Government officials may publicly share their beliefs about how businesses should operate. However, when they use this speech to pressure firms via regulations and threats of financial penalties, they violate the Constitution. Two states, Louisiana and Missouri, sued the federal government to try to stop jawboning.  Murthy vs Missouri argues social media companies like Facebook and Twitter acquiesced to government pressure to censor private speech by throttling individual accounts that expressed skepticism about COVID-19 pandemic measures. The key question is whether the government’s requests were sufficiently coercive to make social media companies effectively state actors and whether the First Amendment rights of those users were violated through censorship.

Current case law provides conflicting guidance for when and how government officials can legally tell private companies how to operate. Even a perceived threat of government action, whether there is clear follow-through, can chill or compel speech. The difference between convincing and coercing is in question, especially when the government has regulatory authority over those it’s trying to convince.  

There have been several public instances of what may be considered jawboning in the past years. The Twitter Files, reporting on internal communications at Twitter, revealed hard evidence of public officials forcefully demanding that content contradicting the government’s guidance on COVID-19 be removed from the platform. Twitter was not the only social media platform the government jawboned. Facebook also was pressured by the CDC to moderate COVID-19-related user content.

Jawboning becomes especially pernicious when it occurs out of the public eye, leaving citizens unaware it is happening and that their speech is being censored at the request of government officials. It can result in companies acting in anticipation of government demands, not just a direct threat. YouTube went so far as to temporarily suspend Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) for suggesting cloth masks do not significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19. In Sen. Paul’s case, government officials never explicitly told YouTube to take down his video. Officials strongly suggested YouTube and the White House coordinate on content moderation decisions. 

Social media companies are not the only firms pressured to censor speech by government jawboning. Financial companies (like credit card companies, insurers, and PayPal) are also subject to government censorship by proxy. In the second case in front of the Supreme Court, National Rifle Association (NRA) v. Vullo, the head of the New York State Department of Financial Services told insurance carrier Lloyd’s she would not pursue other actions against possibly illegal product offerings if they ceased covering the NRA as their corporate insurer. Afterward, she sent letters to insurance companies that wrote policies for the NRA asking them to reconsider their business: “… [T]he Department encourages its insurers to continue evaluating and managing their risks, including reputational risks, that may arise from their dealings with the NRA.”

Unclear standards allow governments to take advantage of firms’ aversion to legal risk, especially in a heavily regulated industry like insurance. Partly as a result of New York’s action, the NRA claims it lost access to banks and insurance companies. According to the NRA, these losses cost the organization millions of dollars and made it much more difficult to spread its message, which the First Amendment protects.

Three other cases are relevant to Murthy and Vullo. In Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963), the Supreme Court held that the government cannot employ a third party to censor or jawbone citizens, in this case, booksellers. A state commission circulated a list of allegedly obscene books to police and distributors, recommending prosecution for selling the listed books. This effort was clearly to intimidate the publisher and prevent the publication of the books, violating the First Amendment.   

The Supreme Court again examined coercion in Blum v. Yaretsky (1982). In this case, a patient challenged policies put into place by a nursing home at Medicaid’s urging. The patient argued that because nursing homes are largely funded by the government, they can serve as state actors and therefore are subject to constitutional limits. The justices held that state action is responsible for private action only when the state provides such forceful input as to feel coercive. In other words, the private actor feels they have no option but to act as a state proxy. In this case, Medicaid payments to nursing homes were not held to be sufficiently coercive to require due process, and the patient was not entitled to a hearing.  

Backpage v. Dart (2015) is similar to Bantam Books and applies most directly to Vullo. The sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, attempted to coerce payment processors away from doing business with online marketplace Backpage’s adult services ad section by sending a letter threatening the companies with a criminal investigation. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruling was unambiguous in rejecting the sheriff’s tactics: “A government entity, including therefore the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, is entitled to say what it wants to say—but only within limits. It is not permitted to employ threats to squelch the free speech of private citizens.”

This legal patchwork does not give a clear standard on what specific actions the government can take that are not coercive. The lack of clarity in the rules governing freedom of speech and association has made jawboning an often-used tool by the government to coerce social media and other companies into censoring their users. 

A strong standard would echo the conclusions of Bantam Books and Backpage. Attempts to censor speech, either by intimidation or threatened legal action, should be prohibited as violations of the First Amendment. The court should also make clear the government can, of course, publicly speak on important matters.

In the Murthy oral argument in March 2024, the Supreme Court justices considered whether a broad ruling would prohibit the government from speaking out against teens jumping out of windows. The government should be allowed to publish information about health and safety, but that’s clearly different from jawboning those who present different views into silence.

Recent history has shown that the government’s ability to jawbone should be greatly reduced to protect First Amendment rights. Americans of all political persuasions should support the Supreme Court setting a clear, objective standard that protects speakers from government interference while allowing the government to provide information it believes is important to the public.

The post A Supreme Court ruling that jawboning is unconstitutional would bolster free speech appeared first on Reason Foundation.

This issue recently reappeared when, as the New York Post reported, “Twitter locked the account of a right-leaning parody site The Babylon Bee after it awarded Rachel Levine, the transgender Biden administration official, the title of ‘man of the year.’ The Babylon Bee story was a reaction to USA Today’s naming of Levine, who is US assistant secretary for health for the US Department of Health and Human Services, as one of its ‘women of the year’ last week.”

Social media companies are free to set their terms of service and moderate content as they choose. It doesn’t mean their policies are smart. In this case, Twitter’s suspension of the Babylon Bee makes Twitter appear to be oblivious to satire and comedy. We can think a social media platform’s decision is wrong and misguided — the Bee suspension is — but private companies are free to get things wrong as they try to do what they think is best for their platforms.

The best way for customers to respond to businesses that have policies we don’t like is to take our business elsewhere. One of the worst responses is to call for government regulations to force those business owners to toe our preferred lines.

The last thing anyone who cares about free speech should want are politicians and government bureaucrats deciding what can and cannot be on social media platforms. Bureaucrats and regulators would be worse at finding an appropriate balance of content moderation than private firms, and their mistakes would likely apply to all platforms. The right doesn’t want people chosen by President Joe Biden regulating all social media platforms and the left doesn’t want people chosen by former President Donald Trump choosing what social media content is and isn’t acceptable. And none of us want content rules that change whenever the political party in power changes.

Like any private business, social media platforms are based on mutually beneficial exchanges where both business and customers benefit. If either the business or a customer does not feel they’ll benefit from the exchange, they have the right to walk away. Just as we can all decide we don’t want to use a company’s services, that company can also decide it doesn’t want to provide us services. A Christian baker has the right to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. And any customers who don’t like the baker’s decisions are free to take their business elsewhere.

Indeed our own organization, Reason Foundation, has had some of its news and analysis content wrongly flagged by social media platforms. While we certainly disagreed with the platforms, we entirely support their right to choose what goes on and is shared on their platforms. And, yes, companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have developed great influence in our society, but social media companies aren’t the government. They aren’t required by the Constitution to let us speak on their platforms.

These companies face a complex task trying to figure out what customers want, how to provide it, and how to make a profit. They certainly get things wrong, as in the case of Twitter’s Babylon Bee suspension. But the gloomy alternative is the government regulating speech, which would also produce a chilling effect whereby social media companies would likely forgo any kind of controversial content to avoid regulatory sanction.  This would be a tragedy given the diversity of conversations occurring on the internet.

Beyond pleasing customers and making a profit, it is also a private business’s First Amendment right to promote whatever speech it wants to. In 1974, the Supreme Court struck down a “right of reply” law that forced newspapers to publish the response of political candidates whose records they wrote about. The law would have forced private newspapers to print speech against their will.

Similarly, in 1995, the Supreme Court struck down a law requiring a private parade to include a gay rights group because it violated “the fundamental First Amendment rule that a speaker has the autonomy to choose the content of his own message.”

Whether it is a parade, a tweet, or a Facebook post, the constitutional principle is that users have no right to force platform providers to host their speech. Rather than calling for government regulation forcing social media companies to do what politicians or certain groups want, media consumers should develop skills at evaluating the merits of information we see online and making good decisions about what social media platforms and news sources we can trust. It is up to us to determine where we go to read, view, and learn things we don’t already know and we’re free to choose which news sites and social media platforms we want to be customers of.

A version of this column previously appeared in the Daily Caller.

The post Social media companies are free to make bad decisions appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The annual Savas Award for Public-Private Partnerships—named for City University of New York Presidential Professor and privatization research pioneer E.S. “Steve” Savas—recognizes an individual or organization whose actions improved the cost-effective provision of public services through partnerships with private organizations.

Eva Moskowitz founded Success Academy Charter Schools in 2006 to tackle the monumental crisis in public education in the largest, most prominent city in the United States. Over the past nine years, Success Academy has become the largest and highest-performing network of public charter schools in New York City.

A longtime Harlem resident and mother of three, Ms. Moskowitz began her leadership in education reform with her service as a member of the New York City Council. As chair of the Council’s Education Committee, she visited hundreds of city schools and was known for her investigative hearings. Success Academy’s distinctive school design, teaching practice, and robust curriculum grew out of those experiences, as did her impassioned advocacy for national reform. Respected journalists, educators, elected officials and political leaders from across the country and around the world have toured Success Academy schools to see her work in action, leading to her recognition as a national leader in education reform.

After completing her B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in American History at Johns Hopkins University, Ms. Moskowitz was a history professor and taught civics at Prep for Prep, a program for gifted minority students.

A video of the Savas Award ceremony is available below:

About Dr. E.S. “Steve” Savas

Dr. E. S. (“Steve”) Savas, as First Deputy City Administrator of New York City in 1969, concluded that a principal cause of inefficiency in public services was the monopoly nature of the work, and he argued for deliberately introducing competition between public agencies and the private sector in order to end unnecessary government monopolies and improve public services. His proposal was bitterly opposed, but it initiated the privatization movement. Later, as an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Reagan, he successfully advocated using housing vouchers, a form of privatization, for low-income households instead of building more public housing projects.

As a professor at Columbia University and currently as Presidential Professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York, he pioneered research in this new field. Referred to as the “founder” and the “Captain of Privatization,” in the New York Times¹, and as the “father of privatization,”² his first article (of a career total of 123) on the subject was published in 1971³ and his first two books in 1977.⁴

Textbooks list his work as one of the 34 highlights in the history of public administration along with the work of Plato, Machiavelli, Adam Smith, James Madison, Max Weber, and Woodrow Wilson.⁵⁶ He is also named as one of the twelve great contributors to public administration in the Twentieth Century, with Herbert Simon, Peter Drucker, and Aaron Wildavsky.⁷ His eight books on the subject have been published in 21 foreign editions, and he advised and lectured on privatization throughout the United States and in 55 countries.

Savas earned BA and BS degrees from the University of Chicago, MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University, and an honorary PhD from the University of Pireaus (Greece).

¹ Tierney, John, “Bringing His Gospel Home: City Hall Lends Ear to Captain of Privatization,” New York Times, May 25, 1995, p. B1.

² Sirigos, Constantine S., “Steve Savas: Father of Privatization,” National Herald, February 19, 2011, p. 1.

³ Savas, E. S., “Municipal Monopoly,” Harper’s Magazine (December, 1971) pp. 55-60.

⁴ Savas, E. S., ed., Alternatives for Delivering Public Services, Toward Improved Performance (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977); Savas, E. S., The Organization and Efficiency of Solid Waste Collection (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, D.C. Heath and Company, 1977.

⁵ Starling, Grover, Managing the Public Sector, 4th ed. (Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1993). (This lists the highlights in the history of public administration.)

⁶ Starling, Grover, Managing the Public Sector, 5th ed. (Ft. Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1998). (This lists the highlights in the history of American public administration.)

⁷ Greene, Jeffrey D., Public Administration in the New Century: A Concise Introduction (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005)

The post Eva Moskowitz Receives Reason Foundation’s 2016 Savas Award for Public-Private Partnerships appeared first on Reason Foundation.

When it hit the Gulf of Leyte in the Philippines, Haiyan had sustained winds of 145 mph, with gusts of up to 170 mph, making it comparable in intensity to the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which had winds of approximately 145 mph at landfall on the Texas Coast. The loss of life in Leyte, currently estimated at between 3,600 and 4,500, may ultimately be as great or greater than Galveston, where between 8,000 and 12,000-a quarter of the town’s population-are estimated to have died, making it the most deadly natural disaster in U.S. history.

