Category: reason

• Trump will make a decision on DACA by Tuesday. Many immigration activists are concerned he will end the deferred deportation of immigrants brought illegally to the United States by their parents.

• Kid Rock is accused of violating federal election laws for teasing his run for the U.S. Senate.

• Hurricane Harvey is likely to be second costliest disaster in U.S. history, trailing only Hurricane Katrina.

• Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly has a draft letter explaining Trump’s rationale for firing former F.B.I director James Comey.

I picked up the new book by former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, “Cop Under Fire: Moving Beyond Hashtags of Race, Crime and Politics for a Better America,” on the recommendation President Donald Trump.

Trump, noted man of letters, plugged Clarke’s book last week in a tweet: “A great book by a great guy, highly recommended!”

Clarke, a conservative firebrand who frequently appears on Fox News, announced his immediate resignation Thursday as Milwaukee County Sheriff. In recent years, he has become something of a conservative celebrity for his denunciations of Barack Obama and police critics, but he’s also been castigated in the press for a series of stomach-churning deaths and scandals at his jail.

His book, then, is Clarke’s later-career image fluffer: a polemic against the lying media, Black Lives Matter activists, and liberal bleeding hearts who tried to thwart his law-and-order agenda.

Normally it would be a waste of energy to give serious consideration to Clarke’s scribblings. One might as well review a YouTube comment section. However, the man has captured the notoriously limited attention of our president, and Politico reports that he is likely to take a position in the Trump administration in the near future, all of which makes his ideas, such as they are, noteworthy.

Author Nancy French—who has worked on autobiographies with such luminaries as actress Stacey Dash, Bristol Palin, and The Bachelor’s Sean Lowe—generously stokes Clarke’s literary ambitions here. But even with French’s steady hand at the tiller, this isn’t as much a book as a series of things Clarke is likely to shout out a window at any given moment.

Some sample chapter titles: “I’m Colorblind When It Comes to Crime and Punishment” and “Guess What? Prison is Supposed to be Unpleasant.” There’s also a passage on Clarke’s opinions on the ’90s sitcom “Murphy Brown” and a biblical exegesis on what Jesus would think of the Second Amendment.

This sort of clownishness hangs about the book at all times, much like the giant cowboy hats and fake medals Clarke adorns himself with. He insists on referring to Black Lives Matter as “Black LIES Matter” (emphasis in the original) in every single instance, and calls Obama the “cop-hater-in-chief.” He spends at least a quarter of his book quoting and arguing against Black Lives Matter, a “subversive, anarchist, hateful movement” that “doesn’t care any more about the lives of black people than the Ku Klux Klan does.”

Like former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom Trump pardoned in August, Clarke is an avatar of the sort of defiant authority that Trump perhaps imagines he projects. It’s an attitude Kevin D. Williamson at National Review identified as the Glengarry Glenn Ross superfan club—would-be alpha males, brash and loud, unconcerned by attacks from the haters and losers, be they the lying press, litigious civil liberties groups, or activist federal judges.

Except of course, these alpha dogs have fragile little egos, which is why they lash out and abuse their power whenever challenged, such as when Clarke asked police to detain and question a man who had the temerity to criticize him on an airplane flight. (Not mentioned in the book.)

Clarke would have his loyal conservative fans believe that he, like Arpaio, is the victim of a political witch hunt for refusing to coddle criminals and standing up for police. His attempts, however, to whitewash his numerous abuses of power and his nauseating record as head of the Milwaukee County jail, must be addressed.

Take Clarke’s description of a lawsuit filed against him in 2010 by Terrance Prude, an inmate:

“Why would an inmate sue you?” [Clarke’s secretary] asked.

I glanced through the lawsuit. “Because he hated his food so much he claims … we violated the Eighth Amendment … which says prisoners should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.”

I stifled a laugh and added, “Well, I sure hope teenagers across America don’t figure out they can sue over not liking what’s put on their plates.”

From this characterization, one might think that Prude sued because he didn’t get a Jell-O cup with lunch, or that he didn’t like his salisbury steak.

Prude actually alleged in his lawsuit that while he was housed in the Milwaukee jail, he was only fed spoiled “nutriloaf,” a foul-tasting vegetable mush that has been the subject of nearly two dozen other inmate lawsuits across the country. The rancid loaf made him violently ill and resulted in rapid weight loss.

Federal circuit judge Richard Posner wrote in a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals opinion reinstating Prude’s lawsuit against Clarke after it had been dismissed by a lower court in 2012:

On his third stay, after two days on the nutriloaf diet, [Prude] began vomiting his meals and experiencing stomach pains and constipation. (He had vomited during the second stay as well.) He stopped eating nutriloaf and subsisted for the eight remaining days of his stay on bread and water (it’s unclear how he obtained the bread). He had weighed 168 pounds before his second and third stays at the jail […] By the end of the third stay was down to 154 pounds…

A guard sent him to the infirmary after one of the vomiting incidents during his third stay, and the nurses there gave him antacids and a stool softener and one of them told him his weight loss was “alarming.” Upon his return to state prison he continued experiencing painful defecation and bloody stools, and he was diagnosed with an anal fissure that the defendants have not denied had developed while he was in the county jail.

During his lawsuit, Prude had attempted to force the jail to release the recipe for the loaf, to determine its nutritional content, but the jail refused, even after a federal judge ordered it to do so.

“The defendants’ response to his suit has been contumacious, and we are surprised that the district judge did not impose sanctions,” Posner wrote. “The defendants ignored the plaintiff’s discovery demands, ignored the judge’s order that they comply with those demands, and continued their defiance even after the judge threatened to impose sanctions.”

