrase "gun violence" may not be invoked as a talismanic incantation to justify any exercise of state power. Implicit in the concept of public safety is the right of law-abiding people to use firearms and the magazines that make them work to protect themselves, their families, their homes...[I]t would indeed be ironic if, in the name of public safety and reducing gun violence, statutes were permitted to subvert the public's Second Amendment rights—which may repel criminal gun violence and which ultimately ensure the safety of the Republic.
For those reasons and more, Benitez concludes that California's new magazine confiscation "hits close to the core of the Second Amendment and is more than a slight burden. When the simple test of Heller is applied, a test that persons of common intelligence can understand, the statute is adjudged an unconstitutional abridgment."
Benitez also concludes that this confiscation, even beyond Second Amendment concerns, amounts to an unconstitutional taking of personal property.
David Kopel at the Washington Post has a smart, detailed analysis of the decision's twists and turns.
Jaap Arriens/ZUMA Press/NewscomA judge in Miami has ruled that Florida's updated "stand your ground" self-defense law is unconstitutional according to the state's constitution because of the way it was crafted.Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and don't forget to sign up for Reason's daily updates for more content.
"Donald Trump has been a vulgar shithead for as long as he has been in American public life," says Reason's Matt Welch. "He's a guy who calls up newspapers pretending to be someone else in order to brag about his sexual exploits, including cheating on his own wives."
On today's podcast, Welch joins Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Andrew Heaton to discuss the president's Twitter outbursts (including his retweet of an anti-CNN wrestling video and his tirade against Mika Brzezinski), and the hijacking of a helicopter by a former action-movie star in Venezuela, who then dropped a grenade on the country's Supreme Court—attempted coup or a false flag operation? Other topics: Trump escalating rhetoric on North Korea, whether Chris Christie is abusing his power (to lounge on a beach), and favorite July 4th memories (most of which involve explosives).
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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picture alliance / Frank May/NewscomElectronic cigarettes are now the most popular technique used by Americans who want to quit smoking. But that pathway could close later this year, thanks to shortsighted federal regulations that effectively prevent innovation.
When Congress passed the Tobacco Control Act in 2009, few electronic cigarettes were on the market. Under the terms of that law, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would have the authority to approve or deny any new tobacco products introduced after February 15, 2007, while products that had been on the market before that so-called "predicate date" would be free from the new level of scrutiny.
That works out fine for cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, and other items that have been around a long time, but it effectively froze the market. Any new products—including almost all vaping devices and the nicotine-laced liquids used in those devices—would have to go through an expensive and vague regulatory process before being offered to consumers.
The deadline for filing those applications is November 8 of this year, unless Congress and the FDA act to change the rules and let e-cigarettes remain on the market.
Greg Conley, president of the American Vaping Association, explains it like this. If you have not filed a retroactive application for any vapor product that has come to market since 2007—which is every single product on the market today—your product is banned. If you file an application before November 8, and the FDA doesn't like what you have included, you're banned. If you file an application on November 8, and the FDA hasn't ruled on that application by November 8, 2019, you are banned.
"So you could spend millions and millions of dollars to try to comply with very vague requirements that have been put out by the FDA, and the FDA could still simply never review your application or just turn it down for an arbitrary reason," Conley said at a recent forum sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. The FDA's own economic analysis of the regulation suggests that 98 percent of all e-cigarette products will not apply to stay on the market.
That's bad news for vaping businesses, but it's also bad news for Americans hoping to stop smoking cigarettes.
According to research from the Center for Disease Control, 35 percent of Americans who sought to quit smoking from 2014-2016 used electronic cigarettes as a substitute. Vaping allows would-be smokers to get a hit of nicotine and to maintain the same physical routine, while avoiding the dangerous chemicals and soot that come from burning tobacco and inhaling it into their lungs. Compared to other methods used to quit smoking, the CDC reports, e-cigarettes are the most popular, beating out nicotine gum, anti-smoking patches, and FDA-approved medications such as Zyban and Chantix:
Centers for Disease Control; https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2017/16_0600.htm
Killing the majority of vaping products currently available on the market while leaving cigarettes available is almost certain to drive some e-cigarette users back to combustible tobacco options. That means the FDA—the very government agency that claims it is "responsible for protecting the public health" and "for advancing the public health by helping to speed innovations"—will be banning innovative products that are helping Americans improve their health. They'll be doing that because Congress, a decade ago, made an arbitrary decision that tobacco products made after 2007 should have to face a different level of scrutiny than those that came earlier.
Imagine how a similar rule would effect any other industry. What would computers look like today if Congress decided in 1999 to force any new microchip-using devices to jump through additional regulatory hurdles while leaving older models on the market? What car would you be driving today if any innovations to internal combustion engines were banned in the 1970s?
