I came home to find my house surrounded by local police looking for my ex-boyfriend.

Instead of using the key I gave them to go inside, they wrecked my house with
tear-gas grenades—I was homeless for months.

I am asking the U.S. Supreme Court to protect my property

rights and yours.

I am IJ.

Shaniz West
Nampa, ID www.IJ.org Institute for Justice
National Law Firm for Liberty
$3.95US/CAN MAY 2020
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22
HOW THE AMERICAN DREAM
44
BECAME UNAFFORDABLE THERE IS NO CHINA CRISIS
KATHERINE MANGU-WARD Unless we cause one by overreacting to Asia’s
changing political and economic landscape

24 DANIEL W. DREZNER

STUDENT LOANS AREN’T

WORKING 52
But free college won’t fix this slow-moving EARTH DAY TURNS 50
catastrophe
Half a century later, a look back at the
MIKE RIGGS
forecasters who got the future wrong—and
one who got it right

32 RONALD BAILEY

CAN’T AFFORD YOUR RENT?

BLAME HERBERT HOOVER.
The feds pushed cities to implement
zoning restrictions. High prices and social
inequality were the inevitable results.
JONATHAN ROTHWELL
58
INTERVIEW: DAVID FRENCH
The Dispatch senior editor on nationalism,
conservatism, Trumpism, and liberalism
STEPHANIE SLADE

36
HOW DOCTORS BROKE
HEALTH CARE
And politicians made things even worse
CHRISTY FORD CHAPIN
 T OPIC S

CONTENTS
4
MAY 2020
FUTU R E
Is the American Dream Dead?
KATHERINE MANGU-WARD
VOLUME 52, NO. 1

5
I N FO G R A P H I C
Government Involvement
Drives Up Costs

12
6 L AW
EC O N O M Y The Constitutional Case
GOP Debt Hypocrisy Against the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau
PETER SUDERMAN
DAMON ROOT

8 14
SEX
R EG U L ATI O N
The Future of FOSTA May
Be Frivolous Lawsuits Your Recyclables Are Going
to the Dump
ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN
CHRISTIAN BRITSCHGI

9 14
DRUGS
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FUTURE
IS THE
AMERICAN
DREAM DEAD?
KATHERINE MANGU-WARD
HERE ARE TWO stories about modern Amer-
icans’ economic lives.
The first story is that the American
Dream is dead. The cost of college is bal-
looning even as higher education becomes
a prerequisite for an increasing propor-
tion of white-collar jobs. Those jobs have
become more important to the American
middle class as manufacturing and many
other forms of well-compensated blue-
collar work disappear. The debt from
obtaining this quasi-mandatory college
education (especially at expensive, cut-
throat elite schools where admission
is statistically impossible) puts newly
minted adults in a terrible position. They
feel they cannot move forward with one
of the major milestones of 20th century
adulthood: homeownership. Nor can
they afford to live in major cities with job
growth, such as New York and San Fran-
cisco, where rents have been increasing
and vacancy rates dropping for the last
decade. Seventeen percent of adults say
they cannot pay this month’s bills in full.
Feeling financially insecure, they defer
childbearing, and when they do have kids
they are stressed about how to pay for
child care and education. Less-educated
male wage earners have been hit hardest
by these economic changes; as a result,
they are struggling with unemployment,
obesity, disability, suicide, and drug
abuse. In extreme cases, this leads to
“deaths of despair” and decreasing life
expectancy. Some could be helped with
medical interventions, but when they seek
treatment, they’re hit by a combination
of rising health care costs (and attendant
medical debt) and a confusingly opaque
system. One-fourth of adults say they have
forgone necessary care because they were
unable to afford it. Government spending
on health care, mostly for the elderly, is
4 MAY 2020
out of control, yet some elderly people are
still choosing between filling their pre-
scriptions and buying food. One-quarter
of nonretired adults have no retirement
savings or pension whatsoever. Oh, and
now there’s a global pandemic.
The second story is that modern Amer-
icans are living the dream. They have
more education, bigger houses, greater
employment options, and better stuff than
ever before. Unemployment, which was
just shy of 10 percent at the start of 2010, is
now 3.6 percent. Real median household
income recently hit a high of $62,000 per
year. In February, Gallup reported that 90
percent of Americans say they are “satis-
fied with their personal lives.” New homes
in the United States are 1,000 square feet
larger than they were in 1973; living space
per person has doubled. Interest rates are
low. More Americans than ever are obtain-
ing college degrees, and those degrees are
paying dividends: The lifetime net return
for a typical college graduate is more than
half a million dollars. Consumer goods
overall are cheaper and higher-quality
thanks to innovation and global trade,
and per-capita expenditure on food has
gone from more than 17 percent of dispos-
able income in 1960 to just over 9 percent
today. Health care is expensive, but 92
percent of Americans have insurance—
and our ability to treat cancer, AIDS, and
other diseases has improved tremen-
dously. Zooming out, more people are
healthy, well-fed, literate, and safe from
physical violence than at almost any time
in human history.
Both of these stories are basically true.
Which one predominates in your thinking
is a function of your temperament, your
political persuasion, and your personal
situation.
Market-minded optimists may be
tempted to focus on the second story,
especially if the goal is to fend off large
interventions into the economy. The
impulse is to say that the rumors of the
death of the American Dream are greatly
exaggerated and that people are sim-
ply mistaken about whether life is—on
balance—worse in meaningful ways.
But it’s important to take the first
story seriously on its own terms, not least
because it is the story that has completely
dominated American electoral politics in
2020 on both the left and the right. While
Democrats and Republicans disagree with
each other (and among themselves) about
how to solve those problems, they are
not—for the most part—disagreeing about
the list of problems to be solved.
One explanation for the gap between
how bad things feel to a substantial seg-
ment of the population and how good
certain economic indicators look is that
many things are getting much better even
as a few important things are getting
much worse.
At right, you can see the sectors where
things have gotten more affordable. You
can also see where things have gotten
more expensive—in some cases wildly
more expensive. In recent decades, the
incredible gains from the private sector
have outpaced the costs of the burgeoning
state, which is why overall economic data
look pretty good. But these gains are not
distributed evenly.
Some people will look at this chart and
Photo: Sharon O’Shaughnessy/Alamy
 FOR SEVERAL YEARS now, economist Mark
see a to-do list: Every one of the red lines, INFOGR APHIC Perry has published a chart showing price
they presume, is a problem that needs to

GOVERNMENT
changes from several key sectors of the U.S.
be fixed by the government. A different
economy. And with each update the diver-
interpretation is that the red lines are
caused by government interference. The
blue lines are areas where consumers are
INVOLVEMENT gence of prices becomes more glaring. “The
obvious conclusion,” Perry says, “is that the

benefitting from a relatively open global DRIVES UP more government gets involved, or the more
government regulation, the greater are the

COSTS
market in manufactured goods and
increases in prices over time. The less govern-
technology.
ment intervention or regulation, the greater
Again, it’s possible that both are true.
the decline in prices over time.”
The government has been meddling in
those red-line sectors for decades, creat-
ing confused expectations about current PRICE CHANGES (January 1998 to December 2019)
and future prices, true levels of supply Selected U.S. Consumer Goods and Services; Wages Hospital services
and demand, and more. Solving these
problems will indeed require legislative 200%
and bureaucratic changes. But the palette College tuition and fees
of possible solutions should not be lim-
College textbooks
ited to sending in the feds with wagons
full of money and rulebooks. 160%
To seriously engage with the idea that
the American Dream has become unaf-
fordable, this issue of Reason delves into Medical care services
Child care and nursery school
the question of how we got where we are 120%
today. In “Student Loans Aren’t Working”
(page 24), Deputy Managing Editor Mike
Riggs looks at the role of federal subsidies Average hourly wages
80%
in pushing up the price of college while Housing
destroying the ability of the market for Overall inflation (+59.6%) Food and beverages
education debt to assess risk. In “Can’t
Afford Your Rent? Blame Herbert Hoover”
40%
(page 32), Gallup economist Jonathan
Rothwell goes back to the origins of resi-
dential zoning policy to explain a host
New cars
of housing woes. And in “How Doctors 0%
Household furnishings
Broke Health Care” (page 36), historian Clothing
Christy Ford Chapin examines the way
doctors, insurers, professional associa-
tions, and politicians created the United -40%
States’ current confusing and cronyist Cellphone services
medical system.
Computer software
Bad things happen to politics when Toys
Americans feel like the future will be -80%

worse than the past. Reactionary and

TVs
socialist ideologies ascend. The stories
we tell ourselves about the problems we
98

08

18
19

face have profound implications for the

20

20

policy directions we take in the future. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

But there’s much more to the story than Compiled by Mark J. Perry, American Enterprise Institute

what politicians and pundits are telling

us right now.

KATHERINE MANGU-WARD is editor in chief of

Reason.

REASON 5
ECONOMY
GOP DEBT
HYPOCRISY
PETER SUDERMAN
REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS, on the whole,
no longer care about debt or deficits—at
least not in any substantive sense. That’s a
problem for a number of reasons, not least
that it increases the risk of a debt crisis in
the future.  was roughly the size of the entire federal
Those same Republicans spent the
better part of Barack Obama’s presidency
complaining bitterly about the trillion-
dollar budget gaps the country ran dur-
ing his first term, and President Donald
Trump promised on the campaign trail
to eliminate all federal debt. But since
Trump’s election, deficits have increased
even faster than expected, and the total
federal debt has risen accordingly. That,
in turn, is likely to have long-term conse-
quences for both the economy and for the
broader politics of debt and deficits.  considerations: In the absence of a crisis,
You can see the nation’s trajectory
spelled out in painstaking detail in the
6 MAY 2020
annual budget outlook from the Congres-
sional Budget Office (CBO). Not only does
it show that the trillion-dollar deficits
that followed the financial crisis have
returned, it projects that deficits of that
magnitude will be a fixture throughout
the coming decade. Indeed, the next
decade’s cumulative deficits are now pro-
jected to be $160 billion higher than was
projected as recently as August 2019.
By 2030, CBO projects the deficit—the
annual gap between spending and rev-
enues—will reach $1.7 trillion, which
budget in 1999. Rising debt and deficits,
the budget office predicts, will coincide
with slowing economic growth, dropping
from 2.2 percent this year to 1.5 percent a
decade from now. The federal government
will be borrowing more, and the economy
will be expanding at a slower pace. It may
not lead to an immediate economic crisis,
but the nation is spending and borrowing
into stagnancy and decline.  cratic primary race, which has promi-
The GOP’s acquiescence to this even-
tuality has been driven mostly by political
lawmakers have little incentive to close
the budget gap, because doing so requires
some combination of raising taxes and
cutting spending, neither of which are
particularly popular. The biggest driv-
ers of long-term debt are Medicare
and Social Security, which benefit
seniors, many of whom are reliable
Republican voters. Trump ran
against cutting those entitle-
ments, and although his rhetoric
has wavered slightly in recent
months, he has not pressed the
issue. Republicans in Congress
don’t exactly seem eager to
tackle it either. (Trump’s 2020
budget proposed
reducing some
Medicare
payments, similar to proposals made by
the Obama administration, but would
leave the program’s essential benefit
structure intact.)
Trump also does not appear to worry
much about what happens down the road.
When his advisers in 2018 raised the
possibility of a future deficit crisis, the
president reportedly shrugged it off, say-
ing, “Yeah, but I won’t be here.” Absent
some event to force his hand, it’s unlikely
that attitude will change.
One possible forcing event would be
the election of a Democratic president in
2020, which would almost certainly see
the GOP return to its Obama-era com-
plaints about sky-high debt and deficits.
Yet if that were to happen, Democrats
would most likely dismiss these com-
plaints as hypocritical—not as honest
efforts to enforce needed fiscal restraint
but as self-interested attempts to check
the opposite party’s agenda. The Demo-
nently featured calls for tens of trillions
in new spending, has already provided
evidence for this view.
That view is also evident in the liberal
intelligentsia’s embrace of simplistic
deficits-don’t-matter economic theories
and in complaints about how the CBO’s
emphasis on basic budget math hampers
the progressive agenda. The GOP’s rank
deficit hypocrisy is empowering liberals
who view concerns about fiscal soundness
as barriers to political and policy success. 
With every passing day, the Trump-
era GOP lends credence to the idea that
Obama-era Republicans cared about defi-
cits only as a means of hampering a Demo-
cratic president. By demonstrating how
little they care about fiscal restraint while
in a position to do something about it,
Republicans are creating a political envi-
ronment that makes it even more likely
that Democrats will proceed with a deficit
denialist agenda of their own. 
Republicans under Trump haven’t just
carelessly let deficits rise and debt pile
up. They’ve made it even harder to find a
politically plausible way of righting the
nation’s fiscal trajectory.
PETER SUDERMAN is features editor at Reason.
Illustration: ElementalImaging/iStock
I give with an eye
toward the future.
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the road. DonorsTrust has helped me think
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SEX
THE FUTURE
OF FOSTA MAY
BE FRIVOLOUS
LAWSUITS
ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN
PASSED IN 2018, the Allow States and Vic-
tims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act—
or FOSTA, for short—made it a federal
crime to host web content that “promotes”
or “facilitates” prostitution.
In the nearly two years since FOSTA
became law, neither federal nor state
prosecutors have used it. But that doesn’t
mean it’s simply gathering dust. Web com-
panies are now experiencing the first wave
of civil lawsuits made possible by the law.
Companies anticipated that FOSTA
would be used more broadly than its
proponents claimed. After Congress
passed the legislation with bipartisan
support, the classified-ad platform Craigs-
list quickly axed its entire personals sec-
tion, including categories on the site that
were essentially used the same way as
dating apps.
It was not the only site to begin limit-
ing legal content related to relationships
and sex. And even though it acted quickly,
Craigslist is now the target of one of the
first FOSTA-based civil lawsuit efforts,
with plaintiffs in California and Washing-
ton state filing suit against the company.
Both cases against Craigslist rely on a
“radical theory of liability,” wrote Univer-
sity of Notre Dame Law Professor Alex Yel-
derman in a January blog post. The suits
allege that Craigslist’s “erotic services
section” was known across the U.S. “as a
place to easily locate victims”; that Craigs-
list knew bad actors had used their site;
and that this knowledge “amounted to a
venture with sex traffickers to efficiently
market victims.”
The suits do not claim Craigslist had
specific knowledge of the plaintiff (Jane
Doe), the person who harmed her, or
which ads were used for sex trafficking
8 MAY 2020
rather than consensual erotic encounters.
The suit simply claims that Craigslist
had previously been put “on notice of
the human sex trafficking” committed
through the site, and was thus responsible
for any trafficking that happened.
Classified-ad sites—like social media
platforms, blog publishers, email newslet-
ter providers, dating apps, and publica-
tions with online comments sections—are
conduits for third-party, user-generated
content. Prior to FOSTA’s passage, judges
routinely dismissed suits against Craigs-
list, Backpage, Facebook, and other web
hosts accused of sex trafficking, since a
federal law on the books bars civil cases
and state charges merely for being con-
duits of third-party speech. But FOSTA
changed the rules for speech that con-
cerns sex, opening the floodgates to indi-
vidual lawsuits against web hosts such as
Craigslist. And because the definition of
“sex trafficking” can be so blurry and the
crime so hard to prove, the broad language
in the law leaves a lot of room for lawyers
to treat FOSTA like a get-rich-quick-off-
Big-Tech scheme.
Another case in federal court this year
targets Mailchimp, an email automation
and marketing service. Anyone can sign
up for an account and use Mailchimp
tools to create and send mass emails. One
company that did so was YesBackpage, an
adult-advertising platform launched after
U.S. authorities shut down Backpage, a
website that allowed adult services ads.
Plaintiff lawyers in the Mailchimp
case say that by letting YesBackpage use
its software, Mailchimp was complicit
in, and thus financially liable for, any
crimes brokered through YesBackpage’s
user-generated content. “Mailchimp’s
marketing relationship with YesBackpage
makes it responsible for its natural conse-
quences—the sex trafficking of Jane Doe,”
the suit states.
“This view of ‘natural consequences’ is
breathtaking,” Yelderman wrote. “When
sex trafficking is somehow construed as
the ‘natural consequence’ of virtually any
action, virtually no person or entity is safe
from the threat of liability.”
Techdirt editor Mike Masnick has
also pointed out that “the claims against
Mailchimp are absolutely the kinds of
things we all warned would happen when
FOSTA was being debated.”
But FOSTA supporters insisted inno-
cent companies would have nothing to
worry about.
In 2018, when the first lawsuit chal-
lenging FOSTA’s constitutionality arrived
in federal court, Justice Department law-
yers argued that it didn’t apply to people
like masseuse Eric Koszyk, who adver-
tised on Craigslist, and sex worker activist
Alex Andrews. The U.S. District Court for
the District of Columbia agreed and tossed
the case, writing that FOSTA was “plainly
calculated to ensnare only specific unlaw-
ful acts with respect to a particular indi-
vidual, not the broad subject-matter of
prostitution.”
The plaintiffs appealed, and in Janu-
ary the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals
granted Koszyk and Andrews standing to
continue the challenge. Hopefully, they
can fight their way to a decision that will
undermine FOSTA before FOSTA further
undermines free speech on the web.
ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN is a senior editor at
Reason.
Photo: Favor_of_God/iStock

DRUGS
IS THE
CRACKDOWN
ON PAIN PILLS
FINALLY
WORKING?
Probably not
JACOB SULLUM
OPIOID-RELATED DEATHS IN the United
States, which had been rising steadily
since 1999, fell slightly in 2018, from
47,600 to 46,802, according to the latest
data from the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. That 1.7 percent
drop was mostly due to a decline in deaths
involving pain pills, which decreased by
13 percent, from 14,495 to 12,552.
The decline in opioid-related deaths
may have something to do with harm
reduction measures such as wider access
to the overdose antidote naloxone and
treatment programs involving the sub-
stitute opioids methadone and buprenor-
phine. Ham-handed efforts to reduce
the supply of pain pills, by contrast, have
deprived bona fide patients of the medica-
tion they need while driving nonmedical
users toward black-market substitutes,
Photo: pepifoto/iStock
which are far more dangerous because
their potency is highly variable.
That hazard has only been magnified
How referendums
by the increasing prevalence of illicit fen- can diffuse populist
tanyl, a cheaper and much more potent
tensions by putting
substitute for heroin. Deaths involving
“synthetic opioids other than methadone,” power back into the
the category that includes fentanyl and its hands of the people
analogs, rose by 10 percent between 2017
and 2018, from 28,466 to 31,335. That cat-
egory of drugs was involved in 67 percent
of opioid-related deaths in 2018, up from
60 percent in 2017.
While the share of opioid-related
deaths involving pain pills (i.e., prescrip-
tion analgesics excluding methadone)
rose from 34 percent in 1999 to 52 percent
in 2010, it has been declining since then.
In 2018, pain pills were involved in 27
percent of opioid-related deaths, many of
which also involved heroin or fentanyl.
Fentanyl’s role in opioid-related deaths
increased more than fivefold between
2013 and 2018. You can start to see why
the upward trend in opioid-related deaths
not only continued but accelerated after
the total volume of opioid prescriptions
began to decline in 2011, which coincided
with the rising prominence of heroin
and fentanyl.
“A practical guide
The increase in opioid-related deaths with powerful potential.”
during the last two decades is part of —Elisabeth R. Gerber,
a broader long-term trend. The total Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy,
number of drug-related deaths fell by 4 University of Michigan
percent between 2017 and 2018, from
“A crucial, clearly written book
70,237 to 67,367, a change that helped
for those who care about the fate
reverse recent declines in life expectancy.
of advanced democracies.”
But the 2018 total was still 11 times the —Richard L. Hasen,
number in 1980. The drug-related death author of Election Meltdown
rate was 20.7 per 100,000 people in 2018,
compared to just 2.7 in 1980. “Drawing on evidence from the
Even before Congress banned nonmed- United States and other democracies,
ical use of opiates and cocaine in 1914, a this book shows how initiatives
and referendums provide a safety
2019 Joint Economic Committee report
valve for populist discontent. . . .
notes, drug-related deaths were falling.
An instant classic!”
But “drug-related deaths have been ris- —Matt Qvortrup, editor of the
ing at an accelerating rate since the late European Political Science Review
1950s,” the report says, notwithstanding Cloth $29.95
the government’s increasingly expansive
and aggressive efforts to suppress the ille-
gal drug trade.
Senior Editor JACOB SULLUM is a nationally
syndicated columnist.
REASON 9
FOOD sounded good on the surface, they may
have contributed to a decline in participation

TRUMP’S in the program, which peaked in 2011 and

has been dropping ever since. Strict school
The Healthy,

SCHOOL LUNCH lunch requirements are futile if kids don’t

end up eating what’s offered—something
Hunger-Free
Kids Act of 2010
CHANGES LEAD this administration aims to fix.
While you won’t hear this from either side, wasn’t exactly
TO A POINTLESS the continued federalization of subsidized
lunch is probably a bad idea. Washington has built on flawless
FOOD FIGHT a long history of publishing unscientific and
outdated nutrition science, and it takes years nutritional
to revise itself. While many school districts
LIZ WOLFE may, in fact, need financial help to feed their
science.
poorest students, making that money contin-
IN JANUARY, PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s gent on adhering to federal menus is a recipe
administration announced changes to the for conflict and political point-scoring rather
U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National than serious policymaking.
School Lunch Program, which was previ-
ously overhauled by former first lady LIZ WOLFE is a staff editor at Reason.
Michelle Obama.
“The Occupant is trying to play petty
with the food our babies eat,” tweeted Rep.
Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.) in response to
the changes. “Add it to the list affirming
that the cruelty is the point with this White
House.”
Sam Kass, who served as executive direc-
tor of Obama’s Let’s Move! obesity reduction
program, proclaimed to The New York Times,
“It’s unconscionable that the Trump admin-
istration would do the bidding of the potato
and junk food industries.”
In truth, Trump’s changes are relatively
minor. They allow participating schools to
more easily serve a la carte items, such as
hamburgers, as snacks; they reduce the
amount of fruit required at breakfast; and
they change the types of vegetables required
at lunch. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny
Perdue says these changes were made at the
behest of school districts and could reduce
food waste.
What’s more, the Healthy, Hunger-Free
Kids Act of 2010 that Democrats say Trump is
undermining wasn’t exactly built on flawless
nutritional science. It required participat-
ing schools to serve low-fat or nonfat milk
instead of whole milk, despite scant evidence
that whole milk leads to weight gain. Com-
plying with the fruit requirement sometimes
saw schools giving low-income children two
whole bananas with breakfast, despite the
fact that starchy carbs are cheap and readily
available to low-income households, while
high-quality proteins are harder to afford for
families relying on assistance.
The National School Lunch Program
dates back to 1946 and is intended to make
it easy for schools to feed their poor-
est students. Though Obama’s changes

10 MAY 2020 Illustration: Asier Sanz

L AW the interests of American consumers by of the Federal Trade Commission,” Roos-
implementing and enforcing a wide array evelt informed Humphrey, “and frankly, I

THE of federal regulations.

The CFPB was also designed to be
think it is best for the people of this coun-
try that I should have full confidence.”
CONSTITUTIONAL independent. The agency was placed in Did the president have the lawful

CASE AGAINST
the hands of a single director appointed by authority to fire him? The Supreme Court
the president to a five-year term. Despite decided 9–0 that he did not. The FTC

THE CONSUMER wielding many executive branch–like

powers, the director of the CFPB does not
“must, from the very nature of its duties,
act with entire impartiality,” the Court

FINANCIAL answer to the White House and may only

be removed by the president for “ineffi-
said. “It is charged with the enforcement
of no policy except the policy of the law.”
PROTECTION ciency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” Because it “cannot in any proper sense be

BUREAU
DAMON ROOT
WHEN CONGRESS PASSED the Dodd-Frank
Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protec-
tion Act of 2010, it created a powerful new
federal agency charged with policing the
financial sector. A brainchild of then–
Harvard law professor Elizabeth War-
ren, the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau (CFPB) was supposed to safeguard
In other words, the director may not
be fired for purely political reasons. What
that means in practice is that if CFPB
inventor Elizabeth Warren were elected
president while a Donald Trump appoin-
tee stands at the agency’s helm, Warren
would be blocked from naming her own
preferred CFPB director until the Trump
appointee’s term had expired.
That unique organizational structure
has raised constitutional questions. How
is it consistent with the separation of pow-
ers to have a quasi-executive agency run
by a lone federal official who is essentially
untouchable by the head of the executive
branch? Is the CFPB effectively a fourth
branch of government unto itself?
The U.S. Supreme Court tackled those
very issues in March when it heard oral
arguments in Seila Law v. Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau.
The outcome will likely turn on the
Court’s application of one of its own far-
reaching precedents. At issue in Hum-
phrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) was
President Franklin Roosevelt’s dismissal
of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
commissioner for purely political reasons.
The man he fired, a Republican appointee
named William E. Humphrey, was not
exactly a New Deal sympathizer. “So
far as I can prevent it,” Humphrey
once said, “the Federal Trade Com-
mission is not going to be used
as a publicity bureau to spread
socialistic propaganda.”
FDR wanted him gone.
“I do not feel that your
mind and my mind
go along together on
either the policies or
the administering
characterized as an arm or an eye of the
executive,” the ruling concluded, the FTC
“must be free from executive control.”
If the president may not fire a commis-
sioner of the independent FTC for political
reasons, then the president likewise may
not fire a director of the independent CFPB
for political reasons, right? Not necessar-
ily. One difference between the two is that
the FTC is run by a panel of five commis-
sioners and, according to federal law, “not
more than three of the commissioners
shall be members of the same political
party.” The CFPB, by contrast, is run by
just one individual.
Seila Law, the outfit challenging the
CFPB, argues that this makes a big differ-
ence. “While the Court has in limited cir-
cumstances upheld the constitutionality of
certain multimember ‘independent’ agen-
cies, whose leading officers the President
can remove only for cause,” Seila Law told
the justices in its brief, “it has never upheld
the constitutionality of an independent
agency that exercises significant legislative
authority but is led by a single person.”
That could prove a winning position. A
majority of the justices may question the
underpinnings of the modern administra-
tive state yet balk at the idea of picking a
fight with an 85-year-old precedent. By
following Humphrey’s Executor without
going one step beyond it, the Supreme
Court could still spell constitutional doom
for the CFPB.
Senior Editor DAMON ROOT is the author of
Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S.
Supreme Court (Palgrave Macmillan).