The judge kicked the case back to district court, but several days before the trial was set to begin in 2013, the insurer for the jail’s food contractor reached a five-figure settlement with Prude.

After Clarke was removed as superintendent of the House of Correction in 2013—no mention of it in his book—the first thing his replacement did was get rid of the nutriloaf. (He also discontinued Clarke’s ego-stroking requirement that guards salute officers.)

Clarke also doesn’t address more dire lawsuits filed against him and his jail. He doesn’t mention the notorious case of Terrill Thomas, who died of “profound dehydration” after a correctional officer cut off the water to his jail cell for a week. He doesn’t mention the lawsuit filed by a woman who says she was sexually assaulted in Clarke’s jail and forced to give birth while shackled to a bed. He doesn’t mention the lawsuit by a woman who alleges she miscarried in her jail cell after guards ignored her going into labor.

“Brutality is defined as savage physical violence,” Clarke then writes with an apparent straight face. “That might describe foreign terrorists or even Planned Parenthood harvesting baby parts to sell to the highest bidder, but not American policing.”

Clarke does write about one successful lawsuit filed against him, however. Two deputies filed suit against Clarke after he repeatedly brought an evangelical Christian group to proselytize to staff during mandatory roll call meetings, even after several complaints. His takeaway from violating the establishment clause of the Constitution? “Unfortunately, we live in an era when some people will make even God the enemy.”

Clarke’s opinions on the current policing debate are a mostly predictable, ramshackle collection of statistics about the “Ferguson effect” from Heather Mac Donald, a Manhattan Institute scholar who argues that zealous oversight and criticism of police has led to a disastrous decline in criminal enforcement.

Things take a darker turn on the subject of national security. Clarke says the nation’s current national security apparatus is nonsensical and prone to constitutional violations. Current security measures all Americans are subjected to at the airport by the TSA are a demeaning and useless charade.

But while his diagnosis verges on libertarian, his cure is pseudo-fascistic. Clarke recommends the creation of a new domestic spy agency “focused on protection, not prosecution,” that would report directly to the president and wouldn’t be burdened by the FBI’s need to build cases. Suspected terrorists would be classified as enemy combatants, transferred to GITMO or similar camps, and tried by military tribunals.

“Like it or not, the enemy is at war with us and has come to our home soil,” Clarke writes. “This isn’t the time to plant rose bushes and go about our daily lives. It’s time to assess, adjust our protocol, and stand up for American lives.”

Cop Under Fire is long passages of twaddle interrupted by the displeasing realization the author had authority over other human beings. Trump’s continuing fascination with unreflective, unrepentant authoritarians like Clarke and Arpaio, and his hearty endorsement of this septic tank of a book, is as good reason as any to make sure Clarke is never near a position of power again.

On Aug. 17, President Donald Trump, in the wake of the Barcelona terrorist attack, tweeted that we all should “Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!” On Aug. 21, the president laid out his new Afghanistan policy, reversing campaign rhetoric by backing an open-ended increase of around 4,000 U.S. troops.

The two statements, separated by four days (or four months in Trump News-Cycle Time) were understandably treated as wholly separate events. But they are not. Trump’s allusion to one of his favorite historical fables—an alleged Pershing mass killing which historians unanimously agree there is zero evidence of having ever taken place—advertises a core belief that has always been at tension with the president’s expressed skepticism about military intervention. Namely, that a key tactical error separating America from victory against Islamic terrorists is the self-restricting embrace of “political correctness.”

This formulation, long embraced by the likes of Ralph Peters, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Ben Carson, and Rick Santorum, can mean everything from the refusal to utter the phrase radical Islamic terrorism (“She won’t even mention the words,” Trump clucked at Hillary Clinton during one of their debates), to the broader and vaguer sense that America lacks the “will to win”…to straight-up violations of the Geneva Conventions.

“We’re fighting a very politically correct war,” candidate Trump lamented to Fox & Friends in December 2015. “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.”

In domestic fights against suspected bad guys, there is no equivalent to the countervailing Trumpian foreign policy tendency to eschew nation-building and avoid disastrous wars. This means that taking the proverbial gloves off America’s internal law enforcement cops will likely be a one-way ratchet. President Trump, through his campaigning as the “law and order” candidate, to his appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, issuance of succeeding travel bans, attempts to punish “sanctuary cities,” fondness for draconian drug prohibition, pardoning of Joe Arpaio, mutual affection for recently resigned Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, re-starting of the controversial 1033 program of transferring military surplus gear to local law enforcement, and much more, has sent the unmistakable message that he will aggressively move around any perceived impediment—including the judiciary branch and the United States Constitution—to give cops and prosecutors more power. He has never exhibited a drop of anxiety about potentially punishing the innocent or otherwise producing unintended consequences.

But overseas, there had been reason to hope that Trump’s internal conflicts would at least produce some kind of draw. “Afghanistan is, is not going well. Nothing’s going well—I guess we’ve been in Afghanistan almost 17 years,” the president-elect said in a joint interview with Bild and The Times of London back in January, sounding not unlike Ron Paul, at least until his very next words: “But you look at all of the places, now in all fairness, we haven’t let our people do what they’re supposed to do….We haven’t let our military win.”

Why did the bellicose version of the 45^th president win out over the intervention-skeptic? Some anti-war voices assert that with the exit of strategist Steve Bannon, the president’s foreign policy has been captured by his generals. That may well have merit.