It's the same story with electronic cigarettes. Because lawmakers lacked the foresight to understand that the future might bring new, better products, Americans might soon be stuck with only the old, dirty options.
David Mizoeff/ZUMA Press/NewscomIn California, the government is documenting what happens when citizens can turn to medicine to end their own lives. In the United Kingdom, the government is forcing parents' hands in the case of an infant with a life-ending medical condition. Two news stories about the government's role in end-of-life issues highlight the potential slippery slope where a recognition of individual liberty transforms into a manifestation of official authority and control.
California lawmakers passed right-to-die legislation in 2015. It permits doctors to prescribe life-ending medication to adults with terminal illnesses and likely less than six months to live.
Now that the law is in place, the state is keeping track of who actually decides to end their own lives this way. Its first report, covering June to December of 2016, determined that 111 people committed assisted suicide in this fashion. The vast majority were over the age of 60 and receiving hospice care.
In the United Kingdom, the government is deciding for itself when to pull the plug in a case sparking international news coverage and horrified responses. Charlie Gard, an infant with a serious and rare genetic condition and significant brain damage, is terminally ill. His parents would like to pursue an experimental treatment in the United States. Doctors, granted authority by the British government and their socialized medical system, have told them no. They are ordering that Gard's life support be shut down. The parents turned to the European Court of Human Rights for support and were rebuffed.
Note that this is not a matter where the British government is being asked to bankroll Gard's experimental treatment. The parents themselves have raised the money to bring him to the United States. Rather, doctors and the British government are overruling the parents and deciding that they have the authority to an end the child's life and what they believe to be the child's suffering.
While it seems unlikely that the treatment in the United States would change Gard's tragic fate, this case should nevertheless be seen as a dangerous assertion of authority disguised as mercy.
For libertarians or anybody who supports an individual's right to end his or her own suffering, what's happening in the United Kingdom is an important and useful reminder of why some conservatives are wary about allowing this right. There is a slippery slope here: An individual's right to decide can transform into a government's insistence on making that call for those who aren't in a position to assert themselves. Western governments use their authority to override parents' decision-making in many areas, from schooling to vaccinations. But what's supposed to be a mechanism to shield children (who have little agency) from parental abuse becomes a method for paternalistic intervention.
After all, what Gard's parents are doing is essentially the opposite of what should trigger government intervention. They are not abusing the child. They are doing what parents are supposed to do: everything they can to save him. And they should have the liberty to do so.
It should not be difficult to avoid the slippery slope that transforms voluntary euthanasia into government-sanctioned termination. It's a matter of respecting the choice of the individual or those who are responsible for making those choices. Government intervention should be limited to situations where it can be shown that the private responsible parties are abusing or neglecting the patient, or where there are no private responsible parties.
One other issue worth examining in the Gard case: The authorities have been quick to dismiss this experimental treatment because it probably won't work. They are probably right. But that's not where medicine and science ends. The development of treatment for an illness is an iterative process that includes many, many failures along the way to success.
The fight between Gard's family and the British government resembles the "right to try" movement, which aims to loosen regulations that keep terminally ill people from trying experimental and not fully government-approved treatments. Consider the discovery of how cannabis oils can be used to suppress serious seizures in children with rare forms of epilepsy. The government's war on drugs and politicians' insistence that marijuana cannot possibly serve a health purpose has created real, life-threatening barriers to the development of this treatment.
Unless the government can show Gard's parents to be abusive, dangerous people, it should not have the authority to overrule them. And unless the government can show a person lacks the capacity to make adult choices, it should not get in the way of the choices they make to end their suffering, even if it means ending their own lives. The easiest way to keep authoritarian demands out of end-of-life choices is to limit the government's role in those choices—and in the choices that lead up to those circumstances, like health care options.
Yui Mok/ZUMA Press/NewscomDoes viewing pornography increase a person's propensity for sexual violence? There are a slew of studies saying no, while another body of research says yes. So how do we know which data to believe? Over at Psychology Today, longtime science journalist Michael Castleman explains why the studies showing an ostensible link between porn and rape are full of flaws.
Castleman's latest effort comes in response to an earlier post on evidence that sexual assault rates have declined while widespread access to pornography is growing. The post "appalled one reader," writes Castleman, "whose critique included citations of studies she claimed demonstrated a strong connection between exposure to porn and sexual assault."
The studies supplied showed, respectively, that 1) a small group of imprisoned Canadian rapists tended to have been avid adult-film consumers, 2) a small group of domestic violence victims in Philadelphia tended to report that their abusers regularly watched porn, and 3) of 62 convicted rapists in Singapore, most had consumed porn within six months before committing their assaults.
