Month: March 2014

Millennials are poised to be the most politically independent
generation yet,
according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
Finally, something that makes me proud of my generation! Actually,
there’s much to like in Millennial viewpoints, from a libertarian
perspective.

Millennials—those born between roughly 1980 and 1995 (some say
2000), also known as Gen Y—are largely in favor
of marijuana legalization and same-sex
marriage. They worry about the
surveillance state. They shun
stricter gun laws. Anecdotally, I’ve known a good deal of
young, Occupy Wall Street types who are also incredibly concerned
with police brutality, free speech, gun rights, drug policy, and
other typically libertarian issues. It’s not surprising that 50
percent of Gen Y adults now identify as politically independent (up
from 38 percent in 2004). 

Millennials aren’t necessarily less conforming to political
categories than previous generations (who were plenty paradoxical
themselves). But we’re less likely to suck it up on certain issues
in order to self-identify with either major (or any) political
party. And, sure, every recent generation has skewed more
politically independent when young. But according to Pew,
this year’s poll recorded the highest levels of political
dissatisfaction in the past 25 years.

Philip Bump says it’s
hard to see how Pew’s new survey could be seen as good
news by the Republican party. But boatloads of malleable
independents can’t be bad news, either. Young
independents may tend to lean Democrat, but that’s largely because
the GOP has mucked things up so badly with social issues and is
seen as lacking its own vision of health care reform (plus the
first Republican leader most of us knew was George W. Bush).

There would seem to be room for Republicans to pick up young
independents if they toned down the culture war rhetoric and
focused more on areas where Millennials see President Barack Obama
and current Democratic leadership as failing (surveillance, drones,
drugs, etc.). But, of course, the GOP is eternally reluctant to
court more libertarian-minded voters at the perceived expense of
evangelicals. 

A few other interesting findings from Pew’s survey of 18- to
32-year-olds: 

• Only 26 percent are married, compared with 36 percent of Gen X
  in 1997 and 48 percent of boomers in 1980. 
• About one-third say they’re not affiliated with any
  religion. 
• Just over half don’t believe there will be any money left in
  Social Security by the time they retire, and an additional 39
  percent think they’ll get benefits at a reduced level. 
• Only 32 percent of Millennials say they’re “environmentalists,”
  compared to 40 percent of those in older generations.

White Millennials were more likely to prefer a smaller
government that provides fewer services (52 percent) rather than a
bigger government that provides more services (39 percent).
Non-white Millennials were more likely to favor big government (71
percent to 21 percent), which is similar to the racial divide seen
in Gen X and boomers, according to Pew. 

Speaking yesterday at a privacy conference NSA
Civil Liberty and Privacy Officer Rebecca Richards said, without a
hint of irony or sarcasm, that the intelligence agency considers
civil liberties a top concern.

From
The Hill:

Civil liberties are a top concern at the National Security
Agency (NSA), the agency’s new privacy chief said Thursday.

“In their blood is [the] protection of your privacy,” Rebecca
Richards said Thursday, speaking at a privacy conference hosted by
the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

Richards has been the NSA’s privacy and civil liberties officer
for a little over a month. The creation of the position was
announced last year, as the Obama administration responded to a
series of controversial revelations about sweeping U.S. government
surveillance.

Given that Richards’ job was only created last year as part of
the Obama administration’s response to reporting on the information
leaked by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden it is hard to take
seriously Richards’ claim that NSA employees have privacy
protection “in their blood.”

Before starting her current job at the NSA Richards worked as

Senior Director of Privacy Compliance at the Department of
Homeland Security, which oversees the
notoriously
privacy conscious TSA.

As Reason’s J.D. Tuccille wrote about President Obama’s
weak and vague NSA reforms last January.

More from Reason.com on the NSA here. 

The title of the Coastal Society’s 1998
conference, which featured a speech by the father of the California
Coastal Commission, Peter Douglas, is relevant to a debate
that may soon come back to the Capitol, writes Steven Greenhut. At
the “Minding the Coast: It’s Everyone’s Business” event, Douglas
detailed his vision for coastal protection. The commission is loved
by environmentalists and loathed by many property owners as
Californians still wrestle with the same question: What does it
mean for everyone to mind the coast? Legislators will weigh in this
year if they revisit a bill that would give the commission vastly
expanded powers – namely, the right to impose fines without first
taking property owners to court.