But Trump, and the people who supported and voted for him, and even man of his #NeverTrump antagonists, have long indulged in the dangerous delusion that military victory is achievable through the removal of proverbial handcuffs. This was true during primary season, through the general election, in the first seven months of his presidency, and after the Afghanistan re-surge announcement. And nowhere has that mindset been made more clear than in Trump’s persistent claims, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Gen. John J. “Blackjack” Pershing defeated radical Islamic terrorism for at least a generation by committing a hideous war crime.

On Aug. 15, during an intensely controversial press conference defending his zig-zaggy responses to the Charlottesville protests and aftermath, the president repeatedly stressed that, “I want to make sure, when I make a statement, that the statement is correct….I wanted to see the facts.” Trump got into hot water, and deservedly so, for including among his facts that there were “very fine people” among the original tiki-torch demonstrators, but the gesture toward empirical humility was otherwise appropriate in a street-fighting world gone mad with wildly inaccurate characterizations of basic details. (For an exposition on which, I highly recommend this Matt Labash account in The Weekly Standard of an Antifa beat-down of a non-Nazi in Berkeley.)

Sadly, though not surprisingly, the president’s adherence to rhetorically restrained crisis management did not last even two full days. On Aug. 17, just hours after a van plowed through the crowded streets of Las Ramblas, killing 13, Trump blurted this:

Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

The word “study” here is almost exquisitely inapt. Trump was referencing one of his favorite shaggy-dog stories from the campaign trail, one that he kept on telling, even embellishing, despite widespread, well-documented pushback from academics, news organizations, and political competitors. In calling back to the tale as president, he demonstrated not only a cheerful disregard for the concept of learning, but a preference for military ruthlessness as strategy. As David French headlined it over at National Review, “In One Tweet, Donald Trump Just Spread Fake History, Libeled a Hero, and Admired an Alleged War Crime.”

Candidate Trump first started telling this story in the military-heavy state of South Carolina, where in February of last year he was waging an eventually successful attempt to drive Jeb Bush out of the race by (rightly!) blaming the Bush family for the “big, fat mistake” of the Iraq War. Like Ted Cruz’s vow to find out whether Middle Eastern sand “can glow in the dark,” Trump’s anecdote about Pershing putting down the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines a century ago served as a way to make a critique of neoconservatism go down with a bloody shot of Jacksonianism.

“They were having terrorism problems, just like we do,” Trump said at the time, botching the analogy from the outset (the Moros were hardly anybody’s threat to bring a nail bomb to Times Square). “And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem.”

(Sticklers may note that Trump said 25 years here, compared to 35 in his recent tweet; he has also claimed 28 years, 42 years, and so on.)

The fact-checking was immediate, and everywhere. Snopes traced the rumor in part to a Gary Cooper movie. The Associated Press, in a piece printed from coast to coast, described the story as “widely discredited.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) called it “bizarre.” Even unironic #MAGA hash-taggers like Lou Dobbs called the tale “apocryphal.”

There are, as far as I can tell, only three historical scraps that remotely resemble Trump’s yarn, and none of them come close to supporting his claim that Pershing (or anyone else) ordered the execution of Moro rebels with blood-soaked bullets. These sources are: 1) a Pershing memoir in which he describes a different man, Col. Frank West, publicly burying killed insurgents “in the same grave with a dead pig,” in order to deter Muslims with fears of going to hell. 2) a letter discovered a half-century after, in which a serviceman (according to one paraphrase) recalls witnessing Pershing “hang a Moro chieftain by the heels over an open grave, kill a pig, and then drop the Moro into the grave with the bloody animal.” That letter was been widely deemed by historians as at best 100 percent uncorroborated, and at worst a “fabrication.” And 3) a 1927 article in the Chicago Tribune, in which:

Capt. Herman Archer relays the “well-known” tale of Gen. Pershing sprinkling captives with pig’s blood and letting them go.

“Then [Pershing] announced that any Juramentado thereafter would be sprinkled with pig’s blood,” Archer wrote. “And those drops of porcine gore proved more powerful than bullets.”

The correspondent does not seem to have personally witnessed this incident, but seems rather to be relaying a war story shared with him by others. No mass executions were reported by the Tribune, and the copy is peppered with characterizations of Muslim Filipinos as “savage sultans” and “devilish brown men”

So: No executions, no pig-bullets, and the only two sources that posit Pershing as a protagonist in any porcine strategy are deeply suspect. Meanwhile, as PolitiFact and others discovered when interviewing relevant academics, the general’s actual approach on the ground was closer to the opposite of Trump’s portrayal. “He did a lot of what we would call ‘winning hearts and minds’ and embraced reforms which helped end their resistance,” Cameron University military historian Lance Janda told PolitiFact. The fact-checkers’ conclusion? “Historians noted that Pershing pursued a less brutal approach to ‘pacifying’ the rebels in the southern Philippines than Leonard Wood, one of his predecessors.”

There are many options available to someone who makes a gross historical error in public: You can quickly correct it and apologize, perhaps examine whether your mischaracterization of the facts calls into question the conclusions you derived from it, or at minimum drop it from your rhetorical rotation. Trump, again not surprisingly, chose none of the above.

Two months after the pig’s blood anecdote had been thoroughly vetted, New York Times Magazine published a long account of Trump’s unique campaign stylings. “The mainstays of his rallies,” correspondent Jeff Sharlet wrote, “are parables, in which he channels such [empathetic-to-the-audience] sentiments into full-fledged, multivoiced dramatic scenes. Trump plays every role. There are three scenes in current rotation; if Trump worked off a set list, they might be labeled ‘The Call,’ ‘The Snake’ and ‘The Bullet.'”