12 MAY 2020 Photo: William E. Humphrey; Public domain

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REGUL ATION
YOUR
RECYCLABLES
ARE GOING TO
THE DUMP
CHRISTIAN BRITSCHGI
CIVIL LIBERTIES
CONDEMNED
TO DEATH BY A
SPLIT JURY IN
FLORIDA
C.J. CIARAMELLA
FLORIDA HAS HAD more exonerations of
death row inmates than any other state in
the country—roughly one for every three
executions the state has carried out. A
track record like that would normally lead
to a certain amount of circumspection,
but not on Florida’s highest court. In a
major decision issued in January, the state
Supreme Court reversed a 2016 ruling and
declared that split juries can recommend
death sentences.
In its majority opinion, the court ruled
that it “got it wrong” when it decided
that the state’s previous death penalty
scheme, which allowed death sentences
to be imposed by the recommendation of
14 MAY 2020
nonunanimous juries, violated the Florida
constitution’s prohibition on cruel and
unusual punishment.
“Lest there be any doubt, we hold that
our state constitution’s prohibition on
cruel and unusual punishment...does not
require a unanimous jury recommenda-
tion—or any jury recommendation—
before a death sentence can be imposed,”
the majority opinion stated. “The text of
our constitution requires us to construe
the state cruel and unusual punishment
provision in conformity with decisions
of the Supreme Court interpreting the
Eighth Amendment.”
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down
Florida’s death penalty law on Sixth
Amendment grounds in 2016 because it
relied too heavily on determinations by
judges, rather than juries. In response,
state legislators rewrote the law to require
10 out of 12 jurors to recommend the
death penalty. The Florida Supreme Court
then invalidated the new legislation,
saying the state constitution required
a unanimous jury recommendation in
death penalty cases. Now the justices have
changed their mind.
Alabama is the only other state that
allows nonunanimous jury recommenda-
tions in death penalty cases. It also allows
judges to override jury recommendations.
According to a 2016 report by Harvard
Law School’s Fair Punishment Project,
89 percent of Florida and Alabama’s
death penalty sentences since 2010 were
decided by nonunanimous juries.
In a lone dissent to January’s deci-
sion, Florida Supreme Court Justice Jorge
Labarga wrote that “the majority gives the
green light to return to a practice that is
not only inconsistent with laws of all but
one of the 29 states that retain the death
penalty, but inconsistent with the law gov-
erning the federal death penalty. Further,
the majority removes an important safe-
guard for ensuring that the death penalty
is only applied to the most aggravated and
least mitigated of murders. In the stron-
gest possible terms, I dissent.”
Requiring unanimous juries under-
scores the gravity of a death penalty
sentence. The Florida Supreme Court’s
decision to roll back those protections
ignores it.
C.J. CIARAMELLA is a reporter at Reason.
Photo: curtoicurto/iStock
BALTIMORE COUNTY RESIDENTS have had
their perceptions about recycling shattered.
In early February, news broke that for the
last seven years, the county has been trash-
ing the glass it collects as part of the county
recycling program.
“There are numerous issues with glass
recycling, including increased presence of
shredded paper in recycling streams which
contaminates materials and is difficult to
separate from broken glass fragments, in
addition to other limitations on providing
quality material,” a county spokesper-
son told The Baltimore Sun.
Glass recycling reportedly stopped in
2013, the same year the county opened a
$23 million single-stream recycling facility,
according to the Sun. Single-stream recycling
refers to the practice of letting people put all
their recyclables into one bin, then sorting it
at processing facilities. It’s more convenient
for consumers than asking them to place
their papers, plastics, and glass items in
Photo: 12 Angry Men/Everett Collection
separate curbside containers.
Baltimore County fully adopted single-
streaming by October 2010, part of a growing
trend among municipalities trying to boost
recycling rates. A study from the American
Forest & Paper Association found that the
population covered by a single-stream recy-
cling service that included glass grew from
22 percent in 2005 to 73 percent in 2014. The
thinking was that if you make recycling easier,
more people will do it.
The trouble is that placing everything
in the same bin increases the chances of
contamination. Non-compatible materials get
mixed together or coated with food waste. So
a good deal of the glass isn’t pure enough to
ground down and ship to glass manufactur-
ers. Chemical & Engineering News notes that
only 40 percent of glass collected by single-
stream services ends up being recycled into
new products, compared to 90 percent of
glass in multi-stream collection systems.
The cost of transporting heavy glass
from recycling centers to glass manufactur-
ers is also often prohibitively high, making
the production of new, nonrecycled glass
more economical.
Regardless of the material in question,
the American recycling industry has been
going through a crisis over the last several
years. Rising rates of contamination and the
effective closure of a major export market
in China, which stopped accepting most
American plastics in 2018, have left material
processing facilities with no willing buyers.
Many of the recyclables that are collected end
up in landfills or incinerators.
That’s exactly what’s been happening to
Baltimore County’s glass. Yet county officials
are still encouraging residents to recycle the
stuff, fearful that people will fall out of the
recycling habit. Ritual is apparently more
important than reuse.
CHRISTIAN BRITSCHGI is an associate editor at
Reason.
REASON 15
LIFEST YLE SHORT OF OPENING a libertarian theme
park (“Ride the Rockin’ Road to Serf-

IS PASSOVER dom!”), it can be difficult to make the love

of liberty a “lived experience,” especially
THE MOST for kids. What we need is something

LIBERTARIAN
hands-on—an emotional, immersive
experience that gets children and their

HOLIDAY? parents totally involved.

Fortunately, this multimedia memory-
maker already exists. It’s called Passover.
LENORE SKENAZY
Passover is the Jewish festival of free-
dom. It’s an annual retelling of the Exo-
dus story, complete with jingles, novelty
foods, and cash prizes. Moses went down
to Egyptland more than 3,000 years ago,
yet the story miraculously manages—like
last year’s matzo—to stay fresh as ever.

Matzo
NOT FOR NOTHING do some Jews jokingly
call this holiday the “festival of constipa-
tion.” Matzo is the corrugated cardboard–
like bread substitute we are commanded
to eat all eight days of Passover. The story
says that when Pharaoh finally let the Jews
go, they feared he might change his mind,
so they fled without even waiting for their
dough to rise. To this day, we eat the same
thing they did: unleavened bread. The fact
that it wreaks havoc on many a digestive
system is actually quite clever: Our suffer-
ing reminds us of our forebears’ suffering.
In fact, on Passover, we can’t even say they,
as in “They left Egypt.” We have to say me
or we, as in “This is to remember when
God took me out of Egypt.” Because, as
the haggadah points out, if “they” hadn’t
been taken out, “we” would still be there.
Touché!

The Haggadah
THIS IS THE Passover playbook filled with
stories, songs, and stage directions such
as “lift the matzo and show it to everyone.”
What other holiday comes with its own
instruction book? And since it’s all right
there, this is a holiday Jews basically cel-
ebrate in the same way from Texas to Tel
Aviv. We eat an apple and nut mixture that
reminds us of the mortar they...er, we...
used to build Pharaoh’s temples. We eat
bitter herbs to feel, well, bitter. We point to

16 MAY 2020
a lamb shank bone to remember how they
(we!) painted lamb’s blood on our door-
frames so God would pass over us (yes,
that’s where the word comes from) when
he got to Plague No. 10, the killing of the
firstborn sons. We even spill some wine as
a small sacrifice in honor of the suffering
of the Egyptians themselves. Every bit of
the service points back to how terrible it
was to be enslaved, reminding us that our
duty is to be grateful for—and to work to
spread—freedom.
The Afikomen
AT THE END of the meal, kids go hunting for
a little piece of—you guessed it—matzo,
known as the afikomen. The winner gets
a prize, often cash that he or she has to
haggle for. Just like trade show organiz-
ers promising the grand prize drawing at
the end, this scavenger hunt keeps people
from leaving early. It also gets the kids
running around, bonding (and fighting)
with their cousins, assuring even more
memories are made.

‘Dayenu’ IF THE HOLIDAY just featured a special

ONE PARTICULAR SONG dominates this game, dayenu. If it featured a special game
holiday: “Dayenu.” In Hebrew, the word and a special food, dayenu. But Passover
means “it would have been enough.” As works on every level, hammering home
in: If God had just taken us out of Egypt, it the message: Thank God (literally!) for
would have been enough—but He did so freedom.
much more, which the song then goes on
to list. The key here is the killer chorus, in LENORE SKENAZY is president of the nonprofit
Let Grow and founder of Free-Range Kids.
which dayenu is repeated endlessly. It’s
so simple that a toddler can sing it. Jews
with Alzheimer’s can sing it too—even
after they’ve forgotten almost everything
else. (I’ve witnessed this myself.) That is a
great jingle.

The Four
Questions
THE FREEDOM THEME is front and center
again when the youngest child at the
Passover dinner is expected to ask the
famous “four questions,” beginning with:
“Why is this night different from all other
nights?” Why? Because this is the night
we really try to feel what it was like to be a
slave set free. Each of the four questions
gets back to that point: Oppression bad.
Liberty amazing! Assigning question
duty to the youngest kid guarantees that
every child will do it at some point, assur-
ing a lot of buy-in. And since it’s the kid’s
first big moment in the family spotlight,
not to mention the great river of Jewish
tradition, it’s memorable for everyone at
the table.

Illustrations: Joanna Andreasson

Source image: shugarWarrior/iStock REASON 17
WORLD
INDIA’S MODI
IMPORTS
AMERICAN
DISCRIMINATION
SHIKHA DALMIA
AMERICA’S SUCCESS IN delivering enviable
living standards while protecting human
rights has made it the moral gold standard
of the world, inspiring global movements
for social justice, freedom, and democ-
racy. But the flip side is that when America
departs from these principles, it hands a
license to other countries to do the same.
India is living proof.
Even before President Donald Trump
brought nativism front and center in U.S.
politics, India was rummaging through
American jurisprudence for intellectual
ammo to justify similar policies. The
world’s second-most-populous country
experienced a massive influx of Bangla-
deshi refugees in 1971 when Pakistan
declared war on Bangladesh to prevent it
from seceding. Pakistan’s brutality trig-
gered the single largest displacement
of people in the second half of the 20th
century, with 10 million Bangladeshis,
predominantly Muslim, fleeing to border-
ing Indian states.
Although two-thirds of these refugees
eventually returned home, the rest settled
in places such as Assam, a lovely, bucolic
state famous for its tea, nestled in the
northeastern Himalayan range. This gen-
erated tensions with the local Assamese.
After some grisly episodes of bloodletting,
the Indian Supreme Court intervened in
2005. It scrapped an existing law that it
insisted was hamstringing the govern-
ment’s expulsion efforts and created an
expedited deportation timetable.
How did India’s highest court justify
all this? By quoting an entire passage from
the notorious 1889 ruling Chae Chan Ping
v. United States, in which the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act
and declared that “the highest duty of a
nation” is to “give security against foreign
18 MAY 2020
aggression and encroachment,” including
from “vast hordes” of foreigners “crowd-
ing in upon us.”
This is exactly how Trump character-
izes Central American refugees—and
how Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi characterizes Bangladeshi Muslim
immigrants. Moreover, just as Trump is
expanding detention camps to house asy-
lum-seekers who illegally cross the border,
the Modi government is building a vast
network of detention camps to segregate
Indian Muslims who can’t prove that their
ancestors hailed from India.
THE MODI GOVERNMENT is also deploying
well-meaning U.S. policies for immoral
ends. Recently, Modi rammed through
India’s Parliament something called the
Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which
will hand mass amnesty to nearly every
religious refugee from Pakistan, Afghani-
stan, and Bangladesh living illegally in
India, unless the refugees are Muslim.
Such a religious test for citizenship has
generated massive protests in India and
condemnation abroad. But Modi’s cheer-
leaders claim that the CAA is no different
from the Lautenberg Amendment, an
obscure American law that was sponsored
by the eponymous Democratic senator
from New Jersey and passed in 1990 to
hand Soviet Jews and Christians an expe-
dited pathway to refugee status.
The concern at that time was that the
political instability generated by the fall of
the USSR would make these groups—but
especially Jews—even more vulnerable
to persecution by fellow citizens and new
regimes. (Lautenberg was subsequently
expanded to include Iranian Jews, Chris-
tians, and Baha’is.) Today, Modi’s support-
ers claim that there is no functional differ-
ence between the Lautenberg Amendment
and the CAA, because both laws create
special channels for some religiously per-
secuted minorities without eliminating
existing channels for any group.
While it would certainly be better if
Lautenberg had been written in a reli-
giously neutral fashion, this comparison
has holes bigger than the Khyber Pass.
The most obvious one is that Lauten-
berg wasn’t meant to cater to dominant
religious prejudices, while the CAA is a
blatant attempt to feed them. Moreover,
Lautenberg aimed to admit more refu-
gees into America, not to create a dis-
criminatory standard for those inside the
country. When it comes to attaining U.S.
citizenship, one uniform rule applies for
everyone, regardless of race, caste, creed,
religion, or nationality. Most importantly,
America had “normal channels” to accept
refugees when Lautenberg was passed,
while India does not.
Modi would have found a way to
advance his Hindu nationalist agenda no
matter what. But his job becomes a whole
lot easier when he can enlist American
laws to make his case for him.
SHIKHA DALMIA is a senior analyst at Reason
Foundation.
Photo: Mint/Getty
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REASON 19
POLITICS
MAYOR PETE’S
‘NATIONAL
SERVICE’
PLAN WAS A
NATIONALIST
FANTASY
MATT WELCH
PETE BUTTIGIEG, THE former mayor of South
Bend, Indiana, who briefly looked like a
serious contender for the Democratic presi-
dential nomination before dropping out on
March 1, loves imagining his war-veteran
self on a debate stage with the Vietnam-
dodging Donald Trump. He is also fond of
asserting that “few—if any—single policy
solutions carry the promise of democratic
renewal more than national service.”
What Buttigieg and other fans of the
perennially elusive goal of national ser-
vice fail to grasp is that the real-world
anecdote always undermines the cam-
paign-season fantasy. Using the blunt
force of government to forge national
unity will forever disappoint as long as
individuals have the ability to wiggle out
of conformity.
Nodding to the political realities of the
day, Mayor Pete stresses that his plan is
“strictly optional.” But it’s worth remem-
bering that no U.S. resident can legally
opt out of paying the taxes that feed the
federal beast.
The 2009 Edward M. Kennedy Serve
America Act (if you wince at that title,
note that the House version was called the
Generations Invigorating Volunteerism
and Education, or GIVE, Act) expanded the
upper limit on Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps
from 75,000 annual volunteers to 250,000,
ostensibly paid for by jacking up the annual
20 MAY 2020
appropriation to just over $1 billion. Yet
Buttigieg notes that current funding lev-
els translate into acceptance for only 13
percent of AmeriCorps applicants and 25
percent of Peace Corps aspirants.
The mayor doesn’t put a price tag on
his “Service for All (who want it)” plan,
nor does he acknowledge that—like the
military, whose acceptance levels are only
20 percent, despite U.S. foreign policy’s
inexhaustible appetite for young bod-
ies—many people who “want” to join fail
to meet the minimum qualifications. Still,
his idea seems undoable at less than $5
billion a year.
Which, to be sure, is only as much as
Washington spends each morning. But
when not dreaming out loud about price-
less plans like this one, Buttigieg was one
of the few candidates who actively cam-
paigned on reducing the government’s
unconscionable trillion-dollar deficits.
And don’t kid yourself—Buttigieg
would love for national service to be a hell
of a lot more expensive than $5 billion a
year. Asked by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow
in April 2019 why he chose to enlist in his
mid-20s after Harvard and Oxford, the
candidate waxed eloquently about seek-
ing to bridge the country’s vast class and
racial divides, a gap perhaps most starkly
observed in who does and does not serve
in the military.
“One thing we could do that would
change that,” he told Maddow, “would be
to make it, if not legally obligatory, but
certainly a social norm, that anybody
after they’re 18 spends a year in national
service.” On his website, the candidate
reiterates that aspiration: “Our intention
is for this proposal to create a pathway
towards a universal, national expecta-
tion of service for all 4 million high school
graduates every year.”
Beware politicians touting blanket
expectations for 18-year-olds. That kind
of generational puppeteering is why we
still have such illiberal anachronisms as
Selective Service, such punitive paternal-
isms as our brand new national vaping
ban for those under 21, and such question-
able national trends as the over-prefer-
ence for college educations over workplace
apprenticeships and vocational training.
Buttigieg’s proposal is nearly identi-
cal to one coughed up by then–Sen. John
McCain in the pages of the Washington
Monthly after September 11, 2001. “The
decline of the citizen-soldier is not healthy
for a democracy,” McCain wrote. “While
it is not currently politically practical to
revive the draft, it is important to find bet-
ter incentives and opportunities for more
young Americans to choose service in the
military, if not for a career, then at least for
a limited period of time.”
Banging the social-cohesion drum,
too, was McCain’s 2008 vanquisher,
Barack Obama, who on the campaign trail
touted a national volunteer network “just
as powerful, just as strong, just as well-
funded” as the military.
The problem is not that some Ameri-
cans choose to serve in the armed forces or
AmeriCorps. The problem is that by con-
scripting taxpayer money toward those
purposes, politicians are distorting the
marketplace of 18-year-olds’ choices and
empowering themselves to decide what
meaningful service looks like.
I am glad Mayor Pete served, and I am
glad that I did not. May our children have
even more choices than we did.
MATT WELCH is editor at large at Reason.
Photo: Lorie Shaull/Creative Commons
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22 MAY 2020
THERE’S NO DENYING that a big chunk of the economy feels pretty
screwed up right now for millions of working-class and middle-
class Americans. There’s a widespread sense that obtaining hous-
ing, education, and health care was once fairly easy and cheap
but has now become mind-bogglingly complex and expensive.
Addressing anxiety around the increasing elusiveness of these
building blocks of an archetypical American life is at the heart
of virtually all rhetoric in the 2020 election cycle, with everyone
from democratic socialist presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders to
nationalist conservative Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) hastening to
offer funeral orations for the American Dream—while also promis-
ing to resurrect it.
What follows is a forensic investigation into how the markets
for health care, higher education, and residential housing got
broken. The goal is not, in this issue, to offer a comprehensive
set of solutions, though you’ll see hints about possible remedies
throughout. Nor is it to challenge the premise that times are
tough. There is much to celebrate in the modern American econ-
omy, but pointing out the ways in which things are pretty good
Illustration: Joanna Andreasson
Source images: ojoel/iStock; Kirk Fisher/Shutterstock
overall doesn’t go far with people who feel like they are drowning.
Instead, we went looking for the moments at which these parts
of our economy veered off track. When you reject the too-simple
narrative about greedy corporations bleeding ordinary Ameri-
cans dry, more complicated and (unfortunately) more intractable
causes for the current crisis emerge. In each sector, well-inten-
tioned efforts by the government to address real problems cre-
ated the conditions for a vicious cycle of rent-seeking, cronyism,
innovation suppression, crippled pricing mechanisms, spiraling
spending, and growing debt. These are stories about how seem-
ingly small policy changes can have big effects on incentives and
choices down the line, for politicians and citizens alike.
If we’re going to restructure American politics around restor-
ing some version of the American Dream—as both Republicans
and Democrats seem keen to do—we should at least know what
we’re facing and why. When you’re trying to fix something, it’s
important to understand how it got broken in the first place.
— KATHERINE MANGU-WARD
REASON 23
24 MAY 2020
 BUT FREE COLLEGE WON’T
FIX THIS SLOW-MOVING
CATASTROPHE

MIKE RIGGS

N THE DAY he signed the Higher

Education Act of 1965, Presi-
dent Lyndon B. Johnson
declared that the law would
“swing open a new door for
the young people of America”
and provide “a way to deeper
personal fulfillment, greater
personal productivity, and
increased personal reward.” Johnson wanted Americans to
know that his government would do whatever it could to help
“every child born in these borders to receive all the education
that he can take.”
Signed at Southwest Texas State College, Johnson’s alma
mater, the Higher Education Act authorized federal scholar-
ships and federally funded part-time jobs for students who
could get into college but couldn’t pay for it. But the real catalyst
for increasing college enrollment was a provision that allowed
the government to directly lend students money for tuition and
to guarantee loans made by other entities. This new lending