Some activists claim that Haiyan is a symptom of climate change and that it should be a wake-up call to take action to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. Even theologians are getting in on the act, saying that the typhoon is the result of the sin of climate denial! But those may not be the most appropriate lessons. First, because it is far from clear that global warming is leading to an increase in the number or intensity of typhoons and hurricanes. Second, and more importantly, even if global warming does result in more extreme weather events, cutting emissions will likely do little to reduce the damage they inflict, while potentially costing a great deal, thereby reducing people’s ability to take preventative or ameliorative action.

In 1948, Erik Palmén showed that tropical cyclones (the scientific name for hurricanes and typhoons) only occur where sea surface temperatures reach at least 80F (26.5C). This empirical observation was later used by MIT Professor Kerry Emmanuel as a basis for claiming that a rise in global temperatures would result in more violent cyclones. But in a 2006 paper, published in the Journal Geophysical Research Letters, Philip Klotzbach showed that “accumulated cyclone energy”-a measure of the total amount of energy in all tropical cyclones from around the world-showed no trend over the twenty year period from 1986 to 2005, in spite of the rise in recorded temperatures during that period.

Of course, twenty years is a relatively short period. Unfortunately, good data on global cyclone numbers and intensity is not available for much longer periods. However, there exist reasonably reliable estimates of the number and intensity of hurricanes in the North Atlantic going back to 1851. As the figure below shows, over that period, there is no significant trend in either the total number of hurricanes making landfall in the US or the number of major (categories 3, 4 and 5) hurricanes making landfall.

Moreover, as the figure below shows, there is essentially no correlation between the temperature of the sea surface in the Northern tropics (where the majority of hurricanes are initiated), as indicated by the green line, and either the number of hurricanes (blue) or the number of major hurricanes (red) making landfall in the U.S.

For longer-run estimates of tropical cylone numbers in other regions, data is generally less reliable. One of the best efforts comes in the form of a 2004 paper published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, which reports on an analysis undertaken by two researchers at the University of Louisiana, Kam-biu Liu and Caiming Shen and a colleague at the University of Hong Kong, Kin-sheun Louie, who used semi-official local gazettes, called Fang Zhi, from China’s Guangdong province, to reconstruct the Typhoon record going back 1,000 years (calibrating their data using reliable observations from 1884-1909). As the authors note: “Remarkably, the two periods of most frequent typhoon strikes in Guangdong (AD 1660-1680, 1850-1880) coincide with two of the coldest and driest periods in northern and central China during the Little Ice Age.” Of course, this analysis is specific to one location and the authors note that “Conceivably, the predominant storm tracks shifted to the south during these cold periods, resulting in fewer landfalls in Japan and the east-central Chinese coast but more typhoons hitting Guangdong.” But even if that is the case, it seems unlikely that the typhoons are any more closely correlated to sea surface temperature than are hurricanes.

In a 2010 paper published in Environmental Research Letters, Professors Ryan P. Crompton of MacQuarie University in Australia, and Roger A. Pielke, Jr. and K. John McAneney of the University of Colorado at Boulder, estimated the time that it would take for signals of human induced climate change “to emerge in a time series of normalized US tropical cyclone losses” and concluded that “[U]nder the projections examined here, the detection or attribution of an anthropogenic signal in tropical cyclone loss data is extremely unlikely to occur over periods of several decades (and even longer). This caution extends more generally to global weather-related natural disaster losses.”

In a subsequent blog post commenting on a recent paper by Kerry Emmanuel, Prof. Pielke reaffirms that “the time to detection of a signal of human-caused climate change, assuming that recent projections are correct, is a long, long time. Like, not in our lifetimes and certainly not now.” So, if anyone claims that there is a link between human-induced climate change and losses due to tropical cyclones-or any other weather-related natural disaster losses-they are either clairvoyant or they are lying.

Given the devastation wrought by tropical cyclones, it certainly makes sense to worry about them. But does that mean-as many activists argue-that global emissions of greenhouse gases should be cut? If it were possible to cut emissions significantly at no cost, then the answer would seem to be, obviously, yes. To that end, it certainly makes sense to remove unnecessary obstacles to lower-emission technologies, such as the production of natural gas through hydraulic fracturing-which has done more than anything to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions over the past decade. But even eliminating greenhouse gas emissions altogether would not stop the scourge of the tropical cyclone.

Fortunately, there are things that can be done to reduce the harm inflicted by cyclones. The response by the survivors of the Galveston Hurricane offers a salutary lesson. They built a massive sea wall, seventeen feet high and ten miles long (two feet higher than the storm surge that accompanied the 1900 hurricane). And they raised the foundations of over 2,000 of the town’s buildings, also by seventeen feet. As a result, when the town was battered again by a massive hurricane fifteen years’ later, the twelve foot storm surge caused considerable economic damage but only 53 people lost their lives.

Such responses help explain why, contrary to claims by some scientists activists, tropical cyclones have become less deadly over time. In the 25 years from 1960 and 1984, approximately 500,000 people died during tropical cyclones. In the next 25 years, from 1985 to 2009, that number fell by 20 per cent, to around 400,000. But over the same period, the world’s population rose by more than 30%, which means that the death rate fell from 0.51 to 0.27 per 100,000, a decline of nearly 50%. (These disaster numbers are from the World Health Organization’s Emergency Events database. The calculations, using population data from the Angus Maddison project, are in an excel spreadsheet available here.

Beyond building sea defenses and raising foundations, death rates have fallen because of the establishment of early warning systems and better infrastructure, which enable earlier and more rapid evacuation, as well as improvements in building technologies, which have meant that more people have had access the kinds of safety previously only available to the rich. After the 1900 Galveston hurricane, most of the buildings still standing were mansions in the town’s wealthy Strand District.

At the same time, access to emergency food, water and medical care has dramatically improved over the past half century in most-but not all-countries. And the primary reason for that is the removal of barriers to trade, which has both enabled people to escape from poverty and ensures that when crisis occurs, entrepreneurs and philanthropists are able to deliver goods and services to those who need them. Matt Ridley notes that “In 2007 Hurricane Dean, a Category 5 storm, struck the Yucatan in capitalist, middle-income Mexico, but the country was well prepared and not a single person died. A year later a storm of similar ferocity hit impoverished, authoritarian Burma and killed about 200,000 people.”

Moreover, and contrary to claims that tropical cyclones are causing increasing economic damage, Roger Pielke Jr and colleagues have shown that “normalized damage” (i.e. the implied damage at equivalent levels of economic development) from tropical cyclones has not increased as a percentage of GDP since at least 1900 in the US or globally since 1970 (the earliest date for which globally comparable data is available) (for updated numbers, see Pielke’s Senate Testimony here).

The implications are clear. The best way to reduce the impact of future tropical cyclones is through a combination of good governance and economic freedom. Good governance (by which I mean government that is responsive, accountable and subject to the rule of law) is necessary to ensure that suitable sea defenses, early warning systems and transportation infrastructure (roads, airports, etc.) are established. Economic freedom (especially the ability to own property and engage in trade without undue bureaucratic interference) leads to enterprise, innovation and economic development, ensuring that individuals are better able to withstand the impact of a cyclone.

Sadly, while the Philippines had early warnings of Haiyan (NASA had forecast that it would hit the central Philippines two days before it made landfall), it generally lacks either good governance or economic freedom: it currently ranks 105 (of 174) on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (a measure of governance) and 97 (of 161) on the Heritage/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom and is classified as “mostly unfree”. That’s why attempts to evacuate people ahead of Haiyan were mostly a chaotic failure and why even now, a week after the storm hit, supplies of food, water and medicine are not reaching people who need them.

It makes sense to implement policies that would reduce carbon emissions if so doing increases economic freedom. Examples include removing unnecessary barriers to natural gas and other energy projects, eliminating subsidies to energy and flood insurance, scrapping undue restrictions on biotechnology and nanotechnology. Unfortunately, attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions beyond these “no regrets” policies would likely be counterproductive.

In the U.S., renewable energy mandates have imposed enormous costs on producers and consumers, harming especially the poorest. Many other interventions ostensibly aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases impose even greater costs per unit of carbon dioxide reduced. Future regulations on emissions of greenhouse gases from coal-fired power stations will likely exacerbate these problems by forcing the early and wasteful closure of existing facilities, necessitating the construction of new (mostly gas-fired) plants before they would otherwise have been built-thereby diverting resources to energy production that otherwise might have been invested in other, more innovative technologies. Adding a carbon tax on top of all these regulations would add insult to injury.

Political leaders have begun to realize that attempting to regulate carbon dioxide emissions is both economically and politically damaging. On Tuesday, Australia‘s newly elected Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, introduced legislation to repeal the country’s carbon tax. Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, reportedly praised the action. In the U.K., the non-partisan Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee has urged a reduction in energy taxes.

Leaders in India, China, Brazil and South Africa made the same realization some time ago, which is why they have refused to agree to any restrictions on emissions unless they receive large amounts of compensation – on the premise that climate change cause by emissions from rich countries is causing loss and damage.

But if voters in rich countries are already balking at higher energy costs due to carbon controls, they’re hardly going to sanction the payment of bribes to foreign nations so that everyone can suffer even higher energy costs! That’s why in an October 22 speech in London full of hubristic talk of a global agreement, the U.S. chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, made the following telling comment:

“Now the hard reality: no step change in overall levels of public funding from developed countries is likely to come anytime soon. The fiscal reality of the United States and other developed countries is not going to allow it. This is not just a matter of the recent financial crisis; it is structural, based on the huge obligations we face from aging populations and other pressing needs for infrastructure, education, health care and the like. We must and will strive to keep increasing our climate finance, but it is important that all of us see the world as it is.”

So, to reiterate, forecasts of cyclonic doom should be consumed with a heaped tablespoon of sea salt. And policies should be framed accordingly. Instead of trekking to Warsaw for another pointless gabfest, energy and environment ministers should stay at home to sort out the ridiculous messes they and their predecessors have created, often in the name of saving the planet. They should focus, to begin with, on scrapping the plethora of subsidies and regulations that are weighing down our economies and preventing us from adapting to change.

The post The Terrible Toll of Typhoon Haiyan Doesn’t Excuse Bad Policy appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The Bastiat Prize honors the writers who best explain the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence. The six Bastiat Prize finalists competing for $16,000 in prizes are:

• Tamzin Booth, The Economist (U.K.)
• Ross Clark, The Spectator (U.K.) and The Times (U.K.)
• Lane Filler, Newsday
• Dhiraj Nayyar, India Today
• Stephanie Slade, U.S. News and World Report
• Kyle Wingfield, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“These Bastiat Prize finalists represent the best of a very strong field of international journalists and it is an honor to recognize their work,” said Julian Morris, vice president of Reason Foundation. “The quality and volume of this year’s entries are proof that more and more journalists around the world are effectively challenging the statist assumptions of their peers and advancing freedom.”

The Bastiat Prize winner will receive $10,000, second-place will collect $5,000 and third-place will receive $1,000. Previous Bastiat Prize winners include Virginia Postrel, Tim Harford, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, Robert Guest, Sauvik Chakraverti, Amity Shlaes and Anne Jolis.

The Bastiat Prize winner will be announced at Reason Foundation’s Media Awards on November 6, 2013 at the New York Yacht Club, where the first annual Reason Video Prize will also be presented. The Reason Video Prize will honor short-form online video, film, and moving pictures that explore, investigate, or enrich libertarian beliefs in individual rights, limited government, and human possibilities. The finalists are:

• Crony Chronicles: I want to be a crony by Owen Brennan, Justin Folk, and Robert Perkins
• Game of Thrones Food Trucks by Isaac Reese for the Institute of Justice
• I, Pencil by Drew Tidwell for Passing Lane Films
• Obama That I Used To Know by Justin Monticello for Just New Productions
• Top DHS Checkpoint Refusals by Matt Mills

“In just a few years, online video has become a widely available platform to speak back to power and explore every aspect of human freedom and ingenuity,” said Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of Reason.com. “These videos are great examples of what the future of video-and politics and journalism- will look like.”

Reason will also award the first-ever Lanny Friedlander Prize to Wired co-founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe for their massive impact helping people understand the power of free minds and free markets through Wired’s analysis of technology, business, and culture.

Tickets to Reason’s Media Awards

You can purchase tickets to Reason’s Media Awards here.

About Reason Foundation

Reason Foundation is a nonprofit think tank dedicated to advancing free minds and free markets. Reason Foundation produces respected public policy research on a variety of issues and publishes the critically acclaimed Reason magazine and its website www.reason.com. For more information please visit www.reason.org.

Contact

Kristen Kelley, Communications Specialist, Reason Foundation, kristen.kelley@reason.org

The post Reason Foundation Announces Finalists for Bastiat Prize and Video Prize appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The main argument in favor of installing electric charging stations – electric cars are better for the environment than gasoline-powered cars – falls apart on closer examination.