“The Bullet” was the fabricated Pershing anecdote. And the way Trump kept performing it throughout the 2016 campaign tells us a lot about the mindset governing his foreign policy in 2017 and beyond. This Sharlet excerpt is on the long side, but worth reading in full:

”Can you imagine what these people say about the United States? How weak we are?” […]

”There’s a story I tell,” he says. ”This is when we were strong.” The crowd cheers. Many have heard it before. He asks if they want to hear it again. ”Should I tell it?” He asks three times.

It begins with a horse, and on the horse there’s a general. The year is 1919; the place is the Philippines; the general is John J. Pershing, known as Black Jack. Trump does not name the war. It’s not the point. ”Tremendous terror problem,” that’s what you need to know, and that the terrorists are Muslims. The point is Pershing’s solution:

“They catch 50 terrorists. … Today we read ’em their rights, take care of ’em, ba ba [the audience boos], we feed them the best food, make sure they have television, we give ’em areas to pray, it’s a wonderful thing. We’re wonderful people. We’re wonderful, wonderful, stupid, stupid people [laughter]. So General Pershing, tough, tough guy … 50 terrorists … what happens is he lines ’em up to be shot. [A man shouts, ”Yeah!”] Lines people up to be shot. … And as you know, swine, pig, all of that is a big problem for them. Big problem. He took two pigs, they chopped them open. [Trump chops his hand.] Took the bullets that were going to go and shoot these men. [Holds up an imaginary bullet pinched between thumb and finger.] Took the bullets. The 50 bullets. Dropped them in the pigs, swished them around [swishes] so there’s blood all over those bullets.[Cheering.] Had his men, instructed his men [voice rising] to put the bullets into the rifles [thumps lectern]. They put the bullets into the rifles and they shot [he shouts the word; another man shouts, ”Yeah!”] 49 men.”

He tells it again, puts the imaginary bullets into an imaginary rifle and shoots his imagined 49 Muslims. ”Boom.”

He leans forward, squints and runs his words together: ”a-pig-infested-bullet-in-each-one.”

A woman shouts, ”Yeah!”

Then, Trump says, they dumped the bodies into a mass grave—he waves his hand across the podium, sweeping the corpses in—and threw the gutted pigs on top of them. They took the final bullet—he holds it up again—and they gave it to the last man. ”And they said, ‘Here, take this bullet'”—he mimes handing it over – “‘go back to your people'”—he jabs a finger at the last man’s ”people,” and yet another man shouts, ”Yeah!”— “‘and explain what we just did!’ ”

Trump pauses. The crowd cheers. ”This is history, folks.”…We can choose to win, or we can choose to lose. For Trump, this is not a choice.

But the war-crimes strategy of foreign policy turns out to be more complicated to enact in the real world, as candidate Trump found out in March of last year when he had to walk back previous statements that service-members are “not going to refuse me, believe me.” So how do you apply the anti-P.C., will-to-win, no-more-weakness bravado within the more established Beltway parameters?

You spend more money on the military. You make threatening noises to would-be adversaries. You increase droning, drop scarier bombs, double down on dirty wars. And yes, you surge. Before you know it, many of the same people who have beaten you up for bad ideas and worse manners will be standing loyally by your side.

“The gloves are off inside Afghanistan,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) enthused moments after Trump’s Aug. 21 announcement. “I am proud of the fact that he listened to the generals and [showed] the will to stand up to radical Islam. I’m relieved he didn’t take the advice to withdraw, which would had been disastrous….This is a war between radical Islam and the rest of us. They hate our guts and not going to stop fighting us until we kill them and stabilize Afghanistan.”

Choosing Lindsey Graham’s style of juvenile chest-puffery over Sebastian Gorka’s may make for better media relations, but it moves America even further away from extricating itself from bloody military conflicts and expensive commitments that have no currently forseeable end point. Whether through fictitious pig-bullet or all-too-real semi-occupation of a miserable country, the fantasy that the United States can somehow will itself to victory is filling body bags, not ticker-tape parades.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments sometime in its coming term in one of the most significant Fourth Amendment cases in years.

At issue in Carpenter v. United States is the question of whether the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when it obtained, without a search warrant, the cellphone records of suspected armed robber Timothy Carpenter. With those records, federal officials identified the cell towers that handled the suspect’s calls and then proceeded to trace back his whereabouts during the time periods in which his alleged crimes were committed. That information was later used against Carpenter in court.

The Trump administration strongly urged the Supreme Court not to hear this case. Why? Because “a person has no Fourth Amendment interest in records created by a communications-service provider in the ordinary course of business that pertain to the individual’s transactions with the service provider,” the administration told the Court in its brief in opposition to the petition for certiorari.

What is more, the administration argued, “the acquisition of a business’s records does not constitute a Fourth Amendment ‘search’ of an individual customer even when the records reflect information pertaining to that customer.”

This cramped view of the Fourth Amendment is extremely dangerous to the privacy rights of all Americans in the age of the smart phone. As the Supreme Court recognized in the 2014 case of Riley v. California, in which the Court unanimously told the police to “get a warrant” before searching cellphones incident to arrest, “modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life.’ The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”

Consider the sort of information a typical cellphone user shares with a cellphone company. It is much more than just numbers dialed or texted; it includes email addresses of correspondents, the URLs of websites visited, and, of course, the physical locations from which the device itself was accessed. Shouldn’t the Fourth Amendment offer some genuine protection for such highly personal private information?

As a back-up argument, the Trump administration claims that even if the Fourth Amendment is held to apply to the cell-site information at issue in this case, the government’s actions against Carpenter should still be ruled constitutional on the grounds that they are a “reasonable” exception to the normal requirements of the Fourth Amendment.

