Reason Magazine - Staff > Radley Balko

Change He Can Believe In

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:00:00 EST

Since the election, the newspapers and Internet have been flooded with unsolicited advice for President-elect Barack Obama. I'll go ahead and add mine.

I don't agree with Obama on much (I don't agree with the current administration on much, either), so I won't make an appeal with him to compromise with the Republicans on the issues where I agree with them. Instead, here are a few recommendations—some substantive, some symbolic—of moves Obama could make that are consistent with the principles he articulated during the campaign:

Increase government transparency. The Bush administration has been the most secretive in history. Bush and his appointees have sought to undermine open records, open meetings, and Freedom of Information regulations at every turn. They've classified huge swaths of government documents, usually with no justification, including classifying such odd items as Associated Press articles and old press releases from federal agencies. Obama should not only stop this mass secrecy, he should reverse it. He should set up a committee of experts, preferably including representatives from groups like the ACLU, media advocacy organizations, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to go back and review his predecessors' dangerous efforts to govern in the dark.

Open up the White House. This would largely be a symbolic move, but I think it's an important one. For years now, the public roads around the White House have been closed off. The process began after a deranged man attempt to scale a White House fence during the Clinton administration, with a second round of closings coming after September 11. Obama will get a fight from the Secret Service, but he should work to reopen the roads around the White House, and generally increase public access to it. The White House is owned by taxpayers, and the officials who work in it work for them. Setting the White House off like a fortress reinforces the unhealthy insularity and isolation too prevalent in the current administration.

Swear off executive privilege. The concept of "executive privilege" states that presidential aides should be immune to subpoenas to testify in court or before congressional oversight committees. The justification for executive privilege is that presidential aides won't be as open and candid with advice if there's a chance they could be summoned at a later date. That's a weak justification. The president's aides work for the public, and get a federal paycheck. If they don't want to be asked about their advice later, they should refrain from giving the president ethically or legally dubious advice.

Revamp the Transportation Security Administration. And by "revamp," I mean "start over." Most security experts agree that the rigmarole we go through at the airport is mere security theater, designed not to make us safer, but to make us feel safer by making it increasingly inconvenient to fly. TSA's approach to security is too reactionary—too set on preventing attacks and attempted attacks that have already happened. And please, whatever you do, resist the temptation to let TSA workers unionize. Security from terror attacks should not be a federal jobs program. You need the authority to fire underperforming screeners quickly and effortlessly. Three game-changing possibilities to head up TSA: security guru Bruce Schneier, Cato Institute security and technology scholar Jim Harper, or Ohio State University's John Mueller.

Investigate the Bush administration. Your running mate, Joe Biden, said during the campaign that an Obama administration would thoroughly investigate the Bush administration for evidence of criminal and ethical wrongdoing. There will be pressure not to. You'll hear arguments from Washington's standard-bearers that to do so would be mean-spirited, backward-looking, or partisan. You'll hear the claim that aggressively investigating your predecessor will set a bad precedent, whereby future administrations will investigate their predecessors every time the White House changes parties. Ignore them. Because the Bush administration has been so secretive, we aren't even yet sure of the damage done, particularly by Vice President Cheney and his lackeys, the Office of Legal Counsel. If you're serious about undoing the harm done to the Constitution by this administration, you'll need to know the extent of the damage. That includes not only members of Bush and Cheney's immediate staff and top-level advisers, but looking into politically motivated and possibly malicious prosecutions by the current administration's U.S. attorneys.

Make fighting public corruption a top priority of your justice department. The Bush administration's Justice Department spent limited taxpayer resources on ridiculous cases like prosecuting distributors of pornography (I refer here to the consenting-adults sort of pornography), people who sell marijuana pipes over the Internet, and doctors who may or may not have overprescribed prescription painkillers (as determined by Justice Department officials, not other doctors). When they did pursue public officials, those prosecutions tended to be motivated by partisan grudge-settling. Your Justice Department should put public officials at all levels of government—of all political persuasions—on notice that abuses of power and position won't be tolerated. When a politician abuses the public trust and gets away with, or gets a slap on the wrist, it lends credibility to the notion that we have a two-tiered criminal justice system—one for the powerful and well-connected, and another for everyone else.

Use the pardon. On the campaign trail, you've expressed some concern about the soaring incarceration rate. Surely your time as a community organizer and in the classroom as a constitutional law professor have also shown you that the criminal justice system is far from flawless. The Founders knew that a criminal justice system made up of flawed men would inevitably produce flawed results, and so created the presidential pardon power as a last check on possible injustices that may have fallen through the courts. Unfortunately, the pardon power has in recent times been used mostly for political patronage, or as a show of redemption to admitted, guilty people who have since rehabilitated themselves. The staff you assign to review pardons should proactively look for cases of possible injustice—of wrongful prosecutions, or in cases where application of the law still somehow produced an unjust outcome.

Radley Balko is a senior editor at reason. A version of this article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.

Obama Should Swear Off Executive Privilege

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:00:00 EST

President-elect Barack Obama has been fairly critical of the Bush administration's secrecy, lack of accountability, and executive power grabs over the last eight years. And rightly so. To his credit, Obama has made some early gestures to rolling back some of the power claimed by President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

One way Obama could send a clear message about the type of service he'll expect from the people who will staff his administration is to make an early vow forbidding any of his staff from claiming executive privilege should they later be asked to testify before Congress, in a deposition, or in any other legal setting. The one obvious exception would be if someone were asked to testify about matters classified for national security purposes.

Executive privilege is the idea that a president should be able to shield his staff from congressional or legal inquiries because staffers who know they could potentially be subpoenaed may not feel as free and open to give the president candid advice. This is nonsense.

The president's political appointees are public servants. Their salaries are paid by taxpayers. What they do and say on the public payroll should be accessible to the public, to the courts, and to congressional oversight. If a presidential aide fears that advice he gives the president could subject him to legal action or congressional subpoena down the road, he shouldn't give advice that's of questionable legality or that's ethically dubious in the first place. It really is that simple. If the president wants to hire a personal attorney who can give him personal legal advice that's protected by attorney-client privilege, that's fine. He should pay that attorney out of his own pocket, or out of campaign funds.

The phrase "executive privilege" doesn't actually appear anywhere in the Constitution. Rather, it has been inferred by presidents from the Constitution's provisions dividing power among the three branches of the federal government. Though variations on executive privilege were claimed in limited circumstances by several presidents before him, including Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman, the term itself was first coined by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Eisenhower went on to invoke the privilege dozens of times over the next six years.

The Supreme Court has been inconsistent on the matter. During Aaron Burr's trial for treason in 1807, President Jefferson argued something similar to executive privilege in attempting to prevent Burr from subpoenaing Jefferson's private letters about Burr. The Supreme Court found that the president is not exempt from the discovery process in a criminal trial, and ordered Jefferson to turn over the letters. He complied.

In the 1974 case U.S. v. Nixon, the Court upheld the general notion that presidential aids should be granted some room to speak candidly without fear of subpoena, but the Court also thoroughly rejected Nixon's claim of "absolute privilege." The ruling—that there's some privilege, but not absolute privilege—left a lot of gray area. Subsequent presidents Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush periodically invoked executive privilege, but it was the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations that really abused the idea.

Bill Clinton invoked executive privilege to keep the health care task forces held by his wife Hillary Clinton shielded from federal open meetings laws. He would again invoke the doctrine to stymie investigations into Hillary Clinton's firing of White House Travel Office employees, and then again to prevent his aides from testifying in the Monica Lewinsky case (he lost that particular fight in court).

George W. Bush moved early to shore up executive privilege, blocking efforts to investigate his predecessor Clinton's role in the fundraising scandal involving campaign contributions from non-U.S. citizens. He also blocked investigations into Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno. Bush's non-partisan deference to presidential power reaped benefits, as he'd go on to invoke executive privilege to thwart attempts by Congress to look into his own administration's scandals, including the U.S. attorney firings, years of missing White House emails, and the cover-up of the friendly fire death of U.S. Army Ranger and former NFL star Pat Tillman.

What we see, over and over, is that the executive privilege doctrine is most often invoked to prevent congressional committees, independent counsel, and other oversight bodies from investigating possible legal and ethical breaches by members of the executive branch. It's not being used to promote candor and open dialogue among presidential advisers, but to prevent the public from learning about possible abuses of power by members of the administration, and from holding those members accountable.

If Obama were to peremptorily swear off executive privilege early on in his administration, and vow that his staff and advisers will not have his permission to invoke it at a later date, it would not only send a clear and important message to the country that he plans to keep his vow to run a transparent and accountable government, it would also send a message to everyone working in his administration that what they say and do will be on the record, and that they should behave accordingly.

Radley Balko is a senior editor at reason.

A Rigged System

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

Those of you voting in Louisiana or Connecticut this week won't have the option of voting for Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr for president. In both states, Barr's campaign insists it had more than enough signatures to put his name on the ballot. But in Louisiana, the courts determined that Barr's campaign missed the filing deadline. That was in part because state offices were closed the week of the deadline, due to Hurricane Gustav. No matter. A federal court determined it would be too expensive to reprint the state ballots to include Barr's name.

In Connecticut, state officials initially said the Barr campaign came up about 500 names short of the 7,500 signatures required to put Barr's name on the ballot. They later acknowledged that they had made an additional error. Barr was only 321 names shy of the minimum. The state then admitted that state officials had actually lost 119 pages of signatures—almost certainly enough to put Barr over the top. Nevertheless, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Barr would not be on the ballot, citing testimony from Connecticut officials that it would be "nearly impossible" to reprint the ballots to include him.