Since Georgia relies on coal-burning power plants to generate most of its electricity, electric cars are actually responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions per mile driven than mainstream hybrid cars, and are no better for the environment than comparable traditional vehicles. The hybrid Toyota Prius produces less carbon dioxide than the plug-in Nissan Leaf. The highly subsidized Chevrolet Volt in electric mode produces just as much carbon dioxide as it does when it operates in gas mode. Further, lithium batteries that power electric cars are particularly bad for the environment.

The installation of electric-car charging stations is also unfair, as it involves redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich. The numbers speak for themselves. The average income of an electric Chevrolet Volt owner is $170,000 per year. Only Mercedes-Benz owners earn more. Why should taxpayers foot the bill for a policy that will mostly benefit the richest in society?

Then there’s the issue of consumer demand. Despite a $7,500 federal subsidy for buyers (and up to a $7,500 state income tax credit for Georgia buyers), Chevrolet sold only 23,000 electric-powered Volts in 2012. The automaker sold more than 10 times as many Chevrolet Cruzes, the company’s gas-powered sister vehicle. By contrast, Ford sells 58,000 F-Series trucks a month. Yet the city of Atlanta wants to install 300 charging stations when there are fewer than 35,000 electric vehicles sold annually nationwide. This defies all logic.

Why, then, is the city of Atlanta pushing this program? Perhaps the answer it that it does not affect its budget, as all taxpayer funding for the program comes from Washington. But this isn’t a federal freebie; it’s a waste of taxpayers’ hard-earned money – money that instead could be used to fix potholes, or better yet, refunded to taxpayers.

Government programs promoting electric cars distort the economy without creating any real value. Wealthy car owners replace older gas-powered vehicles with newer electric ones. The older vehicles are then resold to other drivers. As a result, the subsidy does not eliminate less fuel-efficient vehicles, but instead simply moves them around.

These programs also fail to increase total car sales. Instead, they incentivize buyers to purchase a particular type of car – a Chevrolet, say, instead of a Ford. Not surprisingly, Chevrolet likes this program. But what happens when this subsidy ends? Barring major improvements in electric-car technology, customers will return to buying gasoline vehicles. The only lasting legacy of these programs will be the taxpayer dollars squandered on unnecessary infrastructure and costly bureaucratic administration.

Baruch Feigenbaum is a transportation policy analyst at Reason Foundation. This article was originally published by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on March 19, 2013.

The post Pull the Plug on Electric Vehicle Claims appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Both had enjoyed successful careers, one as a computer programmer for IBM, one as a consultant psychologist. Both had paid their taxes, obeyed the law, been model citizens. And yet, when one died, the federal government refused to recognize the marriage that was good enough for Canada and New York, levying tax on the estate of $363,053. Normally, spouses receive an unlimited deduction for property that passes on death from one to the other. Normally, the IRS tax bill in circumstances like these would be $0.

The survivor fought the tax assessment, and on 6 June 2012, the U.S. District Court in New York found in her favor. The federal government appealed, but on 18 October, 2012, the U.S Court of Appeals again found in the survivor’s favor. Then, on 7 December 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States announced that it would hear the case.

The survivor’s story is of particular significance not because she, Edith Windsor, was married in Canada, nor because she had been with her spouse for forty years prior to their marriage, or even because she had nursed her spouse through progressive multiple sclerosis; but because her spouse, Thea Spyer, was a woman. Under section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, the federal government regards same-sex couples as not married even when they are validly married under state law. The Supreme Court’s forthcoming ruling in United States v. Windsor will thus affect far more than Edith Windsor’s finances.

Beside the lapidary tale of Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer, the story of Hollingsworth v. Perry is messy and fraught, an ugly public spat over a ballot initiative somehow gone horribly wrong. 2008’s Proposition 8-introduced by Dennis Hollingsworth and his co-proponents-asserts that ‘only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.’

In some respects, we have been here before, to this battle over validity. It is shocking, on reading the first page of the opinion in Loving v. Virginia, to find this:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.

It is, of course, the trial judge’s justification for sentencing the Lovings to a year’s jail, to be suspended for twenty-five years as long as they left the state of Virginia. Many people read Loving expecting to see an argument against interracial marriage couched in social Darwinist terms. That the decision was defended on Biblical grounds does, however, invite comparison with the latest legal marital row. Once again, the Supreme Court is being invited to reformulate the definition of marriage while removing federal interference in an area-family law-traditionally in the States’ purview.

This Brief’s Scope

In rebutting the arguments against equal marriage, this brief addresses empirical issues surrounding the definition of marriage. Of necessity, this involves consideration of legal history and marriage customs, as well as arguments drawn by analogy from other disputes. As part of this discussion, it considers comparative law-especially Roman law-and then recounts the uses to which various definitions of ‘marriage’ have been put in social policy debates, including by libertarians. It also outlines why rights instruments may be unhelpful to those who support changes to existing law.

When People Say ‘Marriage’, What Do They Mean?

‘Marriage’ itself is often elusive in this debate, the term used uncritically by parties on all sides. Typically, equal marriage opponents tend to use the word ‘marriage’ as though it has always and everywhere meant something very similar to that which currently exists across the developed

world in the second decade of the 21st century. This takes in not only an assumption that heterosexual monogamy was the historical and legal norm worldwide (it wasn’t). It also suggests that in supporting or endorsing marriage when it comes to falsifiable social science hypotheses- intact marriages between biological parents produce better outcomes for children, for example- any heterosexual, monogamous marriage will do (it won’t).

If it becomes clear that marriage has changed over time, then it is harder to argue against equal marriage. If the historical forms of marriage endorsed by opponents of equal marriage would be struck down under the 14th Amendment in the U.S. or laughed out of the House of Commons, then that argument is harder still. Finally, if some of the historical changes to marriage were larger than the proposed legalization of same-sex marriage-and there is considerable evidence that they were-then the argument cannot be sustained.

The post An Argument for Equal Marriage appeared first on Reason Foundation.

A cinema can admit a teen under 17 unaccompanied by parent or guardian to an R-rated movie without risk of legal penalty. Likewise, a game shop clerk can sell or rent a video game rated MA or AO to a bunch of 12-year-olds without fear of Officer Friendly tapping his nightstick on the door. Parental advisory labels on CDs are just that – they tell parents that song lyrics are explicit and adult. There’s no law that prevents their sale to minors. Industry participants, from the studio mogul to the shopkeeper on the corner, agree to comply because it allows them address the diverse tastes and maturity of the larger market, yet retain goodwill among parents who wish to be informed media gatekeepers for their own household.

Not so with Internet sites like Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn. The Children Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) sets out specific rules and regulations about how websites can gather and use information about children, with the threat of legal penalties behind them. Facebook, for one, finds these rules so cumbersome that, under its terms of service, children under 13 are not permitted to sign up. If it determines that a user is under 13, Facebook will delete the page. Furthermore, if the Federal Trade Commission determines Facebook is not doing enough to enforce its policy, the company may face considerable fines.

The trouble is, there really is no effective way of verifying age online. It doesn’t help Facebook that a recent report by a team lead by danah boyd, senior researcher at Microsoft and a research assistant director in the Media, Culture and Communication Department at New York University, estimates that 7.5 million Facebook users are under 13, despite its terms of use. At the same time, it doesn’t help the FTC’s case that the same research found that 55 percent of parents of 12-year-olds know their children have Facebook accounts and that 70 percent of those kids had assistance from a parent in setting up their page.

Yet when Facebook, citing these numbers, floated the suggestion that it be allowed to open the site to kids under 13, or perhaps create a partitioned version geared to these so-called “tweens,” the reaction was as if it proposed live streaming of nightly kitten-strangling tournaments.

Parent advocacy groups that should know better, such as the estimable Common Sense Media, immediately rallied to the defense of hard and fast age restrictions. Congressmen Ed Markey (D- MA) and Joe Barton (R-TX), who see a malevolent component in every Internet innovation, immediately called Facebook to account.

The trouble is, online age verification is largely unworkable, and legal restrictions based on them are all but impossible to enforce. E-commerce sites that sell wine and tobacco can reasonably thwart a high percentage of minors, at least from making purchases, because they require a credit card, something few teens possess. For social networking sites like Facebook that simply require a name and some baseline information, there is no reliable way for them to prove a 13-year- old is indeed a 13-year-old. The company deserves credit for proposing a solution to this problem rather than simply deciding not to make waves over an inefficient piece of legislation.

To gain some clarity, let’s remember that COPPA is aimed at privacy protection. Its motivations stem from concerns over corporate marketing to children, as well as child predation and cyberbullying, which all rank as parental hot buttons when it comes to their kids’ activities online. While the age verification law may have been a response to these concerns, it must also be weighed against the fact that many parents are actively helping their tweens get online. Overall it points to the reality that parents still consider themselves the best and most effective filter for monitoring children’s on-line habits.

Age limits, on the other hand, are among the worst. First of all, they are arbitrary. The traditional 18 and 21 cut-offs are troublesome enough. But at least those can be tied to key transitional events in one’s life, such as graduation from high school or college, and/or achieving full-time employment. Parents of tweens know that the standard deviation of maturity around the mean age of 13 is much higher.

So we might comfortably say that 10-year-olds should not be on social networks, and just as comfortably as we can say 13-year-olds can. It’s in between where it becomes difficult. According to boyd, a common reason that that parents ignore the age mandate is because their kids have birthdays late in the school year. That is, parents don’t want their kids left out as middle-school classmates who turn 13 in September and October move their social circles online. So the law breaks down.

It’s time for lawmakers to admit the ineffectiveness of online age restriction. Social networks are virtual meeting places, just like any real-word public place where kids and adults congregate in groups, be it a shopping mall or public park. By and large, we expect teens and tweens on their own will be safe in these venues, although we do educate them to identify and counteract potential threats. So it must be the case on-line. Arbitrary federal law cannot be a substitute for parental involvement supported by schools, camps and other awareness programs at the local level.

That sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have been singled out for age-restriction legislation is more an emotional response than a rational one. Lawmakers do consumers no service with kneejerk, close-minded reactions to valid criticism of the enforceability of COPPA’s age restrictions. Instead, they must acknowledge that parents are ignoring the law and give ear to the ideas and proposals that social networks and their users propose. It has worked in the past.

The success of ratings and advisories in other media speaks to both the faith that Americans have in the effectiveness of the market to develop effective ways of helping parents make decisions about the material their children are exposed to. Rather than clamp down on social media through ineffective laws, the government must allow social networking the space to create a similar structure. In the end, it will prove better both at winning buy-in from parents and protecting kids.

Steven Titch is a policy analyst at Reason Foundation.

The post Finding Sensible Social Networking Policies for Children appeared first on Reason Foundation.

For starters, check out Melanie Asmar’s cover story in the latest of issue of Westword magazine entitled, “Colorado hopes to lure filmmakers with a new plan.” Colorado’s film tax credit fund currently holds $400,000. But HB 1286 and Gov. John Hickenlooper’s proposed budget each respectively appropriate $3 million to the fund, meaning the coffers could be flush with $6 million in taxpayer money in 2012.

Ironically, as Colorado attempts the most aggressive expansion of this program yet, many states are going in the opposite direction. 2010 is widely considered the peak year for states paying out aggregate dollars for film tax credits. Last summer The Economist described this trend bluntly saying, “After a decade of escalation, a stupid trend may have peaked.”

Over the last few years states like Washington and Arizona have phased out their programs, and others refused to appropriate them money. Meanwhile groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Tax Foundation have effectively discredited film tax credits through comprehensive national studies. The details are especially grisly when honing in on specific states.

Let’s start with the “high flyers”: Michigan, New Mexico and Louisiana. For years film tax credit proponents cited these states as success stories. A 2008 New York Times article critical of film tax credits (considered contrarian at the time) has proven prescient. Author Michael Cieply wrote, “(S)tates are moving to rein in their largess that has allowed producers to be reimbursed for all manner of expenditures, whether the salaries of stars, the rental of studio space or meals for the crew.”

Michigan’s bipartisan Senate Fiscal Agency found the film tax credit program generated 11 cents in revenue for every dollar spent. Last year Gov. Rick Snyder worked with the legislature last session to slash the program and cap spending at $25 million as a part of a broad tax reform initiative.

New Mexico’s Legislative Finance Office found its program generates 14 cents in revenue for every dollar spent. Last year New Mexico capped its program at $45 million with Gov. Susana Martinez saying the state can’t afford to “subsidize Hollywood on the backs of our schoolchildren.”