“Society has a strong interest in both promptly apprehending criminals and exonerating innocent suspects as early as possible during an investigation,” the Trump administration argued. According to the government, in other words, it takes too long and causes too much hassle for law enforcement officials to bother getting a search warrant in cases like this.

But that view turns the Fourth Amendment on its head. One of the main purposes of the Fourth Amendment—as well as other guarantees in the Bill of Rights—is to restrain overzealous government agents before they run roughshod over the rights of individuals. The Trump administration, by contrast, wants to loosen such constitutional restrictions on the cops.

It is a heartening sign that the Supreme Court agreed to hear this important case over the objections of the Trump administration. Hopefully the Court will ultimately reject the administration’s disfiguring interpretations and issue a decision that gives the Fourth Amendment its due.

Related: Use a Cellphone, Void the Fourth Amendment?

In 1971, the theaters in the New York City ‘burbs were showing a film called Summer of ’42, a wartime coming-of-age story in which sex is wondrous, terrifying, and inextricably linked to romance.

Meanwhile, down in the dank little grindhouse joints of the combat zone around Times Square, you could see Terror in Orgy Castle, The Runaway Virgin, and countless little 8mm loops of burned-out hookers performing the filthiest acts of which the unwired 20th-century mind could conceive. In them, sex was tawdry, tired, and toneless.

Yet all that was to be stood on its head; gauzy romance was about to take a back seat to commercial coitus that was glamorous, exciting and very, very profitable. HBO’s The Deuce is the spellbinding story of how flesh became flash, how the sex trade went from back alleys to boardrooms. Television critic Glenn Garvin takes a look.

View this article.

A panel of experts recently projected that 500,000 Americans could die of opioid-related overdoses between now and 2027, surpassing the annual death toll from AIDS during the worst years of that epidemic. Some of the experts polled put the potential opioid-related death toll at 650,000 over the next 10 years.

We can reach that grizzly milestone with our eyes closed if we just keeping doing what we’ve done for the last decade. But a future in which opioid and opiate-related overdoses claim more lives than a deadly communicable disease is no more inevitable than our present moment was a decade ago.

We got here by reacting poorly to the increase in prescription opioid abuse and associated deaths. There may be no point in asking how many more people would be alive today if we had made different choices when we first recognized this problem, but it’s instructive to revisit the early days of this crisis anyway.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, just over 2,000 people died from heroin-related overdoses in 2005. In 2015, heroin killed 12,989 people. The total number of drug overdose deaths in 2005 was 29,813. In 2015, 52,404.

We have a pretty good idea of what happened between 2005 and 2015. Law enforcement cracked down on pill mills, the Food and Drug Administration admonished pharmaceutical companies to make their drugs harder to snort and inject, and the CDC and Health and Human Services discouraged doctors from prescribing pain medication.

In addition to being public health policies, these were also price signals. The black market responded accordingly with cheap heroin and then cheap illicit fentanyl. As Vox recently reported, there are many places throughout the U.S. where black market heroin and fentanyl now kill far more people than prescription pills.

With each new death record—and we are setting them every year now—the overdose problem moves further out of a realm regulators can control into one they can’t and never will. Oddly enough, they don’t seem to realize it.

Earlier this summer, Kentucky’s legislature passed a law creating a three-day limit on opioid prescriptions for acute pain, meaning that no prescription can be for more than three days worth of pain relievers. In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker wants a five-year mandatory minimum for any person who provided the illicit drugs that led to an overdose death.

The Justice Department recently asked the U.S. Sentencing Commission to require every person convicted of distributing fentanyl to serve prison time, regardless of how little fentanyl is involved, whether they knew they were distributing fentanyl at all, and whether anyone died as a result. As Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer writes at Townhall, there’s also a push to conduct more surveillance of doctors and their patients.

These are the same strategies that got us here.

The list of things we refuse to try, meanwhile, is depressingly long. Heroin maintenance programs—of which there is not a single one in the U.S.—would provide fentanyl-free gear to people who can’t or don’t want to enter medication-assisted therapy; and safe injection sites—which we also don’t have, despite their success in our neighbor to the north (and, uh, Iran)—would provide a place for those people to use under medical supervision.

We should be removing barriers to offering medication-assisted therapy; there should be no limit on how many patients a doctor can help at one time and HHS shouldn’t require days’ worth of training in order to administer the associated medicines.

Anybody should be able to buy naloxone wherever they can buy Tylenol. No one should face incarceration or arrest for reporting a drug overdose.

There are more libertarian policies, of course, but the ones I’ve just listed wouldn’t require the U.S. to do something novel or break any international agreements. They would require us to accept that our problems with drugs, like most problems that universally afflict our species, cannot be eradicated at the population level.

If we don’t try these things now, we shouldn’t expect a future that’s better than our present.

A Utah movie theater that dared to serve alcohol during a sexually explicit movie has won its legal battle against the state’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (DABC).

“The State has violated the First Amendment by bringing an administrative enforcement action against a mainstream motion picture theater showing an R-rated movie,” U.S. District Judge David Nuffer wrote for the court Thursday.

The case stems from a 10-day suspension of an alcoholic beverage license and/or a fine of $1,000 to $25,000 issued to a Salt Lake City cinema called Brewvies for screening the superhero movie Deadpool.

In April 2016, the DABC sent a letter to Brewvies informing the owners they had broken a Utah law against DABC-licensed venues “showing a depiction of an act or simulated act of sodomy, bestiality, or oral copulation and (2) a scene wherein a person displayed his or her genitals.”

