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In his first inaugural address in January 1911, California’s progressive Gov. Hiram Johnson detailed a far-reaching “people’s reform program” that would help wrest control of the state’s government from what his contemporaries called “The Octopus”—a reference to muckraker Frank Norris’ 1901 novel about the outsized power of Southern Pacific Railroad.

As Norris explained, the Cyclopean sea monster was a “symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path.” Drawing heavily from that corporate-power theme, the new governor touted something that would define California politics for the next century: the initiative, recall, and referendum.

California’s emerging experiment in direct democracy would “prevent the misuse of the power temporarily centralized in the Legislature,” Johnson argued, noting that supporters of these reforms believed in the ability of the people to govern themselves. However opponents “may phrase their opposition, in reality (they) believe the people cannot be trusted.”

Ironically, modern California’s progressives have become increasingly hostile to the direct democracy concept, as evidenced by their repeated attempts to place limits on these voter initiatives. The reason has less to do with political ideology and more to do with raw political power.

Democrats exert ironclad control of the Legislature and don’t like the Johnson era’s checks on its power. For example, the state’s Democratic-heavy electorate nevertheless took remarkably conservative positions on the statewide ballot initiatives during the Nov. 3 election—and gave lawmakers a comeuppance on some key issues.

We’ve seen these anti-democratic tendencies arise in recent days, which is ironic timing given the fracas in Washington, D.C. I’ve also been appalled at Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of a legitimate presidential election even as 60-plus courts, state legislatures, and federal agencies rebuke his claims. Apparently, California Democrats now share Trump’s litigious approach: they support elections, but only if they yield the desired result.

For starters, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) announced last week a lawsuit challenging the results of Proposition 22, which exempted drivers for companies such as Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash from the ominous provisions of Assembly Bill 5. That’s the “landmark” legislation that mostly bans companies from using contractors as their workforce.

The voters were unequivocal, given that the proposition passed with a nearly 59-percent “yes” vote. That result is not a huge surprise. The law obliterated moderate-income service jobs—and not just in the burgeoning gig economy. Because of the blowback from freelancers losing their livelihoods in the midst of a pandemic, the Legislature exempted 100 industries from this bad law’s provisions.

In their wisdom, California voters added additional exemptions and they assured that the companies they’ve come to depend upon will continue to exist. Yet Democratic leaders are much less trusting in the intelligence of the people than their ideological forebear, Johnson.

“Prop. 22 not only created a permanent underclass of workers in California—it stripped the Legislature of its power to step in and improve the working conditions for … app-based workers,” said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), who authored A.B. 5. She’s peeved that “corporations can use the initiative process to write their own laws with artificial barriers designed to block elected representatives from doing their jobs.”

Ironies abound. I understand that Gonzalez doesn’t like Proposition 22, but that’s an issue that voters had a chance to consider. Furthermore, the unequivocal purpose of the initiative process—and I’d recommend that she spend some time studying California’s political history—was to block elected representatives from doing their jobs.

Whatever their claims, such opponents simply don’t trust the people, as Johnson understood. Certainly, SEIU and the opponents of this (or any) initiative have the right to challenge its constitutionality, just as Trump had the right to file his election-challenging lawsuits. That doesn’t make it the right—or democratic—thing to do.

Gonzalez complains about the power of corporations to use the process, which is another irony, given that direct democracy targeted corporate power. Yet Democratic lawmakers have nothing to say about the modern-day robber barons who more commonly place initiatives before voters: public-sector unions. Note that the failed property tax hike measure (Proposition 15) was largely a union endeavor.

In another fit of hypocrisy, Democrats last week blasted the movement to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. “This recall effort, which really ought to be called ‘the California coup,’ is being led by right-wing conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, anti-vaxxers, and groups who encourage violence on our democratic institutions,” said California Democratic Party Chairman Rusty Hicks. He didn’t provide evidence to back such inflammatory allegations.

Again, I’d refer Hicks and his Democratic cohorts to Johnson’s inaugural words. He said the initiative, referendum, and recall are not panaceas, but they give voters “the power of action when desired, and they do place in the hands of the people the means by which they may protect themselves.”

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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When the U.S. Department of Justice proved victorious in its historic antitrust suit against AT&T, breaking up what had been the world’s largest corporation in 1984, the feds promised a report every three years to document changes in telecommunications. The first was due in 1987.