In Louisiana two studies found the program generates between 13-18 cents for every dollar spent.Louisiana’s program remains in place but has been hit with several scandals including one where the former top film office official received a two-year prison sentence in 2009 for abusing the program.

Now for the horror stories: Iowa and Massachusetts. The Iowa Office of Auditor of State found that nearly 80 percent of the transferable tax credits issued by the state ($25.6 million of nearly $32 million) were issued improperly. The program was suspended in 2009 after becoming embroiled in controversy. And there have been many successful convictions of filmmakers, officials and tax credit brokers in the ensuing years. The Massachusetts Department of Revenue found its program generates 16 cents in revenue for every dollar spent. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is currently prosecuting a nearly $5 million lawsuit where a Los Angeles filmmaker is facing multiple counts of fraud and larceny.

Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee demonstrated leadership on this issue during a December 2011 meeting when Sen. Kent Lambert (R-Colorado Springs) and Rep. Claire Levy (D-Boulder) questioned whether this film credit program was the best use of taxpayer money. It may be easy for some lawmakers to rubberstamp bills like HB 1286 that are popular under the Gold Dome, but it would be a mistake for them to whistle past the graveyard of failed film tax credit programs.

Harris Kenny is a Denver-based policy analyst at Reason Foundation (reason.org), a nonpartisan public policy think tank. This piece originally appeared on Colorado Peak Politics on February 14, 2012.

The post Picture This: Film Tax Credits Demonstrably Wasteful, Ineffective appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Their counterargument will rest on two claims – that opponents of SOPA and PIPA don’t care about counterfeiting and intellectual property theft and that the intent of SOPA and PIPA is not to “censor the Internet.”

Since this post is designed for non-techies, I’m going to avoid jargon like “DNS redirecting,” and “Chinese firewall,” and instead I’m going to explain the logic of SOPA and PIPA with this syllogism.

Premise 1: Bank robbery is against the law.
Premise 2: Bank robberies extract a high social cost, so we want to prevent bank robberies
Premise 3: Bank robbers use public streets to travel to banks and escape with their loot
Conclusion: The best way to prevent bank robberies is to close all the streets

This is the basic logic behind SOPA and PIPA. The flaw, of course, is that in the end, the social cost of closing all the public streets is higher than the social cost of the bank robberies it aims to prevent. While thieves can’t get to banks, ordinary citizens can’t get to work, school or the grocery store. Defenders of this idea might say their intention isn’t to infringe on freedom of movement, but in the end that’s the effect their “solution” has.

The same goes for SOPA and PIPA. The intention is to stop online piracy. The effect will be to infringe on Internet speech because it makes ordinary websites legally liable for any link, inadvertent or not, they provide to a so-called “rogue” site. If the law is enacted, any good attorney will advise a website owner to shut down any comments section, advertising arrangement or integrated search engine that could be used to deliver a link to a website where alleged pirated content or merchandise can be found. So much for the interactive communication, immediate information integration, and community-building that defines the Internet today.

SOPA and PIPA are bad not because they target counterfeiting and piracy. They are bad bills because they try to do it by closing the information highway.

SOPA and PIPA are the latest and most egregious example of an alarming political trend: instead of strengthening enforcement against actual crimes, lawmakers instead criminalize everyday activities that by nature lend indirect support. Rather than demanding police build a case against real money-launderers, Louisiana lawmakers made cash transactions illegal. Instead of finding a drunk driver guilty, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the defendant could sue the bar owner who sold him the drinks. Congress couldn’t muster the political will to pass a law against Internet poker, so it made it illegal for a licensed bank to transfer funds to a licensed gambling site.

SOPA and PIPA try to fight piracy by criminalizing aspects of the Internet service infrastructure. This infrastructure ensures the functionality of huge search engines and social networks down to the comments section of the smallest websites, and, yes, it can be abused by counterfeiting and pirating sites-and many other parties with criminal intent. However, this same infrastructure is vital to accessibility, openness and free exchange on the Internet. Like closing the streets to prevent bank robberies, the cost of curtailing the Internet’s ability to create free, open communities is much higher than the cost of piracy it seeks to stop. SOPA and PIPA are illogical, intrusive and counterproductive bills that should be scrapped.

Steven Titch is a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation.

The post SOPA and PIPA for Non-Techies appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Last week, Ezra Klein, star liberal blogger for The Washington Post, enthused that “Rick Perry’s book is good. Really.”

Unlike most campaign books, Klein reported, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington is “a book about Rick Perry’s ideas. And his big idea is that most everything the federal government does is unconstitutional.”

That sounded like chicken soup for my frosty libertarian soul, so I got a copy and dug right in.

I won’t go as far as Klein-to say the book is “good” smacks of “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” as Perry’s fellow ex-cheerleader and former Texas governor George W. Bush once put it. If Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative was Merle Haggard, Fed Up! is strictly Lee Greenwood.

Still, Perry’s book is perhaps the most radical manifesto from a top-tier presidential candidate since Goldwater’s 1960 tome-and some of the ideas it contains are very good indeed.

It’s clear from Fed Up! that the guy with a degree in animal science from Texas A&M understands the Constitution better than Barack Obama, former president of the Harvard Law Review.

The book explains clearly how overbroad interpretations of the Constitution’s Commerce and General Welfare clauses have led to a bloated federal government that’s consuming the nation’s future.

Fed Up! also reflects a solid appreciation of how federalism allows people of diverse viewpoints to live under one national government. As Perry puts it, “if you don’t like medicinal marijuana and gay marriage, don’t move to California.”

Alas, Perry has already showed Mitt Romney-style flexibility on federalism, supporting a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. And, as The Wall Street Journal reports, “Perry Is Suddenly Less ‘Fed Up’ Over Social Security.”

On Thursday, his spokesman protested that the book wasn’t meant to reflect Perry’s current views on the program.

In Fed Up! itself, Perry complains that most of the spending reductions in the ’90s came about because Republicans didn’t fight President Clinton’s military cuts hard enough-and makes clear that, as president, not only would he take military spending-more than 20 percent of the budget-“off the table,” he’d fight to increase spending.

Perry’s also “fed up” that, under ObamaCare, “seniors are expected to see major Medicare cuts,” and appalled that an Obama official suggested that the government could deny access to treatments that are ” ‘so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.’ ” “Shouldn’t your doctor make that decision?” Perry asks.

There are legitimate constitutional and policy-based objections to ObamaCare’s mechanisms for cost control. But when the taxpayer has to foot the bill and the cost is bankrupting the country, the answer to Perry’s question can’t be categorically “yes.”

In the book’s closing chapter, Perry envisions America after 15 years of conservative reform: “I see a nation where deficits are a thing of the past”-a pretty utopian goal even if Perry were willing to leave military spending and grandma’s Medicare “on the table.”

On page 174, we get more utopian still, with what may be one of the least conservative sentiments ever expressed by a self-styled conservative: “We are Americans,” Perry writes, “of course we can have the world we want to live in.”

Public opinion polls suggest that the world most Americans want to live in is one in which we can afford global hegemony, a gold-plated welfare state, and low levels of taxation-in short, a world without scarcity. Of course, we can’t have that world.

It doesn’t look like Perry is willing to tell Americans that hard truth. That’s too bad: America could use a candidate with the conscience of a conservative and the courage of his convictions.

Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and author of The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power (Cato 2008). He is a columnist at the Washington Examiner, where this article originally appeared. Click here to read it at that site.

The post The Contradictions of a Conservative appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900, by Stephen R. Bown, Thomas Dunne Books, $26.99

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it became fashionable on the right, and among some hawkish liberals, to defend and even promote the idea of an American Empire to keep us safe from terrorists, hold rogue nations in check, and secure global commerce. It’s true that Pax Americana’s chief boosters believed in empire long before “everything changed”; the neoconservative historian Robert Kagan wrote a 1998 article in Foreign Policy, for example, celebrating the United States as a “benevolent empire.” But the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center provided new momentum for the imperial cause. A month after the attacks, Max Boot published “The Case for American Empire” in The Weekly Standard, arguing that 9/11 “was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.”

In the middle years of the last decade, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grew steadily worse, this jingoism fell out of favor, leaving only a shrinking core of committed neoconservatives to champion the virtues of empire. Still, the questions posed by American global military dominance were far from settled in public opinion. In March, when President Barack Obama ordered the bombing of Libya and the enforcement of a no-fly zone, introducing American military hardware into a contentious Arab Spring for the first time, disputes over Washington’s proper global role were again thrust to the fore of public debate.

Relatively few Americans question the morality or utility of their country’s power, even if there is substantial disagreement about how and when that power should be used. Advocates of empire sometimes acknowledge that ruling the world through military might requires a great deal of violence, but they argue that this is the price of security and prosperity. Two recent histories of previous great empires argue instead that the imperial project is inherently unstable.

The Rule of Empires, by the Washington University historian Timothy Parsons, explores the fundamental contradictions of imperial rule, making the case that empires have become increasingly difficult to maintain as potential subjects’ identities have become less fluid and more nationalistic. In Merchant Kings: When Companies Ruled the World, 1600-1900, the independent historian Stephen Bown takes a less systematic approach to the study of imperial power, but his book supplements Parsons’ by filling in the biographical details of the men who built Europe’s modern commercial empires. Both books demonstrate that while empire may seem a quick route to power and wealth, in the long run the idea is a military and financial loser.

Parsons studies seven empires, searching for the features they have in common. His selections seem designed to illustrate the point that the conquerors become the conquered and vice versa. Britain was once a remote outpost of the Roman Empire, but many centuries later Britain’s might would far eclipse that of its former masters, covering a quarter of the world’s people and lands as far-flung as India and Kenya. The Umayyad Muslims controlled parts of Spain for more than 700 years, but once Spain was united as a Christian kingdom its rulers wasted little time in seizing a South American empire from the Incas. Napoleon led the French to dominate continental Europe, including the former Roman heartland of Italy, which the French treated as a backwater inhabited by savages. They were repaid in kind when the Nazi empire stormed across France in 1940, shocking and embarrassing an ostensibly formidable imperial power.

Parsons argues that empires, contrary to popular opinion, are extremely vulnerable to conquest. Invaders can turn established rulers’ subjects against them and, once in power, expropriate the centralized administrative systems already in use. When a small number of Spanish conquistadors under Francisco Pizarro attacked the Incan Empire ruled by Atawallpa, they took advantage of the civil strife that had begun after the death of Atawallpa’s father. Pizarro and his men were assisted by numerous Incans who sought a better life after Atawallpa’s tyrannical rule, including several of his brothers, who hoped to claim the throne. “In effect,” Parsons writes, “the conquistadors enlisted New World peoples in their own subjugation.” Firmly ensconced in power, the Spanish used Incan roads and detailed censuses to exploit populations long accustomed to imperial rule.

Parsons contrasts this gaping hole in the seemingly impenetrable armor of empire with the resilience of stateless societies. For example, the Nandi, an East African people who live in what is now Kenya, spent a decade successfully fighting off far more heavily armed British imperialists at a time when England was at the height of its power. Parsons does not mention them, but the Mapuche Indians illustrate the point even more dramatically: They resisted both the Incan Empire and the conquistadors, maintaining a large degree of independence well into the 19th century without any centralized political authority.

Empires throughout history have claimed “to rule for the good of their subjects,” Parsons maintains, but this “was and always will be a cynical and hypocritical canard. Empire has never been more than naked self-interest masquerading as virtue.” To keep resources flowing from subjects to rulers, empires must walk a tightrope between subjugation and assimilation. If the state imposes draconian laws and taxes, it will face rebellion, so the rulers must seek out collaborators among their subjects who will assist in the domination of their fellow citizens. In return, collaborators are frequently brought into the imperial fold and given a portion of the spoils. But this leaves the empire vulnerable to conquering from the inside out, with many masters and few servants.

Muslim Spain during the Middle Ages-or al-Andalus, as it was called-faced the latter problem more severely than any other empire Parsons examines, because it was animated by the universalistic creed of Islam. Spanish Christians and Jews were “peoples of the book” (dhimmi) and entitled to practice their religions, provided they paid a head tax known as the jizya. Pagans could be exploited further, possibly through outright enslavement. But any Muslim was theoretically free of these restrictions, and conversion was as simple as publicly declaring, “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.” Parsons explains the conundrum this situation created for the Andalusians: “Proselytizing religion provided a moral excuse for empire building, but it also blunted the extractive power of imperial rule. More seriously, the subject majority threatened to hijack the imperial enterprise as they became Muslims in ever larger numbers.”