Meanwhile, in Texas, the tables were turned. Both the Republican and Democratic parties somehow missed that state's deadline to include Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on the Texas ballot. Barr's campaign sued, noting the equal protection problems with allowing the two major parties to skirt campaign rules while holding third party candidates to the letter of the law. Barr was right—Obama and McCain should have been kept off the Texas ballot. But Barr's suit was dismissed by the Texas Supreme Court without comment. Apparently, the Democratic and Republican parties are, to borrow a now-tired phrase, "too big to fail." They're allowed to break the rules.

Bob Barr has no chance of winning the election. But regardless of what you may think of his politics, or that of third-party candidates like Ralph Nader or Chuck Baldwin, this system is rigged. The two major parties have effectively cemented their grip on power by creating laws that make it virtually impossible for upstarts to compete with them. They have done with campaign laws what federal business regulations tend to do in the private sector—protect the behemoth, entrenched dinosaurs that dominate the industry by making it too expensive and difficult for anyone to challenge them.

In addition to ballot access laws, consider campaign finance rules. In his recent special "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics," ABC News reporter John Stossel profiled Ada Fisher, a woman attempting a low-budget, longshot run for Congress in North Carolina with a staff of volunteers. She found it impossible to comply with the election law without hiring a team of lawyers—which of course, she couldn't afford. Written in small print, single-spaced, Stossel found that the federal election code spans one-and-a-half football fields. Eventually, Fisher and her volunteer campaign treasurer were personally fined $10,000 by the FEC for filling late reports.

Stossel then cut to University of Missouri Professor Jeff Milyo, who ran an experiment in which he asked dozens of college-educated people to try to fill out various campaign finance forms and applications. Of the more than 200 people Milyo tested, Stossel reported, "every one of them violated the law." One participant added, "I'd rather not participate in the political process if it means I have to go through the nonsense I went through today."

That's exactly what the two major parties and the incumbents in Congress had in mind. Come up through their party structure, and you'll have a team of lawyers to help guide you through the process. Challenge them from the outside, and the laws they designed will cripple your candidacy.

Consider these two figures: Congress' approval rating right now is a dismal 19 percent. Clearly, we aren't happy with the people who are governing us. Yet 90-95 percent of the incumbents running for re-election to Congress can expect to win on any given election night. Many run unopposed. Between gerrymandering their districts to ensure a friendly electorate, campaign finance legislation, debate rules that effectively bar third-party participants, onerous ballot access rules, and the privileges of office, the Democrats and Republicans have ensured that the vast majority of the country will chose only between one of two candidates this year—candidates who, when it comes right down to it, really aren't all that different.

The system we have now selects for the sorts of people who want to make a career of politics. If, in order to successfully run for high office, you have to spend years culling favors and working your way up through one of the two major parties, the winners in this game are going to be the party loyalists and power-hungry climbers who couldn't hack it in the private sector—frankly, the last personality type we want governing.

It ought to be much easier to run for office. As it is now, the first task of anyone challenging an incumbent for federal office is to raise enough money to hire a team of lawyers to ensure that they're complying with election laws. There's something sordid about that.

It's difficult enough to raise enough money to mount a credible challenge that overcomes the name recognition and other advantages of incumbency. Congress then continually adds to that the enormous costs of navigating more and more layers of an expensive and confusing web of legalese. Perversely, defenders of these complex laws then justify them under the guise of "getting the influence of money out of politics."

How clever of them. What they're really doing is ensuring that incumbents stay in office, and that one of the two same-ish major parties always remains in power.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of reason. A version of this article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.

The Peacemaker

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:45:00 EDT

In March the sheriff and SWAT team of Richland County, South Carolina, posedfor a photo with an impressive new piece of equipment: an M113A1 armored personnel carrier. The vehicle, which moves on tank-like tracks, features a belt-fed, turreted machine gun that fires .50-caliber rounds.

The sheriff, Leon Lott, obtained the $300,000 vehicle through the 1033 program, named for a 1997 federal law streamlining the Defense Department’s transfer of surplus military equipment to local police departments. Law enforcement agencies pay a nominal annual fee (Lott’s paid $2,000) for access to the equipment, which they can then order at steep discounts, sometimes for free.

In addition, after 9/11 the Department of Homeland Security began offering terrorism-fighting grants to domestic police departments in places such as Eau Claire, Wisconsin; Canyon County, Idaho; and Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. The subsidies help the departments acquire military-style armored
personnel carriers, which they generally use to serve drug warrants.

Critics say the program blurs the line between the military and domestic policing, and that it fosters a militaristic mind-set among officers, many of whom haven’t been properly trained to use the equipment. Charles Earl Barnett, a U.S. Marines veteran and retired police major who has served on several United Nations and NATO military and peacekeeping missions, says a .50-caliber machine gun is “completely inappropriate” for domestic police work. It “causes mass death and destruction,” Barnett says. “It’s indiscriminate. I can’t think of a possible scenario where it would be appropriate.”

Sheriff Lott has named his new acquisition The Peacemaker, explaining in a press release that the name is fitting because “the bible refers to law enforcement in Matthew 5:9 ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.’ ” The announcement concludes, “Sheriff Lott hopes to always bring resolution to all conflict through peaceful means.”

Innocence Denied

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:23:00 EDT

Since the early 1990s, DNA testing has exonerated 220 people in the United States who were convicted of crimes they didn't commit, according to the criminal justice reform group the Innocence Project. As the science of DNA testing improves, labs can go further and further back in time to test even damaged and partially decomposed DNA evidence. Partial tests, which can identify just a few genetic markers, aren't effective for establishing guilt, but they are useful in establishing innocence.

In jurisdictions where lawmakers and public officials are cooperating with innocence advocates and not blocking DNA testing, they're finding disturbingly high numbers of wrongful convictions. Dallas County, Texas, for example, has traditionally maintained strict evidence preservation guidelines, and voters there recently elected a district attorney who supports post-conviction DNA testing. The county leads the country with 17 exonerations since 2001.

Yet half the states still don't have laws requiring the preservation of DNA evidence in rape and murder cases, according to an August report in USA Today. Criminal defense lawyers continue to find old cases where there may be real questions about guilt, and where DNA testing could establish innocence, but where testing is impossible because prosecutors either destroyed or failed to properly preserve biological evidence.

While lawmakers profess concern about wrongful convictions and willingness to fund further DNA testing, such proposals often get attached to broader criminal justice bills with more objectionable provisions. In South Carolina, for example, Gov. Mark Sanford was set to sign a DNA preservation bill until the state legislature attached an amendment establishing a state DNA database that would include anyone arrested for (but not necessarily convicted of ) a crime.

Nor is legislation always implemented appropriately. In 2004 Congress passed the Justice for All Act, which appropriated $14 million to the Justice Department for distribution to the states to pay for DNA testing in possible cases of wrongful convictions. As of January, the Justice Department hadn't distributed a dime. In a press statement issued earlier this year, the law's sponsor, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), said federal officials had deliberately construed the bill's evidence preservation requirements as restrictively as possible, which allowed them to deny every grant request, even to states with good preservation standards.

Why the Republicans Must Lose

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

I grew up in a particularly conservative part of the already conservative state of Indiana. I voted for Bob Dole in 1996 and George Bush in 2000, generally because—though I'm not a conservative (I'm a libertarian)—I'd always thought the GOP was the party of limited government. By 2002, I was less sure of that. And by 2004, I was so fed up with the party that I did what I thought I'd never do—vote for an unabashed leftist for president.

Since then, "fed up" has soured to "given up." The Republican Party has exiled its Goldwater-Reagan wing and given up all pretense of any allegiance to limited government. In the last eight years, the GOP has given us a monstrous new federal bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security. In the prescription drug benefit, it's given us the largest new federal entitlement since the Johnson administration. Federal spending—even on items not related to war or national security—has soared. And we now get to watch as the party that's supposed to be "free market" nationalizes huge chunks of the economy's financial sector.

This isn't to say that Barack Obama would be any better. Government would undoubtedly grow under his watch. And from my libertarian perspective, he has been increasingly disappointing even on the issues where he's supposed to be good. We may not go to war with Iran in an Obama administration, but we'd likely become entrenched in a prolonged nation-building adventure in the Sudan. Obama's vote on the FISA bill and telecom immunity also suggests that, for all his criticisms of President Bush's use of executive power and assaults on civil liberties, Obama wouldn't be much better. On the drug war, Obama has promised to end the federal raids on medical marijuana clinics in states that have legalized the drug for treatment, but he wants to resurrect failed federal criminal justice block grant programs that have had some disastrous effects on civil liberties.

While I'm not thrilled at the prospect of an Obama administration (especially with a friendly Congress), the Republicans still need to get their clocks cleaned in two weeks, for a couple of reasons.

First, they had their shot at holding power, and they failed. They've failed in staying true to their principles of limited government and free markets. They've failed in preventing elected leaders of their party from becoming corrupted by the trappings of power, and they've failed to hold those leaders accountable after the fact. Congressional Republicans failed to rein in the Bush administration's naked bid to vastly expand the power of the presidency (a failure they're going to come to regret should Obama take office in January). They failed to apply due scrutiny and skepticism to the administration's claims before undertaking Congress' most solemn task—sending the nation to war. I could go on.

As for the Bush administration, the only consistent principle we've seen from the White House over the last eight years is that of elevating the American president (and, I guess, the vice president) to that of an elected dictator. That isn't hyperbole. This administration believes that on any issue that can remotely be tied to foreign policy or national security (and on quite a few other issues as well), the president has boundless, limitless, unchecked power to do anything he wants. They believe that on these matters, neither Congress nor the courts can restrain him.

That's the second reason the GOP needs to lose. American voters need to send a clear, convincing repudiation of these dangerous ideas.

If they do lose, the GOP would be wise to regroup and rebuild from scratch, scrap the current leadership, and, most importantly, purge the party of the "national greatness," neoconservative influence. Big-government conservatism has bloated the federal government, bogged us down in what will ultimately be a trillion-dollar war, and set us down the road to European-style socialism. It's hard to think of how Obama could be worse. He'll just be bad in different ways.