It doesn't take an advanced degree to see how extrapolating these findings to the general population is in folly. These studies might show that violent men tend to watch porn, but other studies show that most men have watched porn at some point and many watch it regularly. Since most men don't go on to become violent sexual predators, it's hard to argue that the "link" between porn and predation is one of cause and effect.
Alas, this is just the kind of junk science that culture warriors regularly cite to confuse general audiences. In the realm of sex-work research, it's common for studies to include only data on incarcerated sex workers, on those with criminal records, on those in court-ordered diversion programs, or on those using certain emergency services, and then extrapolating from them to the entire population of people who sell sex. As with the studies that purport to show the effects of porn on all consumers by studying convicted criminals, this conflation leads to reports showing drastically more dire consequences of sex work than exist in more general populations.
While retrospective studies of these sorts are cheaper and lead to faster results, they also "have major—and unavoidable—flaws," notes Castleman. Besides involving only small numbers of participants who are not representative of the whole population in question, "they're prone to recall errors. And in this case, they're plagued by a key researcher error, the assumption that viewing porn is unusual, that most men don't do it, only bad guys."
The studies favored by Castelman's critic, who was trying to show a positive link between porn and rape, were all retrospective. Meanwhile, the studies Castelman cited that showed no such link were all prospective studies, in which respondents were tracked and surveyed over time. These studies "used huge natural experiments—rape rates before and after porn became easily available—in several countries with male populations in the hundreds of millions," notes Castleman. "Those enormous numbers add to the studies' credibility. So does their consistency. In every prospective trial, as the availability of porn increased, rates of sexual assault declined."
NJ.govGov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) took his family to his government beach home over the weekend while state beaches were closed for a budget-impasse-induced government "shutdown." A journalist snapped photos of Christie and family on the otherwise empty beach, producing a PR disaster. Chris Cillizza, a political analyst at CNN, tweeted that Chris Christie's "tone-deafness" was "truly remarkable."
But was it really?
Christie's electoral career is over. His approval rating in New Jersey is scraping the bottom of the barrel. He can't run for governor again, and New Jersey hasn't elected a Republican to the Senate since 1972. Unconstrained by the need to face the voters again, he isn't tone-deaf so much as he's revealing his true self.
That true self is pretty typical of politicians. As Lawrence Reed wrote last year, the bigger a government is, the less likely it is to attract office-seekers who are "honest, humble, fair, wise, independent, responsible, incorruptible, mindful of the future and respectful of others." Lord Acton noted that power corrupts more than a century ago, and his premise has been tested scientifically.
The fact that Christie's actions caught so many political reporters by surprise illustrates the myths the political class like to tell each other—prime among them, that politicians have some innate sense of decency. The rise and success of Donald Trump should have dispelled that idea, but evidently it hasn't. They see Trump as something totally different from most previous politicians, not as a distilled version of what came before.
Christie's senioritis illustrates another problem. The New Jersey governor already has a government home: Drumthwacket, a mansion outside the state capitol. Why the hell does he need some beachfront property too? In a sane world, Christie's historic unpopularity would create the momentum for scaling back the governor's perks. But that would require a shift in attitude toward the people attracted to high office. It would require people like Cillizza to recognize that Christie isn't an aberration; he's the norm.
origamidon/flickrMore than 11 percent of prime working-age men in the U.S. are outside the job market. Why is that, and can anything be done about it?
A. Barton Hinkle writes:
View this articleThe most fundamental cause of economic poverty," said Richmond's 2013 poverty commission report, "is inadequate access to remunerative employment—that is, to good, steady jobs."
The absence of work causes other kinds of poverty, too. As Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser points out in a new article for City Journal, "jobless husbands have a 50 percent higher divorce rate than employed husbands." The loss of a job inflicts a much greater degree of unhappiness than a reduction of income does. A loss of income likewise causes much less divorce, and much less suicide, than the loss of a job does. Jobs matter for reasons beyond money.
What's more: "Jobless men don't do a lot more socializing; they don't spend much more time with their kids. They do spend an extra 100 minutes daily watching television, and they sleep more. The jobless are also more likely to use illegal drugs. ... 18 percent of the unemployed have done drugs in the last seven days."
Nicholas Eberstadt draws an even more finely grained and depressing picture in his book Men Without Work. He, and Glaeser, The New York Times, and many others focus attention on a dilemma no one seems to know how to fix. As The Times put it in a headline last year, "Millions of Men Are Missing From the Job Market."
Alfred Garcia/flickrAnother weekend of rallies in favor of and against Donald Trump.
Viking, AmazonAs its title suggests, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, by Duke historian Nancy MacLean, is filled with all sorts of melodramatic flourishes and revelations of supposed conspiracies. Chains, deep history, radicals, stealth—is this nonfiction or an Oliver Stone film? Even the cover depicts a smoke-filled room filled with ample-chinned, shadowy figures! This book, virtually every page announces, isn't simply about the Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan and his "public choice" theory, which holds in part that public-sector actors are bound by the same self-interest and desire to grow their "market share" as private-sector actors are.