Not surprisingly, Islamic imperialists resolved the conflict between spiritual duty and worldly goods by altering their faith. The Umayyad Empire conquered an area stretching from South Asia across North Africa to Spain within a few generations. Seeing the possibility of losing most of their tax revenue, the Umayyads often simply refused to recognize Jews’ and Christians’ conversion to Islam as legitimate. Parsons points out that no more than 10 percent of the Persian population converted under the Umayyads, and the majority of Egyptians remained Christians into the ninth century.

As the Andalusians learned, Christians under Islamic rule face a powerful economic incentive to either convert or migrate. This steady erosion of the tax base, combined with the assimilation of the Muslim rulers into Iberian culture, weakened al-Andalus until it was reduced to the rump kingdom of Grenada and finally conquered by the combined kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1492-the same year Christopher Columbus set sail on a voyage that would allow Christian Spain to dominate the Americas for the next century.

The free market economist Julian Simon famously argued in his 1981 book The Ultimate Resource that a society’s most important resource was not arable land, precious minerals, or energy supplies but the people who live within it. The decline of al-Andalus demonstrated that imperialists accepted this lesson long before economists. The major difference is that for Simon, it was people’s ability to invent and adapt that makes them central to every economy, whereas empires see their subjects as sources of labor and tax revenue. The Spanish even referred to the Indians whom they forced to mine precious metals in South America as prendas con pies-“assets with feet.” Nowhere was this fact more clear than in India under the British East India Company (EIC).

Empire building typically falls under the purview of governments, but in the 17th through 19th centuries, European states outsourced imperial conquest to quasi-private joint-stock companies. Governments granted these companies monopoly trading rights in distant regions and frequently offered their military might to ward off potential rivals. States rarely intended for the companies to become independent imperial powers, but the potential spoils of conquest proved hard for company officials to resist. After all, they had been freed from the discipline of competition, they were thousands of miles from political oversight, and their military risks were socialized by their state sponsors. As Bown points out in Merchant Kings, the EIC and similar corporations “were less the product of free-market capitalism than the commercial extension of European national wars and struggles for cultural and economic supremacy. They occupied the muddy grey zone that exists between government and enterprise.”

The man most responsible for the East India Company’s acquisitions in India was a young clerk named Robert Clive. In a foreshadowing detail, Bown relates that as a schoolboy, Clive organized a group of boys into a gang and extorted money from Shropshire merchants in exchange for “protection.” Arriving in Madras in 1744, Clive was immediately thrust into a proxy war between the EIC and its French rival. He spent the next 13 years fighting the French company for monopoly trading rights in cities across the eastern coast of the subcontinent. Clive won a number of impressive victories, but the most portentous was a militarily unremarkable conflict in June 1757 at Plassey in the Bengal province of the splintering Mughal Empire. Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daula-the nawab, or governor, of Bengal-in large part by bribing one of his commanders, Mir Jafar, with the promise of political office should Clive prevail. With victory at Plassey, Clive made Mir Jafar nawab of Bengal. More important, Clive and the EIC now held the right to collect taxes in the province, which, Parsons notes, already possessed an efficient, currency-based tax system from its centuries under different imperial masters. In effect, this made the EIC a part of the Mughal Empire, but as Mughal power continued to crumble, the company picked off various provinces. By 1765 it collected tax revenues in most of eastern India.

The EIC’s primary concern was no longer trade but extracting revenue from its Indian subjects. The company made this explicit in an order quoted by Parsons: “Revenue is beyond all question the first object of Government, that on which all the rest depends, and to which everything should be made subsidiary.” With tens of millions of revenue-generating subjects, the company’s position would seem to be an enviable one, but Parsons observes that “the costs of maintaining a government and a standing army nearly bankrupted the Company. Clive’s successors therefore had to squeeze the Bengali peasantry to remain solvent.” Higher taxes produced tragic results for Bengalis in 1769 and 1770 when a famine struck the region. Unable to feed themselves and the EIC’s insatiable appetite for riches, around 3 million people starved to death. News of the famine sent the price of EIC stock tumbling, and the British taxpayers bailed out investors with a £1.4 million loan from the Treasury.

The only people who seemed to profit from the empire were high-ranking company officials. According to Bown, when Clive returned to England in 1760 his fortune was so large that he did not even trust his own company to transport it. Instead, in a move that calls to mind Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22, he deposited hundreds of thousands of pounds with the rival Dutch East India Company in India and withdrew them once safe at home in England. But wealth did not translate into popularity. Bown writes that Clive “angered the people he had bested and the people whose fortunes had been stunted by his attempts to limit corruption. He angered people because he was arrogant and outspoken. There were many who would love to see him fall.” Members of the aristocracy mocked the nouveau riche Clive as a “nabob,” a derisive corruption of nawab. Clive also struggled with depression and an array of physical ailments, which he treated with opium. In 1772 Parliament launched an inquiry into corruption within the EIC. Clive was acquitted but sank deeper into depression, and in 1774, at the age of 49, he committed suicide by stabbing himself in the throat. Even for the profiteers, the blessings of empire were decidedly mixed.

Bown’s chapter on the mining empire established by Cecil Rhodes in southern Africa provides an even starker example of an empire’s failure to enrich its mother countries. Rhodes is best known among Americans today as the man who established the Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, but he was a commercial imperialist par excellence who helped found the De Beers diamond company, served as prime minister of the Cape Colony in what is now South Africa, and seized a territory that he “allowed” his colonists to name after him: Rhodesia. His territories contained the world’s only large diamond mines and sizable gold deposits along with a population of thoroughly subjugated Africans to work them. Nevertheless, the British South Africa Company, which was responsible for the lands, could not turn a profit. Wars drained the company’s revenues, and holding valuable land for white settlement required constant effort to keep Africans away from it. After years of little to no profit, the British government stripped the company of its powers and compensated shareholders with millions of pounds from the public purse.

Empire does not merely lack clear benefits for anyone outside of a small group of functionaries. Parsons argues that the spread of nationalism and of sprawling transnational identities such as Pan-Arabism have made it next to impossible to establish and maintain a modern-day empire. When identities were primarily local, successful empires could rule over vast territories inhabited by hundreds of different ethnic groups. With no common identity to unite subjects, the risk of mass rebellion remained low. But the European empires of the 18th and 19th centuries sowed the seeds of their own destruction, and the destruction of all traditional empires, when they spread the idea of nationalism to their subject peoples. Nationalism allowed rebellious imperial subjects to unite around a single cause, and it simultaneously robbed empires of the collaborators they had exploited for millennia. Whereas a respected first-century Briton could become Romanized without angering his neighbors, the French who assisted the Nazis in World War II were considered traitors to their own people. This development has not yet prevented powerful nations from trying to build new Romes.

Both Merchant Kings and The Rule of Empires are enjoyable, but they suffer from inverse problems. Merchant Kings is long on biographical detail but often short and misleading on historical context. For instance, Bown argues that in 1630 the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (present-day New York) had fallen behind the English colonies of Virginia and New England in population in part because the English Civil War drove Puritans to seek refuge in America. The only problem is that the English Civil War did not start until 1642. By contrast, Parsons thoroughly contextualizes his arguments, perhaps to a fault. His narrative weaves between subject and ruler, colony and metropole, and spans thousands of years, so even knowledgeable readers will sometimes become lost in the procession of sultans, chiefs, and sepoys.

But these problems are relatively minor. Both books succeed in showing the small, concentrated benefits that empires bestow on a ruling class and the extraordinary burdens they impose on everyone else. The security and prosperity allegedly offered by empire is an illusion, and those societies that pursue it-even with the best of intentions-will ultimately receive neither. It’s a lesson that could serve Americans well.

John Payne (johnwilliampayne@gmail.com) is a research assistant at the Show-Me Institute, a think tank in St.Louis. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post Temptations of Empire appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Steve Dingledine, a 43-year-old Washington resident, arrived at 5:45 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the faux-newsman. Colbert is a “court jester par excellence,” Dingledine declared, but he said he also hopes that the comedian’s shtick will shift public opinion. “The awareness is going to be raised to a point where the loophole cannot be exploited by media companies,” the Colbert groupie said.

What advocates of strict campaign finance regulation call a “loophole,” others call protected political speech under the First Amendment. In May, Colbert submitted an advisory opinion request through an attorney asking the FEC to sanction his political action committee.

The central question was whether Comedy Central’s corporate parent company, Viacom, had to report administrative assistance to the PAC and potential payments to air political ads on other television stations. FEC lawyers submitted three different drafts responding to Colbert, and the agency ultimately approved a compromise version allowing Colbert to claim the “press exemption” to campaign finance law. Viacom must therefore report PAC involvement not relating to the late-night program, including logistical support for the PAC and advertising placement on other networks.

Inside the packed hearing room, Colbert’s request didn’t sound like an effort to open a loophole for laughs. A subdued Colbert was nearly mute as his lawyer, Trevor Potter, blandly answered commissioners’ questions with only brief interjections from his client. After all the hype, Colbert’s appearance seemed anti-climatic, in contrast to his cheering fans waiting outside.

By 9:30 a.m., more than 30 of those fans were standing in line, along with a few campaign finance lawyers and Capitol Hill staffers. Six “coordinators” clad in red t-shirts reading “COLBERT SUPER PAC” arrived with signs to energize the crowd. Four Department of Homeland Security officers, who were there to provide security, told the redshirts that no “signs or protests were allowed” in the FEC hearing room. The redshirts assured the police that they planned to remain on the sidewalk’s de facto free speech zone.

Back inside, only one of the six commissioners broke with his colleagues to question the wisdom of the two-tiered set of rules for media corporations and other companies. Don McGahn, an iconoclastic Republican, challenged the authority of the commission to decide who gets a government-approved press license in an age of creative destruction in the media industry.

The FEC has grappled with the definition of the press for decades. In 1980, the FEC investigated Reader’s Digest for making an “illegal corporate expenditure to negatively influence” the 1980 presidential election after the magazine distributed a video reenactment of the Chappaquiddick car wreck involving then-candidate Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). After a long investigation, the case was dismissed in 1981.

Almost 20 years later, the FEC granted a media exemption to the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, which meant the Republican-leaning group no longer had to disclose its spending on certain production expenses. Citizens United was the plaintiff in the blockbuster 2010 Supreme Court case holding that the government may not restrict the independent speech of companies and advocacy groups. If Citizens United need not disclose its spending on documentaries and certain ads as a press entity, why should Viacom and Colbert have to?

“Commentary is a slippery concept, and I’m having trouble being the one who decides what is commentary and what is not commentary. We’re in an interesting era now, post-Citizens United,” McGahn said, citing bloggers and other non-traditional journalists. McGahn also rejected the notion that corporations gained First Amendment rights in Citizens United, arguing that media corporations have long enjoyed the unfettered ability to engage in political advocacy through editorial boards and TV talking heads.

Campaign finance lawyers have speculated that the FEC’s advisory opinion may spur FOX News or Current TV, an Al Gore-owned network featuring former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, to engage in politics through the super PAC model. McGahn registered his objections by voting unanimously with his colleagues to approve one version of the advisory opinion but withholding his vote from the final version that the FEC officially approved.

Colbert mingled with FEC commissioners and staff in a conference room during a brief recess after the vote. An agency lawyer, who chatted with Colbert in the men’s restroom, asked the comedian about the mass of people waiting for him outside the building. “There are a lot of crazy people out there,” he replied. Colbert emerged from the building just before 11 a.m. to address a throng of 150 or so of those crazies, plus gawking journalists and “federal employees with extremely generous lunch break policies,” as he put it.

“Hello freedom lovers! I am here to represent your voice, so please quiet down so we can all hear what you have to say with my mouth,” he said during the three-minute press conference. “There will be [those] that say, ‘Stephen Colbert, what will you do with that unrestricted Super PAC money?’ To which I say, ‘I don’t know. Give it to me and let’s find out.'”

Colbert finished with a fundraising pitch to prime the pump of his super PAC.

“I don’t know about you, but I do not accept limits on my free speech!” said Colbert, who was chauffeured by an ethanol-guzzling Cadillac. “I do not accept the status quo! I do accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express-$50 or less please, because then I don’t have to keep a record of who gave it to me.”

Jeff Patch is a writer and political consultant based in Alexandria, Virginia. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post Stephen Colbert Lampoons the First Amendment appeared first on Reason Foundation.

It has refused to classify Dutch director Tom Six’s gorefest The Human Centipede II, on the basis that it might “deprave” or “corrupt” those who see it-witlessly unaware of the fact that Six’s movie is a blood-spattered critique of the very idea that audiences are easily “depraved” or “corrupted.” So the BBFC has banned a film that explicitly mocks the notion that cinema audiences are like nodding dogs who are warped by what they see, in the name of defending from harm the nodding dogs of the British film-viewing public who might be warped by what they see.