The truth is, unless you vote for a third-party candidate (which really isn't a bad idea), you don't have much of a choice this November. You can either endorse the idea of a massive, invasive, ever-encroaching federal government that's used to promote center-left ideology, or you can endorse the idea of a massive, invasive, ever-encroaching federal government that's used to promote center-right ideology.

Sadly, if the GOP does lose, it's likely to be interpreted not as a repudiation of the GOP's excesses, but as an endorsement of the Democrats'. When the only two parties who have a chance at winning both have a track record of expanding the size and scope of government, every election is likely to be interpreted as a win for big government—only the brand changes.

Voting yourself more freedom simply isn't an option, at least if you want your vote to be taken seriously (and I'm not denigrating any third parties here; I'm just reflecting reality).

Which brings me back to why the Republicans need to get throttled: A humiliated, decimated GOP that rejuvenates and rebuilds around the principles of limited government, free markets, and rugged individualism is really the only chance for voters to possibly get a real choice in federal elections down the road.

Of course, there's no guarantee that's how the party will emerge from defeat. But the Republican Party in its current form has forfeited its right to govern.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of reason. A version of this article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.

How Your Beer Bought John McCain's $500 Loafers

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has made no bones about his disgust for greed. In the primaries, he contrasted his own record of public service with the private sector career of opponent Mitt Romney, whom McCain derided as a "profit manager." More recently, as the world’s capital markets fell into a full-blown crisis, McCain has struck a populist chord, lambasting the "unbridled greed" that he says drives Wall Street.

Though ostensibly more free market than his opponent Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), McCain (he of the eight houses, 13 cars, and $500 loafers) has never been shy about laying into what he feels are the excesses of capitalism, including the way lobbyists can bribe lawmakers to jigger the system to their liking. The problem for McCain is that the fortune he married into came by way of alcohol wholesaling, an industry that isn’t remotely free market, is awash in excess, and that wouldn’t exist were it not for rigorous system-jiggering from high-powered lobbyists.

When McCain married his second wife Cindy Lou Hensley in 1980, he became one half of a very wealthy household. By some estimates, Cindy McCain’s stake in her family’s Hensley & Co. beer distributorship puts her net worth around $100 million. The Hensley company gave McCain an executive position shortly after he married the heiress, helped catapult him into public office, has thrown heaps of money at his campaigns over the years, and in addition to providing him with a charmed life, has played a significant role in putting him an election away from the White House.

Over the course of his career, media outlets covering McCain have delved pretty extensively into the history of Cindy McCain’s father and his company, as well as the ethical issues McCain will have to face if he’s elected and his wife still serves as the company’s president (McCain generally recuses himself from federal legislation pertaining to alcohol regulation—he won’t have that option as president). But thus far, there’s been little examination of the beer wholesaling industry as a whole. To be blunt, the entire industry is a farce. It’s an artificial, anachronistic, government-created entity that’s anti-competitive and full of lobbyists and special interests. It raises the cost of each bottle of beer you drink, though “Joe Six Pack,” as McCain’s running mate might put it, receives no value for the added cost.

Alcohol wholesalers (in this context, wholesalers and distributors essentially have the same meaning) thrive thanks to what’s known as the "three-tier system" of alcohol distribution, a series of laws that date back to just after the end of prohibition in 1933. The 21st Amendment gives states the power to regulate the sale of alcohol within their borders. Some states decided to assume control of all alcohol sales (they’re known today as control states). Most of those that didn’t adopted laws mandating a state-based middleman between alcohol producers (brewers, distillers, wineries) and retailers (restaurants, grocery stores, liquor stores). There are some exceptions, but generally in three-tier states no one is allowed to buy directly from a producer. Everything must go through a distributor. And while it’s possible to envision a role for a beer or wine distributor in a freer market for alcohol, it’s clear that the industry wouldn’t be nearly as lucrative or prominent as it is today were it not for these protectionist laws.

In the book Strange Brew: Alcohol and Government Monopoly, California State Northridge Professor Glen Whitman explains the origins of the antiquated system. It was put in place largely to appease temperance activists, who still held sway in some parts of the country. Angsty prohibitionists feared what they called "tied houses," bars that were owned by liquor producers. Before prohibition, tied houses, they said, had lured blue-collar workers in with free salted pork sandwiches on their lunch breaks. The salty meal would make the laborers thirsty, at which point they’d purchase alcohol from the bar—leading, the temperance activists said, to decreased production, drunkardness, and all-around moral decay. (According to Whitman, this is also the origin of the phrase, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”) A state-mandated middleman, the thinking went, would prevent these devious marketing practices.

The wholesaling industry has thrived ever since. For decades wholesalers have quietly added 18-25 percent to every bottle of beer, glass of wine, and shot of liquor you pour down your gullet. And there's been little resistance to them, for a few reasons. First, wholesalers don’t interact with consumers. They take their markup between producer and retailer, out of the sight of the people whose money they’re ultimately taking. Second, they’re rather powerful. Alcohol wholesaling is a lucrative, concentrated industry that reaps enormous benefits from policies whose costs are spread out across the general public. Which brings up the third reason distribution laws aren’t frequently challenged: They haven’t had many obvious opponents. Until recently, the only people hurt by the three-tiered system were consumers, and again, the cost per consumer was too negligible, hidden, and entrenched for anyone to notice.

That’s changing. Bulk retailers like Costco and Wal-Mart have waged lawsuits against some of these laws, with mixed success. The popularity of microbrews, niche wineries, and the ability of both to reach consumers over the Internet has also put a dent in the distributors’ empire; wholesalers are among the leading advocates for banning alcohol sales over the web.

But it gets worse. Many states have placed further restrictions within this already artificial market. Some states, for example, give wholesalers exclusive rights to distribute alcohol in a particular region, effectively creating government-enforced monopolies. Other states (including Arizona) have enacted “franchise termination laws,” which make it more difficult for retailers and/or producers to switch distributors once they’ve started doing business with one. Producers and/or retailers get locked in. If they feel their existing distributor is taking too much of a markup, isn’t offering a wide enough variety, or is otherwise performing poorly, there's little they can do. The effect is to squeeze out the upstarts and the competitors. According to Whitman, the number of alcohol wholesalers nationwide has shrunk by 90 percent since the 1950s.

The Hensley company provides a good example of how these laws can hurt consumers. Hensley is the fourth largest beer distributor in the country, one of the largest privately-held companies in Arizona, and holds a 60 percent market share in the parts of Arizona it serves. It also distributes Anheuser-Busch products exclusively. Beer-producing giant Busch began an incentive campaign in the late 1990s aimed at getting distributors to drop the products produced by its competitors. In those parts of the country where a given distributor has a huge, government-abetted market share, such arrangements put the squeeze on the variety of options available to consumers (Anheuser-Bush’s national market share rose five percent during the campaign, to 50 percent nationally).

Alcohol wholesalers put out several arguments to justify their existence. None of them are very convincing.

First, they say that wholesaling provides a convenient bottleneck for the government to collect taxes on alcohol. Given that state governments manage to collect sales tax at the retail level on just about everything else, that isn't terribly persuasive.

Three-tier advodacy groups like the National Beer Wholesalers Association also improbably argue that without their members' careful scrutiny and warehousing, we’d be seeing outbreaks of death and disease caused by tainted alcohol—as if the existence of wholesalers and their markup is all that’s preventing alcohol producers from poisoning their customers. Again, not all that persuasive.

For its next argument, NBWA then employs Frederic Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy, boasting that the government-created industry adds 91,000 jobs and effects an impossible $15 billion impact on the U.S. economy. If those figures are accurate, why not require all consumer products to pass through three tiers? In fact, why not add a fourth or fifth tier, too? We could wipe out unemployment! The argument, of course, is preposterous. Without laws mandating their existence, whatever it is that beer distributors claim they generate for the economy wouldn't disappear. That money would merely go to consumers in the form of cheaper beer, wine, and liquor.

The most dubious argument from wholesalers is that because of the potential for abuse, alcohol is different, and therefore consumers and retailers can’t be trusted to buy it directly from producers—and certainly not off the Internet. That argument reeks of posturing because the same wholesalers invoke the mantra of "personal responsibility" (correctly, in my opinion) when they lobby against alcohol regulation in every other form. Browse a few wholesaler trade publications, and you’ll usually find an article lamenting the government paternalism inherent in excise taxes or restrictions on marketing alcohol in the same issue as, for example, an article warning that America will turn into a nation of winos and drunkards if we let Costco or Wal-Mart buy directly from alcohol manufacturers so they can give their customers a bulk discount on booze.

But let’s get back to John McCain. What does the candidate lecturing Wall Street about greed think about the alcohol wholesaling industry? Is it fair? Should government be subsidizing (if not outright creating) an industry by forcing consumers to pay more for alcohol—for which they get little to no added value in return? And who's greedier, the family who exploits that system to amass a small fortune, or the brokers and traders McCain derides for pursuing profits in a free market?

Radley Balko is a senior editor of reason.

Obama's Destructive Crime Policy

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

When Sen. Barack Obama expressed concern early in the primary season that there are more young black men in prison than in college, he raised hope that he might be the first major-party candidate in a generation to adopt a more nuanced criminal policy than the typical "longer sentences, more prisons, more cops." As it turns out, Obama was wrong on the numbers. But the sentiment was right—one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is currently behind bars.

Obama has also heartened advocates for criminal justice reform by expressing reservations about mandatory minimum sentences, at least for nonviolent offenders. He said he would end federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in states where they're legal. And he has expressed some welcome dismay about America's incarceration rate, which is the highest in the world.

But in the last month, Obama's line on criminal justice has been a lot less encouraging.

Read the rest of this article at Slate.