No, MacLean is after much-bigger, more-sinister game, documenting what she believes is
the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance...[and] a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and the national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.
The billionaires in question, of course, are Koch brothers Charles and David, who have reached a level of villainy in public discourse last rivaled by Sacco and Vanzetti. (David Koch is a trustee of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website; Reason also receives funding from the Charles Koch Foundation.) Along the way, MacLean advances many sub-arguments, such as the notion that the odious, hypocritical, and archly anti-capitalistic 19th-century slavery apologist John C. Calhoun is the spirit animal of contemporary libertarianism. In fact, Buchanan and the rest of us all are nothing less than "Calhoun's modern understudies."
Such unconvincing claims ("the Marx of the Master Class," as Calhoun was dubbed by Richard Hofstadter, was openly hostile to the industrialism, wage labor, and urbanization that James Buchanan took for granted) are hard to keep track of, partly because of all the rhetorical smoke bombs MacLean is constantly lobbing. In a characteristic example, MacLean early on suggests that libertarianism isn't "merely a social movement" but "the story of something quite different, something never before seen in American history":
Could it be—and I use these words quite hesitantly and carefully—a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?
Calling attention to the term's origins to describe Franco's covert, anti-modern allies in the Spanish Civil War, MacLean writes
the term "fifth column" has been applied to stealth supporters of an enemy who assist by engaging in propaganda and even sabotage to prepare the way for its conquest. It is a fraught term among scholars, not least because the specter of a secretive, infiltrative fifth column has been used in instrumental ways by the powerful— such as in the Red Scare of the Cold War era— to conjure fear and lead citizens and government to close ranks against dissent, with grave costs for civil liberties. That, obviously, is not my intent in using the term....
And yet it's the only term up for MacLean's job, since "the concept of a fifth column does seem to be the best one available for capturing what is distinctive in a few key dimensions about this quest to ensure the supremacy of capital." Sure, "fifth column" is a dirty, lowdown, suspect term among historians because using it trades in hysteria at the service of the ruling class rather than rational analysis intended to help the downtrodden. But come on, people, we're in a twilight struggle here, with a movement whose goals have included, among other things, ending censorship; opening the borders to goods and people from around the world; abolishing the draft and reducing militarism; legalizing abortion, drugs, and alternative lifestyles; reforming criminal justice and sentencing; focusing on how existing government operations, especially K-12 schools, have hurt poor and minority Americans; and doing away with occupational licensing and other barriers to entry for business owners, among other things. So much for hesitation on MacLean's part. Fifth column it is! As for carefulness, it's worth noting in passing that MacLean identifies former Attorney General Ed Meese and foreign-policy hawk Bill Kristol as libertarians, which must be as much of a shock to them as it is to, well, actual libertarians.
Clearly this sort of book, published by a major house (Viking) and written by an eminent historian (MacLean is a chaired professor at Duke and author of highly regarded books), is ideological catnip to people who dislike libertarianism and its growing influence in politics and culture. At the increasingly hard-left New Republic, Alex Shephard introduces an interview with MacLean by writing that Democracy in Chains "exposes the frightening intellectual roots of the radical right, as well as its ultimate ambition: to erode American democracy." At NPR, novelist Genevieve Valentine writes
As MacLean lays out in their own words, these men developed a strategy of misinformation and lying about outcomes until they had enough power that the public couldn't retaliate against policies libertarians knew were destructive. (Look no further than Flint, MacLean says, where the Koch-funded Mackinac Center was behind policies that led to the water crisis.)
Let's leave aside the fact that Flint's water supply contamination was due to decades of local mismanagement and a stimulus project gone wrong, hardly the sort of thing that mustache-twirling libertarians espouse. And let's ignore the shibboleth Koch-funded for the time being (go here for a realistic appraisal of the Kochs' influence on the modern libertarian movement). Democracy in Chains is chicken soup for the souls of liberals, progressives, and members of the "resistance" who want to believe that libertarians don't just want to destroy or reform ineffective and inefficient public-sector agencies and institutions, but actually want to kill people or destroy them irreparably. Because really, how else can you make a buck in a free market, right?
If liberals and leftists are uncritically celebrating MacLean's attack, scholars and writers with specific and general knowledge of Buchanan's work and libertarianism are taking a more jaundiced view. Reason will be publishing a review-essay in the coming weeks but in the interim, here's a survey of some of the sharpest rejoinders to date.
MORE »
HeinekenThe Hungarian government is threatening to ban Heineken's red star logo, saying it is a symbol of totalitarianism. But the move came after the company won a trademark dispute in Romania with a company that produces a beer popular with ethnic Hungarians.
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