The Human Centipede II certainly sounds nasty. It tells the story of a man who gets his kicks by creating a “human centipede.” He kidnaps people and stitches them together, mouth to anus, and then watches with glee as his hideous creation writhes around on the floor, its individual members forced to shit into each other’s mouths. Nice. At one point, he becomes so excited by the freak he has created that he masturbates himself with sandpaper. Bambi it ain’t.

The BBFC refused to classify the film on the basis that its characters are mere “objects to be brutalised, degraded and mutilated.” Apparently there’s a great risk that the movie could “deprave or corrupt a significant proportion of those likely to see [it]” and therefore it must be squished, chucked into the dustbin of history alongside the 27 other freaky films that the BBFC has refused to classify since the year 2000. After all, we wouldn’t want any cinema-going Brits to rush home and try to create their own human centipede, would we?

Yet The Human Centipede II actually sends up the notion that adult audiences are lethally impressionable. It flips the bird at “media effects” theory, the stubbornly un-proven idea that films can have a dangerous effect on the behavior of those who watch them. It parodies the life out of this elitist outlook by actually having its central character become obsessed with Six’s first Human Centipede movie, to the extent that he tries to recreate its hideous human monster for himself.

The first film, The Human Centipede, was released in 2009. It tells the story of a creepy German doctor who kidnaps three tourists, drugs them, and stitches them together. The BBFC passed it, even though-inappropriately venturing into movie-criticism territory-it said it found the film “tasteless and disgusting.” When Six took that first film around various festivals, he says he was repeatedly asked by brow-furrowing journalists about the danger of “copycatting,” where viewers might become so enamoured by his wacky centipede that they would try to make their own. Six says he thought that idea was so demented, so patently a product of fearful journalists’ salacious imaginations rather than of any hard evidence that films actually warp people’s minds, that he decided to put it in the sequel.

So in the second film, in an ironic, post-Scream mashing together of fiction and reality, the lead character becomes crazily obsessed with The Human Centipede. He decides to go further than the film’s German doctor by stitching together 12 people rather than a measly three. He’s so brainwashed that he constantly pleasures himself over his bigger, more hellish centipede. Six has denied that there is any message to his movie, but somewhere in all of that, amidst the blood and poo and insanity, there’s a devilishly clever assault on the idea that people watch movies and copy them, that our minds are so malleable, like putty, that we can be turned into psychos by psychotic films.

By making “media effects” theory the underlying, unspoken theme of his gory sequel, Six shows just how mad the theory is. If it is ridiculous to claim that Taxi Driver is responsible for attempted political assassinations and that Natural Born Killers unleashed rampant violence, it’s even more ridiculous to fret that a film about a German bloke who makes a human centipede might lead to copycat behavior. Yet that concern was raised by straight-faced journalists when the first Human Centipede movie was released. By depicting it, Six demolishes it.

And what does the BBFC do? It bans The Human Centipede II, just in case the movie might tempt audiences towards centipede-obsessed depravity. The BBFC, which was founded in 1912 and was more appropriately known as the British Board of Film Censors until it changed its name in 1984, makes great play of the fact that it doesn’t actually have the legal authority to ban films. And it is true that, like the Motion Picture Association of America, age classification is the main role of the BBFC. It decides whether a movie should be classified U (Universal), PG (Parental Guidance), 12A (where those under 12 must be accompanied by an adult), 15 (for 15-year-olds and over), 18 (for 18-year-olds and over), or R18 (for movies that cannot be shown in cinemas but may be sold in one of Britain’s 250 licensed sex shops).

Yet it is highly disingenuous for the BBFC to say it doesn’t ban. Its refusal to classify a film, to deny it even an R18 rating, effectively means a film is blacklisted in Britain. It makes it extremely unlikely that the film will be shown in any cinema and makes it a criminal offence for anyone to supply it on DVD or video. So if I get hold of a copy of The Human Centipede II and distribute it in Britain, I could be imprisoned. If that isn’t censorship, I don’t know what is.

The key problem with “media effects” theory is its patronizing view of the public as automatons and attack dogs, who see something and act on it. In arguing that films can invade and mess with our heads, “media effects” theorists call into question the very existence of free will and free choice, depicting our minds as empty vessels waiting to be filled. They overlook the fact that there is something standing in the way of horror films leading to horrific societies-and that is us, reasoned viewers, who know very well the difference between fiction and reality and that kidnapping 12 people and turning them into a human centipede is a pretty rotten thing to do.

Six says he is working on a third Human Centipede film. He hasn’t revealed any details yet, but I hope he sticks with the po-mo, meta approach, perhaps by having members of the BBFC become so warped by a film that they jealously keep to themselves that they turn into centipede-creating lunatics. After all, if, as they believe, movies can make ordinary people go crazy, why can’t movies have the same effect on the authoritarian suits who preview and classify them on our behalf?

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked in London. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post A Disgusting Act of Censorship appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Libertarians, on the other hand, may find the book to be an unexceptional checklist of familiar positions-curious, perhaps, in its shout-outs to Glenn Beck and Jon Voight, but admirable in its championing of Friedrich Hayek. Personally, I found the book’s most shocking passage to be its characterization of Marilyn Monroe as “the greatest comedienne in the history of the screen.” But that’s just me. Or, more pertinently, it’s just Mamet, a man of famously pugnacious rhetorical postures.

The Secret Knowledge grew out of a bridge-burning 2008 essay that Mamet wrote for the left-wing Village Voice. In it, the Pulitzer-winning playwright boldly walked back his own life-long leftism and described the clinching moment in his political journey as having occurred while he was driving in a car with his wife: “We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up.”

Now, his migration complete, Mamet says, “I look back upon my Liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder-as another exercise in self-involvement-rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.”

The author’s full-throated conservatism will give some readers pause. He is sometimes overweening, as in his discussion of such academic phenomena as existentialism, deconstruction, and all-purpose “theory”: “Those incapable of recognizing bushwa may assume that someone else surely knows what these things mean. But, sadly, this is not the case.” Actually, I have heard people explain these things, and, bullshit or not, their baleful effects in the precincts of higher learning have been (as Mamet knows) substantial. Similarly, we can sympathize with the “shame” the author now feels about his exemption from military service during the Vietnam War; but might he not also have observed that many of the thousands of young soldiers who died in that misbegotten conflict might still be with us if that exemption had been universal?

The Secret Knowledge is clearly the result of much reading and extensive contemplation. Mamet’s references range from Tolstoy and Trollope to Friedman and Sowell to Marx and Brecht and the immortally entertaining Susan Sontag. He celebrates his Ashkenazi heritage and, centrally, the Torah, which he sees as a keystone of this country’s Judeo-Christian foundation-a font of true justice, as opposed to the fashionable “social justice” he so witheringly reviles. (On hate-crime laws: “[A]s if getting beaten to death were more pleasant if one was not additionally called a greaser.”) He adheres to the “tragic view” of human nature-we are all irredeemably flawed, prone to corruption, and incapable of perfect understanding-and is thus deeply skeptical of any attempt at root-and-branch social transformation, however slickly retailed. He is especially eloquent in noting the latest instance of this evergreen political scam: “[S]hould we all simply mass behind a leader so charismatic and well-spoken as to induce in the electorate that state of bliss which, though it may momentarily be indistinguishable from madness or satori, necessitates eventual return to a world made more complicated by our surrender[?].”

Readers on both sides of Mamet’s current political stance can take issue with his social conservatism. He is, among other things, an unbending proponent of traditional gender arrangements; and yet who even on the left can deny the miseries that have attended the decline of the two-parent family? Nevertheless, it is exhilarating to hear so much common sense expressed with such forceful eloquence: “The honest man might observe…that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and go out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.”

Mamet is not a man with a plan. Neither the right nor the left is to be entirely trusted, and a complete national salvation may remain forever beyond our grasp. “We are a democracy,” he writes, “and as such do not generally elect our best people to office. How could we? They weren’t running.”

Kurt Loder is a writer living in New York. His third book, a collection of film reviews called The Good, the Bad and the Godawful, will be published in November by St. Martin’s Press. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post David Mamet’s Conversion Story appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Think about that for a minute. Dr. Frankenstein goes into the room telling his aides to ignore what he’s going to say once he’s inside. He knows he will want to come out, so he enlists others to help him subordinate his own later wishes to the ones he has right now, which he apparently prefers.

There’s a name for this sort of thing. In the quietly sizzling field of self-control studies, it’s called precommitment, because it involves acting now against the strength of some later desires, either by taking certain options off the table or by making them prohibitively costly.

Precommitment doesn’t just happen in movies. For years the economists Dean Karlan and John Romalis kept their weight down by means of a clever pact. Karlan and Romalis knew a little something about incentives, so they struck a deal: Each would have to lose 38 pounds in six months or forfeit half his annual income to the other. If both failed, the one who lost less would forfeit a quarter of his income. They lost the weight and generally kept it off, although, at one point, Romalis’s weight popped back up over the limit and Karlan actually collected $15,000 from his friend. He felt he had no choice. He felt he had to take the money to maintain the credibility of their system, without which they’d both get fat.

Precommitment works, which is why Karlan, now a professor at Yale, set out to make it available to the world via stickK.com, the Internet’s precommitment superstore. Karlan’s venture enables any of us to contractually control our own actions or, if we violate the agreement, face a penalty we’ve chosen. Theoretically, it could make a Trollope of the most recalcitrant writer, allowing him to impose on himself the wanted law that cannot be disobeyed. Despite its nerdy origins, the site has a rakish motto: “Put a contract out on yourself!”

The concept is fiendishly simple. StickK.com (the second K is from the legal abbreviation for contract, although baseball fans will detect a more discouraging connotation) lets you enter into one of several ready-made binding agreements to lose weight, quit smoking, or exercise regularly, among other things. You can also create your own agreement, which many of the site’s 100,000 registered users have done. You specify the terms (say, a loss of one pound per week for 20 weeks), put up some money, and provide the name of a referee if you want one to verify your results. Whenever you fail, stickK.com gives some of your money to a charity or friend that you’ve chosen. Whether you fail or succeed, stickK.com never keeps your money for itself aside from a transaction fee.

If you want a sharper incentive, you can even pick an individual enemy or an organization that stickK.com calls “an anti-charity.” Democrats, for instance, might find it especially motivating to know that if they fail to live up to a binding personal commitment on stickK.com, some of their hard-earned money will go to the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Anti-charities apparently are highly motivating; stickK.com says they have an 80 percent reported success rate. “All stickK is doing,” Karlan told me, “is raising the price of bad behavior-or lowering the cost of good behavior.”

What’s especially appealing about ventures like stickK.com is not just that they give us the tools to constrain ourselves but that they are voluntary. We are fortunate to live in a time when the biggest problem that many of us face is coping with our own appetites in the face of freedom and affluence. Inevitably our failures-bankruptcy, obesity-bring calls for government to protect us from ourselves. But there are ways we can protect ourselves from ourselves without trampling the rights of others.

Consider exercise. It’s good for you, and people want to be healthy and attractive. So lots of us join gyms-and then don’t use them, which is why the places get a lot less crowded after January, when the New Year’s resolutions start to peter out. The membership fee is just the cost of our good intentions. The real expense is the time and effort required to work out.

Enter Gym-Pact, a clever Boston venture cooked up by a couple of recent Harvard grads. Gym-Pact gives participants a cut-rate membership. The catch is, you have to specify in advance how many times a week you’ll show up and how much extra you’ll pay for each missed day. In effect, Gym-Pact helps reallocate the cost of exercise to idleness.

Precommitment can be especially helpful when it comes to bad habits, including substance abuse. In the movie Tropic Thunder, one of the characters is a heroin addict who runs out of his drug while making a movie in the jungle. When a jungle drug-making operation is discovered, he gets one of his colleagues to tie him to a tree so he won’t succumb to temptation. Soon enough, of course, he is pleading to be untied, just as Gene Wilder was pleading for his helpers to open the door.

Sound familiar? It should. History’s first known episode of precommitment occurs in The Odyssey, when Odysseus and his men are sailing home from the Trojan War. He has been warned about the Sirens, whose seductive song leads sailors to destruction, but he wants to hear it anyway. So he gives his men earplugs and orders that they tie him to the mast, ignoring all subsequent pleas for release until they are safely past the danger.