Private Accounts Still Make Sense

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Wall Street's wild ride over the last few weeks has many critics of President Bush's 2000 campaign promise to create personal Social Security accounts dredging up the issue to score points with justifiably frightened voters.

Barack Obama's campaign has used the issue as a cudgel to whack John McCain, who supported President Bush's plan. Embattled GOP senators such as New Hampshire's John Sununu are also finding themselves on the defensive as the issue of private accounts is resurfacing in campaign attack ads.

President Bush deserves criticism for the way he pushed private accounts, but not for the idea itself. He deserves scorn for the awful way his administration argued for the idea; for his refusal to expend any political capital to pass what would have been a historic, game-changing reform; and for the way he abandoned the issue at the first sign that it was hurting him politically. The same goes for Republicans who once supported the idea, but who today no longer have the courage to argue for it.

Private accounts made sense in 2001, and they still make sense today, even after the calamitous last month in America's capital markets.

Bush's plan basically allowed for younger workers to create private Social Security accounts, which they could then invest in a mix of balanced stocks, bonds, commodities, and other financial holdings similar to the way most people invest their 401(k) plans today. It was only part of their Social Security tax, but it was at least a start.

More importantly, the plan would have taken a step toward giving Americans ownership over the money they "contribute" (the government's term, not mine) to Social Security. Within a generation, what you and your employer contribute would no longer go into a general fund that can be raided at the will of Congress, but to a personal account with your name on it. Not only could you then invest that money to yield a (much) higher return than what you'd get from the government, but should you die early, the money you've been contributing for all your adult life would be passed on to your heirs. Today, it goes back to the government.

Had the Bush plan been successful, millions of poor people would have begun to accumulate inter-generational savings that could help their children or grandchildren escape the cycle of poverty. Our Social Security system would not only be sound, it would be more honest. Your contribution to your retirement would be exactly that, as opposed to what it is today, which is a tax on youth used to prop up a Ponzi scheme to provide benefits for the elderly.

So what about that financial meltdown? Wouldn't the carnage we've seen in the financial sector of late have wrecked all of these private Social Security accounts? It isn't likely. The earliest the Bush plan could have been implemented would have been January 2003. The Dow at that time stood at 8,607. Last Friday the Dow closed at 10,325, its lowest point in two years. Even if you had invested your entire account in stocks on the day the Bush plan took effect, and then retired on Friday, you'd still likely have come out pretty well.

But that's not even really an accurate assessment of what would have happened. No one gets his first paycheck five or six years before retirement. And all of the plans for full or partial Social Security privatization called for bringing in private accounts in phases. People already near retirement would have received the same benefits they were anticipating. But younger people would have had 20 or 30 or 40 years to invest, using the power of compound interest to yield returns exponentially higher than the maximum 1.5-2.5 percent you can expect from the government. Even if the Dow drops below what it was in 2003, anyone would have had Social Security funds invested in it wouldn't be retiring for decades.

There's no period in the history of the stock market—including the crash of 1929, the stagflation of the 1970s, the crash of 1989, and the tech bubble burst of the early 2000s—in which a worker who'd been investing for 30 years or more wouldn't have still received a far better return than what he got from Social Security, even if he retired the day after a historic Wall Street dive.

Of course, this is assuming that you'd have invested your entire account in stocks. That isn't the way most people invest—which is to balance the risk in their retirement plans among stocks, bonds, CDs, and other investments given their age, income, and other assets. Even still, most of the plans for private accounts under consideration eight years ago still provided for a safety net to protect those workers who might have unwisely invested their entire account in, say, Enron or Lehman Brothers.

Critics now trying to use the financial crisis on Wall Street to make political hay of the push for private accounts in 2001 also neglect to mention that for all the risk they want to associate with Wall Street, if you're under 40, you're at far greater risk of never seeing your Social Security deductions under the present system than under any privatization plan. Social Security faces an unfunded liability of $4 trillion over the next 75 years. USA Today reported in May that the combined federal liability for Social Security, Medicare, and other government programs for everyone currently eligible is more than $57 trillion, or $500,000 for every household in the country. And, of course, Congress can raid the Social Security "trust fund" at will.

The stock market is risky? The federal government currently has obligations it will never be able to keep. And none of this accounts for trillion-dollar bank bailouts, inevitable wars, or the new entitlements promised by the current candidates for present and future occupants of the White House. At 33, I don't expect to get a dime from Social Security. If you're younger than I am, you shouldn't, either.

President Bush and other Republicans running for re-election today do deserve criticism for the way they handled the Social Security privatization debate back in 2001. Not for supporting the idea, but for failing to muster the political will to pass it when they had the chance.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of reason. A version of this article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.

Mississippi Fires Medical Examiner Steven Hayne

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:23:00 EDT

In our November 2007 issue, reason exposed some significant problems with Mississippi's forensic system. The article focused on Steven Hayne, the doctor who for two decades has conducted the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies. (Hayne says he performs 1,500 to 1,800 autopsies per year, an impossibly high number.) reason interviewed medical examiners across the country who reviewed Hayne's work and found it sloppy and incompetent, and who cited several examples where Hayne's trial testimony may have put innocent men in prison.

Drawing on reason's reporting, the criminal justice advocacy organization the Innocence Project called on Mississippi to bar Hayne from doing any more autopsies in the state. On August 5, the state finally severed its ties with Hayne. Commissioner of Public Safety Stephen Simpson announced that Hayne would be removed from the state's list of approved medical examiners and that Mississippi would begin contracting its criminal autopsies to a private firm in Nashville.

The case against Hayne was strengthened by the February release of two men, Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, from the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. Brewer and Brooks were both accused of raping and killing young girls in the early 1990s in similar crimes that occurred within miles of each other. Brooks was sentenced to life in prison, Brewer to death. Hayne performed the autopsy in both cases, and in both cases Hayne and the disgraced forensic odontologist Michael West identified bite marks on the bodies of the victims that they say implicated the defendants. DNA testing later showed both men were innocent. Also in February, police arrested Albert Johnson, who confessed to both crimes.

Even in firing Hayne, Simpson tempered his press conference with praise for the doctor. Attorney General Jim Hood, who frequently used Hayne when he was a district attorney, also vigorously defended him in the local press. Simpson said his agency has no intention of reviewing any cases where Hayne has testified. He had "no comment" on the persistent allegations that Hayne has repeatedly given false and improper testimony during his 20-year reign. Hayne was to remain on contract with the state for an additional 90 days to complete a backlog of 400 to 500 autopsy reports.

The New York and Mississippi Innocence Projects say they're looking at more than 200 cases where Hayne gave improper testimony and may have helped convict an innocent person.

Publius Blogs

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:28:00 EDT

Blogs are often likened to the pamphleteering that helped ignite the American Revolution. In some communities, the targets of anonymous blogs are trying to crack down on their Internet critics with the vengeance of King George III.

Start with Memphis, which last year ranked second only to Detroit in violent crimes per 100,000 residents. The city’s police department has been beset by scandal, including a brutal beating of a transsexual in a Memphis police station that was caught on video last February and quickly made its way across the Internet. Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin has responded by devoting time and city resources to investigating…a website.

MPD Enforcer 2.0 has become an online forum where Memphis police officers and citizens gather to dish dirt on Godwin and the brass at the Memphis Police Department. In July Godwin sought a court order demanding the identity of the site’s administrator, who goes by the pseudonym Dirk Diggler, after the lead character in the movie Boogie Nights. Godwin is also trying to force America Online, which hosts the email account Diggler uses on the site, to reveal Diggler’s identity. And Tennessee District Attorney Bill Gibbons has asked the state Bureau of Investigation to investigate whether police documents were illegally leaked to MPD Enforcer.

In a similar case late last year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation successfully represented the proprietor of Da Truth Squad against the township of Manalapan, New Jersey. The blogger was able to quash a city subpoena that tried to compel Google to turn over his identity.

In March 2008, Whitewater, Wisconsin, Police Chief James Coan assigned city employees to uncover the identity of “John Adams,” the proprietor of freewhitewater.com, a blog critical of Coan. The chief put two detectives, the city’s director of public works, its information technology officer, and the city clerk on the case. In email messages to other officers, Coan identified the blogger as a “suspect,” although no crime had been committed.

Coan has told the La Crosse Tribune he was concerned about “potential threats” from “someone who seems so extremely angry at me and with our department.” In January he and his officers paid a visit to the home of 68-year-old Laird Scott, whom Coan said he was “99.9 percent certain” was the blogger. He was wrong.

The House of Death

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Sandalio “Sandy” Gonzalez recently retired after a 32-year career in law enforcement, 27 as an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), at one point serving as its head of operations in South America.

Three years ago, Gonzalez’s career came to an abrupt end after he blew the whistle in a horrifying case now known as the “House of Death,” in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents stand accused of looking the other way while one of their drug informants participated in torturing and murdering at least a dozen people in the border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

The House of Death case was first reported by Alfredo Corchado at the Dallas Morning News, then followed up with a series of extensive reports by journalist Bill Conroy at Narco News, a website that covers the Latin American drug trade. Conroy, a reporter for a business journal in San Antonio, Texas who covers the drug war in his spare time, has had his own problems with federal retaliation. Federal agents have visited both his home and his office since he began reporting on the case.

At the center of the House of Death case is Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, also known as “Lalo,” a federal drug informant the U.S. government has over the years paid more than $220,000. Lalo was a valuable asset. He had worked his way into the upper echelons of Mexico’s Juarez drug cartel. As of 2003, Lalo was one of the federal government’s key contacts in an investigation targeting Heriberto Santillan-Tabares (“Santillan”), the cartel’s third in line behind leader Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. Fuentes and Lalo worked closely together on a number of drug smuggling operations, and Lalo’s esteem in the cartel grew with Santillan’s ascendance.