Illustration: Joanna Andreasson

Source image: Bill Brooks/Alamy Stock Photo REASON 25
authority, Johnson said at the signing ceremony, would allow
the federal government to issue to “worthy, deserving, capable
students” loans “free of interest and free of any payment sched-
ule until after you graduate.”
The modern approach by which students finance higher edu-
cation grew on and around these three policies—federal schol-
arships, federal work-study funding, and federally guaranteed
loans—like vines around a trellis. Yet half a century later, many
young Americans feel that Johnson’s signature education initia-
tive has saddled them with excess debt and delayed their gradu-
ation into middle-class adulthood.
The Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 started as a cacoph-
ony of disparate complaints against the financial sector but
eventually coalesced around college debt. The idea of forgiv-
ing student loans has since moved from poster boards on the
streets of Manhattan and D.C. to the campaign websites of
Democratic presidential candidates, with Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I–Vt.) promising to wipe out student debt for all borrowers and
former Vice President Joe Biden pledging to expand existing
loan forgiveness programs.
Johnson wanted future generations to think of the Higher
Education Act of 1965 as a promise from the federal govern-
ment: “Tell them that we have opened the road and we have
pulled the gates down and the way is open, and we expect them
to travel it.” He and the 89th Congress paved that road with the
best intentions, and many millions of young people have indeed
traveled along it. Why, then, do so many Americans who have
participated in our system of financing higher education feel
like they’ve been ripped off?
Because many of them were.
THE FIRST STUDENT loan crisis occurred more than 20 years
before Occupy Wall Street protesters set up camp in Zuccotti
Park. Yet it “followed a strikingly similar path to the more
recent experience,” the Brookings Institution’s Adam Looney
and the University of Chicago’s Constantine Yannelis wrote in
a January 2019 working paper titled “The Consequences of Stu-
dent Loan Credit Expansions: Evidence From Three Decades of
Default Cycles.”
In the 1980s, an alarming number of student loan borrow-
ers began defaulting on their payments. In 1985, the default
rate for federally guaranteed student loans—the percentage of
borrowers who had failed to make a payment within 180 days
of the repayment period—jumped to 11.7 percent from 10.7
percent the year before. The federal government’s payments to
lenders who couldn’t collect from student borrowers rose from
$749 million to over $1 billion. “The financial implications...
are staggering,” U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett said
in August 1985. Without major policy reforms, he projected the
default rate would increase to 13.6 percent by 1990.
26 MAY 2020
He was wrong. The student loan default rate for all borrowers
was roughly 22.4 percent in 1990. By 1992, the federal govern-
ment’s annual cost for default payments was nearly five times
what it had been in 1985. The agency then known as the Gen-
eral Accounting Office (GAO) estimated in a 1993 report that
the Department of Education the year prior had “paid about $5
billion in default claims and interest subsidies.”
But the student loan default explosion was not occurring
across the entire education sector. The Department of Educa-
tion’s data suggested, and the GAO and the Office of Manage-
ment and Budget would later confirm, that students of for-profit
or “proprietary” schools—then and now the largest providers of
technical and vocational training to American workers—were
defaulting at much higher rates than other types of students,
largely due to bad federal incentives.
“While proprietary school students comprised about 22 per-
cent of all Government Student Loan Program borrowers who
received their last loan in academic year 1983, they accounted
for 44 percent of defaulters as of September 30, 1987,” read a
bipartisan 1990 report from the Senate Permanent Subcom-
mittee on Investigations. “Over that period, the student default
rate for proprietary schools was 39 percent, as contrasted to a 10
percent rate for four-year public and private schools.”
The rate of default was essentially eating the Government
Student Loan Program (GSLP) program from the inside. “The
cost of defaults, as a percentage of all GSLP program costs, rose
from about 10 percent in [fiscal year] 1980 to 36 percent in [fiscal
year] 1989, and to more than 50 percent in [fiscal year] 1990,”
the Senate report said. “In other words, currently more than half
of the government’s GSLP cost is going to pay for defaulted loans
from the past rather than to subsidize education and training
for today’s students.”
In their paper, Looney and Yannelis trace the default crisis of
the late 1980s and early 1990s to Congress’ 1972 reauthoriza-
tion of the Higher Education Act, in which it allowed for-profit or
proprietary colleges to participate in the GSLP. When it reautho-
rized the act in 1976, Congress extended eligibility to applicants
who had not completed high school and encouraged states that
hadn’t done so already to create their own “guaranty agencies,”
which would partner with the federal government to initiate and
guarantee student loans for low-income students.
In hindsight, allowing high school dropouts to borrow feder-
ally guaranteed money in order to attend for-profit colleges was
disastrous for a large number of borrowers. But you can see the
nobility of the idea if you squint. The federal government was
already subsidizing the education of future teachers, lawyers,
doctors, and accountants; what about mechanics, electricians,
plumbers, and welders? Didn’t they need training, and didn’t
that training cost money?
Bennett, who served as education secretary from 1985 to
1988, did not mince words about for-
profit schools, telling Congress in 1988
that his department found “serious, and
in some cases pervasive, structural prob-
lems in the governance, operation, and
delivery of postsecondary vocational-
technical education.”
But he also trained his criticism on
state guaranty agencies, which were
intended to serve as paternal co-signers
for students but ended up being some-
thing else entirely.
First authorized by Johnson’s Higher
Education Act of 1965, such agencies
were supposed to “partner with the fed- Half a century
eral government to co-sign the bank
loans” and serve “as ambassadors at the
later, many
local level, educating high school stu-
dents about college opportunity and the
young Americans
availability of loans,” the progressive feel that the
Century Foundation’s Robert Shireman
and Tariq Habash wrote in a 2016 report federal college
on the legacy of guaranty agencies. These
supposedly benevolent bodies would not loan system has
only share the risk of default with the fed-
eral government; they would provide the saddled them
Department of Education with a network
of partner organizations that could help
with excess debt
implement the Higher Education Act on
the front lines.
and delayed their
“The idea,” Shireman and Habash graduation into
wrote, “was that by putting their own
donated resources on the table, guaranty middle-class
agencies would have a stake in a humane
and successful loan program, helping adulthood.
low-income students attend quality
colleges.” Ideally, “they would operate
as charities do, with an approach that
hinged on more than just the bottom line:
when borrowers did default, rather than
immediately engaging in aggressive col-
lection tactics, the agencies could assess
the situation and provide assistance and
advice as appropriate.”
But states were not eager to take on
the risk of loan defaults, as evidenced by
the fact that only half of them formed
any kind of guaranty organization after
the passage of the Higher Education Act
of 1965. To incentivize the formation of
guaranty agencies in every state, Con-
gress in 1976 made the federal govern-
ment fully responsible for reimbursing
lenders in the event of default.
“In essence, the federal government
was issuing a blank check to cover the cost
of operational expansion by any guaranty
agency that decided to take advantage of
that opportunity,” Shireman and Habash
wrote. “The system boomed, but rather
than having risk-sharing partners, the
federal government instead had a set of
guaranty agencies that, like a sole-source
contractor, earned more money with
every loan they guaranteed rather than
contributing anything at all.”
In its 1993 report, the GAO noted that
the structure of state guaranty organi-
zations was fundamentally problematic.
They operated with a federal charter as a
co-guarantor of student loans, yet they
“assume[d] little financial risk and are
not compensated in a way that provides
sufficient incentives to prevent defaults.”
In fact, guaranty organizations were
compensated by the federal government
in a way that encouraged risky lending,
according to the 1990 report from the
Permanent Subcommittee on Investi-
gations. To cover their operating costs,
guaranty agencies were allowed to charge
both student borrowers and the Educa-
tion Department a percentage of loan
values. When students defaulted or died
or declared bankruptcy, the Education
Department reimbursed lenders for 100
percent of the default amount, with state
guaranty agencies acting essentially
as a conduit. Yet when guaranty agen-
cies managed to collect defaulted pay-
ments from borrowers, they had to give
the Department of Education only “65
percent or 70 percent of any monies col-
lected.” That combination of incentives
resulted in assembly line lending, not
prudence.
By the late ’80s, the federal govern-
ment’s efforts to educate more low-
income students had resulted in a mad
dash to lend as many poor people as
REASON 27
much money as possible. Bennett
sought to reduce taxpayer exposure to
the federally guaranteed student loan
market by submitting a host of reforms
to Congress, many of which were later
enacted. New rules and regulations
passed by Congress in 1989 and 1990
capped the amount of revenue propri-
etary colleges could derive from federal
student aid programs at 85 percent; the
guaranty agencies were tasked with
paying a larger share of default costs;
and schools whose students had default
rates above 30 percent were barred from
receiving federal aid.
These policy changes shrunk both
the for-profit college sector and the
student loan default rate, according to
Looney and Yannelis. When Congress
loosened the rules in the mid-1990s and
again in the early 2000s, the number of
for-profit colleges increased, as did the
default rate.
All told, Looney and Yannelis esti-
mate that this process—federal credit
expansion, default rate increase; fed-
eral credit contraction, default rate
decrease—has happened three times,
with the most recent credit contrac-
tion cycle occurring just as Occupy
Wall Street was finding its footing. Con-
sidering that we’re now in a period of
relatively tight credit for higher educa-
tion, it should come as no surprise that
default rates are down.
THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES of fed-
erally guaranteed loans to students of
for-profit institutions has been a major
policy topic for decades now. But what
about the attendees of traditional aca-
demic institutions, such as public col-
leges and nonprofit private universi-
ties? Have they been fleeced as well?
Bennett argued in a 1987 New York
Times op-ed, “Our Greedy Colleges,”
that federal aid was actually making
all forms of college more expensive. “In
1978, subsidies became available to a
greatly expanded number of students,”
28 MAY 2020
he wrote. “In 1980, college tuitions
began rising year after year at a rate that
exceeded inflation. Federal student aid
policies do not cause college price infla-
tion, but there is little doubt that they
help make it possible.”
The “Bennett Hypothesis” has been
a source of conflict among higher edu-
cation policy makers and economists,
largely because it’s been so difficult to
test. What’s not in dispute is that college
costs have increased dramatically over
the last three decades. Between 1981
and 1995, the average tuition and gross
The current fees for full-time undergraduate students
across all institution types increased 88.7
consensus is that percent; between 1996 and 2014, the
private colleges, increase was 70 percent. In short, every
type of institution is significantly more
both nonprofit expensive now than it was three decades
ago in today’s dollars, though public
and for-profit, institutions remain the most affordable.
How much of that cost increase was
respond to federal driven by federal aid? It’s difficult to
determine. The current consensus is that
aid by reducing private colleges, both nonprofit and for-
the discounts they profit, respond to federal aid by reducing
the discounts they offer to students. Less
offer to students. federal aid, bigger discount; more federal
aid, smaller discount.
Less federal aid, Proving causation is tougher. David
O. Lucca, Taylor Nadauld, and Karen
bigger discount; Shen noted in a 2015 report for the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
more federal aid, that researchers “only have reliable
time series data on the sticker-price of
smaller discount. tuition rather than the net tuition paid
by students after accounting for scholar-
ships or discounts to lower-income stu-
dents.” Their paper, which looked at the
impact of credit expansions on tuition
increases, found that “expensive, pri-
vate, or sub-four-year programs are
associated with larger tuition responses
to loan maximum changes.”
The difficulties of proving the Ben-
nett Hypothesis reflect the complexity
of figuring out exactly how much col-
lege costs, particularly at private non-
profit institutions. As Lucca et al. note,
the actual cost of college is often not the same as the advertised
price of college. This phenomenon is also a result of federal
intervention in the higher education market.
To determine the cost of attending any particular school,
students can’t just look at the coming academic year’s “sticker
price,” which at private nonprofit institutions can exceed the
median U.S. household income, and which very few students
pay in full. Instead, applicants must fill out a Free Application
for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which the federal government
uses to determine a student’s “expected family contribution”
as well as what types of federal aid the student is eligible for.
That information is shared with the schools that the student
designated in her FAFSA application. The schools then deter-
mine how much “institutional aid”—essentially, merit- and
need-based discounts off the sticker price—to offer the person.
Eventually, students receive a tailored aid package from their
selected schools informing them how much it will actually cost
them to attend.
In 2017, economist Lesley J. Turner looked at the impact of
need-based Pell Grants on the final cost students paid. Across
the entire higher education sector, she estimated that between
11 and 20 percent of Pell Grant aid is “passed through” to
schools, meaning that the schools find a way to capture a por-
tion of the aid without charging students any less out-of-pocket
for their educations. While Bennett claimed that all types of
schools capture aid without lowering costs, Turner found that
the phenomenon occurs most notably at private nonprofit insti-
tutions. Some selective private nonprofit schools, Turner found,
manage to capture as much as 75 percent of Pell Grants. In short,
needy students attending these schools are unable to increase
their purchasing power by the total amount of the Pell Grants
they receive.
My own experience is instructive. After I filled out and sub-
mitted my FAFSA in spring 2004, the private nonprofit univer-
sity I ended up attending informed me that I would be receiving
a merit-based and a need-based scholarship from the university,
a merit-based scholarship from the state of Florida, and a need-
based Pell Grant from the federal government. The remaining
amount I owed in tuition and fees that first year was roughly as
much as I was eligible to borrow in federal loans as a first-year
college student. The following year, my alma mater increased
its tuition and fees, but my Pell Grant dropped slightly with
the federal schedule. Rather than increase my discount, my
university kept my discount the same and informed me that I
owed slightly more—but still roughly as much as I was eligible
to borrow in federal Stafford loans as a second-year college stu-
dent. This process repeated in my third and fourth years, when,
due to tuition increases, I also became eligible for an additional
need-based federal Perkins loan.
There are, of course, alternative theories to explain why the
increase in college costs has far outpaced inflation. In a 2014
report, the Congressional Research Service suggested that col-
leges may have “ineffective centralized control of costs, suffer
from various types of productivity issues, and have institutional
orientations and incentives targeted toward raising and spend-
ing considerable amounts to enhance students’ experiences
as opposed to orientations toward using resources efficiently.”
But even if other factors are driving up costs, federal aid makes
those cost increases possible. Which means that financial aid
for private nonprofit university students looks a lot like health
care, wherein the customer, the third-party payer, and the ser-
vice provider all have varying amounts of information and the
sticker price is never the actual price.
JUST AS EXPENSIVE health care keeps you alive, expensive college
increases your earning potential. In 2015, researchers Chris-
topher R. Tamborini, ChangHwan Kim, and Arthur Sakamoto
published a paper in Demography that measured the 50-year
lifetime earnings gap between high school graduates and
bachelor’s degree holders at $896,000 for men and $630,000
for women. Considering that only 2 percent of students borrow
more than $50,000 for an undergraduate degree, most of us are
getting a good return on our education.
But what if you borrowed money for college and did not get
a degree? What if you borrowed more than you can afford to pay
back? In other arenas, people who lose everything on a bad bet
have the option of discharging their debts and starting over by
filing for bankruptcy. Student loan debts, however, are “pre-
sumptively nondischargeable.” That means that it’s possible to
get rid of them by declaring bankruptcy, but most people can’t.
The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 prohibited borrowers
from discharging student loans in bankruptcy for the first five
years of repayment. Later amendments changed that to seven
years, and then to the entire life of the loan. In 2005, the Higher
Education Reconciliation Act made even private loans nondis-
chargeable in bankruptcy.
In a 2012 piece for Reuters, the progressive writer Maureen
Tkacik highlighted fearmongering in the 1970s, when Los Ange-
les Times reporter Linda Mathews wrote about “underground
newspapers urging students to use bankruptcy to avoid paying
loans.” The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times also
published pieces warning of a looming generation of college-
educated deadbeats who would rather plead poor before a bank-
ruptcy judge than pay a penny for their own education.
A GAO report commissioned by Congress supported the
claim that student loan borrowers were not abusing bankruptcy,
but “the evidence of a lower than 1% discharge rate of federally
insured student loans in bankruptcy did not block the nondis-
chargeability provision from entering the Bankruptcy Code,”
University of Michigan law professor John A. E. Pottow wrote
REASON 29
in 2005. After all, the fact that borrowers were not then fleecing
the federal government did not mean they wouldn’t eventually
try. Rep. Allen E. Ertel, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, claimed
during the 1970s bankruptcy debate that the effort to preserve
dischargeability was “almost specifically designed to encour-
age fraud.”
So why has Congress continued to make student loan debt
presumptively nondischargeable? The two main objectives,
according to a 2019 report from the Congressional Research
Service, are protecting the availability of student loans for future
generations and protecting the “public fisc,” i.e., the federal
purse, from the forgiveness of debt owed to, or guaranteed by,
the government. What’s more, there’s little to no collateral for
creditors to liquidate in the event of bankruptcy. My diploma is
not worth what it cost to print it, and my degree is nontransfer-
able. Human capital is not like other kinds of capital—think of
a factory or even a patent, which a bank could seize and sell if
the borrower failed to pay.
But there are two very good reasons to reinstate discharge-
ability. The most libertarian reason is that bankruptcy is a mar-
ket signal, and the higher education sector badly needs more
of those. Treating student loan debt like any other kind of debt
would make lenders more cautious; schools would need to dem-
onstrate to both banks and potential students that they can
equip the latter to repay the former, making it harder for stu-
dents to indebt themselves.
That said, if we did require banks to assess a borrower’s
credit risk and an institution’s ability to help students find
work that will allow them to meet their financial obligations,
it would likely result in restricted credit access for low-income
and minority borrowers. Such a market might offer them no
credit at all or interest rates significantly higher than those
available to their less risky peers. That’s not an ideal future.
But the same students who might lose access to funding in
an exclusively private credit market are also the ones who suf-
fer most under the current system. As University of Michigan
economist Susan Dynarski noted in a 2015 piece for The New
York Times, students who have the smallest debt loads also have
the highest default rates. “Defaults are concentrated among the
millions of students who drop out without a degree, and they
tend to have smaller debts,” she wrote. “That is where the serious
problem with student debt is. Students who attended a two- or
four-year college without earning a degree are struggling to find
well-paying work to pay off the debt they accumulated.”
Preventing those borrowers from discharging their loans in
bankruptcy is not helping the American economy, but neither
is lending them money to finance degrees they can’t complete.
Those students need a different route to increasing their earn-
ing potential.
30 MAY 2020
THE GAINFULLY EMPLOYED college graduate who has to delay buy-
ing a home or starting a family by a few years because of student
loans from undergraduate school may not seem like a sympa-
thetic character. He has a job, after all, and is likely making
more money than he would be if he hadn’t attended college. The
working adult who borrowed money to attend a sham for-profit
school is also not blameless. But the status quo will not hold for-
ever, and the alternative to what we have now is not necessarily
a free market for higher ed.
If elected president, Sanders would “cancel the entire $1.6
trillion in outstanding student debt for the 45 million borrowers
who are weighed down by the crushing burden of student debt,”
according to his campaign website. His plan calls for canceling
all debt currently held or guaranteed by the federal government
in addition to purchasing and canceling all private student loan
debt. Biden has proposed a less ambitious debt forgiveness plan
and a doubling of the maximum value of the Pell Grant per stu-
dent. Both candidates want to use federal funds to provide two
years (Biden) or four years (Sanders) of free public college.
Voters seem open to further federalizing higher education
funding. A Quinnipiac University national poll released in
April 2019 found that 57 percent support a debt forgiveness
plan proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) that is more
radical than Biden’s but less radical than Sanders’. (Support fell
to 44 percent when pollsters asked about funding the Warren
plan with “a new tax on the wealthy.”)
The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is highly receptive. In a
2019 survey from the New America Foundation, only 17 percent
of Democrats strongly agreed and only 28 percent somewhat
agreed with the statement, “Americans can get a high-quality
education after high school that is also affordable.” When asked
“who should be more responsible for funding higher educa-
tion,” 80 percent of Democrats chose “the government, because
it is good for society.” Only 19 percent chose “students, because
they personally benefit.”
American colleges are not going to endorse reforms that
would require them to do more with less. Despite the mountain
of evidence that its programs have made college more expen-
sive for the middle class and jeopardized the financial security
of nontraditional students and the working poor, the federal
government is not going to cede its role atop the system. But
current and future debtors are up for grabs. And convincing
them to endorse a radical market-based proposal over a radical
socialist one starts with acknowledging that our current system
did them dirty.
MIKE RIGGS is deputy managing editor at Reason.
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 THE FEDS PUSHED CITIES TO IMPLEMENT ZONING
RESTRICTIONS. HIGH PRICES AND SOCIAL
INEQUALITY WERE THE INEVITABLE RESULTS.

JONATHAN ROTHWELL

32 MAY 2020

T THE BEGINNING of the 20th century, there were virtually no
zoning laws in the United States. By 1921, zoning had come to
48 large U.S. cities, representing a fifth of the country’s popula-
tion. By 1932, 1,165 municipal governments had adopted zon-
ing, covering more than two-thirds of the urban population.
By 1968, nearly every metropolitan government had zoning, as
did large swaths of rural America.
It was a revolution, and a rapid one. Property owners were
once allowed to use their land for the most profitable or desir-
able use: live on it, sell it to a commercial or industrial business,
sell it to a developer. Now nearly every municipality has rules
that dictate how a piece of land can be used and what kinds of
housing, if any, are allowed on it.
This wasn’t a spontaneous shift: The federal government
made a concerted effort to promote the comprehensive regula-
tion of local land use through zoning. That hasn’t just meant a
decline in Americans’ liberties. It has meant sharp increases
in the cost of housing and a country much more segregated by
class and race.
ZONING AROSE AT a time of rapid urbanization: The percentage
of Americans living in urban areas jumped from 14 percent
in 1880 to 54 percent in 1920. One source of this swelling was
the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South and
into Northern cities. Another was the large-scale migration
of Eastern and Southern Europeans to the United States: The
foreign-born share of American residents peaked at 15 percent
around 1920.
This rapid influx rearranged urban politics. As growing
ethnic groups organized well-oiled political machines, white
Anglo-Saxon Protestants began to lose control over city gov-
ernments. Many moved to the suburbs and created their own
Illustration: Joanna Andreasson
Source images: ojoel/iStock. Kirk Fisher/Shutterstock
governments there. Others attempted to wrest back control of
the cities by imposing new forms of policing power.
That old guard viewed migration and urbanization as cha-
otic, subversive forces. Native whites worried about competition
for jobs, and some affluent Americans of Northern European
descent fretted about the incursion of allegedly inferior genes.
Social scientists of the era did not, by and large, feel a strong
commitment to free markets—a typical scholarly article of the
era declared that “large cities are excellent illustrations of the
insufficiency of laissez-faire doctrine”—and so educated profes-
sionals were generally all too willing to impose new regulations.
Enter zoning.
In 1920, native-born whites were much more likely to be
homeowners than were immigrants from Eastern and South-
ern Europe, or Hispanics, or Asians, or African Americans. So
zoning laws prioritized the single-family detached home and
sought to isolate it from multifamily housing and from com-
merce. Robert Whitten, an early zoning leader who consulted
around the country, was explicit about this. When Atlanta hired
him to develop the city’s zoning statutes in 1922, Whitten tried
to prohibit black people from living in white neighborhoods,
even though the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down such laws
in 1917.
More broadly, Whitten argued that even one apartment sends
a community of single-family homes down a slippery slope of
devaluation. His views were influential: He co-authored the New
York City Planning Resolution, adopted in 1916, which the 1968
Douglas Commission—a working group charged with report-
ing to Congress about urban problems—later cited as setting
“the basic pattern for zoning ordinances to this day.” That law
attempted to curb the mixed use of land (combining businesses
and residences) practiced by the city’s recent immigrants.
Urban historians agree that these local and state efforts were
“substantially aided”—as the Douglas Commission put it—by
Washington. In fact, the executive and judicial branches of the
federal government were crucial to the rise of zoning.
Herbert Hoover led the effort on the executive side. The
future president served as secretary of commerce from 1921 to
1929; early in that tenure, in 1922, he released the first version
of the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, a template for state
legislatures to allow and promote municipal zoning. In 1926, his
department issued A Zoning Primer, which further encouraged
and facilitated the adoption of zoning.
On the judicial side, there were serious questions about
the constitutionality of the new laws. As mentioned, the U.S.
Supreme Court in 1917 had invalidated zoning based on race.
In addition, the Court in 1912 had struck down an ordinance
in Richmond, Virginia, that prohibited building owners from
extending development past a hypothetical line (or setback)
some distance in from the edge of their property—this, the jus-
REASON 33
tices said, violated property rights. And
in 1921, the Texas Supreme Court struck
down Dallas’ zoning in sweeping terms.
Chief Justice Nelson Phillips wrote that
“the right of the citizen to use his prop-
erty as he chooses so long as he harms
nobody” is both “an inherent and consti-
tutional right.” He concluded from there
that “the police power cannot be invoked
for the abridgment of a particular use of
private property, unless such use reason-
ably endangers or threatens the public
health, the public safety, the public com-
fort or welfare.” For Phillips, such laws
were as impermissible as a rule regulat-
ing a family’s clothes or diet.
But other states supported zoning.
In 1924, Massachusetts’ highest court
approved the town of Brookline’s right
to halt the construction of a home for two
families, after the city council passed a
law prohibiting multifamily housing in
the area. The justices decided that the
restriction met the required standard of
relating to public safety, health, or mor-
als, on the grounds that single-family
zoning increases fresh air, gives children
and adults room to play and move, allows
for the cultivation of land, and provides
safety from infectious disease.
The landmark federal case came in
1926, after a company called Amber
Realty sued the town of Euclid, Ohio,
over a zoning ordinance that prohibited
developing land for industrial use. The
Supreme Court decided for Euclid, and
in the process it upheld comprehensive
zoning laws. At one point, Justice George
Sutherland’s majority opinion declared
that “very often the apartment house is a
mere parasite.”
That ruling, coupled with Hoover’s
model legislation, gave state and local
legislatures around the country confi-
dence to move forward with zoning laws.
I DON’T WANT to suggest that zoning has
had no positive effects. It has helped
improve the quality and safety of hous-
ing. It has made it easier to link hous-
34 MAY 2020
ing developments to roads, water, sew-
age pipes, and other infrastructure. It
has certainly accomplished its goals of
stabilizing property values and helping
families keep away from factories, night-
clubs, and garbage dumps. It may not be
the only way to achieve such ends, but it
has achieved them.
Robert Whitten, Yet zoning has failed by the most obvi-
ous and measurable metric: It has made
an early zoning housing far less affordable.
Zoning, by its nature, restricts the sup-
leader who ply of housing. Where prices exceed con-
consulted around struction and renovation costs, as they
do now throughout the country, develop-
the country, ers have a strong incentive to build more
units on each acre of existing land. Zon-
wanted to prohibit ing forbids this in all but the small areas
set aside for multifamily housing.
black people from During the rapid economic growth
that marked the first half of the 20th
living in white century, there is some evidence that the
cost of housing fell. New federal laws
neighborhoods. subsidizing mortgages via the Federal
He argued Housing Administration made home-
ownership more affordable and encour-
that even one aged construction. So, later, did the G.I.
Bill. Rental payments as a share of family
apartment sends income stood at 23.7 percent for the typi-
cal tenant in 1933; by 1960, the figure
a community was 16.8 percent.
But since then, the trend has gone the
of single-family other way. Median rent as a share of family
homes down a income rose to 22.8 percent in 1980, then
27.1 percent in 2000. As of 2018, it stood
slippery slope of at 31.4 percent. If housing costs were as
low relative to income now as they were
devaluation. in 1960, the typical monthly rental bill
would be $540. Instead, it’s $1,100.
Some might counter that housing
quality has greatly improved since then,
justifying the increase in costs. But while
there have been improvements in home
size, indoor plumbing, and access to
electricity, the Northwestern University
economist Robert Gordon has shown that
most of that happened before 1970. Price
index data from the Bureau of Economic
Analysis attempt to account for the size
and quality of housing by comparing
the prices of the same unit over time. They show that quality-
adjusted prices for housing rose only 1 percent each year from
1930 to 1970, while overall consumer prices rose 2.2 percent.
Then the pattern flipped: From 1970 to 2018, housing prices
grew 4.2 percent each year, while expenses overall grew at an
annual rate of 3.5 percent. So for the last 50 years, according to
government data, housing quality has not improved enough to
justify the rise in housing prices.
In 2005, Gordon and his colleague Todd vanGoethem dem-
onstrated that actual housing inflation is even worse than the
government data suggest. For most of the 20th century, the
Bureau of Labor Statistics did not account for the age (and, thus,
the depreciation) of the unit being rented. And because of dif-
ficulties contacting previous tenants, the statisticians missed
some price increases when one tenant replaced another.
Data from the Census Bureau tell the same story: Quality
improvements have not come close to offsetting housing price
increases. According to the American Housing Survey, the size of
the typical home has increased only slightly from 1985 to 2017,
from 1,344 square feet to 1,500. Rental units increased in size
from 900 square feet to 974. Over a similar period, from 1980 to
2018, the median rental price per room increased by a factor of
4.6, from $131 to $600 in nominal dollars, whereas the median
family income of renters increased by only a factor of 3.5. People
are also much less likely to live in new homes now than in 1980:
The median age of housing structures has increased by roughly
20 years. Meanwhile, the median commute time has increased
by five minutes since 1980, suggesting that affordable housing
requires moving further away from job centers.
Government policies have long prioritized homeowner-
ship and single-family detached housing. Yet homeownership
peaked in 2005, during the housing bubble, at 69 percent. The
homeownership rate now (64 percent) is just as high as it was in
the 1960s and lower than in 1980 (65 percent). Meanwhile, the
percentage of people living in single-family housing—the gold
standard of America’s zoning planners—is down from 69 per-
cent in 1960 to 62 percent in 2017.
Any way you look at it, housing has become less affordable
and less efficient during the last half-century.
A CENTURY OF zoning has also fostered segregation by race
and class. Native-born people of African descent are roughly
three times more segregated (according to a measure called
an entropy index) in the United States than in England. Immi-
grants and low-income households are also far more segregated
in the United States than in many parts of Europe.
The United States stands out as having the largest gap
between rich and poor in neighborhood quality among rich
democracies. Using Gallup World Poll data from 2009–2017, I
was able to calculate the percentage of people in each country
who rate their neighborhood favorably in terms of overall sat-
isfaction, safety, affordability, and similar measures. I found
that people in the bottom income quintile in the United States
were roughly 15 percentage points less likely to give favorable
answers than people in the top income quintile. That compares
to a gap of only two percentage points in Sweden.
European land use policies, scholars have found, are not
biased in favor of single-family homes the way they are in the
United States. And the hostility to urbanization found among
early 20th century American elites wasn’t nearly as popular
in Europe, which experienced centuries of city life before the
United States was even established.
In her 2018 book Segregation by Design (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press), the political scientist Jessica Trounstine demon-
strates that cities that were early adopters of zoning experienced
higher levels of segregation 50 years later. My own academic
work on contemporary zoning shows that municipalities with
more restrictive laws house fewer black, Hispanic, and blue-
collar residents than surrounding areas in the same metropoli-
tan area, and that metropolitan areas are more segregated when
their suburban governments are more restrictive.
It’s impossible to quantify the damage this has done. Rou-
tine social contact between groups—ethnic, economic, or polit-
ical—fosters trust. Isolation hinders it. Good neighborhoods
launch low-income children on upward paths toward higher
income, greater educational attainment, and lower arrest rates.
Bad neighborhoods do the opposite. And segregation tends to
trap low-income children in bad neighborhoods. One obvious
way this manifests itself is in public education: Within the same
metropolitan area, it costs several hundred thousand dollars
more to buy a home near a high-scoring school than near a low-
scoring school. (In metropolitan areas with abnormally severe
exclusionary zoning policies, the school-quality cost gap is
even higher.) Segregation has also deprived African Americans
of wealth accumulation by devaluing homes and businesses in
black neighborhoods.
Single-family detached homes may indeed have qualities
that make them the most desirable abodes in which to raise a
family, but those properties are in no meaningful way harmed
by proximity to attached homes, condominiums, or apartment
buildings. To fix zoning laws, the first step is to accept that poor
people are not a negative externality akin to pollution. Then we
can start to unravel the century-old knots that have prevented
desegregation and made housing so unaffordable.
JONATHAN ROTHWELL is principal economist at Gallup and a
nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan
Policy Program. He is the author of A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto
for a Just Society (Princeton University Press).
REASON 35
36 MAY 2020
 How Doctors Broke
Health Care
AND POLITICIANS MADE THINGS EVEN WORSE