The Odyssey is all about the management of desire, and the famous wiliness of its hero is on full display in this episode. Odysseus essentially invents precommitment to inoculate himself against his own predictable (and potentially fatal) future desires. A lesser man might have relied on willpower alone, but Odysseus knew that no one is immune to temptation.

Precommitment and the Poor

Dean Karlan had spent a good deal of time thinking about precommitment before launching stickK.com, especially in conjunction with his other great interest, Third World finance. A few years back, he and colleagues from Harvard and Princeton set out to investigate whether people would freely choose a precommitment device to help them save, and if so whether it would make much of a difference.

They designed an elegant experiment that produced fascinating results, which they recorded in a 2006Quarterly Journal of Economics paper titled “Tying Odysseus to the Mast: Evidence From a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines.” They carried out their project on the island of Mindanao, in partnership with a rural financial institution there known as the Green Bank. The professors first surveyed 1,777 current or former customers of the bank to assess how good they were at deferring gratification. The surveys asked such questions as, “Would you prefer to receive 200 pesos guaranteed today, or 300 guaranteed in one month?” And equally important: “Would you prefer to receive 200 pesos guaranteed in six months, or 300 guaranteed in seven months?”

Customers who chose the sooner, smaller reward in answer to the first question but the larger, later reward in response to the second were deemed likely to have self-control problems. The researchers offered 710 of these individuals a new kind of savings account called Save, Earn, Enjoy Deposits, or SEED. These special accounts offered the standard 4 percent interest, with a single catch: Withdrawals weren’t allowed until either an agreed-upon date or sum was reached. (Almost all the savers chose a date rather than a sum, since failing to accumulate the latter could mean their savings were locked away indefinitely.)

Some 202 self-aware individuals, or 28 percent of those receiving the SEED account offer, accepted-a group that skewed somewhat female. And 83 percent of SEED enrollees also bought a ganansiya box from the bank. This is like a piggy bank with a lock, except that the bank holds the key; savers accumulate small sums by putting a peso or two into a box when they can. It’s a poor man’s precommitment device, in this case one that mirrors, on a small scale, the design of the SEED accounts.

Karlan and his colleagues found that SEED worked for the participants. After just a year, SEED account holders had increased their savings by a remarkable 81 percent. It was a modest experiment, but it showed that giving people the opportunity to precommit can help them rapidly accumulate capital, even if they don’t have much income. The experiment also showed that many people with self-control problems know they have them. The SEED account participants mostly knew themselves well enough to purchase ganansiya boxes. This kind of self-knowledge isn’t uncommon among the Third World poor. Daryl Collins, a consultant on Third World finance and a former lecturer at the University of Cape Town, reports that poor South Africans sometimes rely on money guards-“a neighbor or relative or friend that you trust and say, ‘Hold this, and don’t let me touch it,’ ” she explains. “Sometimes the same money guard asks you to hold their money, and so when someone comes to borrow money, you say, ‘It’s not my money.’ It works.”

Back in the 1990s, when it was suggested that early-withdrawal penalties might be discouraging Americans from saving more in retirement accounts, a survey found that 60 percent of us wanted to maintain the restrictions; only 36 percent favored making it easier to tap retirement savings early. Why such a lopsided result? I think it’s because people understood how susceptible they would be to the temptation to crack open their own nest eggs. They wanted the barrier left in place to keep themselves away.

I’m not surprised. I remember my mother, in the 1960s, dutifully making regular deposits into a Christmas club account at the local bank. On the surface, Christmas clubs make no sense. You have to make regular deposits-I seem to recall my mother having something like the kind of payment book you might get with a car loan-and you receive little or no interest. Most amazing of all, the bank won’t let you have your money back until December. But of course this was the reason my mother signed up; the arrangement forced you to save, and it kept your savings out of your hands.

I did something similar when I worked at a big newspaper and signed up for automatic payroll deductions, with the money going into my credit union savings account. Then every time I got a raise, I raised the savings deduction by the same amount. My lifestyle never expanded with my income, but I did build up a pile of cash. I had colleagues who used the government’s withholding of income taxes the same way. Those unfamiliar with this technique may not know that you have some discretion about how much Uncle Sam withholds from your paycheck; if you have a mortgage, kids, and other significant deductions, you should reduce the withholding to match what you’ll ultimately owe, since the government won’t pay you interest while it has your overpayments. On the other hand, you can’t access the withheld money until you file your taxes-after which you’ll get a nice, big refund. Think of the lost interest as a modest service charge, well worth it to people who know they might not save any other way.

Self-control sophisticates use the tools that happen to be at hand, as is apparent from the urban numbers racket. If you know how the lottery works, you understand the numbers game, except that the latter offers better odds.

I grew up around people who played the numbers. They’d wager 25 or 50 cents with a bookie on some three-digit number based on a dream or a birthday or some other likely premise, and if the number came in, they’d win. The daily number was always taken from some objective source that was ostensibly beyond manipulation; it might have been the last three digits of the day’s take at Aqueduct, for example, or of the trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange. Like many people who buy lottery tickets, many numbers players play for entertainment.

But back in the 1970s, the sociologist Ivan Light looked at numbers gambling in Harlem and saw not a diversion or even “a tax on stupidity” (the term derisive economists use for state-run lotteries) but a functioning financial system-and an effective precommitment device to help people save. What outsiders didn’t seem to understand was that Harlem residents didn’t trust, and weren’t well served by, banks. The so-called numbers racket, illegal though it may have been, partially filled this vacuum.

First, remember that the winning number is always just three digits, 000 through 999, so the odds of winning are a far-from-astronomical 1 in 1,000. And while the pot never contains millions, a winner who bet $1 might clear $500 after the customary 10 percent tip to the runner, who carries the loot back and forth. (Naturally, no taxes are paid.)

How did this add up to a savings plan? Survey data showed that the players were persistent, with nearly 75 percent playing two or three times a week and 42 percent playing daily, for years on end. In other words, they acted something like long-term investors. And they were likely to get back $500 for every thousand bets of $1 each. That may not seem like much of a return on investment, but bear in mind that many players bet with quarters, a sum that even among the poor tends to vanish unaccountably. They got some hope. They couldn’t raid their “savings” until they won. And their money also bought convenience: Numbers runners made house calls, and these visits no doubt helped people keep playing.

In some poor neighborhoods of India, “deposit collectors” perform the same function. The collector gives a would-be saver a card imprinted with a grid of 220 cells, and the customer commits to handing over, say, five rupees for each cell each day. At the end, the saver would get back 1,100 rupees, less 100 rupees for the collector’s fee. Savers are happy to live with this negative interest rate in exchange for the convenience and for the commitment device.

In Harlem, numbers players also knew their money was supporting black enterprise, local jobs, and a certain amount of neighborhood investment. But most of all, sooner or later you had a large sum of money to look forward to-and no control over when it would arrive.

“Most gamblers understand their numbers betting as a means of personal saving,” Light reported, adding: “The bettor’s justification for this seemingly preposterous misconception arises from unsatisfactory experiences with depository savings techniques. Once a numbers collector has a man’s quarter, they aver, there is no getting it back in a moment of weakness. If, on the other hand, the quarter were stashed at home, a saver would have to live with the continuing clamor of unmet needs. In a moment of weakness, he might spend the quarter. Therefore, in the bettor’s view, the most providential employment of small change is to bet it on a number.”

Precommitment and Paternalism

StickK.com has come along at a time of renewed interest in paternalism. A number of people, most prominently the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and the Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein, have suggested that institutions should help people make better choices by means of more thoughtful “choice architecture.” (Sunstein currently serves as administrator of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.) At company cafeterias, for instance, the fruits and vegetables might be displayed more prominently and priced more attractively than desserts so that people will be more likely to pick healthier items. The idea is not to mandate behavior but to present choices so that the indisputably better option is more likely to be selected.

The classic example is the movement in business to automatically enroll employees in a 401(k) plan, with the right to opt out. This is the opposite of the traditional approach, which relies on employees to opt in. It turns out that human beings have a strong status quo bias, which is a fancy way of saying inertia is a powerful force in people’s lives. In a study published in 2001, for instance, Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea found at one company that sign-ups among new hires rose to 86 percent from 49 percent after automatic enrollment was adopted. Reversing the default condition, which cost nothing and constrained nobody, thus significantly boosted the retirement prospects of a great many employees.

StickK.com lets people do this sort of thing for themselves. It’s a place where they can act of their own volition to make themselves adhere to their second-order preferences-that is, their preferences about preferences. You may like to smoke cigarettes, for example, but you may also prefer not to have that preference. And your rational allegiance is to your second preference, the one that lets you avoid lung cancer and the other problems of smoking. The beauty of stickK.com is that it lets people decide for themselves which longer-term goals they embrace, in effect by becoming their own paternalists. And it gives them the means to enforce their own second-order desires, just as people do when they have their stomachs stapled or their jaws wired to constrain their eating. As Vito Corleone might have put it, stickK.com wants you to make yourself an offer you can’t refuse.

So how can each of us be our own godfather? The answer is to shuck the naiveté of the untutored in favor of a more sophisticated approach to ourselves and our intentions. That means, first, relying as little as possible on willpower in the face of temptation. It’s much better, like Odysseus, to row right past the cattle of the sun god than to count on controlling the hunger that could lead to a fatal barbecue. It also means acknowledging how much we are influenced by our surroundings-and taking command of our environment so that it influences us in ways we prefer. Most important of all, a more sophisticated approach means recognizing that we cannot honor our best intentions by ourselves. If we are to take control of our own destiny in a world of such unprecedented freedom and abundance, we have no choice but to enlist the help of others-not just family but friends, colleagues, and community. The only hope, in short, is to do all that we can to have ourselves tied to the mast of our own intentions.

Yet there are times when we might conclude that someone so dependent on precommitment actually lacks self-control. A fat person who has his jaws wired shut in order to slim down, for example, signals to all that he couldn’t control his eating without resort to artifice. Jon Elster has observed that, when it comes to booze, many societies have norms against both drunkenness and abstinence. Sydney Greenstreet, pouring a drink in The Maltese Falcon, puts the point neatly: “I distrust a man who says ‘when.’ If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much, it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.” Regardless of the signals it sends, committing yourself-irrevocably, if you can-to your best intentions is the most powerful weapon available in the war for self-command.

Hell Is Not Other People

Inhibition often begins with the sense that somebody is watching; experiments have demonstrated that simply installing a mirror makes people behave more honestly when, for example, they pick up a newspaper and are supposed to leave their money on the honor system. Mirrors also seem to diminish stereotyping, promote hard work, and discourage cheating. In one study of children, the mere presence of a mirror reduced the stealing of Halloween candy by more than 70 percent. You can think of other people as human mirrors. “Our friends and relatives,” the psychologist Howard Rachlin writes, “are essential mirrors of the patterns of our behavior over long periods-mirrors of our souls. They are the magic ‘mirrors on the wall’ who can tell us whether this drink, this cigarette, this ice cream sundae, this line of cocaine, is more likely to be part of a new future or an old past. We dispense with these individuals at a terrible risk to our self-control.”

Human relationships are vital in many ways, but in the self-control arena we are as dependent on them as Odysseus was on his crew, for we simply cannot bind ourselves to our own wills without other people. Participants in some 12-step programs have sponsors they can call upon when the will weakens, and even stickK.com encourages users to name a referee who can attest to whether they’ve met their goals. While loneliness subverts self-control, community can promote it in various ways, not least by minimizing social isolation and establishing norms. Communities are also social information systems, and being known in one is surely a moderating force, because reputations are valuable. Communities can reward with esteem and punish by turning a cold shoulder. You can use this knowledge against yourself. If you make New Year’s resolutions, for example, you’re much better off telling everyone about them, even putting them on a blog. Once this is done, you’ll be much more likely to uphold them, since your reputation will be at stake.

If you’re serious about living up to your second-order preferences, then the truly radical approach is to treat yourself like a moderately sophisticated lab rat. People often do so instinctively by promising themselves a certain reward-opening the good wine, buying a new dress, taking a vacation in Hawaii-when a certain goal is met. But self-rewards can be tricky without appointing someone else to bestow or withhold the prize. If you don’t mind treating yourself like a lab rat, friends and family members can be a big help.

If you want to make a difficult but enduring change, announce it (to yourself and others) well in advance; an engagement period is always useful in getting one’s intended to the altar. It’s not by chance that the military allows enlistees a period of time between signing and induction. One study of charitable giving found that it rose when a delay was permitted between pledging and giving. Another study found that the longer in advance people ordered groceries, the less they spent and the healthier their choices were.