In August 2003, Santillan and Lalo commited their first murder at the abandoned house near the Texas-Mexico border—the House of Death—torturing and killing a man named Fernando Reyes, a Mexican attorney and childhood friend of Santillan. After the murder, Lalo briefed his handlers at ICE about what he had done. ICE agents would later testify that word of Lalo and Santillan’s first murder went out to ICE and Justice Department officials in Mexico City, El Paso, and Washington, D.C., including the office of U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton. But the federal government allowed the investigation to continue. Over the ensuing months eleven more people would be murdered at the House of Death, including a legal U.S. resident, at torture sessions Juarez cartel elites would grotesquely refer to as carne asadas, or “barbecues.”

In January 2004, while under torture at the House of Death, one man gave his captors the address of a DEA agent assigned to the agency’s office in Juarez. The gruesome murders of Mexican citizens may not have moved the U.S. government to cut short its investigation, but threats against a federal agent apparently did. Gonzalez, who was in Washington at the time, received news of the threat, and flew to El Paso to oversee the crisis. Over the next several weeks, Gonzalez grew increasingly outraged as he learned about ICE’s handling of Lalo and the Santillan investigation.

Rather than give up a drug operation (and apparently an unrelated cigarette smuggling operation), Gonzalez learned that federal agents had allowed a paid government informant to participate in a dozen brutal murders—all but the first of which could have been prevented.

When Gonzalez sensed that internal investigations of the case were headed toward a cover-up, he fired off a letter to his counterpart at ICE demanding he take responsibility. Gonzalez’s letter reached the highest levels of the Justice Department, including the desk of DEA Administrator Karen Tandy.

But instead of praising Gonzalez’s efforts to expose this egregious mishandling of a paid government informant, Tandy and other government officials reprimanded him for creating a record of ICE’s transgressions. Tandy and U.S. Attorney Sutton called Gonzalez “hysterical,” warning him not to talk to the media. They eventually forced him into an early retirement in 2005.

Since then, Gonzalez has been frustrated in his attempts to get the executive branch, Congress, or the media to investigate what happened in Juarez.

In August, reason Senior Editor Radley Balko spoke with Gonzalez by phone.

reason: When did you first hear about the House of Death murders?

Gonzalez: In January 2004. I was in the D.C. area on business when one of my assistants called me and said that Customs or ICE had contacted our office, and said that we had to evacuate all of our personnel from the Juarez office because they were in danger. I didn’t wait to get into specifics at the time. I just issued instructions to my staff to assist our Mexico City office and ICE in whatever they were doing.

So, that was the first inkling. When I went back to El Paso, I started looking into it. I started getting reports of what was going on, and eventually dug until I learned about the murders. I then spoke to my counterpart at ICE, and when I got the picture of what was going on, I just couldn’t believe it. It was outrageous.

reason: You then wrote a letter detailing what you knew and demanding an investigation. Who got a copy of that letter? And what was the reaction to it?

Gonzalez: This all started as a threat against some agents and their families. So even if ICE didn’t want to get into the murders, they had to at least investigate the threats to the agents. The DEA flew in a supervisor from Mexico City. He was operating out of my office in El Paso. When I finally found out what was going on with the House of Death, I wrote the letter to my counterpart at ICE. The letter basically said to him: Unless you can come up with a really good explanation, you’re responsible for this whole mess. These were murders, and we had the possibility of federal agents looking the other way, knowing the murders were taking place. Allowing an informant to take part in violent crimes is a very serious matter, so I also sent a copy to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Their reaction was completely negative. The U.S. Attorney never even contacted me to discuss the matter. Instead, he complained about me directly to the Justice Department. I got a call from the number three person in the DEA, who instructed me not to talk to the media, and not to write any more letters. He told me that everyone was very upset. No one wanted to discuss the issues I had raised. They just wanted me to shut up. I think at that point they realized that this whole mess was now a matter of record. So they went after the guy who put it on the record.

reason: You’ve said you wrote the letter because you saw signs that the investigation was looking more like a cover-up than an actual investigation.

Gonzalez: DEA was doing their investigation and ICE was doing theirs. When the officials met in Washington, it became clear to me that what was being reported by ICE and what was being reported by DEA were very different. I said “bullshit.” I mean, this is murder we’re talking about here—multiple murders—and something’s got to be done.

reason: At that point, the DEA had already dropped Lalo as an informant, right?

Gonzalez Yeah. They dropped him the previous July after he was caught at the border with an unauthorized stash of marijuana.

reason: But ICE kept using him—not only after he’d been caught smuggling while working as an informant, but after they learned that he had participated in a murder while on their payroll.

Gonzalez: Correct.

reason: Why do you think they kept using him? Did they want to get more information on the cartel, or were they using him in other cases that they didn’t want to compromise?

Gonzalez: I think it was a combination of those two things. They were also using him in some huge cigarette smuggling case. And of course he was well into this cell of the Juarez cartel. As long he was there, he could provide information.

reason: So of the 12 murders at the House of Death, in how many cases did ICE agents have prior knowledge that one was about to take place?

Gonzalez: That’s the big question. That’s why they don’t want an investigation.

reason: There’s evidence that there were at least two where they had advance knowledge, correct?

Gonzalez: Lalo gave an affidavit or a declaration to the Mexican authorities where he admitted to taking part and/or being present—and it’s been a long time since I’ve read that—in five murders.

reason: If ICE had handled the situation properly after they learned of the first murder, do you believe the subsequent murders could have been prevented?

Gonzalez: Oh, absolutely. I mean, after the first murder, they had all the evidence they needed. At the time that first murder took place, we already had a prosecutable drug case against Santillan. And then we had the murder on top of that.

reason: After all this, the main target of the investigation—Santillan—was only charged with drug trafficking. He pled guilty, and received a 25-year sentence. U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton dropped five murder charges against him—all committed at the House of Death. Do you think Sutton was afraid of what would come out in a trial where Lalo and Santillan were called to testify?

Gonzalez: Oh, there’s no question about that. No way they could afford to put Lalo on the stand and have him testify to all of this.

Remember, he had a drug case before the first murder took place. That’s the case that he pled guilty on. The murders had to be dismissed because the government’s star witness and informant, Lalo, would have had to testify that he took part in them. At that point, any defense attorney worth his salt would’ve gotten out of Lalo that he was reporting these murders to federal agents before they happened.

reason: The DEA administrator at the time, Karen Tandy, has admitted in court testimony that she gave you the only poor performance review of your career because of your letter calling for an investigation into the murders. That led to your retirement. Have any of the ICE officers who handled the Lalo case been held accountable—criminally, professionally, or otherwise?

Gonzalez: Not to my knowledge. I doubt it. I would have heard about it.

reason: Have you had any indication that Congress might step in? Have you talked to anyone on Capitol Hill?

Gonzalez: Back in 2005 I went and briefed the senior staff of two senators.

reason: Which ones?

Gonzalez: [Iowa Sen. Charles] Grassley and [Vermont Sen. Patrick] Leahy. I think what happened is one of the members of Leahy’s staff was a Justice Department officer who was on loan on a detail to the senator’s staff. I think she knew Johnny Sutton. She worked out of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys. She knew Sutton personally and throughout the whole interview she was antagonistic. My guess is that she railroaded the whole thing.

reason: You eventually won a lawsuit and a settlement from the federal government. What exactly did the jury determine in that case?

Gonzalez: I was suing the government for retaliating against me when I blew the whistle on some missing drugs on another case in Miami. But I amended the lawsuit to include their retaliation for my letter in the House of Death case. This was an ongoing pattern of discrimination and retaliation against whistle-blowing that began in Miami and continued in El Paso. Believe it or not, the government tried to use the letter against me in the case. The jury didn’t buy it.

reason: What were the terms of the settlement?

Gonzalez: The jury ruled in my favor and awarded me $85,000. Both parties appealed, and the government settled for $385,000. But the jury that heard all of the evidence ruled in my favor. Of course, the government didn’t admit to doing anything wrong.

reason: Some of the families of the people murdered at the site brought a class action suit against the federal government for its complicity in their deaths. Do you know the status of that case?

Gonzalez: The judge threw it out. I don’t know if they’ve appealed, but I don’t think they had a chance. I mean, these federal judges, they’re not really independent. They like to say they are, and I guess maybe some of them are, but most of them will rule in favor of the government every time.

reason: The Department of Homeland Security is now trying to deport Lalo back to Mexico, where he’ll almost certainly be murdered. Two questions. First, what is their stated reason for deporting him? And the more obvious question—do you think they’re trying to deport him because he’s likely to be killed?

Gonzalez: There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re trying to deport him because they know he’ll be killed. It gets rid of the main witness against the government should someone ever look into this.

I don’t know the stated or official reason they’re trying to deport him. I would guess that it’s because he’s an illegal alien, or something like that.

I mean, they want him dead. There’s no question about it.

reason: He has asked that if he is deported, it be to someplace other than Mexico. The government is arguing against that, too.

Gonzalez: I wasn’t aware of that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. All I know is that they are trying to get rid of him so he can get killed. Once he’s out of the picture, there’s no way this case can be revived, because all the other witnesses are government agents.

reason: Tell me about the Joint Assessment Team Report.

Gonzalez: The Joint Assessment Team was two guys from Customs, two guys from ICE, and two guys from DEA who were to go in and interview everybody and then hopefully come to a conclusion about what happened. They did that. They interviewed over 40 people, including me, and issued a classified report. But when I asked for a copy during discovery, they would only release the portion that was their interview with me. They said the rest of the report was “national security.”

So I was the agent in charge of that whole area, and they never showed me the results of the report. The only thing I can conclude from that is that what they found out was not pretty, and they weren’t about to tell me that I was right. They also never showed it to the regional DEA director in Mexico City, who had also signed on to my letter. Odd that neither he nor I received a copy of the report, isn’t it?

reason: You’ve had a long career at the DEA and you’ve seen two pretty serious abuses of power in that time. In both the House of Death and the Miami cases, you took more punishment for blowing the whistle than the people actually involved in the corruption.