CHRIST Y FORD CHAPIN

REASON 37
 F THERE’S ONE thing that almost
everyone in America can agree
on, it’s that the health care system
is broken.
Nearly 18 percent of America’s
economy is devoted to spending
on health care, far more than the
share in any comparable country.
And although the U.S. medical
system provides some of the best
health care in the world, it does
so only for those who can afford
it. Moreover, fragmented service
delivery undercuts overall qual-
ity. A decade after passage of the
Affordable Care Act (ACA), health care spending is still eating up
government and household budgets, nearly 28 million Ameri-
cans remain uninsured, and costs continue bounding upward.
It’s no wonder that health care was the top priority for voters
in the 2018 elections or that debates over how to fix it dominated
the 2020 Democratic primaries. On one side of those debates
were candidates such as former Vice President Joe Biden and
former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who want to
alter the ACA by adding a public option. On the other side were
candidates such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Elizabeth
Warren (D–Mass.), who favor scrapping the current system and
replacing it with a single, government-run program they call
Medicare for All. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has
declined to defend the 2010 health care law in court and prom-
ised to replace it (though the president won’t say with what).
These proposals misdiagnose what ails the U.S. health care
system because they ignore its history. Too many of today’s
policy “solutions” build upon the faulty insurance company
model that currently organizes U.S. health care—a model that
was concocted by the American Medical Association (AMA) in
the 1930s as a way to protect the professional status and earn-
ing power of its members. It resulted in care that is expensive,
bureaucratic, and frustrating for both patients and caregivers.
Some versions of Medicare for All would eliminate private
insurers. However, the resulting program, though free from
corporate power, would retain the same organizational model,
with a government agency assuming the role previously played
by insurance companies. Bad institutional incentives would
largely remain intact.
The history of health care—both before and after the intro-
duction of the insurance company model—shows how aligning
the economic incentives of doctors with the needs of patients
can deliver health care that is cost-effective, widely available,
and humane.
38 MAY 2020
THE HEALTH INSURANCE model we know today came about after
physicians’ professional stature began to rise at the end of the
19th century.
With the discovery of germ theory, medicine and medical
procedures such as surgeries became safer and more effec-
tive. Innovative treatments proliferated. Doctors capitalized
on their enhanced cultural standing to convince state legis-
latures to either pass or strengthen licensing laws. Along with
AMA-backed reforms that helped reduce the number of medi-
cal schools, licensing laws significantly limited the quantity of
practicing doctors. Women, African Americans, and the work-
ing class were disproportionately excluded from the doctor-
ing profession and consigned to lower-level medical positions,
such as nursing.
With the supply of doctors restricted and the demand for
increasingly effective medical services growing, health care
prices rose. During the 1920s, an ailment that required a hos-
pital stay could easily consume 10 percent of a family’s annual
income. Increasing prices only lightly constrained demand,
since patients highly valued services that could either improve
their quality of life or determine whether or not they lived. Still,
families found it difficult to budget for health care because of
the unpredictable nature of illness, both in occurrence and cost.
These developments inspired a variety of groups to come up
with new ways to organize health care. For example, during the
first decades of the 20th century, the nation had thousands of
mutual aid societies, also known as lodges or fraternal orders.
While some lodges—like the Order of Elks—originally restricted
membership to native-born white males, immigrants and Afri-
can Americans established their own societies. Immigrant orga-
nizations ranged from the Venetian Fraternal Union (serving
Italian Americans) and the Independent Order of Vikings (serv-
ing Swedish Americans) to the First Serbian Benevolent Society
and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. They
functioned as social clubs, usually with distinctive uniforms
and regalia. At the local lodge, bar, or church where they met,
immigrants could speak their native language and share food
from their home country. Fraternal orders also offered mem-
bers, in return for regular dues payments, financial security
products. Most supplied life insurance. Many contracted with
physicians and hospitals to provide medical care.
African Americans created a massive network of these asso-
ciations, some of which evolved into black-owned insurance
companies and banks. One such society in Mississippi—the
Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor—constructed
a hospital. Dues-paying members received burial insurance and
up to 31 days of medical and surgical care.
Labor unions also furnished health care for members.
In 1913, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union
(ILGWU) founded a clinic in New York City. In exchange for a
small fee, members—who also helped run the clinic—could
access both medical and dental services. During the 1930s, the
Transport Workers Union contracted with more than 50 doc-
tors, including specialists, to provide members with care both
in the doctor’s office and in the hospital.
Businesses experimented with medical care provision as
well. While factories hired doctors to run on-site clinics, “indus-
trial medicine” flourished as a specialty. To stave off bad pub-
licity for their employers, industrial physicians monitored the
workplace for ways to prevent injury and disease. They also
weeded out the chronically ill from job applicant pools. Some
businesses contracted with outside medical providers. During
the 1920s, the Endicott Johnson Corporation, a shoe manufac-
turer in upstate New York, spent about $22 annually for each
worker and his or her family to access physician, hospital, and
dental services.
Consumer cooperatives were another vehicle of delivery. In
1931, Dr. Michael Shadid established such an organization in
Elk City, Oklahoma. For an initiation fee and annual payment,
patients could access both physician and hospital services. Sub-
scribers also elected a board of directors to operate the plan. Dur-
ing the Great Depression, Farm Security Administration officials
helped farmers’ organizations establish similar cooperatives
around the country.
Nor were doctors passive participants in the health care sec-
tor’s wave of organizational innovation. By the early 1930s,
they had founded hundreds of prepaid physician groups, which
delivered high-quality care in a cost-effective manner. Two fea-
tures distinguished them from today’s physician groups.
First, they were multispecialty. This format offered patients
“one-stop shopping” for comprehensive care, ranging from gen-
eral practice and surgical to obstetric and ophthalmological
services. But integrated care offered more than convenience—it
improved service quality. In today’s health care system, patients
with multiple conditions or difficult-to-diagnose illnesses often
consult a variety of physician specialists in separate practices.
Although general practitioners theoretically coordinate the
patient’s overall care, in reality, most physicians lack the time
to confer regularly with colleagues outside their practice. In con-
trast, early prepaid groups had responsibility for the patient’s
entire health profile. These group doctors met regularly to dis-
cuss how to treat difficult cases. Patients received holistic care,
while physicians had more opportunities for creative problem
solving and for learning across medical specialties.
The second distinctive feature of these doctor groups was
that they were “prepaid.” In the early 20th century, prepaid care
was synonymous with health insurance. Accordingly, the pre-
paid doctor group acted as its own financing or insurance unit.
Individuals and families paid a set monthly fee in exchange for
unlimited services. Physicians who worked for prepaid groups
Illustration, previous page: Joanna Andreasson
Source image: Ljupco Smokovski/Shutterstock
typically earned a salary plus a portion of the group’s quarterly
profits. These financing arrangements motivated physicians to
both hold down costs and provide high-caliber care.
Examining how present-day financing systems incentivize
physicians to behave illuminates the elegance of prepaid group
arrangements. Rather than directly financing care themselves,
today’s doctors are usually compensated by third parties, either
governments or outside insurers.
In health care systems around the world, one of two problems
almost always occurs: Either medical providers ration care, or
they practice “overutilization,” a fancy term for the delivery of
unnecessary and wasteful services and procedures.
Where physicians earn a set salary—as do British doctors or
American physicians who work for closed-panel HMOs like Kai-
ser Permanente—a primary patient complaint is that care can
be difficult to obtain. Doctors seem reluctant to greenlight treat-
ments, because their employers encourage them to ration care
and because more services and procedures mean more work
without additional pay. Moreover, these arrangements often
produce lower-quality care, though the degree of this problem
depends on additional economic conditions, such as whether
the financier is a government monopoly or a firm competing
against other insurance companies. (Similar complaints arise
when doctors receive set per-patient “capitation” fees.)
With fee-for-service systems, in which each discrete treat-
ment or action results in a payment from the insurer to the
doctor, overutilization and rising costs are always among the
drawbacks. Currently in the U.S., most insurance companies
reimburse doctors on this basis, thereby encouraging them
to oversupply care. It’s not that physicians are particularly
malevolent. It’s that they respond to financial incentives just
as carpenters, mechanics, lawyers, and, yes, even professors
and journalists do.
Imagine renting an office, purchasing equipment, hiring a
bevy of administrators to keep up with mountains of govern-
ment and insurance company paperwork, and working 10- to
12-hour days knowing you’ll be paid only if you bring in enough
money to cover both overhead expenses and your salary. If
Medicare and insurance company reimbursements (less than
half of doctors accept Medicaid patients) were not enough,
might you be tempted to find additional revenues not by “run-
ning up the bill,” as we might see it, but by “providing my
patients with the same gold standard treatment that I’d want
my own family members to receive”? Perhaps?
In contrast to current financing arrangements, prepaid phy-
sician groups aligned the doctor’s pecuniary self-interest with
the patient’s desire for quality care. They carefully balanced
resource expenditures between rationing and overutilization.
Remember: Group physicians collectively assumed the finan-
cial risks associated with insuring patients against the costs of
REASON 39
illness, and group doctor compensation
derived from a portion of the organi-
zation’s total profits. On one hand, if
group doctors delivered poor-quality
care or rationed services, they earned
less. Patients who became sicker would
consume additional resources, and dis-
satisfied customers would discourage
new subscribers from joining. On the
other hand, if group physicians sup-
plied unnecessary services and proce-
dures, they reduced their pay by fritter-
ing away group resources.
Because they offered reasonably
priced insurance and excellent care,
prepaid physician groups were popu-
lar with consumers. In 1929, Drs. Don-
ald Ross and Clifford Loos started just
such a group in Los Angeles. Members
paid a monthly fee plus a small deduct-
ible at the time of service. Benefits were
generous. The Ross-Loos plan offered
prenatal and delivery care well before
insurance companies would even con-
sider covering such high-cost benefits.
Within six years of its founding and dur-
ing the Great Depression, the Ross-Loos
practice grew to staff 50 doctors and
serve approximately 40,000 patients.
Most prepaid groups contracted with
hospitals for admitting privileges.
Because of its size, the Ross-Loos prac-
tice had its own pharmacy, laboratory,
medical library, and ambulatory sur-
gery facility.
Progressive political thought bur-
geoned at the end of the 19th century
and continued to influence policy mak-
ers through the New Deal era—and pro-
gressive reformers admired prepaid
doctor groups. Progressives not only
had respect for but were practically
obsessed with expertise, scholarly stud-
ies, statistics, and facts piled high. The
Committee on the Costs of Medical Care
(CCMC), which operated during the late
1920s and early 1930s, embodied this
impulse. Academics, leading physi-
cians, public health officials, political
reformers, and scholars associated with
40 MAY 2020
nonprofit foundations studied a variety
of health care models, ultimately recom-
mending the propagation of prepaid doc-
tor groups. Progressive CCMC members
recognized the model’s organizational
efficiency and wished to position it at the
core of a government-financed health
care system.
Today’s progressives might protest,
asserting that they too believe in exper-
tise; after all, most academics stand
among their ranks. But today’s health
Physicians care debates, rather than addressing fun-
damental economic and organizational
who worked for issues, unfold largely as morality tales,
pitting “good guys” against “bad guys.”
prepaid groups (Note that the “bad guys” in this telling—
policy makers who either oppose reform
in the early 20th or are proposing minor repairs—also fail
to recognize the health care system’s
century typically structural frailties.) Some contemporary
earned a salary reformers underscore the administrative
savings they believe will result from the
plus a portion centralized management of health care.
Others offer budget forecasts that, like
of the group’s the Knights of the Round Table, are noto-
riously fictitious. But what’s missing are
quarterly profits. discussions of how to configure institu-
tions and structure provider and patient
This financing incentives to ensure accessibility, qual-
arrangement ity, and cost-effectiveness.
motivated them SO WHAT HAPPENED to prepaid doctor
groups and the health care models spon-
to both hold down sored by mutual aid societies, unions,
businesses, and consumer coopera-
costs and provide tives? In sum, AMA leaders captured
and reconfigured the market to serve
high-caliber care. their own ends.
Through the first decades of the 20th
century, the American Medical Associa-
tion marshaled its considerable power to
shut down and halt the spread of “alter-
native” health care organizations. Phy-
sician leaders believed they threatened
their professional autonomy and pay.
Worried about interference in “their”
sphere of medicine, AMA officials even
opposed health insurance because it
allowed groups external to the doctor-
patient relationship to finance care. They also feared that phy-
sician groups would develop into corporations that would com-
mercialize health care and produce “supermarket medicine.”
Accordingly, AMA leaders waged war against physicians who
contracted with or worked for “third parties,” whether mutual
aid societies or doctor groups. Since AMA members controlled
state licensing boards during this period, they could revoke the
medical licenses of transgressing doctors. For example, AMA
officials warned physicians that working for Shadid’s coopera-
tive would jeopardize their medical licenses. Organized physi-
cians also exercised a great deal of control over hospitals, and
they frequently persuaded administrators to rescind the admit-
ting privileges of doctors who ran afoul of AMA preferences.
Additionally, medical societies often expelled members who
worked with third parties. The L.A. County Medical Associa-
tion, a constituent AMA society, dismissed Drs. Ross and Loos.
Physicians who lacked medical society membership had diffi-
culty obtaining malpractice insurance, ostensibly because they
lacked colleagues to testify on their behalf.
Although AMA leaders had great success suppressing the
health care market’s organizational evolution, their feat only
amplified calls for government funding to increase access to ser-
vices. As policy makers experimented with programs to improve
economic conditions during the Great Depression, health care
was a leading reform target. Committee on Economic Security
(CES) members, who laid the cornerstone of the American wel-
fare state with the 1935 Social Security Act, initially hoped to
include government-financed medical care in the legislation.
President Franklin Roosevelt—savvy politician that he was—
rejected their plan, understanding that hundreds of AMA medi-
cal societies could lobby congressional members to sink the
entire bill. But his administration continued to eye health care
reform, and at the end of the decade it held a national conference
to spotlight the issue.
Unable to fight a two-front conflict—on one side against
competitive markets, and on the other side against government-
financed medicine—AMA leaders concocted a new strategy. In
1938, they finally endorsed health insurance. Yet they contin-
ued battling the insurance models that the market had already
produced, such as prepaid benefits delivered through consumer
cooperatives and doctor groups. Instead, AMA leaders designed
their own, very particular insurance model. They then pro-
moted their specific model under the banner of the “voluntary”
market—that is, the alternative to government programming,
which they cast as communism.
The AMA’s brainchild—the insurance company model that
organizes our health care system today—permitted only one
type of third party to finance medical services: insurance com-
panies, not mutual aid societies, unions, or even doctor groups.
The association’s leaders instructed insurance companies to
fund individual physicians rather than group practices and to
reimburse physicians on a fee-for-service basis—a payment
method that, as discussed, guaranteed overutilization and
escalating costs. (Initially, physicians even set their own com-
pensation fees, until insurers implemented standardized fee
schedules between the 1950s and 1970s.) AMA parameters
also required complete physician autonomy, free from insurer
supervision.
Recognizing that it would drive up health care prices, insur-
ance executives were wary of the AMA’s proposed model. Insur-
ers had little desire to finance services if they could not control,
supervise, or even forecast the supply of those services. But they
gave in to AMA wishes because they wanted to combat nation-
alized medicine and because their business clients—to whom
they sold life insurance and pension products for workers—
had been clamoring for employee health insurance. Federal tax
guidelines granted employers a hefty tax break for providing
workers with fringe benefits beyond monetary compensation.
Plus, employer-provided health insurance weakened labor orga-
nizing by making businesses, not unions, the stewards of work-
ers’ financial security.
Though mistrustful of one another, physicians and insur-
ers joined together to hurriedly develop the health care sector
around the insurance company model. AMA officials and insur-
ance executives continually and forcefully argued that govern-
ment provision of health care was unnecessary because the “vol-
untary” insurance sector was thriving. Quite remarkably, they
grew coverage quickly enough not only to rebuff Harry Truman’s
plan for universal health care but also to defeat moderate reform
proposals proffered by President Dwight Eisenhower and a vari-
ety of bipartisan congressional alliances. Between 1945 and
1965, the share of the populace covered by health insurance
increased from approximately one-quarter to 80 percent.
Predictably, under the insurance company model, health
care costs shot upward in tandem with expanding coverage
rates. Physicians and insurers responded by building institu-
tions to manage their financing relationship.
Although physicians adamantly resisted insurance com-
pany regulation, AMA officials begrudgingly relented in
response to the negative publicity surrounding medical costs.
A 1950s Blue Cross study revealed that approximately 30 per-
cent of hospital admissions were unwarranted. Hospitalization
allowed doctors to deliver patients more tests and procedures
than were available in a physician’s office. During the same
decade, the press uncovered a trend of unnecessary surgeries.
Pathologists discovered, for example, that in some hospitals
more than half the appendectomies performed were unneeded.
Although overt fraud was worrisome, insurers were more con-
cerned with small accretions of overutilization, both inside and
outside the hospital. Such services were difficult to detect but,
REASON 41
when aggregated, pushed insurance
prices significantly higher.
Insurers responded by instituting
cost containment measures. Gradually,
over the course of decades, they gained
the power to supervise doctors and
influence how medicine is practiced.
During the 1950s, they began carefully
monitoring physician services through
medical forms. By the 1960s, physi-
cians often needed to obtain insurance
company permission to admit patients
to hospitals. Insurers also worked with
medical societies and hospitals to
establish utilization review commit-
tees, which examined whether phy-
sician services properly matched the
patient’s diagnosis. Insurers collected
data from these committees to create
standardized treatment blueprints: In
return for compensation, doctors had
to accept insurance company instruc-
tions on patient care. Despite these
cost-containment efforts, health care
expenditures, as a percentage of our
nation’s GDP, have grown each decade
since the 1950s.
Though health care reformers had
long attempted to dislodge the insur-
ance company model, they surrendered
that fight by the 1960s. As Social Secu-
rity Administration officials and their
allies developed a plan for government-
provided retiree health care, they real-
ized that they had to construct the pro-
gram around the institutions that were
already being used to manage service
financing and delivery. They there-
fore designed Medicare to incorporate
the insurance company model. Policy
makers also appointed insurance com-
panies to administer Medicare by act-
ing as intermediaries between federal
officials and service providers—doctors
and hospitals.
The ACA also adopted the insurance
company model. Although progres-
sive legislators attempted to subvert
the model with the “public option”—
a government-run insurance plan that
42 MAY 2020
would operate alongside today’s private
insurance—that provision was ulti-
mately defeated. And the public option,
as proposed in today’s health care
debates, is unlikely to undermine the
insurance company model to the same
degree as initially projected, because
state exchanges have not appropriated as
much of the health care system as policy
The American makers and analysts originally planned.
Medical THIS CHECKERED HISTORY helps explain the
Association’s frustrating state of the U.S. health care
system today. It shows why care is frag-
brainchild— mented and costs are high—the highest
in the world as a percentage of GDP. And
the insurance it demonstrates that the country’s health
care system, including the so-called “pri-
company model vate sector,” is not based on the evolu-
that organizes tion of competitive markets. Instead,
the model sprang from the minds of
our health care physician leaders seeking to safeguard
their professional status and earning
system today— power. Ironically, the arrangements they
designed have developed in a way that
permitted only undermines those very goals. Today’s
system is largely controlled, in a top-
one type of third down manner, by insurance companies.
Finally, this account reveals how our
party to finance current health care debates are neglect-
medical services: ing the most vital aspects of reform. To
fix our system—that is, to provide better
insurance care while getting rid of unending and
unsustainable cost increases—we must
companies, consider how to structure institutions to
operate effectively without Washington
not mutual aid bureaucrats supervising and controlling
medical care. Insurers can tell them that
societies, unions, such an approach to cost containment is
or even doctor futile. And cost control purely through
budget constraints, without attention to
groups. institutional incentives, will only lead
to rationing.
Direct Primary Care (DPC) physicians
are beginning to reclaim their heritage
by approximating the prepaid doctor
groups of the early 20th century. Seen as
a low-cost alternative to concierge care,
DPC groups accept monthly membership
fees in lieu of insurance. In return, they
provide patients with extended physician visits, lab and
diagnostic tests, and—in states where doctor groups are
permitted to purchase drugs at wholesale costs—reduced-
priced prescription medications. They have had excellent
success in terms of cost containment and care advance-
ments, such as increased doctor-patient communication
through phone and email conversations.
DPC promoters often speak of physicians’ desire to
escape the “eight-minute consultation” and the burden-
some volume of insurance regulations and paperwork.
The American Academy of Family Physicians even sells
a “DPC Toolkit.”
However, these groups are single-specialty, revolv-
ing around general practitioners. If they do develop into
multispecialty practices that deliver comprehensive care,
they’ll have to negotiate with hospitals for patient admis-
sions and facility usage. And that process will take some
time to evolve.
One can envision the innovations that might ensue
under such a system. Imagine doctor groups catering to
elderly patients with appointment pickup vans or offering
free nutrition classes for diabetic and overweight patients.
DPC is neither a silver bullet nor the only way to reform
health care. But the model does demonstrate that reform-
ers must look at the health care system’s economic struc-
ture to understand how all actors—physicians, hospital
administrators, patients, and third-party financiers—are
incentivized to behave.
In many ways, that would represent a return to tra-
ditional progressive ideals, from the institutional
efficiency that reformers promoted in the early 1900s
to the participatory democracy—or empowering of
local communities—they advocated in the 1960s. As
we debate how to make health care more accessible and
affordable, we should emphasize institutions that can
evolve on the ground, in response not to special interest
groups or to federal officials but to the unique needs of
patients. From the elderly Latino couple in San Anto-
nio dealing with the effects of aging to the young black
woman suffering from breast cancer in New York City, it’s
the patients with the least economic and political power
who will bear the brunt of our health care system’s fail-
ings—whether their care be costly and difficult to afford
or inexpensive but rationed.

CHRISTY FORD CHAPIN is an associate professor of history

and capitalism studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore
County and the author of Ensuring America’s Health:
The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System
(Cambridge University Press).

Photo: litu92458/iStock REASON 43

44 MAY 2020
 UNLESS WE CAUSE ONE BY
OVERREACTING TO ASIA’S
CHANGING POLITICAL AND
ECONOMIC LANDSCAPE

DANIEL W. DREZNER

Illustration: Adrienne Bresnahan/Getty REASON 45


HE UNITED STATES has a long and distinguished history of freak-
ing out about powerful rival nations. When countries even
begin to approach the United States in economic might, the
political reaction often borders on the hysterical. At the height
of the Cold War, high rates of Soviet gross domestic product
(GDP) growth caused policy makers to fret that the USSR’s cen-
trally planned economy would outperform American capital-
ism. Members of Congress reacted with their usual aplomb,
tolerating the rise of McCarthyism and the blacklisting of
suspected communists in the arts. Sputnik triggered a similar
panic about whether the United States was losing the space race
to a communist foe.
A few decades later, the Japanese were the source of anxiety.
After four decades of rapid growth, they seemed poised to over-
take the United States economically. A pallet of books with titles
like Japan as Number One, The Enigma of Japanese Power, and
The Japan That Can Say No caused Americans to panic again.
A Cold War treaty ally was suddenly viewed as something dif-
ferent: a rival with a novel variety of capitalism, one relying
on greater state intervention than ours, that was threatening
American hegemony. Members of Congress continued to react
in a calm and professional manner—for example, by smashing
a Toshiba boombox on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.
As it turned out, American fears of both countries were wildly
overhyped. Decades of Soviet demographic decline and eco-
nomic stagnation proved that the Stalinist system was not, in
fact, terribly viable. Likewise for Japan: Decades of demographic
decline and economic stagnation proved—you get the idea.
46 MAY 2020
The current freakout is about China, and the parallels to past
freakouts are striking. After two generations of rapid growth, the
Middle Kingdom now has the second-largest economy in the
world. Its 1.4 billion people already make it the largest import
market for everything from crude oil to hair dryers to automo-
biles. It has been the most important engine of global economic
growth since the 2008 financial crisis, and the debate among
most private-sector analysts is whether its economy will over-
take the United States in this decade or the next one.
The corresponding reaction from American officials has been
predictable. For decades, successive U.S. administrations paved
the way for China to enter the liberal economic order. The Trump
administration has thrown away that welcome mat and blasted
the notion that engagement was ever a good idea.
Whenever a Trump official gives a talk at the Hudson Insti-
tute, a China hawk gets its wings. In 2018 it was Vice President
Mike Pence saying mournfully, “America had hoped that eco-
nomic liberalization would bring China into greater partnership
with us and with the world. Instead, China has chosen economic
aggression, which has in turn emboldened its growing military.”
In 2019 it was Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s turn. “Frankly,”
he said, “we did an awful lot that accommodated China’s rise in
the hope that communist China would become more free, more
market-driven, and ultimately, hopefully, more democratic.”
Alas, he concluded, “we didn’t realize how China was evolving.”
The Trump administration’s “phase one” truce with China on
trade, signed on January 15, belies a panoply of aggressive steps
this administration has pursued to contain the People’s Repub-
lic. These range from arresting a Huawei executive for espionage
to blocking Chinese takeovers of U.S. firms to restricting visas for
Chinese students interested in studying certain scientific fields
in America to contemplating limits on Chinese firms’ ability to
raise capital in U.S. stock markets.
For all the talk about the politics of Washington being more
polarized than ever, the bipartisanship of the new consensus
about China is striking. If Democrats have opposed the Trump
administration’s actions, it is mostly because they think the
actions haven’t gone far enough. When Trump escalated the
trade war with China in spring 2019, Senate Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer tweeted, “Don’t back down. Strength is the only
way to win with China.”
China also generates strange bedfellows within Congress.
A 2018 letter from 15 U.S. senators from both parties warned
about the threat of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s
massive global infrastructure development venture. “The goal
for BRI is the creation of an economic world order ultimately
dominated by China,” they asserted. At the Munich Secu-
rity Conference in February, I heard no distinctions between
Republican and Democratic members of Congress on the threat
posed by China. Outside of government, the new Washington
consensus has prompted a cottage industry of essays, reports,
think pieces, and long-form journalism opining on What To
Do About China.
Remember when I said that both the Soviet Union and Japan
suffered from economic stagnation and demographic decline?
There are good reasons to believe that China will be the next
As it turned out,
country in line. China’s population crisis is already baked in: American fears
Sometime this year, the median age in the country will exceed
that in the United States, and by 2040 senior citizens will com- of the Soviet
prise a greater portion of China’s population than ours. To
describe China as economically stagnant would be a gross exag- Union were wildly
geration. Nonetheless, its growth rate has fallen by more than
50 percent in the last decade, and its productivity growth has
overhyped. Decades
fallen by far more than that over the past 25 years. It appears of demographic
that China will get old before it gets rich. Yet the new Washing-
ton consensus is too panicked to observe these realities. decline and economic
To be fair to the new conventional wisdom, it is not founded
only on hysteria. A key premise of the old consensus was that stagnation proved that
engaging China would facilitate that country’s transformation
from a one-party dictatorship into a more open and liberal pol-
the Stalinist system
ity. The actual results have been...well, not that. The apparent was not, in fact,
failure of the previous narrative to play out as hoped has rattled
many people’s faith in the power of economic freedom to lead terribly viable.
inexorably to political freedom.
Instead of classical liberal arguments about the pacifying
effects of trade, the new consensus is replete with terms like
predatory liberalism and weaponized interdependence. In the
new narrative, China is an authoritarian state hell-bent on world
domination; we must decouple the U.S. economy from China’s
in order to check Beijing’s rise. The new consensus increasingly
sounds like an update of the old containment doctrine, with WHAT WE GOT WRONG
China’s brand of authoritarian capitalism replacing Soviet-style THE POLICY CONSENSUS that surrounded U.S. support for China’s
communism as the existential threat to the American way of life entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) has not aged
that must be confined to a limited sphere. well. In a March 2000 speech, President Bill Clinton overprom-
It’s one thing to say that the old Washington consensus got ised just a wee bit when he claimed that “the more China liber-
China wrong. It’s another thing entirely to conclude that the alizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential
exact opposite approach is warranted—and let’s be clear, that is of its people—their initiative, their imagination, their remark-
what the Trump administration wants us to believe. able spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power
A proper U.S. strategy toward authoritarian capitalism in not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand
general and the Middle Kingdom in particular needs to appre- a greater say.” Support for China’s entry into the WTO was
ciate the strengths and the weaknesses of the China model. bipartisan; the Senate approved it 83–15.
Cold War hawks exaggerated Soviet capabilities, and today’s What did policy makers get wrong? Back in the day, liberal
China hawks do the same with the regime in Beijing. Even if one internationalists made two arguments about why China’s par-
accepts that China poses a significant threat to the American ticipation in the global economy was in America’s national inter-
way of life, the optimal response is far removed from the actual est. First, if China traded more with the rest of the world, it would
response we are witnessing today. Indeed, it seems as though alter that country’s domestic political character. Economic free-
much of the policy response to China is predicated on a loss of dom within the People’s Republic would increase, leading to
self-confidence by the United States. Debates about China are more economic affluence. These factors would nudge China into
stalking horses for debates about what is wrong with America. the same political evolution that its Northeast Asian neighbors
experienced: greater demands for the rule of law, followed by

