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Tonight’s episode of John Stossel’s eponymous Fox Business show
is called “The Rise of the Libertarians.”

Matt Welch and I appear on the program to discuss the themes we
outlined in our book
The Declaration of Independents and to talk about all the
recent developments that argue for what we’ve called “the
Libertarian Moment” and even “the
Libertarian Era.”

Other guests include Penn Jillette, members of Students for
Liberty, and former Rep. Ron Paul.

Follow the show on Twitter at the hashtag #TheRise.

Stossel airs tonight at 9pm ET. Go here
for more information on the show.

Stossel’s syndicated column appears every Wednesday at
Reason.com.
Read the latest here and check out his archive
here.

According to a

report released yesterday by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime
(UNODC), the amount of land devoted to opium poppies in Afghanistan
reached an
all-time high this year: 209,000 hectares, up 36 percent from
last year and 8 percent higher than the previous record, set in
2007. The good news, according to the UNODC: “Unfavourable weather
conditions, particularly in the Western and Southern regions
of the country, meant that the 2013 opium yield was adversely
affected,” so that estimated opium production, while 49 percent
higher than last year, was still lower than the 2007 record. Once
again, drug warriors’ most effective tactic in Afghanistan, which
produces about 90 percent of the raw material for the world’s
heroin, seems to be praying
for bad weather.

Although it could have been higher with better weather, the 2013
production level, 5,500 tons, was more than enough to satisfy the
annual global demand for illicit opium, which is estimated to be
something like 5,000 tons. Production has exceeded that level in
five of the last 10 years. So even if the weather gets
really bad, drug traffickers willl have a
stockpile on which to draw. After opium production fell to a
measly 185 tons in 2001 under the Taliban (who simultaneously
cracked down on and profited from the trade), heroin did not
disappear from the streets.

Even less meaningful is the official number of “poppy-free”
provinces, which fell from 17 to 15 (out of 34) this year. But let
us note for the record that most of Afghanistan’s provinces are
once again producing opium. The farm-gate price for opium fell by
12 percent, the sort of change you might expect as production
expands, although it is still “much higher than the prices fetched
during the high yield years of 2006-2008.” Hence the returns
“continued to lure farmers.”

That reality reflects a basic problem with the never-ending,
always-failing strategy of preventing drug use by attacking supply.
Although the UNODC seems to have forgotten, the whole point of
eradicating poppies and seizing opium is to drive up prices and
thereby discourage heroin consumption. But to the extent that drug
warriors succeed in raising prices, they make the business of
growing poppies and producing opium more appealing, thereby
defeating themselves. As you may vaguely recall from an economics
course in college, higher prices stimulate an increased supply,
which drives prices down again. Even in the heroin market. In the
last decade, as opium seizures skyrocketed, heroin
purity rose and heroin prices fell.

But there’s always next year! Back in 1997, Pino Arlacchi, the
first director of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime
Prevention, which later became the
UNODC, explained that
“global coca leaf and opium poppy acreage totals an area less than
half the size of Puerto Rico,” so “there is no reason it cannot be
eliminated.” Four years ago, UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria
Costa declared:
“It is no longer sufficient to say: no to drugs. We
have to state an equally vehement: no to crime.”
Yesterday Costa’s successor, Yury Fedotov,
called the 2013 cultivation figures “sobering,” but he also
had a solution: “What is needed is an integrated,
comprehensive response to the drug problem. Counter-narcotics
efforts must be an integral part of the security, development and
institution-building agenda.”

Drug warriors are becoming so sophisticated that pretty soon we
will have no idea what their goals are, and neither will they. Then
they can declare victory without fear of contradiction.

In September, J.D. Tuccille wrote about a man
landing in prison for teaching people how to
relax and “beat” polygraph tests. McClatchy had been reporting
on the federal pursuit as the government tests thousands of
thousands of people every year for security clearances.

McClatchy is still on the campaign and now reports on the
inevitable side effect of this pursuit. The feds collected the data
of customers of two men under investigation and
passed that information around to various agencies without
redacting any information:

Federal officials gathered the information from the customer
records of two men who were under criminal investigation for
purportedly teaching people how to pass lie detector tests. The
officials then distributed a list of 4,904 people – along with many
of their Social Security numbers, addresses and professions – to
nearly 30 federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service,
the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Food and Drug
Administration.