Gonzalez: There’s no question.

reason: How widespread do you think these abuses of the informant system are in federal law enforcement?

Gonzalez: Well, I’m not sure that there is an “informant system.” I think every agency has its own rules and regulations regarding informants. It all has to do with individuals and how they handle their informants, but in general I think there is a tendency throughout the government to cover up misconduct, whether it’s informant-related or otherwise. At least in the law enforcement agencies.

reason: You said at a conference earlier this year that while corruption is a problem, the bigger problem is that federal prosecutors don’t hold corrupt agents accountable. Is that an accurate assessment of your opinion?

Gonzalez: Yes. In the House of Death case, the prosecutor’s office is involved, the U.S. Attorney is involved. So it gets covered up. If there had been no involvement of the prosecutor’s office in the misconduct, they might have gone after some of the agents. But Sutton’s people were in the thick of things. So, you know, it gets covered up.

reason: Have the higher-ups in Sutton’s office, the DEA, or ICE been questioned about the case? About why they allowed it to continue?

Gonzalez: No. Who’s going to question them? No one made the decision to investigate the initial misconduct, so everyone’s off the hook. I mean, the key person here is United States Attorney Sutton. He’s independent from Washington in the sense that if he decides to conduct an investigation, it gets done. I guess conceivably he could get enough pressure from the DOJ to step on it, but by then, so many people would know about it, it would turn into a major scandal. But if the U.S. Attorney wanted—if he had wanted this looked into—it would’ve happened.

reason: You’re now retired after a career in the federal government. What have you taken away from all of this?

Gonzalez: I think the American people would be justified in believing that their own government may be as corrupt as any of the countries our government criticizes for corruption.

reason: You’ve had more than a 30-year career as a DEA agent and you’ve seen all of this corruption go down. Has it caused you to rethink or reconsider the War on Drugs?

Gonzalez: I’m not ready to say that we should legalize drugs, if that’s what you’re talking about. I just don’t think that the problem has been dealt with properly. I think that we probably should concentrate more effort on demand reduction than give, for example, the Pentagon a bunch of money so they could run their ships and planes and say that it’s detection and monitoring, which doesn’t work.

Maybe concentrate more on education, when kids are young—making an effort in their formative years to make it so that they don’t ever think of using drugs. I know this is wishful thinking but just going at it through enforcement alone...I think it’s been shown that it really doesn’t work. We’re successful in putting people behind bars, but then other people take their place right away. It’s a never-ending cycle.

Cops Employing Robbers

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Ryan Frederick, the 29-year-old Chesapeake, Virginia man facing capital murder charges after shooting and killing a police officer during a nighttime drug raid on his home, was back in court for a preliminary hearing earlier this month. What came out at the hearing may be the beginning of the unraveling of the state's case against him.

Frederick has said he was asleep in preparation for an early shift when police raided his home at 8:30 p.m. on January 24. According to search warrant affidavits, officers were acting on a tip from an informant that Frederick was running a major marijuana growing operation in his garage. The raid turned up only a misdemeanor amount of the drug—about a third of an ounce.

Frederick has said in interviews and in letters to his family that he was awoken by his dogs barking at the intruders, then heard the sound of someone breaking down his front door. He says he grabbed his handgun and ran to his living room, where he saw that the bottom panel of his door and been busted out and saw someone reaching up through the broken panel toward the door handle. Frederick says that's when he fired, striking and killing Det. Jarrod Shivers. Police and prosecutors counter that Frederick fired through the door, hitting Det. Shivers as he was standing on Frederick's front lawn. Police say they announced themselves before attempting to enter Frederick's home. Frederick and at least two neighbors say they heard no announcement.

Frederick's case is only one recent example of the inherent danger and disproportionate absurdity of using violent, forced-entry police tactics to serve nonviolent drug warrants. This raid on a man with no prior criminal record left a police officer dead, his wife widowed, and his children without a father, while effectively ruining Ryan Frederick's life. He's facing one count of capital murder for the shooting of Shivers, a felony drug distribution charge, and a charge of using a weapon during the commission of a drug crime.

Now, disturbing new questions have emerged about the quality of the police investigation and the way the Chesapeake Police Department's narcotics officers may have been using confidential informants in their drug investigations. The latter would be nothing new. The ACLU is currently in the midst of a national campaign aimed at drawing attention to the misuse of informants, including in high-profile cases in Cleveland, Dallas, and just across the U.S.-Mexican border near El Paso.

Last May, a local TV news station identified the police informant in Ryan Frederick's case as "Steven," a 20-year-old man who was dating the sister of Frederick's fiance. The report noted that Steven had been arrested for stealing credit cards nine days prior to the raid on Frederick's house and may have broken into Frederick's garage three days prior to the raid to collect evidence against him. According to Frederick's family, the two had been feuding after Frederick accused Steven of stealing from him. The search warrant in the case notes that the informant had been inside Frederick's home three days prior to the raid, where he saw evidence of the marijuana-growing operation. In an interview with a local TV station shortly after his arrest, Frederick said someone had broken into his garage at about the same time.

In June, I spoke with a second man who confirmed to me that Steven had indeed broken into Frederick's home. He could confirm that, he said, because he assisted with the break-in. I gave him the moniker "Reggie" at the time, but can now identify him as Renaldo Turnbull, Jr. I had been made aware of Turnbull and his story by John Hopkins, a reporter with the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. Hopkins told me Turnbull called him to tell him about his involvement in the raid after the police arrested Turnbull on charges of burglary and fraud—charges Turnbull says were undeserved. The Pilot decided not to publish Turnbull's accusations at the time.

When I spoke with Turnbull in June at the Chesapeake Jail, he confirmed that he and Steven had been working for the police as paid informants for several months and that Steven had cut a deal with the police after being arrested for credit card theft—they'd drop the charges if he brought them evidence of a major marijuana operation. He confirmed that he and Steven then broke into Ryan Frederick's home and stole the alleged marijuana plants the police then used as probable cause to obtain the search warrant that led to the fatal raid. Turnbull was hesitant to confirm the more serious allegations he had made to Hopkins in February—that the police were actually encouraging these illegal break-ins—explaining that his lawyer had advised him to stop taking and that he feared the police would retaliate if he kept talking. "I don't want to get into any more trouble," he said.

Last week, the Virginian-Pilot finally reported on Turnbull's conversations with Hopkins from last February, explaining that Turnbull's allegations seem to be confirmed by new revelations from special prosecutor Paul Ebert at a pretrial hearing earlier this month. Referring to the break-in at Frederick's home, the Pilot reported:

Turnbull said he and an accomplice didn't worry about breaking into Frederick's garage because police assured them they would be protected.
"The dude said he was going to look out for us, so let's go do it," he said.
[...]
Turnbull said he met with Shivers once and talked with him on the phone on other occasions. During a meeting at a 7-Eleven store near the intersection of Battlefield Boulevard and Cedar Road in Chesapeake, Shivers introduced himself.

"He told me what to look for. He said, if you know of any burglaries or anything, let Steven know... He said no evidence, no pay... He said if you know where it is, go get it.

According to Virginia criminal defense attorney John Zwerling, if Turnbull's allegations are true, they would represent illegal conduct on the part of the Chesapeake Police Department and the late Det. Shivers. "If the police were sending informants to break into private residences to collect probable cause for drug warrants, it would be the same as if the police were breaking in themselves," Zwerling says. "The police would be participating in crimes, and the warrants would be invalid."

As they had done with me last June, the Chesapeake Police Department and the office of special prosecutor Paul Ebert declined to comment on the allegations to the Pilot.

In the pre-trial hearing earlier this month that inspired the Pilot to finally run with Turnbull's interview from last February, prosecutors actually admitted that much of their case rests on the word of what they describe as two "burglars" who had broken in to Frederick's home prior to the raid. According to the article:

Prosecutors said they have evidence that more than one person broke into Frederick’s detached garage days before the deadly drug raid, taking about half of the marijuana growing inside.

Prosecutors haven't yet identified them, but it's difficult to see how the "burglars" who broke into Frederick's home could be anyone other than Steven and Turnbull.

Which means the police either encouraged the break-in into Frederick's home (as Turnbull has said), or they knew or should have known their probable cause had been obtained illegally. According to Zwerling, either scenario would invalidate the warrant the police had obtained to search Frederick's home, meaning the raid on Frederick's home itself was illegal. That would also lend support to Frederick's case should he decide to use a claim of self-defense.

More broadly, if true, all of this would also mean that narcotics officers at the Chesapeake Police Department were routinely sending informants to commit illegal burglaries in order to obtain evidence in drug cases—the makings of a major scandal.

Of course, if Steven and Turnbull are indeed the "burglars" referenced by prosecutors, they're both now facing their own charges (the credit card charges against Steven were dropped, then reinstated after the raid—which didn't turn up the marijuana the police said in the warrant that the informant told them they would find), which means they're both at the mercy of the state. At this point, neither is likely to to say anything damning about the Chesapeake Police Department. Jailhouse informants who are in the game of bargaining information for time off of their own sentences have little incentive to tell the truth. Indeed, Turnbull has since stopped speaking with reporters.

Ryan Frederick and the city of Chesapeake deserve to know the details of the the burglary to his garage three days prior to the police raid on his home—and if the police encouraged or permitted the burglary.

The only sure way to get at the truth in this case is through an outside investigation, one that grants both Steven and Turnbull complete immunity from all prior charges so they can tell state or federal investigators what they know free from any pressure from local law enforcement.

It's also important to find out if such tactics were limited to this case or if, as Turnbull has said, they're common practice in Chesapeake.