REASON 47
political liberalization. No policy maker believed this would
happen overnight; the Clinton speech quoted above is chock-full
of caveats. The overarching belief, however, was that over time
China would start to resemble, say, South Korea.
The second argument was not about changing the charac-
ter of Chinese politics but about altering the existing regime’s
incentives to disrupt the liberal international order. This logic
was simple: The more that China needed the rest of the global
economy to fuel its economic growth, the less Beijing would act
like a “revisionist” state and the more it would act like a status
quo power.
This was at the root of a decadelong call by the United States
for China to be a “responsible stakeholder” in the system. As
Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick suggested in the 2005
speech that coined that phrase, “China does not believe that its
future depends on overturning the fundamental order of the
international system. In fact, quite the reverse: Chinese leaders
have decided that their success depends on being networked
with the modern world.” Indeed, the Chinese and American
economies became so intertwined that in a 2007 paper, Har-
vard historian Niall Ferguson and University of Bonn economist
Moritz Schularick dubbed them “Chimerica.”
The new Washington consensus is predicated on the notion
that the previous few paragraphs are so absurd that they should
be laughed out of the discourse. It might be worth taking a
moment, however, to consider exactly how the old Washington
consensus got China wrong before concluding that the exact
opposite approach is the way to go.
INCREASINGLY OPPRESSIVE
EVEN TRUMP’S BIGGEST cheerleaders allow that the opening to
China worked for a while. In his Hudson Institute speech, Vice
President Pence acknowledged that “for a time, Beijing inched
toward greater liberty and respect for human rights.”
In terms of economic openness, China did more than inch.
Whether you look at the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Eco-
nomic Freedom, the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom
Rankings, or one of various metrics from the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development, the result is the
same. In the late ’90s and the early part of this century, China’s
economy was indeed liberalizing. Beginning around 2006,
there was a decade of stagnation and reversal of reforms. But
in the last few years, the country’s economic freedom scores
have again increased across the board.
The quality of China’s free trade agreements with other
countries has consistently improved in recent years. Even
in the area of intellectual property rights, the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center ranks China
ahead of Chile and India and on par with Mexico. At the China
48 MAY 2020
Development Forum’s fall meeting last year, I heard Chinese
officials repeatedly brag about a new law permitting 100 per-
cent foreign ownership of Chinese entities. It is possible that
Beijing is simply gaming the system by making cosmetic policy
changes to placate a business sector that desperately wants
access to China’s market. Still, these metrics contrast sharply
with Trump’s depiction of China as a unique rogue actor in the
global economy.
This part of the consensus was nonetheless wrong in two fun-
damental ways. The first was that the increase in economic lib-
erty would spill over into an increase in political liberty. If any-
thing, in China the two have been inversely correlated in recent
years. The leadership in Beijing, it turns out, never wanted to
follow the path of South Korea; they wanted to follow the path
of Singapore, a city-state with copious amounts of economic
freedom and very circumscribed politics.
The nonprofit Freedom House observed in 2019 that “Chi-
na’s authoritarian regime has become increasingly repressive
in recent years”—and that sentence, if anything, undersells the
depth of repression. During the last 10 years, the country shifted
from a routinized form of authoritarian power transfer in which
new leaders were appointed every decade to the lifetime leader-
ship of Xi Jinping. The repression of ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs
in the western part of the country has been increasingly brutal
and systematic. The erection of a massive network of intern-
ment facilities, prisons, and forced labor camps speaks to the
regime’s ruthlessness and deep illiberalism. According to The
New York Times, President Xi explicitly urged his subordinates
to use the “organs of dictatorship” to demonstrate “absolutely
no mercy” to the Uighurs.
When Clinton advocated for China’s entry into the WTO, he
said, “We know how much the internet has changed America,
and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could
change China.” Unfortunately, it appears that the People’s
Republic has changed the internet rather than vice versa. There
are a hundred different ways to prove China’s digital authori-
tarianism: the country’s online freedom plunging to a decade-
low level, according to Freedom House; official efforts to create
an Orwellian-sounding “social credit” system in which Chinese
citizens would receive rewards and benefits for their public
conduct; the massive expansion of the surveillance state; or
the simple fact that far more Western news sites are blocked
by China’s censors in 2019 than were a decade earlier. Reports
that China is exporting its surveillance regime to sympathetic
allies have been somewhat exaggerated. To paraphrase John
Quincy Adams, however, Xi’s regime has become a fortress city
on a hill, demonstrating to other aspiring autocrats its recipe
for success.
The second mistake was in thinking that as Chinese citi-
zens became more affluent and globally connected, they would
become more classically liberal in their attitudes. Recent sur-
vey work conducted by Renmin University’s National Survey
Research Center suggests a more complex evolution of views.
While China’s young people are more tolerant of concepts
like same-sex marriage than are their older neighbors, they
hold more illiberal views on questions of race, religion, and
human rights. Younger mainland Chinese are more support-
ive of authoritarianism than are older generations. And more
affluent Chinese, those who can travel and access information
beyond China’s censors, express attitudes similar to their less
affluent peers’. Journalist accounts suggest that they are hos-
tile toward Hong Kong protesters as well, believing them to
be suffering from “post-prosperity arrogance.” Yet mainland
reactions to Hong Kong are more varied than a lot of Western
press coverage suggests.
The 1990s assumption that greater affluence and economic
liberty would produce more political liberalization rested on a
simple empirical regularity: That was the way things had worked
in the past. And it might still work that way: The residents of
Hong Kong have visibly demonstrated that even a taste of civil
liberties makes people fight to preserve them. Still, it should be
clear that waiting for the Chinese Communist Party to evolve is
not a fast-acting recipe for good American foreign policy.
WEAPONIZED INTERDEPENDENCE?
CHINA’S INTERDEPENDENCE WITH the rest of the world has not been
the pacific balm that liberals expected. Here, again, the old
consensus did not get everything wrong. Traditionally, the
rapid rise of a new “great power” triggered a hegemonic war.
But as China has caught up to the United States, there has been
no major hot conflict. Economic interdependence likely played
a role in that.
The Chinese leadership is still rhetorically committed to
an open global economy. Xi Jinping sounds more liberal than
Donald Trump when he addresses the World Economic Forum.
Even as Beijing has reciprocated U.S. protectionism during the
bilateral trade war of the last two years, it has simultaneously
lowered barriers with the rest of the world. Claims that the Belt
and Road Initiative is entrapping countries into fealty to China
have been dramatically overblown, to the point where even Xi
Jinping acknowledged a need to rethink its branding. My own
research suggests that if China is intending to upend the global
economic order, it is doing so in a radically suboptimal manner.
Harvard professor Iain Johnston knows more about China than
I ever will, and he arrives at the same conclusion: When it comes
to the global economy, China is not a revisionist state.
China’s stakeholder status, however, has not prevented the
country from gaming the system. Reports of forced technology
transfer—the practice of requiring Western-owned factories in
China to use advanced technology, which is then copied and/
or stolen—are legion, representing a serious cost to U.S. firms.
The country’s cyberespionage, which was muted after a 2015
bilateral agreement with the United States, has flared up again
during the Trump years. Beyond the economic realm, Beijing
has adopted a more bellicose posture in its backyard. Even the
most stalwart defenders of China’s foreign policy acknowledge
that it has been testing its limits in the South China and East
China seas, making territorial claims on islands and waters and
backing them up with a vigorous naval presence.
China has also taken a more active role in global governance,
but not in the way U.S. policy makers anticipated. Name an
important international organization, and the pattern has been
the same during the Trump years: U.S. retreat matched by more
active Chinese involvement. This is particularly true at the
United Nations, where Chinese candidates have bested Ameri-
can candidates to head agencies such as the Food and Agricul-
ture Organization. Chinese officials now run four of the 15 spe-
cialized U.N. agencies; the United States runs one. One former
senior U.N. official described multiple agencies to me as “lost”
to China. Beijing is aiming to control the World Intellectual
Property Organization next. Each of these small victories per-
mits Beijing to exert greater influence over agencies neglected
by Washington. Instead of passively assimilating into the global
community, the Chinese are looking to change it.
Beyond existing institutions, China has also created a pano-
ply of new structures ranging from the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank to the BRI. These are designed to put Beijing
at the center of new economic networks and to keep the United
States on the outside looking in. Yes, China is acting like a stake-
holder, but it wants greater say over the system as well.
The old consensus failed to recognize that as Chinese power
increased, the country would be able to exploit that interde-
pendence. As China’s market size has grown, it has become
less reliant on exports. Beijing is now more willing to throw its
economic weight around, forcing multinational corporations
to comply with official requests or face a cutoff in access to the
Chinese market. Its recent flexing of market power has been so
aggressive that Victor Cha and Andy Lim of the Center for Strate-
gic and International Studies dubbed it “predatory liberalism.”
If there was a crystallizing moment for the new Washington
consensus on China, it was the National Basketball Associa-
tion (NBA) fracas that played out last October. As the protests
in Hong Kong heated up, Houston Rockets General Manager
Daryl Morey tweeted a message supporting the residents taking
to the streets. The backlash from the Chinese government was
predictable: All of the team’s exhibition games were removed
from Chinese television.
The backlash from the rest of the NBA was more disturbing.
The initial response—from the league’s commissioner, Adam
REASON 49
Silver, to Brooklyn Nets owner Joseph Tsai to All-Star LeBron
James—was to disown Morey for speaking up. As Cha and Lim
explained in The Washington Quarterly, “the NBA cannot afford
to lose the Chinese market with its emerging middle consumer
class larger than the population of the United States.” Seeing a
U.S.-dominated sports league kowtow to an authoritarian gov-
ernment was a shock to basketball fans and the foreign policy
community alike.
The NBA incident is only the most visible example. The
Chinese government has successfully applied similar pressure
to U.S. airlines and Hollywood producers. On human rights,
Chinese diplomats also have become much more outspoken
in recent years, threatening “countermeasures” in response to
any criticism from foreign governments. China has grown much
more comfortable with using sticks as well as carrots as part of
its economic diplomacy.
The other flaw in the old consensus was a failure to appreci-
ate that China might exploit its economic position to engage in
further surveillance and coercion of other countries, a phenom-
enon that political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham New-
man have labeled “weaponized interdependence.” This is what
has triggered bipartisan anxiety about the role that the Chinese
tech giant Huawei is playing in the development of 5G mobile
networks across the globe.
As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explained in December
2019, “Thanks to the way 5G networks are built, it’s impossible
to separate any one part of the network from another.” There-
fore, he declared, “it’s critical that [allies] not give control of
their critical infrastructure to Chinese tech giants like Huawei
or ZTE.” Similarly, in fall 2019, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.)
and Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) jointly requested that U.S. intelligence
officials investigate whether a Chinese smartphone app popular
among teenagers poses a national security risk. “With over 110
million downloads in the U.S. alone,” they wrote in a letter, “Tik-
Tok is a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore.”
A COUNTERPRODUCTIVE RESPONSE
THE OLD CONSENSUS on China was flawed because it rested on a
Whiggish narrative in which the arc of history bends toward
free markets and liberal democracy. Such overconfidence was
bolstered by America’s unparalleled standing in the world a
generation ago. The United States was the global hegemon, and
it seemed like the rest of the world was copacetic with this fact.
But free markets and civil liberties are the exceptions and not
the rule in world history.
A little introspection and humility are good things for a pol-
icy making community. Unfortunately, the debate has lurched
all the way into full-blown panic mode. The new Washington
consensus is less about the souring of elite attitudes toward
50 MAY 2020
China and more about the souring of elite attitudes toward the
United States. American intellectuals have gone from believ-
ing in the end of history to believing that history will bury us.
Columnists opine that the U.S. needs to copy China’s top-down
tech strategies. Last summer, Foreign Affairs devoted 50 pages
to what had happened to the American Century (hint: noth-
ing good); in January, the same magazine ran a special section
debating whether capitalism was doomed.
As one State Department official explained to me last spring,
“The U.S. electorate lost faith in the global economic system.” In
November, Nils Gilman wrote at The American Interest that “if
the proof of the economic pudding is in the eating, China seems
to have been using a better cookbook over the last decade.” The
thought that dare not speak its name, the one underlying all of
this anxiety, is that China’s model of political economy might be
superior to America’s.
This anxiety has arguably led the Trump administra-
tion to respond to China in ways that are counterproductive.
There clearly are areas of concern in dealing with the People’s
Republic—on human rights, on economic networks where
China might achieve dominance, and on true challenges to our
national security. These contentious issues require targeted
measures and cooperation with allies to give the United States
a strong bargaining position. The Trump administration has
done the exact opposite.
In dealing with China, the president has linked issues that
should be kept separate. He casually suggested trading the pros-
ecution of a Huawei executive for trade concessions and told Xi
Jinping he would stay quiet on Hong Kong so as not to disrupt
trade negotiations. And the U.S. trade war has not been limited
to China; Trump has hiked tariffs on every major economy. The
result has been that China has expanded its global market share
even as trade with the United States has declined, and even as
China’s human rights violations have continued apace. The
success of U.S. efforts to block Huawei from participating in the
construction of 5G networks has been limited at best. This is
partly because Huawei has embedded itself so deeply in these
networks, but it is also because the Trump administration’s
diplomacy has been so ham-fisted. Even many of our close allies
trust Xi Jinping more than Donald Trump.
The actual trade negotiations with China proved nothing
short of a fiasco. The Tax Foundation estimates that the Trump
administration’s aggregate tariff increases amount to “one of
the largest tax increases in decades” and says that the costs of
the trade war have already exceeded whatever benefits the 2017
tax bill was projected to produce for long-term growth. Moody’s
Analytics estimates just one year of the trade war shaved U.S.
real GDP growth by three-tenths of a percent and cost almost
300,000 jobs. The “phase one” trade deal does nothing to chal-
lenge the elements of China’s behavior that the new Washing-
ton consensus finds so objectionable. If anything, it does the
opposite, creating a “managed trade” arrangement that flouts
WTO rules and makes the Chinese government the guarantor
of agricultural and energy purchases.
The lesson China has drawn is that it cannot and should not
fully liberalize, lest it increase its vulnerability to reprises of the
Trump administration’s economic pressure. Little wonder that
Chinese firms have ordered their foreign suppliers to reduce
their reliance on U.S. components, enraging American firms
that deal in microchips and biotech. The new Beijing consen-
sus about the United States includes talk of “financial war.”
The Quincy Institute’s Chas Freeman has concluded that “both
countries are in the process of reconciling themselves to pro-
tracted confrontation based on real and imagined differences.”
In U.S. history, only two historical examples parallel the
decoupling scenario that the Trump administration envisages
with China. The first is the Embargo Act of 1807, in which the
United States sanctioned both Great Britain and France during
the Napoleonic wars. It crippled the U.S. economy at the time,
causing GDP to shrink by an estimated 5 percent. The second
example is the imposition of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930,
a choice that contributed to a two-thirds decline in global trade.
(Oh, and to the Great Depression.)
The existing trade war has been damaging enough. A true
decoupling from China, one that extended to capital markets
and higher education, would produce a similar shock to our
economy. A reverse migration of foreign-born scientists and
technicians would reduce innovation in the United States while
bolstering it in China.
WHAT MAKES AMERICA GREAT
U.S. FEARS HAVE led to an overhyping of the communist regime’s
competence. One reason Beijing acceded to the phase one trade
deal was to remedy a pork shortage of its own making.
Not only has China’s economic growth slowed down; there
is strong evidence that its officials have overstated its growth
rate by more than two percentage points annually for the last
12 years. The country’s total debt-to-GDP ratio now exceeds
300 percent, as continued fiscal stimulus has not yielded
faster growth.
China’s bungled reaction to the new coronavirus highlights
how the regime’s authoritarianism could sabotage its future.
COVID-19 got out of control because local authorities in Wuhan
ignored warnings from doctors. The city’s mayor did not tell
citizens what was happening in late December—when doing
so could have halted the virus’s spread—for fear of upsetting
superiors in Beijing. Chinese authorities are now aggressively
quarantining affected regions, but much of the damage has been
done. Official data from February showed the sharpest monthly
contraction in the country’s economic activity on record.
For all the talk of China catching up to us technologically, a
recent survey from Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies
concluded that “the gap between the United States and China
remains substantial.” By China’s own rankings, the country
is still lagging in areas such as artificial intelligence research.
Indeed, China’s own illiberalism hampers its ability to catch up;
U.S. researchers are better at international collaboration than
their Chinese counterparts.
My Tufts colleague Michael Beckley says that Beijing’s recent
military assertiveness is coming not from strength but from
weakness—from a “profound unease among the country’s lead-
ers, as they contend with their country’s first sustained eco-
nomic slowdown in a generation and can discern no end in
sight.” A surefire way to exacerbate Chinese bellicosity, Beckley
notes, would be to close off the U.S. market to China.
Continuing to pursue a true break would harm both econo-
mies and worsen the security situation. U.S. policy makers need
to restore their faith in the free enterprise system that made us
the world’s richest country in the first place and worry less about
the Middle Kingdom.
There are areas in which the prospect of weaponized inter-
dependence means that some negotiated decoupling will be
necessary. In those arenas, however, the United States will need
the cooperation of its allies—because otherwise, China is likely
to be the one setting global standards in 5G and other technical
areas. The U.S.-China Trade Policy Working Group, a collection
of economists and lawyers from both sides of the Pacific, has
put forward a framework for managing the relationship. As
for coping with predatory liberalism, Adam Silver’s change of
tune in the face of a media firestorm shows that negative press
attention is the best way to get U.S. firms to stop kowtowing to
Chinese authorities.
As long as China’s government acts in a repressive manner,
there can and should be limits to the economic relationship. In
winner-take-all sectors, prohibiting Chinese predatory prac-
tices makes sense. Yet the United States trades with allies that
have similarly abysmal human rights records, from Honduras
to Saudi Arabia. During the Cold War, we cooperated with the
Soviet Union on arms control, space research, and other areas.
The Chinese state is brutal, but the answer is not to repudiate
our commitment to openness. The United States can negotiate
from strength with China—so long as policy makers in Wash-
ington remember what makes America great.
DANIEL W. DREZNER is professor of international politics at the
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
REASON 51
 DAY
H
50
TU N
R T

R
A
E S

52 MAY 2020
 HALF A CENTURY LATER, A LOOK BACK AT
THE FORECASTERS WHO GOT THE FUTURE
WRONG—AND ONE WHO GOT IT RIGHT

RONALD BAILEY

Photo: Paul Sequeira/Getty REASON 53

A
BOUT 20 MILLION Americans turned out for
the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Lec-
tures and rallies took place at more than
2,000 college campuses, 10,000 elemen-
tary and high schools, and thousands of
other places across the country. Forty-two
states adopted resolutions endorsing Earth
Day, and Congress recessed so that legislators could participate
in the activities in their districts. It is sometimes described as,
up to that time, the largest public demonstration in history.
The lectures and literature surrounding the event featured
lots of dismal predictions about the future. One such compen-
dium of doom was The Environmental Handbook, whose cover
noted that it had been “prepared for the first national envi-
ronmental teach-in.” Commissioned by the group Friends of
the Earth, the book preached the perils of rising population
and imminent depletion of nonrenewable resources. Many of
its contributors—let’s call them the Catastrophists—warned
that even such drastic actions as halving the number of human
beings and stopping economic growth completely might not be
enough to prevent the imminent ecological cataclysm.
A different group of researchers believed that while eco-
nomic growth and technological progress had created some
ecological problems, these things also would be a source of
solutions. Let’s call these folks the Prometheans. The economist
Theodore Schultz argued in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
in 1972 that the expansion of modern agriculture would free up
more land for nature. Other proponents of this more sanguine
outlook included the oceanographer Cy Adler, the economist
Christopher Freeman, and Nature editor emeritus John Mad-
dox, author of the 1972 book The Doomsday Syndrome.
Today, the Earth Day Network hopes a billion people across
the world will participate in Earth Day 2020, where the 50th
anniversary focus will be on man-made climate change. Living as
we do in the future that the Catastrophists and the Prometheans
were forecasting, now is a great time to look back at the claims
made five decades ago. Which side had the abler prophets?
THE CATASTROPHISTS
IN HIS CONTRIBUTION to The Environmental Handbook, an essay
called “The Limits of Adaptability,” the biologist René Dubos
claimed that “the dangers posed by overpopulation are more
grave and more immediate in the U.S. than in less industrial-
ized countries. This is due in part to the fact that each U.S.
citizen uses more of the world’s natural resources than any
other human being and destroys them more rapidly, thereby
contributing massively to the pollution of his own surround-
ings and of the earth as a whole.”
Handbook editor Garrett De Bell’s essay claimed that over-
54 MAY 2020
population was the biggest reason for mankind’s increasing use
of pollution-causing energy sources. While “population control
will take time,” De Bell argued, we could get a start on a solution
“by ceasing to use power for trivial purposes.” Specifically, the
prices for energy supplies should be so scaled as to discourage
people from using such “abundant luxuries” as blenders, can
openers, power saws, mowers, clothes dryers, air condition-
ers, hair dryers—and cars, of course: “If you wanted to design a
transportation system to waste the earth’s energy reserves and
pollute the air as much as possible, you couldn’t do much better
than our present system dominated by the automobile.”
De Bell also noted that burning fossil fuels was increasing
the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “Scientists are
becoming worried about increasing CO2 levels because of the
greenhouse effect, with its possible repercussions on the world
climate,” he wrote. Reducing energy use in the U.S. by 25 percent
during the following decade could be a start toward “preventing
disastrous climatic changes.”
In their contribution to the Handbook, political scientist Rob-
ert Rienow and his wife, author Leona Train Rienow, declared
that “a New Yorker on the street took into his lungs the equiva-
lent in toxic materials of 38 cigarettes a day.” Although factories
and residential heating contributed to urban smog, automobiles
were the biggest culprits: “While cars get faster and longer, lives
get slower and shorter. While Chrysler competes with Buick
for the getaway, cancer competes with emphysema for the lay-
away. This generation is indeed going to have to choose between
humans and the automobile. Perhaps most families have too
many of both.”
The book’s most urgent vision of imminent global environ-
mental disaster was courtesy of the Stanford biologist Paul
Ehrlich. He sketched a scenario in which devastating famines
would kill tens of millions of people in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America by the end of the 1970s, and smog disasters in Los
Angeles and New York would kill 200,000 Americans in 1973.
Warning that “America’s resource situation was bad and bound
to get worse,” he dismissed “cornucopian economists” by imag-
ining future congressional hearings in which a “distinguished
geologist from the University of California” would urge that
“economists be legally required to learn at least the most ele-
mentary facts of geology.”
Ehrlich’s essay was not a prediction for how the 1970s would
literally unfold. But it was obviously designed to scare people
about the impending ecological apocalypse, and it did conclude
with an actual prediction: “Most of the people who are going to
die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already
been born.” He added that by 1975, “some experts feel that food
shortages will have escalated the present level of world hun-
ger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions.
Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-pop-
ulation collision will not occur until
the decade of the 1980s.”
“Population will inevitably and
completely outstrip whatever small
increases in food supplies we make,”
Ehrlich confidently declared in the
April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle.
“The death rate will increase until at
least 100–200 million people per year
will be starving to death during the
next ten years.”
Harrison Brown of the National
Academy of Sciences published a
chart in the September 1970 issue
of Scientific American projecting
that humanity would run out of cop-
per shortly after 2000; lead, zinc,
tin, gold, and silver would be gone
before 1990. Brown claimed that
his estimates took into account the
possibilities that “new reserves will
be discovered by exploration or cre-
ated by innovation.” The February 2,
1970, issue of Time quoted the ecolo-
gist Kenneth Watt: “By the year 2000,
if present trends continue, we will be
using up crude oil at such a rate...that
there won’t be any more crude oil.”
And in January 1970, Life maga-
zine warned: “In a decade, urban
dwellers will have to wear gas masks
to survive air pollution.”