Any place or event regulated by alcoholic-beverage authorities in Utah is prohibited from allowing conduct “considered contrary to the public health, peace, safety, welfare, and morals,” including “showing a film, still picture, electronic reproduction, or other visual reproduction” that depicts sex or simulated sex acts, a person displaying their genitals or butt, or “a person being touched, caressed, or fondled on the breast, buttocks, anus, or genitals.”

After receiving the letter about the R-rated Deadpool, Brewvies owners filed a lawsuit against Utah’s alcohol-control agency and its leadership. “The film Deadpool is not obscene, and Defendants and the DABC have not claimed the film is obscene, under applicable constitutional standards,” noted Brewvies in the complaint. Thus Brewvies’s showing of the film Deadpool and the other “mainstream” movies are constitutionally protected speech, it argued.

Nuffer agreed. And since Deadpool is constitutionally protected speech, the state can only regulate it if it does so using minimally restrictive means in the service of a compelling government interest. In this case, Utah’s DABC failed.

The law “is overinclusive because it captures mainstream content,” writes Nuffer. And because it “is not the least restrictive means for effectuating the State’s interest, it fails strict scrutiny. Brewvies is entitled to declaratory and injunctive relief.”

To crack this important case, two Utah Bureau of Investigation agents had gone undercover at Brewvies, where they ordered Bud Lights and watched Deadpool. In a crime report, Officer Sean Cannon noted numerous violations of the public-morals clause, pointing out, “the main character in the film is shown on his back under bed sheets briefly engaged In masturbation or simulated masturbation using a stuffed unicorn toy.”

Cannon included in his report:

In the final credits, a drawing of the main character (male) is shown “as he rides on the back of a unicorn, he rubs its horn briefly until the horn shoots outs rainbows (simulating orgasm).” The tail of the unicorn raises slowly as he rubs the horn simulating arousal until the horn shoots out the rainbows.

Cannon’s review (the random capitalization and quotations suggests he might have been flustered) continued:

The main character (male) In the film is shown numerous times engaging in acts or simulated acts of sexual intercourse with the female counterpart during a holiday themed sex-montage. They “are shown having sex while nude (we see the woman sitting on the man’s groin In bed, rocking on his lap as he fondles her bare breasts and she gasps). He is then shown behind her while she’s on her hands and knees” engaged in sexual intercourse or simulated sexual intercourse.

[…] During the holiday themed sex montage, it shows the main character (male) nude “on his hands and knees on a bed while a woman wearing a leather bikini (with an strap-on penis that isn’t shown) has her groin area pressed against the man’s posterior; the camera then cuts to his face, he Is sweating and grimacing as she says to relax before the scene ends. She bends down to him and says “Happy Women’s Rights Day” during the sodomy or simulated sodomy scene.

This isn’t the first time the department has targeted Brewvies. In 2011, the cinema was investigated for showing The Hangover Part II. At the time, Brewvies parent company, CinemaPub, agreed to pay a $1,500 fine pus $127 in administrative fees. In 2015, DABC said the cinema could not show the films Magic Mike and Ted 2.

As the media and politicians rush to blame the intensity of and damage from Hurricane Harvey on climate change and zoning, Ray Lehmann of R Street wants to talk about a more obvious villain: public policies that use tax dollars to subsidize development and population growth in flood-prone areas.

Harvey, he says, isn’t a weather problem, it’s a “people problem.”

“More than half the US population now lives in coastal counties,” says Lehmann, who believes that climate change is happening and that human activity contributes to it. “That’s up about 45% over the decades from 1970 to 2010.”

One of the major reasons for that shift is that in the late 1960s, the federal government started offering federal flood insurance priced below market rates, which made it far cheaper for developers and people to build and live in areas more prone to extreme weather. Even worse, as Reason’s Ronald Bailey has reported, the same program allows people to rebuild in flood-prone areas. “There was a great journal piece in Nature in 2003 [that projected global losses from weather events] would, by 2050, rise to about $60 billion, Lehmann tells Nick Gillespie. Even “if you did not include the impacts of climate change or sea level rise at all, it would still be expected to rise to about $50 billion dollars, just from economic development and growth in coastal populations.”

Is Houston’s lack of zoning is part of the problem? Lehmann points out the most of the areas destroyed by Superstorm Sandy were heavily restricted when it came to land-use, zoning, and planning. As an instructive alternative, he talks about Port Aransas, south of Houston the Gulf Coast. When Harvey made landfall then, it was a Category 4 hurricane, stronger than when it smacked Houston. Yet due to a 1980 law, the Coastal Barrier Resources Act, the area is less develped because all federal subsidies—for roads, electricity, water, flood insurance, and more—were barred. When people are faced to pay full price for where they want to live, they tend to choose areas less likely to get wiped out.

Lehmann believes that climate change is real and that human activity adds to it. Controversially among many libertarians and free-marketers, he and R Street support a carbon tax to reduce greenhouse gases, even as he says any reductions will likely have minimal effects on the climate. Ideally, says Lehmann, the carbon tax would be used to reduce corporate income taxes to zero, freeing up resources for the sort of economic growth and technological innovation that will allow us to cope more easily with all sorts of problems, including extreme weather. “The greatest response to climate change is to be wealthy and to have the resources to be able to deal with the effects,” he says.

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This is a rush transcript—check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Hi, I’m Nick Gillespie, and this is the Reason podcast. Today we’re talking with Ray Lehmann, he’s a senior fellow at R Street and he’s also the co-founder of R Street, which is a public policy think tank that talks about environmental and other kinds of policy issues. Ray Lehmann, thanks for talking.

Ray Lehmann: Thanks for having me.