The latter wouldn't be so unusual. When a botched raid in Atlanta killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston in November 2006, the ensuing federal investigation found that narcotics police in Atlanta routinely lied in drug warrant affidavits. The city's entire narcotics division was eventually fired or replaced. That case unraveled after a police informant came forward to contradict the narcotics officers' version of events.

Drug policing is driven by statistics—the number of arrests made and the amount of contraband seized. Statistics-driven policing incentivizes shortcuts, encouraging even good police officers to bend the rules when it comes to the use of informants, or perhaps exaggerate or mislead in a warrant affidavit if it increases the odds of making the big bust. That corrupted information then provides the basis for these violent, forced entry raids into private homes. It isn't difficult to see how how they can—and often do—go wrong.

In this case, a man with no prior criminal record, a steady job, and who was recently engaged had his home violated—perhaps by two police informants. Then, three days later, he was allegedly awoken by the sound of someone battering down his front door. His reaction was to defend his home by shooting at the intruders. It isn't a stretch to say that many people might have had the same reaction.

Sending Ryan Frederick to prison for the rest of his life won't bring Det. Jarrod Shivers back. And unless the Chesapeake Police Department—and for that matter, police departments all across the country—dramatically change the way they investigate and prosecute drug cases and serve drug warrants, it certainly won't prevent similar tragedies from happening again.

The only way to prevent that is to stop sending police teams barging into private homes to arrest people suspected of nonviolent drug crimes.

ADDENDUM: Earlier on September 25, the day this article posted, Chesapeake Police Chief Kelvin Wright denied that Renaldo Turnbull was ever a police informant. However, Wright did not say whether Turnbull was one of the "burglars" who broke into Ryan Frederick's home.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of reason.

Corporatism, Not Capitalism

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Forget AIG for a moment. Forget Freddie and Fannie, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers. Imagine a company much bigger. Imagine a company that at the end of this year will have spent $400 billion more than it has taken in. Worse, imagine that the company's accounting is so bad, the $400 billion doesn't even begin to cover the whole of this company's liabilities.

In fact, the company deliberately chooses to use what's known as "cash accounting" rather than the more accurate accrual accounting. Cash accounting looks at how much cash the company has on hand, regardless of future liabilities. It's like saying if you have $75 dollars in your checking account right now, you're $75 in the black, never mind that you've deferred your car payment, quit your job, and have a rent check due at the end of the month.

The company also practices dirty accounting tricks like "forward funding," "advance funding," and "delayed obligations," deceptive tricks that hide its precipitous finances from auditors and its investors.

This company routinely borrows from its workers' pension plan to pay off its debt. Its accountants then claim that because the company owes the borrowed money to its own pensioners and not to outside creditors, the resulting hole in the pension plan doesn't really count as a liability. Sometimes, the company's executives neglect to pass a budget at all. When that happens, they keep the company running with "emergency expenditures," which its accountants don't consider real expenditures for records-keeping purposes, even though they're paid with real money.

By now, you've probably guessed where I'm headed. I'm not really talking about any private company. I'm talking about your federal government. If any private corporation employed the same accounting tricks Congress and the White House use to hide the government's massive debt and financial liabilities, its board and executive officers would all be in prison. In the government, it's common practice. And that's not even considering the funding of our two ongoing wars, which somehow emanates from outside the normal budget process.

If the government were required to abide by the same accounting standards as private industry, its debt would be in the trillions, not billions. Last May, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said that the government's unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare alone comes to a staggering $99.2 trillion, or $330,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. It's an impossible figure.

So when congressional leaders and presidential candidates Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) call for more government oversight of our struggling financial institutions, go ahead and laugh. You know you want to. The idea that the private sector would be in better shape today if only we demanded more oversight from our politicians is preposterous. Our politicians wouldn't recognize "fiscal responsibility" if it spat in their ears.

Wall Street moguls may be "greedy," as both John McCain and Barack Obama have described them, but at least there are real consequences when their greed becomes excessive. They go out of business.

Except, that is, when the government bails them out. Thus far, in addition to being on the hook for the federal government's own massive debt, taxpayers are also putting up $85 billion to back insurance giant AIG and up to $100 billion each to back Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and we're funding the Bear Stearns backstop. Congress is also expected to approve at least $25 billion in corporate welfare for the big three automakers. You can probably expect more handouts down the road. All of this has some analysts now questioning the U.S. government's bond rating, and worse, wondering whether the government itself may soon collapse under the weight of its own debt.

When you, Joe Citizen, spend frivolously and default on your loans, the bank takes your house. When the government spends your tax dollars frivolously, it simply cooks the books to cover its excesses. When the books are left in ashes, the government just takes more of your money, or it prints more money, leaving the money it hasn't already taken from you devalued. Over the last few weeks, we've learned that you now face the prospect of an additional indignity: When your neighbor's bank spends frivolously and defaults on its loans, the government's going to take your money then too, to keep the bank in business.

Many commenters have blamed all of this on capitalism. This isn't capitalism. It's a peculiar kind of corporatist socialism, where good risks and the resulting profits remain private, but bad risks and the resulting losses are passed on to taxpayers. There's nothing free-market about it.

Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, nor either party's leadership in Congress, has proposed a reasonable plan to deal with the government's unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities. In fact, all have proposed expensive new government programs that can't possibly be funded over the long term. All seem both oblivious to the federal government's impending financial peril and intent on making it worse.

Perversely, all are then simultaneously demanding that they be given greater control over the private sector—because, they gallingly explain, corporations have shown that they can't be left alone to behave in a manner that's fiscally responsible.

Governments have been screwing over taxpayers for about as long as there have been governments and taxpayers. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a fairly recent development, and has spurred an explosion of wealth and the greatest standard of living in human history. What's happening now isn't capitalism, but capitalism is certainly taking the brunt of the blame.

Unfortunately, the end result may be that our politicians make capitalism more accountable to them—the same people who have shown that when it comes to the government's finances, they're accountable to no one.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of reason. A version of this article orginally appeared at FoxNews.com.

A Decent Pick

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is certainly one of the more interesting and controversial characters to emerge in the national political scene of late. Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) selection of her to be his running mate was widely reported to be last-minute, a compromise choice when advisers and party insiders expressed concern over his preferred pick, independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman. The pick smacked of desperation, and it seems clear now that McCain's camp didn't have time to vet Palin in the way it might have liked.

But it may ultimately go down as a serendipitous oversight—and provide guidance to future candidates to eschew the overly risk-averse vetting process and be willing to take chances—to look outside the Beltway establishment for political talent. Palin wowed the GOP convention last week, may have united the party, and won begrudging praise from the very punditocracy and media elites she skewered in her speech.

If Palin helps McCain get elected, he'll of course have no regrets about having selected her. But it's worth wondering whether if McCain's campaign had vetted Palin more thoroughly, she'd have made the cut. I suspect not.

It's now been widely reported that McCain's biggest selling point on Palin—that she's been a trailblazer on pork-barrel spending, one of McCain's pet issues—was off-base. Palin did eventually oppose the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," but only as of late last year, only after initially supporting it, and only after the two Alaska politicians most associated with the bridge—Republican Sen. Ted Stevens and Republican Rep. Don Young—were under federal investigation. Palin then still took the money for the bridge, she just diverted it to other projects. This was hardly political courage.

Over the course of her brief career, Palin has also had no qualms about working with Young and Stevens to procure federal dollars for local projects—at least until she was savvy enough to realize that public sentiment had turned sour on the process. Under Palin's stewardship, Alaska still leads the nation in per capita spending on federal pork projects, and under her tenure as mayor, the town of Wasilla raked in $26 million in federal earmarks.

Now, you could argue that a governor or mayor who's able to deftly game the earmark system to the advantage of her constituents is only doing what's expected of her. The problem, of course, is that McCain introduced Palin as a maverick reformer of the earmark process—someone who risked her career to fight waste and abuse and to take on Alaska's GOP establishment. That simply isn't true.

But perhaps Palin has learned from the experience. She is at least on the right side of the issue now. And as a libertarian, there's plenty I like about Palin. I don't agree with many of her culturally conservative positions, but she has for the most part declined to enshrine those views in public policy. Her lack of experience doesn't bother me much at all. Washington's in desperate need of fresh blood and fresh ideas, not the promotion of another five-term senator who's found a permanent home in the Beltway morass.

But what I like about Palin should bother McCain. Palin actually has staked out unorthodox positions on a number of interesting issues, and they're issues that McCain and the Republican base that has embraced her would probably find troubling. Palin's taken a lot of heat, for example, for her (relatively loose) ties with the Alaska Independence Party, an organization that favors a vote on whether the state should secede from the union. Palin has also been friendly with the state's Libertarian Party. Palin's willingness to engage pro-liberty, deeply anti-federal political organizations—even fringe ones—is refreshing. But it's wholly at odds with John McCain's "country first" nationalist fervor.

Palin was also one of just three governors in the country to issue a proclamation in support of "Jurors' Rights" day, an event sponsored by the Fully Informed Jury Association, which encourages the doctrine of jury nullification. Nullification is an idea abhorred by tough-on-crime conservatives.

Palin also comes from a state whose constitution has one of the strongest privacy provisions in the country. Alaska's traditional reverence for privacy and personal autonomy is reflected in a number of issues that would likely be at odds with the national Republican Party—or at least the Bush administration—including a rejection of the Real ID Act, and the de facto decriminalization of marijuana.

Palin supported both the Iraq War and the surge, but in the past she has said she also supports a defined "exit strategy," an approach explicitly rejected by McCain, who has said we may well be in Iraq for decades.

Palin's persona thus far seems to be more in the tradition of Alaska's frontier, individualistic conservatism than John McCain's Weekly Standard-style national greatness conservatism. It's a philosophy that's skeptical of government, instead of what Repubilcans stand for now, which is to embrace government, so long as Republicans are running it.