THE PROMETHEANS
PEOPLE IN DEVELOPED countries
“have been assailed by prophecies
of calamity,” Maddox wrote in The
Doomsday Syndrome. “To some, pop-
ulation growth is the most immedi-
ate threat. Others make more of pollution of various kinds,
the risk that the world will run out food or natural resources or
even the possibility that economic growth and the prosperity it
brings spell danger for the human race.”
The trajectories Maddox foresaw for population and food
production differed dramatically from those predicted by the
Catastrophists. Technologically advanced rich countries, he
noted, had undergone a demographic transition from the Mal-
thusian past of high fertility/high mortality societies to a high
fertility/low mortality combination. But this, he argued, was a
temporary stage; we were already entering a population-sta-
bilizing low fertility/low mortality state. “Although the demo-
graphic transition has only just begun in large parts of the devel-
oping world, there is every reason to expect that it will produce
demographic stability entirely comparable with that which now
exists in Western Europe and elsewhere in the industrialized
world,” he concluded. “The population explosion has all the
signs of being a damp squib.”
Food production, meanwhile, was “now increasing much
faster than population.” During the 1960s, Maddox observed,

Photo: The Boston Globe/Getty REASON 55

it grew at 2.7 percent annually, handily outstripping the global
population growth rate of 2 percent a year. In India and South-
east Asia, food production was increasing at 4 percent annu-
ally, about double their population growth rates. And further
improvements were possible.
With regard to energy, Maddox cited estimates from 1970
that “there are more, but not much more, than 300,000 million
tons of petroleum [about 2.1 trillion barrels] still to be extracted
from the ground.” At the then-current rate of extraction of 15
billion barrels annually, he calculated that supplies would last
for 135 years.
And other natural resources? “Techniques for exploration
and extraction of metals seem to have kept ahead of scarcity,“
he observed. Consequently, supplies of metals “are becoming
economically more plentiful, not more scarce.”
Maddox fully acknowledged that pollution was harming
people and the natural world. Cutting air pollution in the U.S.
by 50 percent, he said, would increase life expectancy by three
to five years. But he did not think pollution threatened the very
existence of the human race. It was, he argued, an open-access
commons problem that could be solved through technology
and sensible public policy. In 60 American cities, he pointed
out, average levels of smokiness had already declined by 20
percent from 1957 to 1970; sulfur dioxide had fallen by a third
from 1962 to 1969.
Noting that burning fossil fuels was increasing concentra-
tions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Maddox calculated
that CO2 would increase by 15 percent by 2000. That is, in fact,
what happened. He also predicted that that rise would result in
“an increase of the temperature on the surface of the earth by
something like one-half degree centigrade.” That was also just
about right.
Finally, “if it turns out that the scale of industrial activity
is so great that the accumulation of carbon dioxide threatens
climate change,” Maddox wrote, the same ingenuity that was
reducing other forms of pollution “could be applied to regulate
the concentration of the gas. To be sure, such an intervention
would require expensive and historically important changes in
industrial practices, but calamity is avoidable.”
The bottom line for Maddox was that “technology and pros-
perity are not the inherent nuisances of which environmental-
ists continually complain, but rather, the means by which a
better environment could be created.”
WHO WAS MORE RIGHT?
WORLD POPULATION HAS increased since 1970, though at a lower
rate than predicted by the Catastrophists. At the time of the
first Earth Day, there were 3.7 billion people on Earth; that
has now risen to 7.6 billion. On the other hand, the global total
56 MAY 2020
fertility rate back then was 4.8 children per woman; it has
now plummeted to 2.4. In 83 countries—including the United
States—fertility is below the replacement rate of 2.1 children
per woman. Those 83 countries represent half the world’s pop-
ulation. Wolfgang Lutz, a demographer at the International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, projects that world pop-
ulation will peak in this century and then begin to fall.
Though our population doubled, those globe-spanning
famines did not occur. Instead, world food production more
than tripled, with average per-capita calories supplied rising
from around 2,400 to nearly 3,000 per day. In the U.S., corn
yields since 1970 have grown from about 60 bushels per acre to
nearly 170 now. Modern agriculture is becoming so productive
that the Rockefeller University researcher Jesse Ausubel thinks
humanity is at the cusp of “peak farmland,” and that our total
use of land for agriculture will soon begin to decline.
Meanwhile, Maddox appears to have been too conserva-
tive—not too optimistic—in his beliefs about global petroleum
resources. In 2014, the U.S. Energy Information Administration
estimated the total amount of technically recoverable petro-
leum at about 3.4 trillion barrels.
Just as the world did not run out of oil, it did not run out of
copper, lead, zinc, tin, gold, or silver. In 1974, the total world
reserves of copper amounted to 417 million tons. The U.S. Geo-
logical Survey reports that in 2019, world copper reserves stood
at 830 million tons. In 1974, world lead reserves were 132 mil-
lion tons. In 2019, they were 83 million tons. Zinc reserves went
from 236 million tons to 230 million tons. Tin reserves moved
from 10 million tons to 4.7 million tons. Gold reserves rose
from 41,000 tons to 54,000 tons. Silver reserves moved up from
187,000 tons to 560,000 tons.
As you may have noticed, city dwellers in developed coun-
tries are not wearing gas masks as they go about their daily lives.
As forecast by Maddox, urban air was cleared using technol-
ogy and the “vigorous application of social instruments, laws,
and taxes.” From 1970 to 2018, the Environmental Protection
Agency reports, America’s combined emissions of six key air
pollutants dropped by 74 percent, even as the U.S. economy
grew by 275 percent. The United Kingdom and the European
Union have likewise experienced steep declines in air pollution.
Surface water pollution has also been reduced. Based on 14.6
million pollution readings at 265,000 monitoring sites between
1972 and 2014, the EPA reports that in 1972, 30 percent of
tested surface waters in the United States did not meet the fish-
able standard (thriving habitats for fish that are safe to eat); only
15 percent failed that standard in 2014.
Both Catastrophist De Bell and Promethean Maddox worried
about the possible climatic effects of rising atmospheric concen-
trations of carbon. Indeed, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere
has increased by 25 percent, from 328 parts per million in April
1970 to 412 parts per million today. Since the first Earth Day,
the globe’s average temperature has increased by about 1 degree
Celsius, and recent research suggests that the world is on track to
increase by another 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.
De Bell responded to climate change by recommending
energy austerity, while Maddox argued that the same human
ingenuity that was solving other air pollution problems could
be brought to bear on greenhouse warming. Given how thor-
oughly economic growth and sci-tech prowess have falsified the
Catastrophists’ other forecasts, it’s not implausible that those
same forces will let us surmount the problems posed by climate
change too.
THE SENSE OF AN ENDING
IN HIS 1967 book The Sense of an Ending, the literary critic Frank
Kermode argued that human beings try to give significance to
our short lives in the long sweep of history by placing ourselves
in the middle of a narrative arc. That arc typically traces civili-
Photo: Bettmann/Getty
zation’s fall from a golden age through a current stage of deca-
dence to an impending apocalypse—one that may, through the
bold efforts of the current generation, usher in a new age.
“The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume
that the End is pretty near,” observed Kermode. But since the
end never arrives, “the historical allegory is always having to
be revised....And this is important. Apocalypse can be discon-
firmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordi-
nary resilience.”
The dire prophecies of the first Earth Day have been mostly
proven wrong, but the prophets of an always-impending envi-
ronmental apocalypse have not thereby been discredited. Augu-
ries of imminent catastrophe remain resilient, even as the world
of 2020 is in a much happier state than the Catastrophists of
1970 ever expected.
Science Correspondent RONALD BAILEY is the author of The End of
Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (Thomas
Dunne Books).
REASON 57
58 MAY 2020
 inter view by
STEPHANIE SLADE

The Dispatch’s David French on the

value of liberalism and the problems
with the new nationalist right

‘I Think the
Protection of
Liberty Is a
Common Good’
Illustration: Yudhidarwan/Fiverr REASON 59
“There is a level
of panic and
catastrophizing
about American
politics that’s way
out of proportion,”
says David French.
“And that is
dangerous to our
body politic.”
It’s ironic that French, a Tennessee-based evangelical
Christian, has found himself in the position of trying to per-
suade his fellow conservatives to cool their jets. After all, the
51-year-old writer, litigator, and activist made a name for
himself lobbing attacks on laws and policies that he felt were
infringing on people’s rights. As president of the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), he helped file suit
against college speech codes that were preventing students
from voicing unpopular opinions on campus. As a colum-
nist for the conservative magazine National Review, he regu-
larly drew attention to religious liberty violations such as the
Obamacare contraception mandate.
But since about the time Donald Trump made his presi-
dential aspirations known, French has found himself in hot
water with folks on the political right who fault him for not
being a team player. The brief against him was epitomized by
a now-infamous May 2019 essay in the Christian journal First
Things in which New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari
complained that “liberalism of the kind French embodies has
a great horror of the state, of traditional authority and the use
of the public power to advance the common good, including in
the realm of public morality.”
In October, French left his perch as a senior editor at
National Review to join former colleague Jonah Goldberg and
former chief of the now-defunct Weekly Standard Stephen
Hayes in a new media venture called The Dispatch. In Decem-
60 MAY 2020
ber, French sat down with Reason Managing Editor Stephanie
Slade to explain that while he’s “every bit as conservative” as
he was before the Trump era, he’s also deeply committed to
the values of classical liberalism.
Reason: In one of your recent email newsletters, you used
the phrases common good conservatism and nationalist
conservatism. Can you tell us what those terms signify
and how they differ from each other, if at all?
French: They’re mainly synonyms in my mind. The reason
why I used common good conservatism is because I’m going
with phrases used, for example, in some of [Sen. Marco]
Rubio’s work and in a lot of the work you’re seeing out of
Claremont, out of First Things. It’s emphasizing the role of the
government in fostering the common good over the role of the
government in protecting liberty.
They would reject, in many ways, this formulation from
the Declaration of Independence that we’re endowed with
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and then the next
sentence following that, that governments were instituted
among men to protect these liberties. They have much
greater confidence, for example, than I do, that governments
can in fact create economic conditions, can create social con-
ditions that advance human welfare in a concrete and pre-
dictable way.
So you’re seeing a lot more emphasis on the right on cen-
tral economic planning and a lot less emphasis on individual
liberty—certainly a lot less emphasis on free speech, a lot
less emphasis on economic freedom, more of an argument
that because the market has been shaped a great deal by gov-
ernment, that essentially that means it must continue to be
shaped as much as we can possibly shape it to advance the
common good. It’s a sharp turn from what you would call
classic Reagan conservatism.
What do you think caused that departure?
Well, there’s always been a strain of the GOP that is populist.
And populism is rarely focused on small government and
individual liberty, particularly the populism that you’ve seen
in the South over the years....Populism in the South was pub-
lic works: a big public intervention into the poor rural South.
There’s a very flawed belief that the principles of Reagan
Republicanism and classical liberalism have failed this coun-
try—this is an argument you’ve seen from Patrick Deneen at
Notre Dame—and that therefore we need a correction.
The thing that has come to exemplify everything that’s
wrong with modernity for this crowd, as you well know,
is Drag Queen Story Hour. Tell us what those words mean
and then give me the Frenchian position on it.
Drag Queen Story Hour is a small movement of drag queens
and friends of drag queens who will host, in public libraries
scattered around this country, small gatherings of people who
will listen to a drag queen read a children’s book. Children
come to Drag Queen Story Hour. They see the drag queens and
they interact with the drag queens. It’s come to symbolize the
advance of the sexual revolution and, particularly, the way that
the sexual revolution touches the lives of children. So the argu-
ment that was made was that classical liberalism is inadequate
to address the threat of Drag Queen Story Hour, and that Drag
Queen Story Hour is the product of liberty unrestrained. This
is what happens when people are given too much liberty: Drag
queens read books to kids.
My argument about this was really pretty simple. I don’t
like Drag Queen Story Hour. I would not take my children to
Drag Queen Story Hour. But I don’t have to go to Drag Queen
Story Hour, and unless they violate anti-obscenity or inde-
cency statutes or otherwise applicable and constitutionally
appropriate laws, they enjoy all the protections of the First
Amendment that everybody else enjoys. In fact, that open
access to the use of public facilities has been a boon to social
conservative groups like Christian organizations. There are
thousands of churches that conduct worship services in
empty classrooms and gymnasiums and cafeterias across this
country, who have access to library facilities and other pub-
lic buildings. They utilize those to say and preach and teach
things that the common good conservatives would very much
like and very much endorse. And you cannot have a legal sys-
tem that allows the government to dictate which preferred
viewpoint gets access to its facilities. If you embrace such a
system, you’re not going to like the outcome.
The idea is that if conservatives can stop Drag Queen Story
Hour from happening at the library, then why can’t pro-
gressives stop—
They can and will stop church services, Bible studies, Tea Party
meetings, GOP gatherings. I mean, once you lift the [require-
ment of] viewpoint neutrality in access to public facilities, you
lift it. It’s gone. And you better be in charge of everything, or
you’re going to see your preferred viewpoint locked out of the
public square.
Now, that’s a pragmatic response. I tend to think that lib-
erty has independent value. A lot of [common good conserva-
tives] think there is no independent value in liberty unless
liberty is used for virtue. But I think the protection of liberty is
a common good.
It’s true, though, that people on the left increasingly are
trying to use the power of the state to impose their values
on conservatives.
Oh, sure.
So why isn’t it true that at some point you have to fight fire
with fire?
The fact of the matter is that we have systems in place that pro-
tect individual liberty increasingly effectively. This is some-
thing a lot of people miss. People who just started following
politics recently tend to think that religious liberty is under
unprecedented siege, when the reality is religious liberty has
more protections right now from government interference
than it has had in the last 25 years. People tend to think that
free speech is under unprecedented attack, when right now
people are more free from the threat of government censorship
than they have been perhaps anytime in the whole history of
the United States of America. There is an enormous advance
of legal protection from censorship from the government over
the last 25–30 years that is completely underappreciated.
What we face now isn’t so much the government imposing
its values but private actors using the power that they have,
whether financial or cultural, to try to crowd out competing
voices from the public square. That would be, for example,
when the Oscars doesn’t let Kevin Hart be a host. That’s one
private entity telling a private citizen he can’t host their gath-
ering. I am concerned about the culture of censorship that
exists in a lot of these private actions. But it’s just a fundamen-
tally different thing from the formal censorship that happens
at the point of the government’s bayonet.
But we did just go through a presidential administration
that wanted to make Catholic nuns provide their employ-
ees with birth control. We do have states trying to force
bakers and florists to provide their services for gay wed-
dings even if they object on religious grounds. So govern-
ment power is being wielded.
It’s trying. And that’s been the case throughout American his-
tory. I mean, the wisdom of the necessity of the Bill of Rights
was made manifest from the very first founding generation.
As bad as the Little Sisters of the Poor case was or as bad as
the Masterpiece Cakeshop case was, they’re not the Alien and
Sedition Acts, and the Alien and Sedition Acts came in the
founding generation.
There is a tug of war between government oppression and
individual liberty that has been a part of the fabric of this
country for 200+ years. I opposed the Obama administration’s
legal position in Little Sisters of the Poor. I opposed their legal
position in Masterpiece Cakeshop. And by the way, they lost.
They lost. Individual liberty won.
REASON 61
Your former boss, National Review Editor Rich Lowry,
has recently taken it upon himself to make the case for
a “benign” nationalism. Is there such a thing as benign
nationalism?
Only if the definition of nationalism is watered down to near
meaninglessness. I think the United States of America is a dif-
ferent nation from virtually any other nation in the history of
the world. It has a different history. It has a different composi-
tion. It is a collection of many nationalities. There’s that old
phrase blood and soil nationalism. That’s difficult to translate
into the U.S. I mean, whose blood? Which soil? So if you’re
going to water nationalism down into, “Well, we have shared
historical stories,” or “Most of us like the flag,” or “We’re
stirred by specific events from our history, like Normandy
Beach,” these things are symbols that matter. But as far as an
organizing principle for a coherent politics, I think national-
ism is dangerous.
What would nationalism look like as a political organizing
principle?
In my view, it’s hard for nationalism to avoid becoming very
centralizing—to avoid becoming statism, with the principal
actor being the national government. Nationalism is in many
ways a direct challenge to the fact of American pluralism.
America is a continent-sized, multi-faith, multi-ethnic, consti-
tutional republic. It’s hard to think of a nation anywhere in the
world combining so many different nationalities and so many
different and often competing strains of faith, with so many
different geographies and subcultures.
You hear frequently this phrase used, real America. All of
America is real America. The whole thing.
And you say that as somebody who lives in Franklin, Ten-
nessee, a place that conservatives would call real America.
Oh, I’m in the middle of real America. The fact of the matter
is that we have many different American experiences, many
different American stories, many different perceptions of this
country. And I agree: When you have that degree of pluralism,
unity is a challenge. But I believe that unity is harmed more
than it is helped when you try to centralize.
One complaint that nationalists make is that there’s a lib-
eral elitist pastime of crapping on America. They think
we need a renewal of basic pride in our country. You’re a
veteran. You enlisted in the Army Reserves after 9/11. You
served in Iraq. I imagine you’re a patriotic person. So do
you feel like the nationalists have a point?
Yeah. I think that there are people who tell a very flawed story
about this country, and I do think there are people who live
62 MAY 2020
within this country who don’t particularly like it. But because
politics is the art of overreaction these days, I think that we
conservatives paint with way too broad a brush about that.
There are people—I experienced that when I was in law
school—who just look at the United States as this dreadful
beast that was 200 years of greed, exploitation, and genocide
followed by a couple of halfway decent social reforms that
have made us only marginally less awful. I met people like
that. They’re out there. But the idea that that is sort of a domi-
nant strain of thinking—you see this all the time. You’ll hear
someone on the right say, “They hate America.” That’s just
false. You can nut-pick, and you can find an individual here
and there, or even some sort of coherent intellectual move-
ment coming out of some university, that does hate America.
But this sort of “they hate America” talk, which is a tool of
mass mobilization, is just a flat-out overreaction.
You and your family have been targets of some pretty hei-
nous and horrible speech online. In the time since that
started, this has become a highly politicized topic. There’s
a lot of talk about needing to regulate social media com-
panies to require them to monitor their users’ speech and
make sure that users are not doing things like bullying or
spreading false information. Where do you come down
on that?
Just going back to my family’s experience: To the extent that
true threats are communicated through social media, they
should be prosecuted.
Social media companies...should have the liberty to be able
to build and foster the kind of community that they seek to
cultivate with their product. My general view is the govern-
ment should take its hands off of social media companies, but
that social media companies, when in doubt, should privilege
free expression. What I’ve long argued is that social media
companies should voluntarily try, as much as is practical with
their given platforms, to track the First Amendment. Now, it’s
different with different platforms. If you’re a Facebook and
you want Instagram to be a much more kid-friendly space,
sure. Fine. No nudity. Just like broadcast television without
violating the First Amendment restricts profanity and nudity,
etc. You can build the kind of community that you want. But
as much as possible while doing that, try to avoid outright
viewpoint discrimination. When in doubt, err on the side of
free speech.
That’s not the government’s business. You hear a lot of
argument right now that the government needs to step in to
make sure that Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or whoever
is sufficiently protective of “free speech” as the government
defines it. And they pinpoint Section 230 of the Communica-
tions Decency Act [which says that web platforms are gener-
“I would not take my children to Drag Queen
Story Hour. But I don’t have to go to Drag
Queen Story Hour, and...they enjoy all the
protections of the First Amendment that
everybody else enjoys.”
ally not liable for the speech of their users], and they say,
“That needs to be repealed or substantially reformed.” Let’s
be super clear about this: If the government repeals Sec-
tion 230, it would ultimately create one of the biggest waves
of censorship in the whole history of the United States of
America. It would not have the effect that people think that it
would have.
Why is that?
Section 230 basically says you can have good-faith modera-
tion of user content without turning the moderator into the
speaker. What does that mean practically? It means if I write
a comment on Facebook, I’m responsible for my comment.
Facebook is not. And Facebook can even moderate my com-
ment and delete it if it has racial slurs or whatever. But the
moderation of my comments does not make Facebook liable
for my speech.
This was enacted as a reaction to two different cases,
both out of New York. In one, a court said that an early inter-
net platform that moderated user content was going to be
responsible for user speech. In another, the court said that
you’re not responsible for user speech if you don’t moderate
at all.
What’s the problem there? If you don’t moderate at all,
then you’re Gab [a social media site popular on the far right].
And Gab is a sewer. I know there are people who are on it, but
Gab is an absolute open sewer, and a company like Facebook
will not exist like that.
Because not enough people will want to use it.
Nobody wants to play in the sewer, right? These companies
are not going to become the raw open sewage of the internet.
What’s the alternative? If they’re responsible for user
speech, they’re going to be vetting your speech. Which means
the voices that will exist will be voices that have access to the
levers of power [and the ability] to speak in the way that jour-
nalists speak or the way that celebrities speak. Average people
will not have an opportunity to speak.
Imagine if I can’t comment on Yelp about a restaurant
unless Yelp fact checks me. I can’t comment on Facebook
about my beliefs about the flaws of the University of Michi-
gan football coach unless Facebook fact checks me. What? So
this notion that good-faith moderation is key to allowing the
internet that we use and take for granted, it’s absolutely true.
It’s indispensable for regular, average, ordinary, everyday
Americans to have a public voice. You revise this and you’re
going to place these companies in a box: Submit to the gov-
ernment or be a sewer. And that would be a tremendous prac-
tical act of censorship.
Let’s get a little more explicitly political. Nobody saw Don-
ald Trump coming, but everybody seems to have a pet the-
ory about how he got elected. Do you have an explanation
that you think is the most plausible?
I think there are a couple of factors that are underappreci-
ated in the rise of Trump. One is just his raw celebrity. How
many hundreds of millions of dollars were spent by the [Mitt]
Romney campaign to brand him with the American public?
Hundreds of millions of dollars. And this is a guy who was a
governor. He headed up the Salt Lake City Olympics. He had
run for president before in ’08. And still, if you’d ask an aver-
age American to name three facts about Mitt Romney, even the
average American voter, what would they have been? So poli-
ticians have to spend a ludicrous amount of money [to brand
REASON 63
“What we face now isn’t so much the
government imposing its values but private
actors using the power that they have,
whether financial or cultural, to try to
crowd out competing voices.”
themselves]. A lot of us who live and eat and breathe politics
don’t fully appreciate this.
Donald Trump has been one of the most famous Ameri-
cans for decades. And his brand, which was particularly
enhanced through [his game show] Celebrity Apprentice, is
“I’m an entertaining, super smart, super successful business-
man.” And then because of his massive celebrity, think about
the free media he got. As much as all politicos were like, “Oh,
Marco Rubio: rising star. Ted Cruz: the new constitutional
conservative,” millions of Americans just didn’t know those
guys, and they knew Donald Trump.
And then Donald Trump—the very famous, successful
celebrity—sold a very simple, potent message. I should’ve
been more aware of just how potent this message was with
voters who are not super political but really tired of the status
quo. I was buying a truck in Columbia, Tennessee, and I was
talking to the salesperson...and he said, “I like Donald Trump
because he won’t apologize for America and he kicks ass.” And
I thought, “You know, that’s a pretty compelling, simple mes-
sage: He’s strong. He’ll fight for America.”
You briefly thought about running as a conservative chal-
lenger to Trump in the 2016 general election. Do you think
that’s why you’ve become the subject of so much ire?
There were a couple of waves of anger. One wave was in late
2015/early 2016, when I wrote very critically about the alt-
right, and that triggered just this awful backlash. Then when I
considered running, there was another wave. And then I think
the most recent [reason] is that there are very few Christian
conservatives who were publicly Never Trump in the election
who have maintained that stance. Very few.
Why have you been so stubborn on that?
64 MAY 2020
I’m every bit as conservative as I was the day before Trump
came down the escalator. I just think Trump is fundamentally
incompatible with what I thought the conservative movement
was, and I’m not willing to concede what I believe the conser-
vative movement should be to him.
I reject this idea of all of these Americans sitting around
going, “I need a president to fight for me.” You don’t. You’re a
free American citizen. There is a level of panic and catastro-
phizing about American politics that’s way out of proportion.
And that is dangerous to our body politic. I just do not believe
that the defense of the values that I care the most about and
have fought the hardest for in my life—I don’t think those val-
ues need Donald Trump as their champion. I don’t believe the
pro-life movement needs him. I don’t think the argument for
religious liberty needs him. I don’t think the argument for free
speech needs him. I don’t think we need him.
We already were living in a world where progressives
watch MSNBC and conservatives watch Fox News. With
sites like The Dispatch and Breitbart and Jacobin, now
everybody can choose the precise echo chamber that they
want to live in. Does that worry you at all?
It worries me a ton.
This is a large issue, and it’s creating huge gaps of knowl-
edge in the politicized portion of the American electorate,
those people who pay close attention to politics. It’s creating a
complete distortion field in our perceptions about each other.
I don’t know if you saw the More in Common research that
said that the people who are most well-informed about poli-
tics are most wrong about the political beliefs of their oppo-
nents—they tend to believe that their opponents are far more
extreme than they really are. That’s the product of people
engaging with media that feeds that perception. It’s exacer-
bating divisions. If you think the Democrats are 25–30 points together more than it’s pushing us apart. Politics is only one
more extreme than they really are, doesn’t that raise the part of that.
stakes of the election a lot in your mind? There was a book written several years ago called The Big
Yeah, we’ve got a real problem. And I live in the heart of Sort. All of the trends that were identified in that book have
Trump country, and I see it every single day. If you read Twit- only accelerated. We tend to live around like-minded people
ter, progressives will say, “Look at all those bad people in more than we used to. The percentage of Americans living in
Trumpland who see all of these terrible things that Trump landslide counties, counties that went for one candidate or
has done and love him anyway. What a pile of hypocrites another by 20 points or more, is higher than it’s been since
those people are.” Well, that applies to some people. It applies we’ve been measuring the statistic. If you look at everything
to an awful lot of the very vocal Trump supporters you’ll see from [college football to Game of Thrones], a lot of pop culture
online, because they know everything Trump does. They preferences map with political preferences....And then if you
have histories of condemning the same behavior in Demo- look at the map of faith—where do people who go to church
crats and then they just flip around. regularly live?—it is not an even distribution across this coun-
But your average, regular, everyday Trump voter doesn’t try. These are tectonic forces that are dividing us.
see the world like that. The media that they watch is very In my view, that’s one of the things that is so dangerous
effective at defending Trump and very effective at highlight- about nationalist conservatism. The response to these tec-
ing Democratic excesses and Democratic wrongdoing. So tonic forces should not be forced centralization. It should be
if you talked to somebody at random in Franklin, Tennes- enhanced federalism. Let San Francisco be San Francisco. Let
see, about Donald Trump and they pay attention to politics, Franklin be Franklin. Nancy Pelosi needs to be less important
they’re going to know all the best defenses of Trump about in my life. And Ted Cruz needs to be less important to a San
Ukraine, and they might believe that they know terrible Franciscan’s life.
things about Biden that have been spread around conserva-
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
tive media. Is it really true that they have accepted all the
bad that Trump has done? No. They don’t
believe it.
I’ll never forget, I had a conversation
with a sweet lady at my church. She said,
“Why do you, David, still not support our
president?” And rather than have a long
conversation...I said, “You know, I just
want a president who doesn’t lie all the
time.” And she looked at me, and she said,
“Donald Trump lies?” with all sincerity,
TWENTY-TWO 911 CALLS
with every ounce of sincerity in her. This
is somebody who watches Fox primetime,
DIDN’T SAVE HIS LIFE.
who listens to Rush [Limbaugh] or Mark
Levin. She would be able to talk to me
about the basic outlines of the Ukraine
controversy or the basic outlines of the
Russia investigation. But the defense of
Trump comes through so powerfully that
there is no perception of the truth of the
OUR CHILD PROTECTION SYSTEM IS FAILING.
underlying indictment. When the government gets it wrong, kids die. Gen Justice
works to mend the broken child protection system and
Do you have any optimism about our provide free legal representation on behalf of abandoned,
ability to break out of this place that abused and trafficked children.
we’ve gotten into as a country?
Not in the short term. I don’t think that Donate today at genjustice.org.
there is any significant social, cultural,
political, religious trend that is pulling us