Gillespie: Okay, so we’re talking about Hurricane Harvey, which has slammed Houston and is actually taking on other parts of the Gulf Coast right now. One of the things that we’re hearing a lot … and this has certainly gotta be the most politicized hurricane in history, even more than Katrina as its unfolding … but we’re hearing that Hurricane Harvey, and especially the damage in Houston, is evidence of climate change. The LA Times, this is a representative headline, in a house editorial they said, “Harvey should be a warning to Trump that climate change is a global threat.” Is that the right way to be talking about Hurricane Harvey, and especially the damage in Houston?

Lehmann: It’s not that … Obviously we believe climate change is a global threat. Whether any particular storm can be attributed to climate change is more controversial. It’s not entirely clear that climate change, in and of itself, would change hurricane patterns in this way. There’s various impacts that climate change could have on hurricanes. Sort of general consensus is that warmer sea temperatures will drive more powerful storms. There’s mixed opinion on whether they will cause more frequent storms, and there’s pretty much consensus, at least in the Atlantic basin, that the long-term effects of climate change would actually be to make fewer storms make US landfall, because the ones are gonna be weakening, so fewer storms are gonna get that northeast lift to take them off the Caribbean and into the United States. Unfortunately that means they’ll mostly be hitting Latin America, where they don’t have the same resources we do to recover.

Gillespie: Well that seems-

Lehmann: But what you can is … Yeah, that’s a problem. What you can say for sure is that sea level rise is a threat. That has already happened and there are other causes of sea level rise beyond just climate change, all of which contribute both in this storm and flood risks more generally.

Gillespie: What are the other causes of sea level change? And I’m working at this from a layman’s perspective, but you, like Reason believes that climate change is happening, that temperatures are warming and that human activity has a t least something to do with that, but then, if it’s not just the polar ice caps and whatnot, what’s causing sea level rise?

Lehmann: If you go to southern Louisiana, it is erosion, soil erosion in general, which … or what you would call “land subsidence,” which is the land falling as much as the sea rising, so that’s happening in a number of areas including here. I live in Florida. That’s happening even without change in the absolute level of the sea. In Louisiana, actually one of the major … not major, but contributing causes is the nutria rat eating away at a bunch of vegetations and that causing greater erosion. There are other definitely other causes besides just climate change that are relevant in these contexts.

Gillespie: To go back to this question of the effects of climate change on the number and intensity of storms, is there yet … I mean, there’s a lot of theory out there but is there yet evidence that … because you also hear this, that, “Get used to this, there are gonna be more hurricanes. There are gonna be more big storms and they’re gonna be more intense.” And you’re saying the evidence on that is a little bit mixed or ambivalent right now.

Lehmann: It’s mixed.

Gillespie: Yeah.

Lehmann: Yeah, I mean the truth is we just came off a dozen years without a major hurricane making landfall in the United State. There had not been one since 2005. Sandy was a very large storm but it wasn’t even a hurricane when it made landfall. It was a tropical storm, just a physically enormous one. You had Hurricane Ike, and that was a 2 and last year you had a couple 1s, but there hadn’t been a 3 or larger, is a major hurricane.

Gillespie: But each big storm, and I guess whether it’s a tropical storm or a hurricane and what category of hurricanes varies, but it seems that each big storm sets damage records and that’s often kind of … That kind of gets equated with, “Well the storms are more powerful, they’re more dangerous.” But is the damage record, is that mostly because more people are living near places … like are living on the coast or in areas that are at risk? So it is really a weather problem or is it kind of a location and demographic problem?

Lehmann: It is primarily a people problem. As I mentioned, I live in Florida. It is a low-lying peninsula that juts out into the most hurricane-prone region in the world. If you go back to World War 2, Florida was the smallest, least-populated state in the south, and it is now the third-largest state in the country. More than half the US population now lives in coastal counties. That was up about 45% over the decades from 1970 to 2010. In fact, there was a great journal piece in “Nature” back in 2003, and they projected the global food losses would, by 2050, rise to about 60 billion dollars. That’s about ten times what they have been, it’s about 6 billion dollars. But if you did not include the impacts of climate change or sea level rise at all, it would still be expected to rise to about 50 billion dollars, just from economic development and growth in coastal populations.

Gillespie: Well, and Houston is like that. In 1950, Houston only had about 600,000 people I think. Something like that, and it’s now got about 2.3 million people. It’s nipping at the hills of Chicago to become the third-largest city in the country and then the metro area itself or the larger county is big as well. So it’s clear that like, if a hurricane hits, a big storm hits in Houston now, it’s gonna to affect magnitudes of order more people than it would have 50 years ago or 40 years ago, or property.

Other things that I’ve read that say, that attribute to the ferocity of the storm there though, is that the amount of pavement and developed surfaces around Houston is just gigantic because the more people you have, the more roads you have, the more houses you have, the more buildings, and that all makes it harder for water to dissipate. Is that sort of development a contributing factor to the effects of these storms?

Lehmann: I can’t say it’s not a contributing factor. Beyond just the fact that there are more people, more surface area making it more difficult for groundwater to be absorbed definitely contributes to the size of the flood. The thing that people have been bringing up specifically is noting that Houston doesn’t have zoning, right? But zoning, if you look nationwide, the actual impact of zoning tends to be to fight dense housing as opposed to encouraging it. If everyone in Houston lived in the kinds of high-rises they live in in San Francisco or New York City or Chicago, then theoretically you could have that same-size city with less covered space, more open land. But you can’t assume that that’s what a zoning board in Houston would do, right? That’s not how zoning boards usually act. People don’t like density, and when you give governments power to control land use like that, they usually act in the opposite direction, which is where the politics are. So I think what you can say is that like, there are probably flood mitigation measures that they could still take.