Although the polygraph-beating techniques are unproven,
authorities hoped to find government employees or applicants who
might have tried to use them to lie during the tests required for
security clearances. Officials with multiple agencies confirmed
that they’d checked the names in their databases and planned to
retain the list in case any of those named take polygraphs for
federal jobs or criminal investigations.

It turned out, however, that many people on the list worked
outside the federal government and lived across the country. Among
the people whose personal details were collected were nurses,
firefighters, police officers and private attorneys, McClatchy
learned. Also included: a psychologist, a cancer researcher and
employees of Rite Aid, Paramount Pictures, the American Red Cross
and Georgetown University.

Moreover, many of them had only bought books or DVDs from one of
the men being investigated and didn’t receive the one-on-one
training that investigators had suspected. In one case, a
Washington lawyer was listed even though he’d never contacted the
instructors. Dozens of others had wanted to pass a polygraph not
for a job, but for a personal reason: The test was demanded by
spouses who suspected infidelity.

Read the whole story
here.

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Mike Power, author of the
book
Drugs 2.0, nabs an encrypted online interview
at the site Medium with a person purporting to be
operating the new version of the Silk Road darkweb sales site,
still using the original pseudonym for that role, “Dread Pirate
Roberts.” (The federal government claims that a man named Ross
Ulbricht
who they have arrested was the original Dread Pirate
Roberts.)

Choice excerpt, and wise no matter who the source is:

The recurring theme [at] Silk Road is that we provide
honest, unadulterated products to people who want them, and whether
we [were] here or not, most people would have access to them anyway
from shady street dealers who lie through their teeth.

Let us assume you have a son who is in his teenage years and you
knew they were going to do drugs, what as a parent, would you do?
Would you let them go to their friends’ friends’ dealer … or would
you help them buy from Silk Road from vendors who are reviewed
regularly, and where we will be offering product-testing services,
and [where we have] a resident doctor to ensure nobody harms
themselves?

Ultimately you cannot stop people doing drugs, but you can make
it safer for them, and get people off the streets and away from
violence — which is what we stand for.

He won’t discuss security measures for the site, which as Power
notes has not yet established a record of completed sales with
stated customer satisfaction. And for feds who want to try to slap
down the site again, he has this to say:

You will hunt me — but first ask yourselves is it worth it?
Taking me down will not affect Silk Road — back-ups have already
been distributed and this entire infrastructure can be redeployed
elsewhere in under 15 minutes, and you will gain nothing from our
database.

Reason
on Silk Road.

Mike Power, author of the
book
Drugs 2.0, nabs an encrypted online interview
at the site Medium with a person purporting to be
operating the new version of the Silk Road darkweb sales site,
still using the original pseudonym for that role, “Dread Pirate
Roberts.” (The federal government claims that a man named Ross
Ulbricht
who they have arrested was the original Dread Pirate
Roberts.)

Choice excerpt, and wise no matter who the source is:

The recurring theme [at] Silk Road is that we provide
honest, unadulterated products to people who want them, and whether
we [were] here or not, most people would have access to them anyway
from shady street dealers who lie through their teeth.

Let us assume you have a son who is in his teenage years and you
knew they were going to do drugs, what as a parent, would you do?
Would you let them go to their friends’ friends’ dealer … or would
you help them buy from Silk Road from vendors who are reviewed
regularly, and where we will be offering product-testing services,
and [where we have] a resident doctor to ensure nobody harms
themselves?

Ultimately you cannot stop people doing drugs, but you can make
it safer for them, and get people off the streets and away from
violence — which is what we stand for.

He won’t discuss security measures for the site, which as Power
notes has not yet established a record of completed sales with
stated customer satisfaction. And for feds who want to try to slap
down the site again, he has this to say:

You will hunt me — but first ask yourselves is it worth it?
Taking me down will not affect Silk Road — back-ups have already
been distributed and this entire infrastructure can be redeployed
elsewhere in under 15 minutes, and you will gain nothing from our
database.

Reason
on Silk Road.