REASON 65
AND OUR OWN

K AT ROSENFIELD

66 MAY 2020
“IT IS A period of civil war,” begins the opening scroll of the very
first film in the Star Wars series, which just goes to show that
these movies have always been more than space chases and
lightsaber fights. The 1977 movie that would eventually spawn
a multidecade, multimedia, multibillion-dollar franchise (with
at least one of those billions dedicated to Baby Yoda merchan-
dise alone) was inspired as much by the postwar landscape
of the 1970s as by the samurai films and movie Westerns to
which it owes an obvious cinematic debt. Years after Star Wars
debuted in theaters, creator George Lucas told the Chicago Tri-
bune that it was “really about the Vietnam War, and that was
the period where Nixon was trying to run for a [second] term,
which got me to thinking historically about how do democra-
cies get turned into dictatorships? Because the democracies
aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.”
Four decades later, not much has changed in the long-ago,
far-away galaxy where Star Wars takes place—but the franchise
is more relevant than ever. In 2020, Star Wars isn’t just political;
it’s a microcosm of the fractious, tribal, exhausted landscape of
American politics—and not only because of our 21st century
predilection for making every major motion picture a battle-
ground for the culture wars. The most recent trilogy of films,
billed as the third and likely final act of the saga’s mainstage
space opera, is as confused about its message as a Democratic
primary candidate; as ambivalent about technology as a mil-
lennial in a love-hate relationship with her iPhone; as steeped
in nostalgia as an old-timer wearing a “Make America Great
Again” hat and muttering that the factories will reopen any day
now. It’s a funhouse-mirror reflection of a democracy having
an identity crisis...which, incidentally, is what the franchise
itself is doing, too. More than anything else, it’s the lack of a
coherent narrative that makes Star Wars such a potent meta-
commentary on the politics of the last five years.
The Force Awakens marked the dawn of the Trump era:
Released on the eve of the 2016 election, it captured a brief
moment of liberal optimism—a time when the future of both
Star Wars and the presidency seemed destined to be female.
Then came The Last Jedi, made in those shell-shocked months
following Trump’s election and inauguration. Our heroes reck-
oned with the consequences of putting their faith in the wrong
leadership, and the movie leaned heavily on the kind of progres-
sive rhetoric emphasized by Democrats who thought that 2018
would usher in a wave of radically progressive politicians (rheto-
ric that fell as flat with voters as The Last Jedi did with most fans).
Finally, there was Rise of Skywalker. Premiering almost exactly
a year before our next presidential election, the film read like a
flailing Hail Mary attempt to get things back on track, reuniting
the (fan) base with a familiar narrative, canon characters, and
apologies for the excesses of the film that preceded it.
Star Wars lost its narrative footing just as pop culture was
Photo: Jeff Gritchen/Orange County Register/SCNG/Getty
increasingly becoming the lens through which our political con-
flicts take place. The personal is the political, fandom is religion,
and the release of every Star Wars film is accompanied by a spate
of breathless Twitter-sourced news stories about problematic
fans boycotting the movie or bullying minority cast members
off social media. As a result, the new trilogy is seen as a proxy
for America in the age of Trump. Luke Skywalker, the anointed
leadership of a new generation of Jedi, now lives in self-imposed
exile on a distant planet after failing to live up to expectations.
(Hillary Clinton, without a spaceship on hand, had to settle for
the Chappaqua woods.) Ben Solo, the son of Han and Leia, was
pushed into the arms of the evil First Order by the mentor who
feared his dreams of the dark side—and became the pop-culture
patron saint of disaffected young men who, seeing themselves
as unfairly demonized by the progressive left, veer to the right in
search of belonging. There’s even a ripped-from-the-headlines
plot twist in Rise of Skywalker in which the First Order’s Admiral
Hux is revealed to be a secret rebel mole, for no other reason than
that he’s lost confidence in the temperamental Kylo Ren; the
only thing missing is an anonymous op-ed assuring the galac-
tic public that the First Order administration still has adults in
the room. (Perhaps ominously, things do not end well for Hux.)
But it’s not just about liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right,
or the light vs. dark sides of the Force. Both the fictional Star
Wars galaxy and our present political landscape are trapped
between the competing lures of burn-it-all-down progressivism
and wallow-in-the-past nostalgia. And while the former had its
disastrous trial run during The Last Jedi, the latter isn’t neces-
sarily working either, as evidenced by the franchise’s uneasy
relationship with advances in technology.
Take the action scenes, which have always been inspired by
real-world combat: samurai sword battles, tank warfare, high-
flying dogfights at close range. Behold the thrilling spectacle of
the rebels navigating their X-wings through the twisty, turny
trenches of the Death Star before a well-timed torpedo incin-
erates its core—or, 40 years later, the gut-punching Last Jedi
opening sequence, in which the Resistance “bombs” the First
Order as it closes in on a planet housing the rebel base, losing
countless lives and resources in the process.
But where combat tech hasn’t evolved much in the world of
Star Wars, our own has been revolutionized by targeted missiles
and unmanned drones. This makes kicking off The Last Jedi
with what’s essentially a suicide mission—all to destroy one
lousy dreadnought—seem that much more incongruous. Back
in 1977, remotely detonating your enemies from thousands
of miles away was a movie villain’s game. In the 21st century,
it’s how Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama preferred to
wage war. An American military operation no longer takes the
form of a few plucky pilots standing up to a massive, organized,
military-industrial machine; we are the machine, the uniformed
REASON 67

Combat tech hasn’t
evolved much in the
world of Star Wars,
but our own has been
revolutionized by
targeted missiles and
unmanned drones.
leadership with our finger on a button, obliterating our enemies
from space (where no one can hear them scream).
Even as it ignores modern drone warfare, Star Wars has
swung dramatically in the opposite direction when it comes
to anxieties over the internet. In the real world, bots sow chaos
on social platforms, A.I. sex dolls create consent controversies,
and Jordan Peterson’s YouTube channel just might be a rab-
bit hole to alt-right radicalization. In a key Rise of Skywalker
plotline, C3PO deprives the Resistance of valuable information
because of a flaw in his programming: The droid cannot trans-
late an inscription written in Sith, a quirk that feels like a warn-
ing about the dangers of suppressing speech. Trying to silence
their enemies leaves our heroes dangerously ignorant of the key
to defeating them. Worse, the only way to retrieve the essential
information is a hack that also wipes C3PO’s memory—and
the decades’ worth of information, and relationships with his
human comrades, that memory contains.
The whole thing is distasteful, and it highlights the incon-
sistencies in how droids are treated: At the same time they’re
cooly weighing the need to scramble C3PO’s brain, the rebels are
coddling an abused droid named D-0 who rebuffs them when
they get too close, rolling back with a panicked “No, thank you!”
(Insert your best R2-#MeToo pun here.)
That’s an exception that proves the rule: In the Star Wars
universe, droids may be servants, companions, soldiers, or co-
pilots; the one thing they aren’t is autonomous. When they try
to exert control over their own lives, bad things happen. In the
spin-off film Solo: A Star Wars Story, we learn that Lando Calris-
sian once had an unrequited love affair with a temperamental
droid named L3-37. L3 is a tireless advocate for droid eman-
cipation, and she gets catastrophically injured after inciting a
droid revolt; the only way to save her is to upload her conscious-
ness to the Millennium Falcon, where she’s subsumed into the
ship’s navigation system. Though nobody says so, it’s an ethi-
68 MAY 2020
cally fraught moment: L3 survives, sort of, but at the cost of her
personhood. It’s not hard to imagine the rambunctious droid
balking at her new future as a vehicle, her jilted lover and his
pals literally riding around inside her head. And all this droid-
rights rhetoric is happening at a moment when real-life science
is finally getting advanced enough to raise complicated ques-
tions about our relationships with A.I. and related technologies.
Your Alexa may not be colluding with Siri and Google to
overthrow the government or kill you in your sleep, but she’s
listening in on your conversations, collecting your data, and
violating your privacy—and your trust. But whose fault is that?
In a world where we allow algorithms to guide what we watch,
where we travel, even who we date, we have to ask ourselves
which kind of intelligence is truly in control. What would have
happened if C3PO, rather than welcoming his amnesiac future
with a resigned farewell, screamed and wept and begged his
friends not to erase his mind?
As though the franchise weren’t confused enough in its reck-
oning with the ways technology has changed us, there’s also the
fact that the actual politics of the Star Wars universe somehow
haven’t changed at all. Four decades after the first films, our
heroes are still fighting the exact same ideological battles as
before, a conceit so bizarre that it bypasses nostalgia and veers
into self-delusion.
At the start of The Force Awakens, the opening scroll informs
us that Princess Leia and her band of resistance fighters are
once again on a quest to liberate the oppressed, re-establish
the Republic, and “restore peace and justice” to the galaxy—in
other words, a quest to spread democracy on a massive scale.
But as three decades of real-life American foreign policy have
taught us, democracy can’t be foisted on an unwilling public,
and Star Wars doesn’t make a particularly convincing case that
the galaxy even wants what the Resistance is selling. Thirty
years after the Battle of Endor, the Republic established by
Leia has already fallen into ruin; in The Last Jedi, a wrecked
Resistance sends out a frantic distress call and is met with
silence. The people have lost hope, someone says—but what if
it’s worse? What if they’re simply sick of it all?
By the time we get to Rise of Skywalker, the idea that anyone
appreciates what the rebels are doing becomes a literal punch-
line, as Rey uses a Jedi mind trick to brainwash the First Order’s
stormtroopers into welcoming her aboard. “It’s OK we’re here,”
she says. “You’re relieved that we’re here.”
“Thank goodness you’re here,” the stormtrooper agrees.
It’s funny because it’s bullshit.
By the time we reach the climax of Rise of Skywalker, the lines
between good and evil, oppressed and oppressor, light side and
dark side are hopelessly blurred. Remember, the Resistance
is ostensibly mobilizing to regain control of a Republic that
rightfully belongs to them, having won the war for the galaxy
a good 30 years ago. Yet they still call themselves rebels, and
they still operate less as an organized government and more as
a slapdash militia with questionable leadership, which spends
most of its time being dominated by the better-funded, better-
organized, technologically superior First Order. Even their big,
final battle is won only at the last minute by the lucky arrival of
a populist army of private citizens, all of whom just happen to
have ships with advanced battle tech on board. (Nobody men-
tions it, but the Resistance would’ve been a lost cause from the
get-go if the new Republic had decided to get serious about gun
control.) And the enemies they’re here to fight? After you’ve
spent three films peeking under the armor of the First Order’s
stormtroopers, learning their backstories, and even meeting
some who defected, escaped, and have lived peaceful lives ever
since, it’s a lot less clear in these final moments that the Resis-
tance victory is a cause for celebration.
Knowing that the First Order’s army is made up of kidnapped
child soldiers who were ripped from their families and trained
to kill, are we really meant to enjoy the spectacle of them run-
ning, screaming, helplessly trapped in their ship and dying en
masse as it crashes and burns? And are the galactic masses,
including the recently defeated, really going to welcome their
new overlords under the current circumstances? One can’t help
noticing that this war wasn’t even about the competing armies
Photo: Everett Collection
at all. The battle that mattered was an intimate, secret stand-
off between Rey, Palpatine, and Ben Solo—in other words, just
another power struggle between members of the galaxy’s rul-
ing elite. If the people can’t be arsed to join the fight, maybe
it’s because it’s all the same to them: No matter who ends up in
charge, it’s Force-sensitive family dynasties all the way down.
Palpatines, Skywalkers. Sith lords, Jedi knights.
Culture critics often compare the interplanetary govern-
ment of Star Wars to the United Nations, but the fractious gal-
axy with its unregulated movement and free trade among vari-
ous worlds feels much more like a single nation of cooperating
states: ours. And on the eve of the 2020 election, Star Wars feels
like a cautionary tale about the dangers of putting your faith in
leaders who turn out to be sore winners, of scorching the earth
you have to live on when the war is over, of win-at-all-costs
tribalism when you still need the losers’ acceptance in order
to govern effectively. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,
people were divided, fearful, frustrated, exhausted, and justifi-
ably pessimistic about things ever being otherwise.
May the Force be with us.
KAT ROSENFIELD is a culture writer and novelist. Her most
recent book, A Trick of Light (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), was a
collaboration before his death with Marvel founder Stan Lee.
REASON 69
BOOKS
The Late Murray Rothbard
Takes on the Constitution
A lost volume of American history finds the light of day.
JEFFREY ROGERS HUMMEL
HE CONSTITUTION IS tradition-
ally seen as the culmination
of the American Revolution.
But in the fifth and final vol-
ume of Conceived in Liberty,
the libertarian firebrand
Murray Rothbard portrays
it as a reactionary counter-
revolution against the Revo-
lution’s radical principles,
orchestrated by a powerful array of monied interests who
hoped a more centralized government would reproduce many
hierarchical and mercantilist features of the 18th century
British state.
The first volume of Conceived in Liberty was published in
1975, launching a lengthy history of America from the found-
ing of the colonies to the adoption of the Constitution. Three
more volumes came out in due course, but the fifth, which
promised to explore the period from the end of the American
Revolution to the Constitution’s ratification, never appeared.
Rumors circulated that Arlington House, the conservative
publisher of the first four volumes, was not happy with Roth-
bard’s critical approach to the Constitution. But the actual
explanation is probably more mundane, since Arlington
House went out of business in the early 1980s.
By the time of Rothbard’s death in 1995, any trace of the
fifth volume was thought to be irretrievably lost. But an early
manuscript copy, partly typed but mostly handwritten, ended
up in the Mises Institute archives. Now the economic histo-
rian Patrick Newman has painstakingly deciphered Roth-
bard’s scrawl and shepherded the book into existence.
When the first volume of Conceived in Liberty came out, I
was a graduate student, and my field at the time was colonial
history. The volume’s 531 pages, written with the assistance
of Leonard Liggio, covered the American colonies during the
17th century. I already knew a good bit about the subject. Yet I
was amazed at its comprehension, its detail, and above all, its
unique and revealing interpretations. The next three volumes
maintained the same high standard.
Book five is not quite up to the earlier installments. How
could it be? It does not have the thorough bibliographic essays
that graced each of the previous volumes, although Newman
70 MAY 2020
has partly remedied this by supplementing Rothbard’s few
footnotes with his own supporting references. Despite Roth-
bard’s reputation for being able to make his first draft his
final draft, his earlier volumes definitely went through some
editing by others. And the fact that Rothbard’s original manu-
script for the fifth volume apparently dates back to 1966,
well before the publication of any of the other installments,
strongly suggests that, given the chance, he would have done
much editing and expanding himself. (In the other volumes,
he clearly consulted important sources that appeared only
after 1966.) Finally, the fifth volume could have done without
Andrew Napolitano’s fervid foreword, which will weaken the
work’s appeal to a wider audience.
But the book is still vintage Rothbard. As in all of his his-
torical writing, he starkly identifies those he considers heroes
or villains. That sometimes leads to a lack of nuance, thanks
to prose that understates or ignores his heroes’ flaws and his
villains’ virtues. On the other hand, Rothbard’s partisan-
ship helps to vividly capture the acrimonious sectarian and
personal divisiveness of the period. It certainly serves as an
antidote to the tendency of many other accounts to minimize
these disputes and conflicts.
THE FIRST SECTION of the book deals with the “critical period”
following the American Revolution. Rothbard quickly dis-
poses of the common belief that the U.S.’s postwar economic
hardships were due to excessive importation of inexpensive
British goods. Anticipating more recent findings, he attributes
these hardships partly to the fact that, after the war ended,
the U.S. faced all the mercantilist restrictions that the U.K.
applied to other foreign countries. Britain had been the colo-
nies’ major trading partner, and independence forced a pain-
ful reorientation of American trade. This in turn prompted
pressures from merchants and artisans for a more powerful
government with navigation laws protecting American ship-
ping and tariffs protecting American manufacturers.
A second economic problem was the revolution’s lingering
war debt. The state governments devoted the largest portion
of their postwar expenditures not only to servicing their own
debts but also, in some cases, to assuming the debts of Con-
gress. Doing this required a tax burden unimaginable before
the war. Eventually most states adopted a gradual approach,
easing the burden with various forms
of taxpayer relief—including, in seven
states, new issues of paper money. But
the Massachusetts government was
exceptionally aggressive in trying to
pay both interest and principal on its
debt quickly. That is what provoked
Shays’ Rebellion in the western part of
the state in 1786.
Portrayed by nationalists then and
by historians for a long time afterward
as a debtor’s revolt, Shays’ Rebellion in
fact was essentially a tax revolt, like the
American Revolution before and the
Whiskey Rebellion later. In a preface
to this volume of Conceived in Liberty,
Thomas Woods credits Rothbard with
being the first to interpret Shays’ Rebel-
lion this way. While not strictly cor-
rect—a few historians, notably E. James
Ferguson, had already cited taxes as a
major cause of the uprising—this inter-
pretation has since become the histori-
cal consensus.
Popular accounts of the post-Revo-
lution, pre-Constitution period often
claim that tariffs between the states
caused major economic disruptions.
Rothbard correctly dismisses this as
a “bogey,” but given how often those
unfamiliar with the period raise this
alleged problem, I wish he had given
the topic more attention. Virginia did
impose a minor tariff on all imports by
ship, until it exempted American goods
in 1787. And New York and Connecti-
cut taxed foreign goods that arrived
through other states. But the general
rule was complete reciprocity among
states.
Indeed, while Alexander Hamilton’s
Federalist No. 12 raised the specter of
future trade restrictions between states,
its main complaint was that competi-
tion was keeping state tariffs on foreign
imports too low. “Hitherto...these duties
have not upon an average exceeded
in any State three percent,” Hamilton
wrote, but with the Constitution, they
could be “increased in this country, to
at least treble their present amount.”
When discussing the Western ter-
ritories, Rothbard displays none of the
implicit nationalist bias so common
in histories of the United States. He
exposes wealthy land speculators’ pur-
suit of large government grants. More
surprising and yet refreshing is his sym-
pathy for the various secessionist move-
ments in the Southwest, even those that
were tempted to join the Spanish empire
in order to gain navigation rights down
the Mississippi River. I know of no other
U.S. historian who has dared to justify
these endeavors. At the same time,
Rothbard denounces white settlers’
invasion of Indian lands and criticizes
Congress’ creation of a military force to
provide those settlers with subsidized
protection.
THE MOST REVEALING parts of this book
deal with the Philadelphia Convention
and the ratification of the Constitution.
Anyone familiar with the previous vol-
umes in the series will not be surprised
by Rothbard’s position here. After all,
book four made clear his view that the
Articles of Confederation, the previous
compact among the states, had created
a government that was too strong, not
too weak.
Many accounts of the Philadelphia
Convention treat its proceedings topi-
cally, often leaving the impression that
the Constitution emerged through a
process of calm deliberation. Rothbard
instead gives a mostly chronological
blow-by-blow account. This approach
highlights how bitter some of the dis-
agreements were. Of the 74 state del-
egates chosen for the convention, 19
declined even to attend; some who did
attend left in disgust. By the end of the
proceedings, only 41 delegates were
left, three of whom refused to sign the
document.
Rothbard’s chronological approach
also discloses how very close the con-
vention, held in secret, came to forg-
ing a document that granted far more
power than the Constitution ultimately
mandated. The Virginia Plan, formu-
lated by James Madison, originally gave
the central government explicit author-
ity to use military force to compel obe-
dience from any state. Although this
provision was soon dropped, the plan
continued to call openly for a “national
government” that was “supreme.” It
gave Congress a veto over state laws and
such vaguely phrased broad powers that
there would have been no effective con-
straints on the government’s scope.
The rival New Jersey Plan enumer-
ated specific powers for Congress. But it
was the Virginia Plan’s plenary powers,
minus the state-law veto, that the con-
vention approved for consideration by a
five-man Committee of Detail a full two
months into the convention’s delibera-
tions. Only at that late date had Madi-
son and other nationalist delegates
begun to moderate their opposition to
enumerated powers. The Committee
of Detail then composed a suggested
list of these powers, appended with the
hitherto undiscussed clause permitting
Congress to make all laws “necessary
and proper for carrying into execution
the foregoing powers, and all other pow-
ers vested by this Constitution.”
Madison subsequently proposed
adding to Congress’ enumerated pow-
ers the powers to grant corporate
charters and establish a university,
but these proposals were voted down.
Another rejected proposal would
have given Congress the authority to
assume state debts. Several delegates
suggested that these additions were
now unnecessary, not because they
considered these powers undesirable
but because they believed they were
already implied. Madison himself sup-
ported the assumption of state debts, in
sharp contrast to his later position, but
he agreed in a private conversation with
Hamilton that it was best not to include
that authority expressly because it
might generate opposition to the Con-
stitution’s ratification. These are just a
few of the many critical incidents that
REASON 71
Conceived in Liberty, Volume V lays bare.
What makes Rothbard’s rendition more remarkable is that,
like all historians, he had to rely primarily on Madison’s notes
on the convention. These notes were published posthumously
in 1840, when none of the other delegates were left alive to
challenge them. It is well-established that Madison revised his
notes before publication, and this has prompted suspicions
that he doctored them to bring the proceedings more in accord
with his later Jeffersonian sympathies, toning down his efforts
to create a more centralized and intrusive government. But not
until the 2015 publication of Mary Sarah Bilder’s Madison’s
Hand were these suspicions confirmed, through forensic evi-
dence and other documents about the convention.
THE CONSTITUTION’S ADVOCATES pulled off a linguistic coup by
seizing the label Federalists for themselves. Many supporters
of the Constitution had in fact wanted to replace the Articles’
federal system of government with a fully national system,
even though the convention cautiously removed the word
national from the draft. The true defenders of federalism were
72 MAY 2020
the Constitution’s critics. But they have gone down in history
as Anti-Federalists, even though, as Rothbard reports, they
never accepted that label themselves.
Here again, Rothbard’s claim has been confirmed by later
work. In this case, Pauline Maier’s exhaustive 2010 study,
Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788,
points out that opponents actually used such monikers as
republicans and true federalists.
The Federalists, who were more tightly organized than
their opponents, used their control over the postal monopoly
to delay and sometimes suppress their opponents’ mail. They
even on occasion resorted to political bribery, physical intimi-
dation, malapportionment of delegates, and holding state
ratifying conventions in locations difficult for delegates from
Anti-Federalist districts to attend. These strong-arm tactics
allowed the nationalists to ram the Constitution through the
first five state conventions in rapid succession.
Federalists then began using the prospect of disunion to
persuade the remaining states to ratify. But it was the Phila-
delphia Convention that had actually created that possibility
Photo: spxChrome/iStock
by requiring ratification by only nine
states for the Constitution to take effect.
Moreover, Federalists in the northern
neck of Virginia, in New York City, in
northeastern North Carolina, and in
Providence, Rhode Island, went so far as
to threaten secession from their respec-
tive states if those states did not ratify
the Constitution.
Rothbard does not go into as much
detail as Maier does about the debates
at the state ratifying conventions. He
is more interested in the composition
of the delegates, where they were from,
their motives, what special interests
they represented, whether and why
they switched sides, and each side’s
procedural maneuvers. But he makes
a convincing case that a majority of
Americans opposed the Constitution
and would have rejected it if the Anti-
Federalists had been fairly represented
and better led. He also shows that the
much-touted federalism of the U.S. sys-
tem was less an intended consequence
of the Philadelphia Convention, as
commonly alleged, than an insincere
concession that the Anti-Federalists
wrenched from the nationalists during
the ratification struggle.
ONCE THE CONSTITUTION was under con-
sideration in Massachusetts, Virginia,
and New York, the Federalists found
themselves in trouble. Previously, at
Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention,
the defeated Anti-Federalists had
drawn up a proposed list of amend-
ments, which then were circulated
to the other states. The Federalists
themselves had to compose a series of
recommended amendments in order to
get Massachusetts to ratify. They just
barely avoided making Virginia’s rati-
fication conditional upon a series of 40
amendments passed by the convention.
And in New York, they assented not only
to a full slate of amendments but also to
a circular letter calling for a second con-
stitutional convention to frame those
amendments. Overall, five states cou-
pled their ratifications with proposed
amendments; in two others, amend-
ments were offered by the minority.
Many ardent Federalists were per-
fectly prepared to thwart those con-
stitutional amendments once the new
government began operation. But the
politically astute Madison realized that
the popular demand for amendments
had to be satisfied. Anti-Federalists led
by Patrick Henry had defeated Madi-
son’s bid to be one of Virginia’s senators,
and he barely squeaked into the House
of Representatives. Already three more
states—Virginia, North Carolina, and
Rhode Island—had endorsed New York’s
call for a second convention that under
the Constitution, if endorsed by two-
thirds of the states, could recommend
amendments. And the more than 200
state proposals went far beyond a simple
bill of rights. Many of them would have
stripped the central government of some
of its new powers. In particular, every set
of proposed amendments that emerged
from a state ratifying convention called
for a curb on Congress’ ability to impose
internal taxes.
Madison carefully culled through
the proposals, eliminating those he
saw as “endangering any part of the
Constitution.” As eventually ratified,
the only amendment that dealt with
the relationship between the state and
central governments is what became
the 10th, which enshrined the conces-
sion that the government had only
limited powers. The other nine amend-
ments in what become the Bill of Rights
guaranteed various personal liber-
ties, and Rothbard applauds them as
“intensely libertarian.” But he laments
the fact that the House voted down an
attempt to add the word “expressly”
before the 10th Amendment’s clause
that “reserved” to the states or people
all powers not “delegated to the United
States by the Constitution.”
After Congress approved the Bill of
Rights, the Rhode Island legislature,
which had chosen no representatives to
the Philadelphia Convention, refused
for a while even to convene a ratifying
convention. Rothbard reveals that some
Rhode Islanders hoped to become a
small, independent, free-trading entity.
Only after Congress threatened a total
embargo did Rhode Island ratify the
Constitution—by a one-vote margin.
Notice the irony: The only serious threat
of trade restrictions between states
occurred after the Constitution was in
effect, not before.
One need not share Rothbard’s
opinion about the undesirability of the
Constitution to find his interpretation
of what happened illuminating. His
view of the Constitution as a counter-
revolution had been advanced by earlier
historians who differ with his politics,
and this view is being increasingly
embraced by scholars who admire the
Constitution. Agree with it or not, Con-
ceived in Liberty is filled with reliable,
engaging, and challenging history.
JEFFREY ROGERS HUMMEL is the author of
Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A
History of the American Civil War (Open Court).
He teaches economics and history at San Jose
State University.
Conceived in Liberty, Volume V: The New
Republic, 1784–1791, by Murray N. Rothbard,
Ludwig von Mises Institute, 332 pages, $45
REASON 73
BOOKS
How We Lost the War on Poverty
JOHN MCCLAUGHRY
ITH JOHN F. Kennedy’s elec-
tion to the presidency in
1960, Amity Shlaes recounts,
Americans developed a grow-
ing urge for a “big change that
blasted like a space rocket.” By
1972, when the smoke from
that rocket had somewhat
cleared, they had acquainted
themselves with the New
Frontier, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, two landmark
civil rights acts, Medicare, Medicaid, the New Federalism, the
“urban disorders” of Watts and Detroit, and the severing of the
last feeble tie between the dollar and gold. But it was President
Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty that gave the era the appel-
lation of “the Great Society.”
In Great Society: A New History, Shlaes describes the actors,
events, and outcomes of those years. The book is a fast-moving
and entertaining read, rich in interesting details and extraor-
dinary in the author’s marshalling of the history. Shlaes,
an experienced journalist, has a gift for leading the reader
through subjects that initially seem only marginally related,
tying them together in the service of her narrative.
As one who lived through that era, most of it in Washing-
ton, I appreciate how Shlaes has shone her reportorial light
into many fascinating corners and upon a marvelous and
frequently flawed cast of characters. Besides Presidents Ken-
nedy, Johnson, and Nixon, this cast includes poverty czar
Sargent Shriver, his brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy, presiden-
tial wordsmith Richard Goodwin, United Auto Workers leader
Walter Reuther, Fed Chairman Arthur Burns, radical activists
Tom Hayden and Michael Harrington, California Gov. Ronald
Reagan, Michigan Gov. George Romney, black power leader
Nathan Wright Jr., and future senator Daniel Patrick Moyni-
han. (I had encounters with all of them except Shriver.)
The overarching theme of the Great Society was a massive
social project announced by Johnson in a 20-minute address
at the University of Michigan on May 22, 1964. He told the
graduates that “far from crushing the individual, government
at its best liberates him from the enslaving forces of his envi-
ronment.” His administration, Johnson said, had assembled
“the best thought and the broadest knowledge to find answers
to society’s problems.” Those answers would be implemented
by a “fighting and aggressive” federal government dedicated
to winning a war against poverty and against the “loneliness,
estrangement, and isolation” that were its consequences.
“The men around Johnson,” Shlaes observes, “felt the
74 MAY 2020
weight of this faith in them, and strove hard. Viet Nam would
be sorted out. There would be a Great Society. Poverty would
be cured. Blacks of the South would win full citizenship. The
Great Society would succeed.” There would be plans! Many
plans! Measurements! Results! The federal government, led
by a powerful and determined president advised by the best
social scientists, would become the driving force for social
change, as opposed to merely backfilling the shortcomings of
capitalism.
And how did all this work out? Poorly, says Shlaes.
SHLAES’ MOST COMPELLING example contrasts a monumental
public housing project in St. Louis called Pruitt-Igoe with an
adjacent neighborhood development project called the Bicen-
tennial Civic Improvement Corporation.
Pruitt-Igoe was a stark and stupendous complex of 33
high-rise apartment buildings for the poor, designed by ris-
ing architectural star Minoru Yamasaki. Begun in 1955, it
was the delight of the urban planners of the ’50s. But by the
mid-’60s, it had become a decaying, dangerous, increasingly
abandoned, and crime-ridden concrete wreck. Interpretations
of Pruitt-Igoe’s descent vary, but all agree that high-rise rental
housing for the poor (or at least the nonelderly poor) turned
out to be a very bad idea. Feeble attempts at rehabilitating
parts of the project foundered. After resisting the embarrass-
ment for years, the feds threw in the towel in 1972. The demo-
lition was finished in 1976. Half of the site now hosts indus-
trial warehouses; the other half became an unplanned urban
forest, later bulldozed for commercial redevelopment.
By contrast, there was the Bicentennial project, literally
in the shadow of a Pruitt-Igoe high-rise, inspired by Father
Joseph Shocklee of St. Bridget’s parish. Working with people
of the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood organization, Shocklee
put together a team involving the gas company, the Pulaski
Savings Bank, a few private donors, and a small-scale minor-
ity contractor. Starting in the mid-1960s, Bicentennial bought
up vacant brick town houses for $600, found and counseled
prospective homeowners, contracted for the rehab, and
financed the sale with unsubsidized market-rate mortgages
from Pulaski. Existing homeowners cooperated to help the
new homeowners improve their education and job skills, find
employment, and improve their new properties.
As Bicentennial scored successes with 80 new homeowning
families, the appeal of home ownership for the working poor
blossomed. Under the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)
Section 235 mortgage insurance program, passed in 1968,
mortgage brokers rushed to enroll low-income homebuyers.
They offered nominal down payments,
40-year terms, and 1 percent financ-
ing. But the program relied on new
construction, not the more troublesome
rehab, and it favored large contractors to
achieve the government’s grandiose pro-
duction goals (6 million housing units
for low- and moderate-income families
over 10 years).
The contractors had to pay FHA-
mandated above-market Davis-Bacon
wages to their unionized (and largely
white) workforces. There was little time
or inclination to prepare inexperienced
homebuyers for ownership or to bring
them into a supportive neighborhood
organization. The result: brand new
suburban-style split-level houses, pur-
chase price $23,000—unaffordable
even with the extreme subsidy terms.
When a confused and fitfully employed
buyer couldn’t pay, the lender fore-
closed, the FHA took the hit, and the
buyer often departed with all the copper
plumbing for resale. (This aftermath is
not in the book.)
SHLAES IS PARTICULARLY insightful in
describing the tribulations and failures
of the Community Action Program
(CAP), managed by the free-standing
Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).
CAP, a radical departure in the history
of federal programs, squeaked through
the Democratic Senate on a 46–44 vote.
The proposition was this: Uncle Sam
would directly fund local organiza-
tions in poverty-impacted areas to plan,
develop, and coordinate the many fac-
ets of Johnson’s War on Poverty.
America’s mayors did not like this
one bit. Accustomed to managing fed-
eral funds for urban programs, the may-
ors regarded the activist groups—com-
posed more often than not of minority
citizens resentful of City Hall for its
neglect, disrespect, and even oppres-
sion—as budding revolutionaries. This,
they believed, was not just an affront to
the mayors but also a federally funded
recipe for revolution.
CAP also required “maximum feasi-
ble participation of the residents of the
areas and the members of the groups.”
But participation in what? Making
plans? Assenting to the plans of others?
Hiring and firing? Dealing with City
Hall? Coordinating multifarious other
programs and organizations? As Moyni-
han pithily summarized: “The govern-
ment did not know what it was doing.”
The dream of mass participation
wound up dissolving. Fifty years later,
it would be a challenging task indeed
to find a local CAP agency imbued with
anything resembling the revolutionary
themes of the 1960s.
SHLAES OFFERS A fascinating, detail-rich
re-enactment of President Richard Nix-
on’s Camp David economic summit of
August 15, 1971, which she describes as
“one of the most impressive [collections
of minds] in the history of economic
policy.” The impetus was a deteriorat-
ing international economic situation
brought on by the excesses and mis-
fortunes of the Great Society era: the
costly and unwinnable Vietnam War,
the interminable and conflict-ridden
War on Poverty, the unrepaired wreck-
age from urban riots, a housing finance
fiasco that eerily foreshadowed that of
2007, and the forced abandonment of
any tangible link of the dollar to gold.
Nixon’s Camp David summit pro-
duced at least a grudging acceptance of
breaking the gold link, imposing wage
and price controls, and enacting the
first general tariff (10 percent) since
Herbert Hoover’s day. That all turned
out badly. Shlaes, quoting Arnold
Weber, notes that “almost everyone
associated with the sweeping interven-
tions...has recanted or admitted error.”
And that brings Shlaes to her tren-
chant conclusion. Quoting the econo-
mist Friedrich Hayek, she concludes
that grand governmental schemes to
broadly reorder society are doomed to
fail. Public planners do not have ade-
quate information from the grassroots,
and they cannot collect information
from a nonexistent price system. The
Great Society program deserves to go
down in U.S. history as a baneful exam-
ple of a far-ranging, high-sounding,
politically motivated experiment that
turned out to be largely futile in achiev-
ing its hopes, proposed and carried out
by theoreticians and planners who (to
borrow from Moynihan) simply did not
know what they were doing. With the
notable exceptions of the civil rights
bills, this was a sorry legislative era that
festers in the memory of many people
still living.
And what of Bicentennial? The for-
mer Pruitt-Igoe tenants had discovered
a superior alternative to government
housing aid, Shlaes writes. “With his
small [private sector] housing program,
Father Shocklee had shown that ‘the
poor’ were more like the middle class
than people supposed. They gained
from something only when they had a
chance to own it.”
Contributing Editor JOHN MCCLAUGHRY was
a Senate legislative aide from 1964 to 1967,
authored the definitive law review article on the
Section 235 program, and served on the National
Commission on Neighborhoods.
Great Society: A New History, by Amity
Shlaes, HarperCollins, 429 pages, $32.50
REASON 75
REVIEWS