But in 1986, with only a year to the deadline, the DOJ was stuck: no team in the U.S. government had the expertise to understand the complexity of this enormous, changing marketplace. A slew of consulting firms was there for hire, but they had all worked for AT&T. So the DOJ gave up on the experts and hired one man who had never studied the communications sector.  

Peter Huber had no conflicts and started from scratch. The Geodesic Network: 1987 Report on Competition in the Telephone Industry, later cited widely as “the massive Huber report,” became a runaway bestseller for the Government Printing Office. The report brilliantly detailed how technologies of freedom were primed to crush old monopolies with disruptions at the network’s “edge”—personal computers, software, devices—if policymakers would lean back. The 450-page, data-dense thesis was delivered to the DOJ in 11 months; weeks early, as that was all the time Huber needed to go from zero to the world’s leading authority on perhaps the most complicated public policy issue yet invented. 

The world lost Peter, and a good fraction of our human capital, on January 8, 2020. He was 68—again ahead of schedule.

Peter was the towering public intellectual of his generation. He explained the evolving internet to policymakers before there was a commercial internet and while the world was still bollixed in 19th-century regulation. The U.S. was relatively blessed to be abused by a private monopolist, where shards of light might glance and antitrust be launched, unlike the impenetrable state-owned PTT (Post, Telegraph, and Telephone) behemoths stifling Canada, Mexico, the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. 

Experts saw the problems, but Peter was the visionary who saw the future. And then tripped the light fantastic through time, space, and dense complexity! Huber explained and inspired in virtually every sentence. His 1995 Federal Telecom Law treatise (an exhaustive text, co-authored with Michael Kellogg and John Thorne) described phone regulation under the 1934 Communications Act thusly: “Telecom providers and regulators engage in an endless minuet that moves dancers in or out of the circle called ‘common carriage.'” 

He was not fooled, as have been so many scholars, by announced intentions or the gloss of a “public interest” standard. “To say that the FCC watched [AT&T] grow to these gargantuan proportions since 1934 without complaint would be incorrect,” he elaborated in Law & Disorder in Cyberspace: Abolish the FCC and Let Common Law Rule the Telecosm (1997). “The FCC’s official mission since 1934 had been to protect telephone monopolists from ‘inefficient’ competition.'”  

He then elucidated how frequency use would be transformed: “Early in the next century…this dismal regulatory era will finally come to an end. Broadcast spectrum will be dezoned. Roseanne will have to compete for airtime with the more civil, uplifting, and profitable expressions of ordinary people talking on wireless phones.” Today, nearly half of what was then the “TV Band” has been liberated, and the Huber Revolution has arrived—Facetime your friends on your smartphone to celebrate.

Born a Canadian but reared in the Swiss Alps, Huber received his doctorate in engineering at MIT and became a professor at age 23; he was tenured at age 25. At age 30, while teaching thermodynamics at MIT, he received his law degree. Graduating first in his class from Harvard Law School, he was summa cum laude—an honor awarded so rarely he was the only recipient from 1975 through 1996.  He then promptly ditched academia to become a serial visionary.  

Mastering telecommunications law was just one foray. In 1988, he published Liability: The Legal Revolution and Its Consequences, where he measured the costs of tort awards—measurement was the recurring method packed into his elegant policy poetry—and found great excess: closed municipal swimming pools, obstetricians fleeing whole counties in Mississippi, productive manufacturing pushed into oblivion. Too much safety was making us less safe. His work helped trigger a tort reform movement.  

In Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom (1991), Huber took on the exploding use of dubious expert testimony. Federal rules to exclude “junk science” (a term Huber coined) were instituted under a new Daubert rule (a federal case Huber helped litigate). Professors would be required to carefully apply the facts of the case to accepted analytical models of their discipline. Under this rule, Nobel Laureates have (correctly) been tossed for presenting ad hoc theories. Experts got more serious. The law improved.

In Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto (1999), Huber again melded deep veins of science, economics, and law. Rising above the standard squabbles—in over 30 years of friendship I cannot once recall Peter discussing politics, conventionally defined—he delivered a blueprint for regulations as if people mattered. Peter sought the optimal mix of social coordination, intelligently targeting the magic of the market. “Wealth is green,” he wrote. “Wealth, not poverty, supplies the means to conserve the wilderness.”   