Earlier today, President Obama
announced a plan to tweak Obamacare by allowing state insurance
commissioners to let health insurers continue to offer plans that
do not pass muster under Obamacare’s health insurance regulations.
The announcement came following mounting public outrage about the
millions of individual market health plans being terminated as a
result of the health law’s regulations—in direct contradiction to
the president’s repeated promise that people who liked their health
plans could keep them. Congressional Democrats had been circling
around plans to address plan cancellations all week; the
announcement was in large part a response to growing pressure from
within the president’s own party to respond.

But the president’s plan doesn’t resolve the mess. Indeed, it
may have just compounded the law’s existing political and policy
troubles. Big questions remain about how it will work, and how
other parties will respond.

1. Will congressional Democrats be satisfied?
The president’s tweak was designed to help congressional Democrats
under fire for supporting a law that caused people to lose their
health plans despite many absolute promises to the contrary. But
while some Democrats appear to be
happy with the change, which allows them to blame insurers for
cancelling plans, it’s not clear that this will placate all of
them. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who sponsored a bill to require
insurers to continue existing plans,
said in a press conference this afternoon that the president’s
proposal was a “step in the right direction,” but also suggested
that a further legislative fix might be needed.

2. How will the insurance industry react? This
is potentially a big deal. Right now, the insurance industry is
working closely with the administration, and despite frustrations
with the rocky rollout of the exchanges, has largely avoided direct
confrontation with the administration. Not so here. The head of
America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), issued a statement warning
that the president’s plan could upend the insurance market.
“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the
requirements of the law,”
said AHIP CEO Karen Iganagni, “could destabilize the market and
result in higher premiums for consumers.” That, in turn, could have
political consequences, as next year’s insurance rates will be
revealed in the months leading up to the 2014 election.

3. How will the new policy be implemented? A
letter sent to state insurance commissioners says that the Obama
administration will allow health insurers to “choose to continue
coverage that would otherwise be terminated or cancelled” next year
under a “transitional” policy. But that still depends on the say-so
of state insurance regulators, who are merely “encouraged to adopt
the same transitional policy” regarding specific types of
terminated coverage. Yet insurance regulators aren’t sure how to do
that. “It is unclear how, as a practical matter, the changes
proposed today… can be put into effect,” said the head of an
insurance commissioner’s group, according
to a Wall Street Journal health reporter. So there’s a
significant operational question about how—and whether—this would
work.

4. Will state insurance commissioners actually pursue
the Obama administration’s encouraged change? Maybe not.

At least one has already said no thanks: Washington state
Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler, one of
the most liberal insurance regulators in the nation, has
already indicated that his state won’t participate, citing “serious
concerns” about implementation and insurance market stability.
Washington state, notably, has had direct experience with insurance
market meltdowns in the past: In the 1990s, it passed a slew of
health insurance market reforms that eventually
resulted in the large majority of individual market insurance
carriers exiting the market.

5. Is it legal? Right now the administration is
citing “transitional” authority to implement the change. But it’s
all pretty vague. The idea, as with the delay of the employer
mandate, is that transitional authority gives the administration
the power to do what is necessary in order to put the law in place.
But the power to take the steps necessary to implement a law
doesn’t apply here. What the administration is doing is using its
authority to not implement a part of the law.

• President Barack Obama’s
  solution to the disaster of the rollout of his signature Affordable
  Care Act is to allow insurers to
  uncancel customers’ policies for a year. Insurance industry
  representatives worry this will make the problem
  even worse.
• As of the third fiscal quarter, total student debt has
  surpassed $1 trillion. Good luck getting them to pay for your
  health care!
• Desert Hot Springs in California may be the next city to
  
  declare bankruptcy, though they’re trying hard to resist
  it.
• 
  School security spending is predicted to double to $5 billion
  by 2017 in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings.
• Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is
  threatening legal action against aides who told police about
  his drug use and drunken-driving. Snitches get stiches, guys!
• Murderous Boston ganster
  Whitey Bulger has officially been sentenced to two life terms
  (plus five years).

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If we’d all spent the last few generations eating
swill slapped in front of us at state-run cafeterias, who would
feel comfortable describing a world of gourmet restaurants,
fast-food drive-ins, greasy spoons, and ethnic food carts evolving
all by itself if we just swept away the federal Department
of Heartburn? Yet describe the alternatives, we must, when goggling
at the current if-you-like-it-there-it-goes fiasco that doesn’t
even rate a description as the army-issue shit on a shingle of
health care systems. We can’t reliably describe what a free society
would come up with for treating people’s aches and pains given time
to evolve and react to human needs, writes J.D. Tuccille, but
Obamacare can be improved upon. A lot.