BOOK

UNCANNY VALLEY
LIZ WOLFE

In 2013, Anna Wiener quit her

TV
CURB YOUR
ENTHUSIASM
CHRISTIAN BRITSCHGI
Curb Your Enthusiasm is back,
and so is society’s ultimate
norm enforcer. The show’s
10th season follows Seinfeld
co-creator Larry David as he
navigates the irritations and
annoyances of everyday life
via a fictionalized version
of himself.
As in seasons past, much
of the show’s comedy comes
from David and his unfortunate
coffee-fetching job in publish-
ing to work in Silicon Valley.
Seven years later, that choice
brings us another entry in the
glut of books about tech-world
malfeasance.
Wiener’s memoir, Uncanny
Valley, dips into gender studies
(“my job had placed me, a self-
identified feminist, in a position
of ceaseless, professionalized
deference to the male ego”)
and touches on founders’ self-
centeredness (“baby tyrants...
one-hit wonders who had
dropped out of school and
become their own bosses and
thought they knew how the
world worked”).
But Wiener was too junior
to have a full view of the world
about which she purports to
offer a sweeping indictment.
She worked in relatively low-
level customer support roles
with little prior experience
BOOK 20 pages before writing: “If the yet got a hefty payday at the

THE MAGA DOCTRINE

interlocutors arguing about establishment senses in our end, cashing out stock options
what the appropriate stan- times something akin to Ancient for $200,000. She made
dard of behavior is in a given Rome, I suggest they look to a out fine and couldn’t see the
situation: When is it OK to ask C.J. CIARAMELLA figure very different from Nero whole map, but she doesn’t
someone’s weight? Should for Trump comparisons. They let that stand in the way of her
a pregnant woman jog? Can should look a century earlier, to conclusion that Silicon Valley’s
Charlie Kirk, the founder of the the influential orator Cicero.”
the same dish be used to feed tech titans are making our
conservative college group Kirk’s points, such as they
humans and dogs? world worse.
Turning Point USA, has written are, tend to be either so obvi-
This intense focus on seem- Wiener is at her best when
The MAGA Doctrine, a work of ous that they’re unremark-
ingly minor everyday questions she grapples with Edward
exquisite flattery and brown- able or so wrong that they’re
of propriety makes the show as Snowden’s whistleblowing and
nosing masquerading as a field bizarre. He insists, for example,
insightful as it is funny. David, her own startup’s metadata
guide to Trumpism. that Trump is a staunch small-
like the rest of us, has to inter- collection: “We didn’t think of
“There is a set of principles, government and free market
act with a world full of people ourselves as participating in
however roughly hewn, behind conservative, tariffs and deficit
who are often selfish or annoy- the surveillance economy. We
the president’s vision of national spending be damned. (A cynic
ing (or find him so). Making it weren’t thinking about our role
renewal,” Kirk assures readers, might wonder whether Kirk is
all work is an informal set of in facilitating and normalizing
“one that is both familiar and redefining Trumpism to under-
rules that everyone either qui- the creation of unregulated,
eternally in need of clear, firm cut nationalist conservatives,
etly agrees to follow or flouts at privately held databases on
restatement.” some of whom have heckled
the risk of social stigma. human behavior.”
The goal of every MAGA- him at speaking gigs.)
Curb’s most recent season In interviews about Uncanny
grapher is to impose detail and The MAGA Doctrine has the
even finds a role for commerce Valley, Wiener paraphrases a
order on this chainsaw sculpture substance and style of a hastily
in this daily negotiation of CEO: “Silicon Valley is a culture
of an ideology. Unfortunately, written book report. But seen as
behavioral norms: David opens focused on doing, not reflect-
The MAGA Doctrine is not a a shameless attempt to ingrati-
a “spite store” to get back at a ing or thinking.” Her book is
work of rigorous analysis. The ate the author to the president
coffee shop owner who served afflicted with the same malady.
cover features a photo of Trump and his cult of personality, it
him scones that were too dry Still, the result is compellingly
hugging an American flag, and may just be a perfect encapsula-
and coffee that was too cold. readable. Credit that to rubber-
lest anyone doubt his fealty, tion of the current conservative
Sometimes it’s important necking or to the strength of
Kirk both dedicates the book movement.
for someone to sweat the Wiener’s writing, even if she
to Trump and thanks him in the
little things. Society depends doesn’t offer much in the way
acknowledgments. Kirk man-
on it. of novelty.
ages to contain himself for just

76 MAY 2020 Photo: Curb Your Enthusiasm/HBO

 BOOK

SECONDHAND
BRIAN DOHERTY

In 2014, an exporter of used

electronics from the U.K. to
Lagos, Nigeria, was sentenced
to 16 months in prison and over
DOCUM EN TA RY 142,000 British pounds in fines.
His crime? Helping get used
LEARNING TO TVs and other electronics no

SKATEBOARD IN A one in the U.K. wanted to the

largest secondhand electronics
WARZONE (IF YOU’RE market in Africa, where they’d

A GIRL) improve the lives of workers,

sellers, and consumers by
being repaired and resold or
ERIC BOEHM FIL M
stripped for usable parts.
In America, skateboarding
can be a punky act of youth-
JUST MERCY His punishment came from
a cruel do-gooder stunt by
ful rebellion, or at least a Greenpeace in collaboration
STEPHANIE SLADE
way to get away from your with Sky News, which put a
overbearing parents for a bit. tracer in a TV and abandoned it TV

In Afghanistan, it’s all that and
much more.
Learning To Skateboard in
a Warzone (If You’re a Girl)
is the newly crowned Oscar-
winning documentary short
about female students at Ska-
teistan, a school in Kabul that
teaches Afghan kids reading,
writing, arithmetic, and rip-
ping. Started by Oliver Per-
covich, an Australian, in 2007
and supported by donations,
the school’s ongoing suc-
cess and recognition makes
a strong argument for the
merits of cultural exchange
in transforming a repressive
society.
The girls in particular are
pushing boundaries. Most
women in Afghanistan have
no formal education and few
have hobbies like skateboard-
ing, to say the least. Their
school is also a refuge for
self-expression. Boys skate-
board in the streets of Kabul,
one student explains, but girls
would risk reprisals for daring
to do so. One of the instruc-
tors, a former student herself,
dares to dream of competing
internationally in the sport.
In accepting the Oscar
for her documentary, direc-
tor Carol Dysinger said she
hopes the film “teaches girls
courage, to raise your hand, to
say, ‘I am here, I have some-
thing to say, and I am going
to take that ramp. Don’t try to
stop me.’”
Fairly early in Just Mercy, an
employee of the Monroeville,
Alabama, district attorney’s
office encourages a young
lawyer played by Michael B.
Jordan to visit the nearby To
Kill a Mockingbird museum.
It’s housed in the courthouse
where Harper Lee’s father
worked, the assistant explains;
you can see the place where
Atticus Finch once stood. The
sly joke, of course, is that Finch
is a fictional character.
Not so with this movie’s
protagonist. Bryan Stevenson
really is a Harvard Law gradu-
ate who moved to the Deep
South in 1989 to represent
impoverished death row
inmates. He really did found
a practice called the Equal
Justice Initiative, which has
won relief for hundreds of
wrongly convicted and unfairly
sentenced prisoners—begin-
ning with Walter McMillian,
played by Jamie Foxx, an
innocent black man who really
was framed by local authori-
ties for the murder of a young
white woman.
The film is based on Steven-
son’s autobiography of the
same name. If its storytell-
ing suffers for depicting an
uncomplicatedly righteous
protagonist, it’s likely because
director Destin Daniel Cretton
rejected manufactured drama
in favor of fidelity to the source
material—the true story of a
good man.
in Hampshire. When they found
it in Nigeria, they knew some-
one had violated a law defining
such devices as “hazardous
waste.” Their search led them
to an exporter, Joe Benson,
who ended up in trouble with
the law over 11 shipping con-
tainers’ worth of electronics he
was sending into Nigeria.
“Insisting that Africa’s
secondhand traders adopt
Europe’s definition of ‘waste’
or risk prosecution—in
Europe—is a kind of colonial-
ism,” complains Bloomberg
Opinion columnist Adam
Minter in Secondhand: Travels
in the New Global Garage Sale.
Minter’s delightfully detailed
book helps us appreciate how
those who pick, choose, and
ship First World refuse to less-
developed nations make the
Earth richer and more environ-
mentally sound.
“No legislation or regulation
was required to create” the
process Minter describes. This
interconnected world of “glo-
balized trade in secondhand
goods evolved on its own, con-
necting those who have stuff
with those who don’t. Goodwill
and Greenpeace couldn’t
have devised a better system
if they’d tried.” He success-
fully criticizes journalism that
is “blind to how much value
is created when less affluent
people are given the opportu-
nity to parse the goods of the
wasteful affluent.”
HIS DARK
MATERIALS
KATHERINE MANGU-WARD
Attempts to bring Philip Pull-
man’s young adult novels,
The Golden Compass, The
Subtle Knife, and The Amber
Spyglass, to the screen have
largely failed. The books were
written in response to C.S.
Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe, which
Pullman has called “morally
loathsome,” noting that for the
Christian author “death is bet-
ter than life; boys are better
than girls...and so on. There is
no shortage of such nauseat-
ing drivel in Narnia, if you can
face it.”
Pullman’s anti-author-
itarian, anti-church, and
individualist message shines
through in HBO’s new His Dark
Materials series, and the adap-
tation captures the author’s
enthusiasm for explorers,
tinkerers, and physicists, in
contrast to Lewis’ fondness for
medieval monarchs and mam-
mals who know their place.
But its villains are too instantly
loathsome, its protagonist
children too plucky, and its
drama insufficiently self-aware
to fully capture the compelling
air of mystery and enlighten-
ment that makes the books so
beloved.

Photo, left: Just Mercy/Jake Netter/Warner Bros.

Photo, right: Secondhand/Bloomsbury Publishing, cover detail REASON 77
FROM THE ARCHIVES

20
begin to improve. Certainly air
and water quality in the United
States, Europe, Japan, and other
developed countries will be even
better than it is today. Enormous
YEARS AGO progress will be made on the
medical front, and diseases like
May 2000 AIDS and malaria may well be
finally conquered. As for climate
change, concern may be abating
“What will Earth look like when because the world’s energy
Earth Day 60 rolls around in production mix is shifting
2030? Here are my predictions: toward natural gas and
As the International Food Policy nuclear power. There
Research Institute projects, we is always the possi-
will be able to feed the world’s bility that a tech-
additional numbers and to pro- nological break-
vide them with a better diet. through—say,
Because they are ultimately cheap, effi-
political in nature, poverty and cient, non-
malnutrition will not be elimi- polluting fuel
nated, but economic growth will cells—could
make many people in the devel- radically
oping world much better off. reshape
Technological improvements in the energy
agriculture will mean less soil sector. In
erosion, better management of any case a
freshwater supplies, and higher richer world
productivity crops. Life expec- will be much
tancy in the developing world will better able to
likely increase from 65 years to cope with any
73 years, and probably more; in environmental
the First World, it will rise to more problems that
than 80 years. Metals and mineral might crop up.
prices will be even lower than One final predic-
they are today. The rate of defor- tion, of which I’m most
estation in the developing world absolutely certain: There
will continue to slow down and will be a disproportionately
forest growth in the developed influential group of doomsters
economies will increase. predicting that the future—and
Meanwhile, as many develop- the present—never looked
ing countries become wealthier, so bleak.”
they will start to pass through the RONALD BAILEY
environmental-transition thresh-
olds for various pollutants, and “Earth Day, Then and Now”
their air and water quality will

78 MAY 2020 Illustration: Miyuki Sena

Photo: Reason, May 2000
Q&A

Michael Strain Wants You To

American middle class has been permanently weakened. Another is
that quality of life hasn’t improved over the past few decades. Another

Believe in the American Dream

is that America is no longer broadly characterized by upward economic
mobility.

INTERVIEW BY PETER SUDERMAN
IN THE AMERICAN Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It),
Michael Strain takes a deep dive into the state of the American
economy. Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute,
doesn’t gloss over the country’s problems, particularly low workforce
participation for young men without high school diplomas. But he
marshals a trove of data to argue both that the economy is broadly
healthy and that it’s benefiting nearly everyone—including the lower-
income households who need it most.
In February, before the market was disrupted by COVID-19, Features
Editor Peter Suderman spoke with Strain about his book, economic pes-
simism, and why left and right alike have been getting this issue wrong.
Q: One chapter concerns the “hollowing out” of middle-class jobs.
You admit that’s happening. But you also argue it’s not permanent.
A: If you look at traditional middle-class jobs—production workers in
manufacturing, clerical workers—those jobs as a share of total employ-
ment certainly have been declining. That’s caused significant social,
political, and economic consequences. It shouldn’t be dismissed.
But there has been a growth in other middle-wage jobs. These jobs are
not as readily automated. They are middle-paying jobs that require a
middle level of skill, [and they’ve] been growing as a share of employ-
ment.
It’s a broader lesson in economic dynamism. You’re going to see
occupations change and occupations shrink in terms of their size. But
you’re also going to see them grow. We’re seeing both.

Q: You’re fighting a perception of economic decline. What would you

Q: How do you define the American dream? say to people who perceive decline but aren’t likely to pore through
A: It means different things for different people in different times. But the data and look at the charts?
no matter what your specific definition, there’s a strong economic com- A: What I would say is that the economy right now is very strong; that
ponent to it. The idea that you can better your economic outcomes, that the rewards to this strong economy are accruing to all sorts of people,
if you work hard and play by the rules, wages and incomes will grow, including workers with relatively fewer skills and lower wages, workers
and perhaps most importantly, that you can expect your children will be who are more vulnerable; and that if you work hard, you can better your
better off than you. economic outcomes. You can expect to see your wages and incomes
grow, and you can expect your kids to do better than you. That’s what
Q: So what’s the good news? the data show.
A: If you listen to the populists on the political right, including the presi-
dent, or the political left, you hear this message that the game is rigged,
that the rewards to the economy flow only to the top. There’s a biparti-
san consensus that is striking.
That narrative is wrong. If you look at wages and incomes, they have
been growing over the past three decades. America is still characterized
by upward mobility. Workers do still enjoy the fruits of their labor in the
sense that wage gains are still primarily driven by productivity gains.
Of course, different groups of Americans have fared better than others.
The top 1 percent has seen much faster income growth than workers
in the middle. But that doesn’t mean that workers in the middle and
toward the bottom have seen stagnant gains.

Q: Your book warns that while the American dream is alive, populism
could kill it. How is populism threatening the American dream?
A: One way is populist policies. The policies [President Donald Trump]
has pursued are designed to help the working class, but the trade war
has, if anything, reduced manufacturing employment at the same time
that it’s raised consumer prices.
The second way is the message. If all people hear is that they’re vic-
tims of the elites, that they don’t have agency, that hard work doesn’t
pay off, that the economy only works for people at the top, that
capitalism is broken—that will dim their aspirations. That
message is deeply corrosive and can hurt the very people
to whom it is targeted.

Q: What are the biggest wrong ideas that peo-

ple have about the economy right now?
A: One is that wages and incomes have
been stagnant for decades. Another is
that since the great recession, we’ve
seen a significant rise in income
inequality. Another is that the

REASON 79
BRICKBATS
In Bladen County, North
Carolina, the chair of the
Board of Elections threatened
to have anyone who recites
the Pledge of Allegiance at a
board meeting arrested.
The Arizona Department
of Education inadvertently
released the names, email
addresses, and other per-
sonal information of nearly
7,000 parents whose children
take part in a school voucher
program. The release
included the disabilities
listed for children with spe-
cial needs.
Philadelphia police officer
Keith White claimed that
80 MAY 2020
She reluctantly paid for one station. The city also sued
video, which showed stu- Kroon, seeking $500 for each
dents grabbing, pulling, and day he used the building for
poking her daughter with a anything other than its legal
pencil for 14 minutes while purpose. Only after Kroon
the driver ignored the girl’s countersued did the city drop
cries for help. its suit and issue a certificate
of occupancy.
The Colorado State Patrol
has charged a Denver sher- At Minneapolis–St. Paul Inter-
someone he arrested on drug
iff’s deputy with reckless national Airport, a Transporta-
charges in 2018 attacked him,
driving, driving more than tion Security Administration
causing bleeding and dam-
40 mph over the speed limit agent grabbed Tara Houska’s
age to his teeth. The arrestee
in a construction zone, and braids from behind, snapped
was charged with aggravated
three counts of reckless them like reins, and said,
assault, simple assault, and
endangerment. The deputy, “Giddy up.” Houska says when
reckless endangerment. Sur-
James Grimes, was clocked she complained, the agent
veillance video later showed
driving more than 100 mph responded: “It was just in fun,
that the defendant did not
while transporting inmates. I’m sorry. Your hair is lovely.”
in fact resist arrest, and that
He was reportedly racing
White sustained his injuries
another driver.
when he tripped and fell. In Alameda County, California,
Candace Steel gave birth in
When the city of Seattle put a a jail cell, screaming in pain
When her 5-year-old daugh-
former fire station up for sale, and calling for help. Employ-
ter was bullied on a Dallas
it advertised it as a “unique ees ignored her for hours,
school bus, Audrey Billings
residential dwelling.” Thom responding only when they
asked to see the videos.
Kroon paid $712,000 for the heard the cries of her new-
The school system told her
building and spent thousands born daughter.
she would have to pay $600
more remodeling it. Three
for each video to cover the
years later, he got a letter
work of redacting footage —CHARLES OLIVER
from the building inspector
not relevant to her child.
ordering him to stop using
the structure as a resi-
dence, because
its only legal
use was
as a
fire
Illustrations: Peter Bagge
 A Libertarian Vision
for 2020 and Beyond

V isions of Liberty is more than an introduction to the broad scope of political liberty. Each of the
contributors dares to imagine a future free from the meddlesome and coercive hand of the state,
a world where people can use their unleashed ingenuity and compassion to do amazing things for edu-
cation, health care, finance, and more. Visions of Liberty is a dream of a world that might be—one that is
truly worth striving for.

PAPERBACK AND EBOOK AVAILABLE

AT ONLINE RETAILERS NATIONWIDE.