In The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (2005), with Mark P. Mills, Huber taught Bill Gates, who remarked that it was “the only book I’ve ever seen that really explains energy, its history, and what it will be like going forward.” 

Then came the 2013 masterpiece, The Cure in the Code: How 20th Century Law is Undermining 21st Century Medicine. “Code has the tendency to rise from servant to master to sole proprietor,” Huber explained. “The first autopilot kept a plane cruising at steady speed and altitude; the cockpit of the future, it is said, will have a pilot, a computer, and a dog, the dog there to bite the pilot if he touches the computer. Much of medicine is now on a similar glide path.” Huber’s tour of targeted cancer therapies presents a thrilling optimism for curing disease by rewriting our genetic software, even as it cries in frustration over rigid institutions yet to embrace our more hopeful destiny. The therapeutic cocktails that emerged to salvage hope from horror with HIV/AIDS were quickened by shading regulatory rules and permitting opportunistic use of less tested compounds—and even of the otherwise horrific thalidomide. Peter elucidates the trade-offs governing our choices with commanding prose and impeccable logic. 

Peter was not a mad scientist. He packed a rapier wit, but a charming grin, and carried a gentle soul. He extended many a helping hand, and loved to see his fellow man triumph.

And woman. Huber’s first law career missions were to clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and then Sandra Day O’Connor. He found heroes in both. Ginsburg was relentlessly loyal to the logic of the law, found Huber. “Her decisions were reproducible.” Huber was prideful to be part of O’Connor’s historic mission; in 1991, he joked: “When you’ve seen one woman Supreme Court Justice you’ve seen ’em all.” The following year he wrote a biography, Sandra Day O’Connor (Women of Achievement), specifically for girls ages 9 to 12.

Lou Gehrig, our greatest athlete, was stricken with a malady that destroyed his muscles. Peter Huber, a polymath genius, was accosted by frontotemporal degenerative disease, which attacked his brain. It stole from us an incomparable thinker. In Hard Green, Peter wrote, “There is no inherent scarcity of food, fuel, metal, mineral or space to bury our trash. When we exhaust economic goods, we grow, find or invent others to replace them.” Alas, we have now sadly discovered the irreplaceable factor.

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1/22/1890: Hans v. State of Louisiana argued.

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There was a time, not that many decades ago, when ranting loners swapped their ideas not with tweets and YouTube videos but with stamps and Xerox machines. One of those ranters was Gerry Reith, whose raw, paranoid, apocalyptic fables were shot through with distrust for just about every institution around.

Reith lived, far too briefly, in a distant territory called the ’80s zine scene, where creative weirdos traded self-published magazines, homemade fliers, and envelopes stuffed with art. He fluctuated between the ironic paranoia of the Church of the SubGenius and the honest-to-God paranoia of a man wary of “Masonic mind control techniques”; he was active in the Wyoming Libertarian Party but also had larger radical dreams of escaping a “global totalitarian culture” that was “trivializing” our lives.

In 1985, shortly after his suicide at age 25, a selection of Reith’s stories appeared in a slim small-press book called Neutron Gun. Now another small press, Nine-Banded Books, has published a wider collection of his stories, essays, posters, and poetry, called Neutron Gun Reloaded.

As with many outsider artists, Reith’s best work eschews any subtlety and instead embraces a sort of primitive surrealism. “The Roots of Modern Terror” imagines the state as a bus flying down a dark, wet, and winding mountain road with a half-blind drunk at the wheel; some passengers are demanding a new driver, but no one is willing to stop the bus. In “Kings of Orient, Dresden, D.C.,” the protagonist stumbles through a burning building until he meets a soldier, who explains that the government is burning the city to prevent unplanned fires from breaking out. “Funny about the planning center,” the soldier adds. “Computer printouts keep catching on fire.”

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It took two years and the threat of a lawsuit, but officials at Harrison High School in Westchester, New York, have allowed Luke Wong to found a chapter of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom on campus. Wong was turned down twice, for reasons he says were never made clear to him. He says one administrator suggested he join the debate club or write an op-ed for the school newspaper instead. After the Alliance Defending Freedom took up his case, the school relented. “The student provided additional information and made adjustments to the application as requested by the district, and the club was subsequently approved,” said principal Kimberly Beukema.

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