On the other hand, since speed and proximity kill self-control, it pays to keep a buffer of time and space between you and the most dubious gratifications. The Wall Street Journal cites the example of Scott Jaffa, a systems administrator in suburban Washington, D.C., who “destroyed the online access code for his 401(k) so he could no longer have instant access to his retirement accounts. His goal was to make it ‘significantly harder’ and to require ‘human interaction’ before he could trade on his own emotions.” This act of precommitment helped him endure some stomach-churning stock market declines without taking any harmful action.

Homer and Ned

In America, it sometimes seems, you are either Homer Simpson or Ned Flanders. Homer is a slave to his appetites most of the time, although his fat-clogged heart is in the right place, while his neighbor Ned is a paragon of self-control, never letting his temper get the better of him even for a moment-but only because he’s in thrall to a cult-like evangelism. Both men seem to be missing a fully functioning will.

I go back and forth when I think about which I’d rather be. Homer is selfish, shortsighted, flabby, and dumb, finding consolation in a bucket of fried chicken with extra skin. Ned is nicer and better-looking, has better-behaved kids, and runs his own business, yet there is something awful about him too. The basis of his good life seems contrived, even prefabricated, and his relationship to choice efficient but somehow stunted.

The third alternative is to decide for ourselves which of our preferences we like and then defend them against the importuning of those we do not. In the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s formulation, this is what makes you a person; the alternatives are submitting blindly to impulse, like Homer, or submitting blindly to some power outside yourself, like Ned.

Faced with these options, we find ourselves once again in the position of Odysseus, who must navigate between Scylla and Charybdis as part of his long and difficult journey home. But while we don’t have much say over the desires we have, we certainly can decide which we prefer and then search for ways to act on that basis. Self-regulation will always be a challenge, but if somebody’s going to be in charge, it might as well be ourselves.

Daniel Akst (danielakst@gmail.com) is a member of the editorial board at Newsday. This article is adapted from his book We Have Met the Enemy, published by arrangement with the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. © Copyright 2011 by Daniel Akst. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post Commit Yourself appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The sense of alarm is palpable, the inherent drama of the news inescapable. But do the events justify the coverage? In the first nine days after the earthquake, the print editions of The New York Times andThe Washington Post together carried 69 stories on the nuclear accident, including 16 on the front page. A Lexis/Nexis search of U.S. daily newspapers found 1,936 stories that mentioned the accident as of March 28.

The accident is frequently described as the worst since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union, with potentially dire consequences for the future of nuclear power. If we look back to Chernobyl, however, which was a far worse catastrophe than what has happened at Fukushima, the gap between what the media told the public and what a majority of scientists believed was huge.

In 1987, one year after the Chernobyl accident, the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) compared media coverage surrounding the disaster with scientific opinion on nuclear power. News coverage at the broadcast networks, news magazines, and leading newspapers treated Chernobyl as a disaster for nuclear energy in the United States as well.

By a 3-to-1 margin, news stories concluded that a Chernobyl-style disaster was likely to occur in the U.S. Among sources identified as scientists, those who called U.S. reactors unsafe outnumbered those who called them safe by a 3-to-2 margin. (For example, a scientist on the CBS Evening News delivered this soundbite when asked about nuclear safety: “Anything that can melt down possibly will.”)

Conversely, a CMPA survey of 580 scientists randomly selected from the listings of American Men and Women of Science (the “Who’s Who” of the scientific community) found that those who rated a Chernobyl-type accident as improbable outnumbered those who rated it as probable by a 4-to-1 margin, and those who regarded U.S. reactors as safe outnumbered those who found them unsafe by the same 4 to-1 margin.

Of course, it could be that scientists were more sanguine about nuclear power before Chernobyl, and these numbers reflect a falloff from even higher levels of support. Except that a similar study conducted in 1980 found nearly identical results. That survey of 741 AMWS-listed scientists, published in Nature, also found that scientists preferred to proceed with nuclear energy development by a margin of 89 to 9 percent.

This was all the more impressive, considering that the 1980 survey was conducted a year after the Three Mile Island accident that soured many Americans on nuclear power.

It’s been a quarter of a century since Chernobyl, and we don’t know whether scientific opinion has changed. But it seems unlikely that support for nuclear energy would have changed after so many years without a major incident. Indeed, this technology has been getting a new look from governments and environmentalists alike in recent years, as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

To risk assessors, nuclear power fits into the low probability-high consequence category of events that seem especially risky to the public because their negative effects occur only rarely but with devastating results. People are more likely to accept the negative effects of events that occur regularly and build up their impact cumulatively over time. Thus, the public rates air travel as more dangerous than travel by automobile, despite that fact that fatalities are far more likely to occur from car accidents than from airplane accidents.

The Fukushima event is dangerous both for what has already happened there and for what might yet happen. But all the scary headlines may produce irrational fears along with the fears that are perfectly reasonable. For example, on the West Coast and elsewhere, residents have engaged in panic buying of potassium iodine (which prevents radiation-induced thyroid cancer), despite living some 5,000 miles away from any radiation leak.

But media-fueled panic over this story is not inevitable. The Washington Post recently chronicled the informative but low-key coverage by NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, which has received partial credit for the absence of panic among the Japanese public. And when this crisis fades away, we will still need to find the means to fulfill our energy needs. The crucial task will become more difficult if frightening media images interfere with a reasoned assessment of nuclear power’s risks and benefits.

S. Robert Lichter is professor of communications at George Mason University, where he also directs theCenter for Media and Public Affairs, which conducts scientific studies of the news and entertainment media, and the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), which works to improve the quality of statistical and scientific information in the news. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post Nuclear News Meltdown appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley, Harper Collins, 448 pages, $26.99

Ideas have sex. In biology, through the evolution of sex some creatures became better able stay ahead of the competition. Ridley persuasively analogizes trade to sex as the engine driving the evolution of human culture. People are the only creatures known to trade one object for a different object-say, a fishing net for a spear. Thus was born the division of labor and markets. Progress is an evolutionary process, not a planned one. Deploying these basic insights, Ridley traces the arc of human prosperity from the caves to the gleaming towers of modernity. Although he acknowledges problems, Ridley cogently argues that human creativity is an inexhaustible resource, fully justifying both his title and his conviction that the best is yet to come. As the saying goes, if you read just one book next year….

Brian Doherty, senior editor

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century Volume One (1907-1948): Learning Curve, by William H. Patterson, Tor Books, 624 pages, $29.99

Science fiction guru and grand libertarian inspiration Heinlein finally gets the full doorstop literary biography treatment, and it’s a treat. Digging deep into a documentary record that isn’t as rich as a biographer might hope for-lots of Heinlein’s early effects were destroyed-Patterson skillfully guides the reader (without telling him what to think) through Heinlein’s childhood, Navy years (he left because of illness, though would have been happy to serve for life), 1930s activism in the socialist-leaning Upton Sinclair wing of California’s Democratic Party, and his idyllic-then-hellish second marriage. Heinlein always scorned the restrictive social mores of his time, but his political and economic libertarianism hadn’t yet developed by the time this volume ends. Only in a footnote do we learn a volume of Pearl Harbor revisionism was key to disabusing Heinlein of his earlier liberal FDR worship.

Nick Gillespie, editor in chief, Reason.tv and Reason.com

A Renegade History of the United States, by Thaddeus Russell, Free Press, 400 pages, $27

I picked up this fully mesmerizing account of why America is so totally awesome fearing that it would be a third-rate knock-off of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Russell’s Renegade History recovers how the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, and even the blacks all became white (and stopped being gangsters), what a total jerk John Adams was (the hagiographical musical 1776 be damned!), why Dizzy Gillespie (no relation, alas) was rejected for the draft in World War II, and so much more. He skewers lefties, righties, and even libertarians (for whom he has the most sympathy). Long after the Air Force has enough money to bomb all the schools holding bake sales and kids are free to attend slacker magnet schools, this should be the first book that gets crammed down their throats.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, senior editor

America and The Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, by Elaine Tyler May, Basic Books, 199 pages, $25.95

The contraceptive pill celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2010. American studies professor Elaine Tyler May’s America and The Pill makes well-trodden territory fresh again in her chapters on the men involved in the invention, sale, and vilification of the baby-prevention tablets. They hoped convenient hormonal contraception would stave off nuclear war, stem the rise of communism in the third world, and defuse the population bomb. They feared that unleashed female desire would turn women into ravenous man-eaters. Five decades later, the jury is still out on all counts.

Michael C. Moynihan, senior editor

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder, Basic Books, 544 pages, $29.95

The strict rules set forth by the Reason Book of the Year Committee require that I select only one entry, though 2010 was a bountiful year for both fiction and non-fiction-so allow me to clumsily skirt the rules and add a stack of books very much worth reading: Paul Berman, Frank Dikötter, Martin Amis, Michael Burleigh, Pascal Bruckner, Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow’s letters. But if your time is limited, go straight to Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, so named for the pitiable chunk of land between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany-Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states-where millions were liquidated between 1930-1945. Snyder’s brilliant and bone-chilling exposition of the Stalinist and Hitlerian killing fields, which utilizes much new archival material, makes one wonder how contemporaneous deniers of Soviet crimes (to deny fascist crimes was, thankfully, always considered the exclusive domain of cranks and anti-Semites) would react to, for instance, his accounting of the 100,000 Poles murdered during the 1937-38 purges or the six million who died because of planned famines. When the historian Robert Conquest was asked to provide a subtitle for a new, post-Cold War edition of his book on Stalin’s purges, he suggested, “I told you so, you fucking fools.” The fools are now looking even more foolish, thanks to the efforts of indefatigable historians like Snyder.

Damon Root, associate editor

Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris, Random House, 784 pages, $35

Each installment of Edmund Morris’ beautifully-written three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt contains some dismaying information-from the trust-buster’s racism and imperialism to his crafty warmongering in the run-up to the Spanish-American War-but Colonel Roosevelt is the biggest downer of the bunch. The book opens with the former president slaughtering animals on safari and ends with the unneccessary death of his beloved son Quentin, one of the 50,000 or so Americans killed in World War I, a pointless bloodbath T.R. desperately wanted the U.S. to enter. In the interim Roosevelt mounted a Progressive Party challenge to his hand-picked presidential successor William Howard Taft, thus ensuring victory for the monstrous Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the federal government, launched the country into that squalid war, seized control of the economy, and outlawed free speech. Thanks to Morris’ considerable talents, this depressing chapter of American history was a joy to read.

Peter Suderman, associate editor

Zero History, by William Gibson, Putnam, 416 pages, $26.95

Cyberpunk visionary William Gibson coined the word cyberspace in 1982 and helped build the linguistic foundations of the digital age. His recent novels, though, have shifted the balance between prediction and description: For most of the last decade, his work has been nestled firmly in the present day. His latest novel, Zero History, captures the zeitgeist of the connected-age with eerie precision. It’s a high-tech thriller constructed out of information-age infrastructure: secretive social networking, obscure couture, high-end marketing firms, and military contracts. Gibson’s present, like his future, is driven by the interplay between mass commerce and individual preference. Not only is everyone online, they all have something to sell.

Jacob Sullum, senior editor

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, by Daniel Okrent, Scribner, 468 pages, $30

In this engaging and illuminating history of the 18th Amendment’s birth and 14-year life, the journalist Daniel Okrent vividly shows how prohibition warps everything it touches, transforming ordinary business transactions into tales of intrigue. His detailed descriptions of the ways in which Americans managed to get their booze despite the government’s determination to stop them are a commentary both on human ingenuity and on the senseless costs imposed by paternalistic edicts. Okrent explains how the Anti-Saloon League turned a minority position into the supreme law of the land by mobilizing a highly motivated bloc of swing voters and how it was ultimately defeated by an unlikely coalition of angry wets and disillusioned drys. The story of their unprecedented and never-repeated feat offers hope to those of us who recognize the parallels between alcohol prohibition and the war on other drugs.

Jesse Walker, managing editor

They Live, by Jonathan Lethem, Soft Skull Press, 208 pages, $13.95

John Carpenter’s They Live is a lively leftist B-movie beloved by fans of paranoid science fiction. Jonathan Lethem’s They Live subjects the film to what must be the closest reading it has ever received, teasing out the curious contradictions in the picture’s worldview and uncovering some of the odder implications of the things we see onscreen. The result is a smart and enjoyable take not just on Carpenter’s cult movie but on a host of cultural topics, from conspiracy theories to workplace shootings to graffiti. If that sounds a little cerebral for a movie starring a pro wrestler, don’t worry; to his credit, Lethem never forgets that the film is fun. I can’t really claim that this is the best book of the year, but it’s the book that most feels like it was specially designed to appeal to me.

The post The Year in Books appeared first on Reason Foundation.