View this article.

In 2013 the city of Sunnyvale, California enacted a ban on
so-called high-capacity gun magazines. According to the new law, it
was a criminal offense to possess any magazine holding more than 10
rounds, though exceptions to the ban were granted to certain
privileged gun owners, such as “any retired peace officer holding a
valid, current Carry Concealed Weapons (CCW) permit.”

Several individuals soon filed suit in federal court,
challenging the prohibition on Second Amendment grounds. Yesterday,
those plaintiffs suffered their first setback when the United
States District Court for the Northern District of California, San
Jose Division,
refused to grant a preliminary injunction that would have
stopped the city from enforcing the ban while the litigation moved
forward.

Why? Because, the district court declared, “the right to possess
magazines having a capacity to accept more than ten rounds lies on
the periphery of the Second Amendment right, and proscribing such
magazines is, at bare minimum, substantially related to an
important government interest.”

At the Volokh Conspiracy, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh
largely
concurs with that judgment, arguing that because high-capacity
magazine bans do not impose a “substantial burden” on the Second
Amendment right to self-defense, they are likely to pass
constitutional muster. “Even if bans on magazines with more than 10
rounds are unwise,” Volokh writes, “not all unwise restrictions are
unconstitutional. That’s true for speech restrictions. It’s true
for abortion restrictions. And I think it’s true for gun
restrictions as well.”

Karl Hess had one of the most wide-ranging
ideological journeys of the libertarian movement. An anti-communist
writer and activist in the 1950s and early ’60s, he was a key
speechwriter in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. But
in the late ’60s, he shocked a lot of his old friends by turning
against the Vietnam War and embracing
the New Left, which he felt was more attached in practice to
his anti-state, pro-liberty ideals than a conservative movement
devoted to wars abroad and “law and order” at home. He wrote one of
the most famous libertarian essays of the period—”The Death of Politics,” published
in Playboy in 1969—and he kept moving leftward:
dabbling in anarcho-syndicalism, joining the Industrial Workers of
the World, serving as secretary of education in the shadow cabinet
of Benjamin Spock’s People’s
Party. He kept his ties to the free-market libertarians,
though, and as his attitude towards much of the left started to
sour he became buddies with Charles Murray and was hired to edit
the Libertarian Party News—though I can attest, having
read his correspondence with my editor
at Liberty toward the end of Hess’ life, that he
never lost his interest in eliminating workplace hierarchies.

If you’re a longtime libertarian, chances are good
that you know that story already. (Those of you who don’t can learn
more in Hess’ two memoirs, Dear
America and
Mostly on the Edge.) I gave you the quick version here
to set up this 1952 episode of the CBS show Longines
Chronoscope, in which a rather young Hess—29 years old and
working for Newsweek—interviews Henry Wallace, who had
been vice president during FDR’s third term and the 1948
presidential candidate of the leftist Progressive Party. Hess is
joined by William Bradford Huie, editor of The American
Mercury, which at that point was no longer the lively literary
journal run by H.L. Mencken but had not yet devolved into the
anti-Semitic rag it became in its final decades.

If you’re hoping for a big left/right confrontation between Hess
and Wallace, you won’t get it: Huie asks most of the questions, and
Wallace is in a contrite anti-Communist mode, worrying that Stalin
plans to subvert the country via inflation. (The only allusion to
their guest’s left-wing past comes after Wallace’s comment at 7:55
that Stalin wants “a fifth column in every western country.” Huie
asks: “Is that rather disillusioning to you, sir? You’ve been
friendly toward the Soviet Union at various periods in your life.”)
But it’s still a pretty amazing artifact.

Bonus video: A few months later, Hess and Huie interviewed
the Illinois congressman Harold H. Velde, chairman of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. Hess asks more questions in
this episode, and Velde peppers his comments with phrases like
“pinkos, as they are properly known.”

Elsewhere in Reason: Read Reason‘s interview
with Hess here, and watch
him reminisce over a joint with Robert Anton Wilson
here. I mention Wallace’s perhaps-surprising role as a trucking
deregulator in
this article.