View this article.

Yesterday, Wikileaks published a draft of the
intellectual property chapter of the secretive and controversial
Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP).

This document is the first full chapter to be leaked. The TPP is
billed as a free-trade
agreement that will prepare the US and 11 other Pacific-rim
nations. This leak gives clearer insight
about how far-reaching and potentially damaging this agreement,
which the Obama Administration hopes to hammer out by the of the
year, could be. Here are some of the worst features discovered
in the Intellectual Property chapter.

1. Loose Language Means Worse
Laws: Earlier this week, Reason contacted
Simon Lester, a trade policy analyst with Cato, regarding the TPP.
Having read prior leaks, he cautioned that “the problem is, a lot
of [TPP] rules are very vague.”

The newly released document shows the same trend. Addressing how
this group of nations will deal with everything from copyrights, to
domain names, to Internet service provider liability, and even
border enforcement,
the language throughout this 95-page chapter is dangerously broad.
Governments have enough trouble reconciling technology and the law
in a productive way, and allowing a centralized body of authority
to make sweeping, international decisions is a poor foundation to
remedy that issue.

2. You Don’t Really Own Your Phone…Or Any Electronic
Device: Although
unlocking your phone has been illegal for nearly two decades in
the US, legislators have been working this year to do away with the
outdated, innovation-stifling
Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The TPP would
crush these efforts and extend the same bad legislation abroad.

The draft states
that the 12 nations would “provide adequate legal protection and
effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective
technological measures.” This means that despite having paid for an
iPhone or Xbox One, you would not legally be allowed to tinker with
the device, because the TPP would make it illegal to tamper with
manufacturers’ digital locks that prevent you from from changing
carriers or share copies of your video games.

3. Copyrights and Cronyist Collusion: It’s
no secret that CEOs from the Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA), Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of
America (PhRMA), International Trademark Association (INTA), and
many others
voiced their support for the TPP in an open letter to Obama.
Luckily for these large copyright holders, the agreement would
extend copyright terms up to 100 years after an author’s death and
as much as 120 years for unpublished corporate works.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
explains that “such bloated term lengths benefit only a
vanishingly small portion of available works, and impoverish
the public domain of our collective history,” and points
out that “the U.S. will see no new published works enter the public
domain until 2019.”

Compounding this problem, the TPP intends to make service providers liable for
copyright-infringing material that they host. This would
essentially force Comcast, Time Warner Cable, others to become
private Internet police not just for the U.S. government, but for
all 12 countries in the agreement.

4. The U.S. Government is the Leading the
Charge: The draft lets readers see where nations
disagreed about terms of the agreement. Thus, we know that the US
pushed for 120-year copyrights, Chile opposed the idea, and
Australia and others proposed 70-year terms. This is consistent
throughout. More than any other, it is the US government that
pushed in favor of stricter rules and regulations. Peter Peter
Maybarduk, a director at the advocacy group Public Citizen,

said it’s “the Obama administration’s shameful bullying” that
dominates the TPP negotiations. The EFF lauds the “numerous heroic
proposals for fixes, most notably from Canada and Chile” to strike
down the US’s “dangerous provisions.”

I’ve got a
column up at Time.com (and in the next print edition) talking about
those
awful “Got Insurance?” ads aimed at get Millennials to sign up
for Obamacare.

Here’s the start of
the piece:

Is massive stupidity covered under Obamacare? What about sexual
promiscuity and heavy drinking? Those are some of the questions
raised by a controversial ad campaign that aims to encourage
younger Americans to sign up for health-insurance plans created by
the Affordable Care Act.

But there’s a deeper issue that the new “Got Insurance?”
campaign ignores completely: Why should young and relatively poor
people be forced to sign up for insurance that charges them
above-market rates to subsidize rates for old and relatively
wealthy people?

I trust that I’m not overly optimistic when I conclude:

Younger Americans may indeed be reckless enough to do keg stands
and have unprotected sex on a regular basis, but they’re not so
dumb as the “Got Insurance?” ads–or the architects of
Obamacare–seem to think.

Read the whole thing.