Of course, John McCain is still at the top of the ticket. If he's elected, it will be his policies and philosophy that determine public policy, not Palin's. And there's the strong possibility that Palin's views will morph during a McCain administration to align more with his—indeed, on foreign policy that seems to have already happened.

But of all the aspiring politicians McCain could have boosted into the national spotlight of a presidential campaign, he could have done a lot worse than Palin. If she manages to hold on to her more individualist, limited-government instincts, she'd be a welcome force in a party that has generally abandoned its "leave-us-alone" constituency—thanks in no small part to the man at the top of the ticket. She's certainly a world away from Joe Lieberman, McCain's reported favored pick.

In short, John McCain may have actually made a good pick this month—in spite of himself.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of reason. A version of this article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.

Lower the Drinking Age

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:30:00 EDT

It's been nearly 25 years since Congress blackmailed the states to raise the minimum drinking age to 21 or lose federal highway funding. Supporters of the law have hailed it as an unqualified success, and until recently, they've met little resistance.

For obvious reasons, no one wants to stand up for teen drinking. The alcohol industry won't touch the federal minimum drinking age, having been sufficiently scolded by groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and federal regulators. So the law's miraculous effects have generally gone unchallenged.

But that may be changing. Led by John McCardell, the soft-spoken former president of Middlebury in Vermont, a new group called the Amethyst Initiative is calling for a new national debate on the drinking age. And McCardell and his colleagues ought to know. The Amethyst Group consists of current and former college and university presidents, and they say the federal minimum drinking age has contributed to an epidemic of binge drinking, as well as other excessive, unhealthy drinking habits on their campuses.

This makes perfect sense. Prohibitions have always provoked over-indulgence. Those of us who have attended college over the last 25 years can certainly attest to the fact that the law has done nothing to diminish freshman and sophomore access to alcohol. It has only pushed underage consumption underground. It causes other problems, too. Underage students, for example, may be reluctant to obtain medical aid for peers who have had too much to drink out of fear of implicating themselves for drinking illegally, or for contributing to underage drinking.

More than 120 college presidents and chancellors have now signed on to the Amethyst Initiative's statement, including those from Duke, Tufts, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Syracuse, Maryland, and Ohio. Over the last few years several states, including Wisconsin, Montana, Minnesota, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Vermont have also considering lowering their drinking ages back to 18.

All of this has the usual suspects predictably agitated. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, not accustomed to striking a defensive posture, calls the Amethyst Initiative's request for an "informed debate" on the issue "deeply disappointing," and has even raised the possibility that parents shouldn't send their kids to colleges who have signed on to the measure.

Acting National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Mark Rosenker says it would be a "national tragedy" to, for example, allow 19- and 20-year-old men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to have a beer in celebration of completing their tours of duty.

Supporters of the 21-year minimum drinking age have long credited the law with the dramatic reduction in traffic fatalities they say took place after it was passed. But a study released last July may pull the rug out from their strongest argument.

The working paper by economic researchers Jeffrey Miron and Elina Tetelbaum finds that the bulk of studies on highway fatalities since the federal minimum drinking age went into effect erroneously include data from 12 states that had already set their drinking ages at 21, without federal coercion. That, Miron and Tetelbaum conclude, may have skewed the data, and indicated a national trend that may not actually exist.

While it's true that highway fatalities have dropped since 1984, it isn't necessarily because we raised the drinking age. In fact, the downward trend actually began in 1969, just as many states began lowering their drinking ages in recognition of the absurdity of prohibiting servicemen returning from Vietnam from enjoying a beer (the 1984 law was a backlash against those states). As Miron and Tetelbaum explain, 1969 was the year when "several landmark improvements were made in the accident avoidance and crash protection features of passenger cars," a more likely explanation for the drop than a law passed 15 years later.

Miron and Tetelbaum also credit advances in medical technology and trauma treatment for the decline in fatalities, which makes sense, given that we've seen improvements in just about every other area of human development over the same period, including life expectancy, and both incidence and survival rates of major medical conditions like heart disease, cancer, and stroke—none of which have much to do with teen drinking.

The U.S. has the highest minimum drinking age in the world (save for countries where it's forbidden entirely). In countries with a low or no national minimum drinking age, teens are introduced to alcohol gradually, moderately, and under the supervision of their parents.

U.S. teens, on the other hand, tend to first try alcohol in unsupervised environments—in cars, motels, or outdoor settings in high school, or in dorm rooms, fraternity parties, or house parties when they leave home to go to college. During alcohol prohibition, we saw how adults who imbibed under such conditions reacted—they drank way too much, way too fast. It shouldn't be surprising that teens react in much the same way.

Anti-alcohol organizations like MADD and the American Medical Association oppose even allowing parents to give minors alcohol in supervised settings, such as a glass of wine with dinner, or a beer on the couch while watching the football game. They've pushed for prison time for parents who throw supervised parties where minors are given access to alcohol, even though those parties probably made the roads safer than they otherwise would have been (let's face it—if the kids hadn't been drinking at the supervised party, they'd have been drinking at an unsupervised one). They advocate a "not one drop until 21" policy that's not only unrealistic, it mystifies and glorifies alcohol by making the drug a forbidden fruit—a surefire way to make teens want to taste it.

McCardell and the academics who have signed on to the Amethyst Initiative are asking only for a debate—an honest discussion based on data and common sense, not one tainted by Carry Nation-style fanaticism. In today's hyper-cautious, ban-happy public health environment, that's refreshing. The group comprises serious academics who have collectively spent thousands of years around the very young people these laws are affecting. The nation's policy makers would be foolish to dismiss their concerns out of hand.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of reason. A version of this article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.

McCain, Obama Equally Gassy on Oil

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In an interview last week on National Public Radio, Barack Obama was asked about his proposal for a "windfall profits" tax on oil companies. To her credit, the interviewer prefaced her question by noting that nearly all economists from across the political spectrum oppose the idea. Taxing oil company profits won't make gas any cheaper—it'll likely make it more expensive in the long run by discouraging exploration—and it won't speed the development of alternative energy sources. Obama's answer was pure demagoguery, pitting senior citizens and working class families against oil companies, who he says are reaping profits "hand over fist."

Obama's opponent John McCain has smartly opposed a tax on oil company profits—and Obama has promptly attacked him for it.

But McCain isn't much better. McCain has proposed an equally ridiculous "gas tax holiday," which will also do almost nothing to provide relief at the pump. Obama has smartly opposed the idea—and McCain has promptly attacked him for it.

Economic ignorance is nothing new in politics. Neither is the idea that a candidate would perpetuate economic idiocy he knows to be false because it plays into the narrative he's pitching to the voters. But no issue seems to prompt more jaw-dropping sophistry and anti-capitalist demagoguery than gas prices.

Both candidates have promised to crack down on so-called "oil speculators," who are really only commodities traders wagering on whether the price of oil will go up or down. Speculators are an important part of the market process because they're generally knowledgeable about what they're trading, and their collective wisdom sends useful signals about supply and demand. "Cracking down" on speculators is silly. In the first place, it isn't possible. Oil futures are traded all over the world, well outside of U.S. jurisdiction. In the second place, if you own a 401(k), you're likely an indirect "speculator" yourself.

We Americans seem to think we have a right to cheap gas. There is no such right. Like anything else sold on the free market, the gas at the station pump belongs to someone else, at least until it falls into your tank and you swipe your credit card. From extraction, to processing and refining, to retail sale, someone owned the oil in your car at every step of its manufacture. And each owner was free to put whatever price on the stuff he pleased. You have no more right to cheap gas than you have to cheap bananas, or a cheap iPhone. This notion that cheap gas is part of our national heritage has been both nurtured and exploited by politicians, despite the fact that there's little they can do—or should do—to make it so.

For years now, our political leaders have told us that we need to wean ourselves off of oil and gas and find cleaner, more renewable energy sources. McCain and Obama are no exception. But there's no surer way to change our behavior when it comes gas consumption than high prices at the pump.

In fact, that's exactly what's happening. We're driving billions fewer miles per month than we drove last year. We're biking more, walking more, and more often opting for public transportation. Sales of sport utility vehicles have plummeted, while quaint gas-sippers like the Geo and the Mini-Cooper are all the rage. The big car companies have all but stopped production of gas-guzzlers, and can't churn out hybrids fast enough to meet demand.

We're changing our habits. We're driving less, and driving more fuel-efficient cars when we do. The market is working. High gas prices are altering behavior and nudging us toward more conservation-oriented transportation habits.

So why are our politicians tripping over themselves to keep prices low?

The easy answer is to win votes. The better answer is that Washington can't handle not having control. Letting market forces dictate our energy habits isn't satisfactory for our all-knowing leaders in Washington, because elected officials want their hands on all of the economy's levers, all of the time. Instead of letting supply and demand alter consumption patterns and drive the market to come up with better sources of energy, they'd rather keep gas prices low through government fiat, while at the same time promoting their own favored forms of alternative energy through subsidies, tax breaks, corporate welfare, and research and development boondoggles. It's waste piled upon waste, and a massive strain on taxpayers. But we let it go on.

The whole mess does nothing to ensure that the cleanest, most efficient, or most innovative ways of harnessing energy will win market share. On the contrary: The winners in this system are the energy suppliers with the most political clout in Washington—a lesson you'd think we'd have learned from the ethanol debacle.

Unfortunately, this isn't likely to end anytime soon. Pandering to voters by making impossible promises and vilifying faceless speculators is quite a bit easier than explaining to the American people that sometimes, sometimes, they're going to face problems that cannot—and should not—be fixed by politicians.

Radley Balko is a senior editor of reason. A version of this article originally appeared at FoxNews.com.

The System is Broken

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) info@reason.com (Roger Koppl) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

...