I know there are two major reservoirs that date back to like the ’40s, and they’ve held up pretty well given the intensity of this storm, but they probably could use some updating. The army corps might want to look at that, and when it comes to storm water runoff, maybe they’re not … The market on its own may not be pricing the externality of that appropriately. There’s actually an interesting system in DC. In DC itself, they have something like a cap and trade system for storm water, where if you’re downtown and it’s really expensive to retrieve storm water runoff, you can buy credits from people up in Cleveland Park or whatever to get your share of the runoff through their properties. That’s a thing. Either a tax on total paving or that sort of thing, that might be a way to move it in a more flood-friendly direction, but I don’t think you can say it’s zoning or development in and of itself.

Gillespie: Yeah. Well, and zoning it’s, as Houston climbs the list of the most populated cities, the most popular cities in the country, zoning keeps coming up. “That’s why it’s so ugly. That’s why it has no character. That’s why it has flooding.” And it’s odd for a city that is almost universally rebuked by zoning czars and land planners and aesthetic architects, it seems to be quite popular, popular enough that more people keep moving there. It’s strange and yeah, the whole notion that zoning somehow is the thing that separates us from the animals is kind of bizarre, to say the least.

Lehmann: Right, right.

Gillespie: You know, you have talked about, that right near Houston and actually in the storm, there is an alternative to … a story that’s not really being talked a lot about that has to be with Port Aransas. Tell me about what is going there and why that kind of is a counter example of how we might seriously mitigate the effects of extreme weather.

Lehmann: Right. One thing that’s interesting about this is that it’s not actually the case that you should conceive of the damage we’re gonna see from Harvey as primarily hurricane damage, because it’s set over Houston for all these days as a tropical storm or even a sub-tropical storm, so all the flooding was not by a hurricane. It was done by just a massive and unprecedented amount of water. It was a hurricane when it landed. It was a category 4, and there’s only been a few category 4s we’ve ever had. It landed near Port Aransas, which is just north of Corpus Christi, and you certainly saw damage down there, right?

Gillespie: And Corpus Christi is a few hours south down the Gulf of Mexico coast from Galveston and Houston.

Lehmann: From Houston. Yeah, from … Right, exactly. You definitely saw damage there. The early, the insurance modeling firms that do this kind of thing expect about two billion dollars in wind damages there, but for a category 4 storm hitting a coastal region, that’s actually remarkably low, and the reason it’s remarkably low is there’s not much development there, and there’s a good reason there’s not much development there, which is that area is part of the coastal barrier resources system, which was set up in the early ’80s. It was a Republican proposal, came from John Chafee of Rhode Island. It was signed by President Reagan, and what the Coastal Barrier Resources Act does, is any land within this zone of 270 million acres … if you put them together, they’d be like the third-largest national park in the country … any development in that area, you’re free as a private citizen to invest your own money. What you can’t get is federal subsidies.

There’s no federal highways. There’s no federal public housing. You’re not eligible for flood insurance in this zone of barrier islands and coastal wetlands that were undeveloped as of the early ’80s, and they’ve mostly stayed under-developed, because developers don’t want to do it. They don’t want to invest if they can’t get the subsidies, and that’s pretty key to our resilience from these sorts of storms because barrier islands serve the purpose of being a buffer. They absorb a lot of water. They can flood. They can be underwater for some period of time.

We saw, in places where barrier islands are developed, say the Jersey shore in Hurricane Sandy, the difference between … They’re right next to each other, but Island Beach State Park and Seaside Heights. Seaside Heights is just north of Island Beach State Park. Island Beach State Park is part of the coastal barrier resources system. It serves its function of absorbing water. Seaside Heights is where Snooki goes and it served its function of getting knocked to hell when Sandy came through.

Gillespie: Yeah. Well, it’s funny when you talked about the shift towards people living in coastal counties and whatnot. I, like you, grew up in New Jersey a painful number of years ago, but I can remember even in the ’70s where … I grew up in Monmouth County by Sandy Hook, which is the first ocean beach. It’s about 30 miles or 35 miles north of Seaside Heights, and I always felt kind of bad for … It was common, like the people who lived by the beach tended to have lower-income jobs. They were blue-collar workers. I mean, it was kind of a hard scrabble existence, and within 10-20 years all of a sudden everybody wanted to live on the beach. Similar in California, even. I lived in LA and Santa Monica during the course of the late ’60s and ’70s, went from kind of a sleepy working-class town to a playpen for Hollywood royalty. How much did federal policy or state policies kind of change to make the beach or the shore more attractive for people to live there? Was is that a bunch of policies went into place that helped soak up all of these high costs that people wouldn’t be willing to pay out of pocket?

Lehmann: In 1968 we created the National Flood Insurance Program. Prior to that, there really wasn’t very much insurance coverage for floods. There had been some market in like, the late 19th century and the early 20th century. There was a series of Mississippi River floods in the ’20s that kinda ended that, and after that it became very difficult to get insurance coverage for floods. Some of that is things that are sort of accidents of the history of the insurance market in the United States. It’s always been state-regulated, and so historically most insurance companies were local. We didn’t have the national companies that you do now, back then, and so local companies would face extreme … unlike a fire, which is a fortuitous thing, it tends to only affect one property at a time, maybe two or three if it’s a major blaze … a flood can destroy an entire city. So insurance companies that were local didn’t want to be exposed like that. The re-insurance market, which is insurance for insurance companies, wasn’t yet as developed as it is now, and so you didn’t have very much private flood insurance.

In the ’60s, we created the National Flood Insurance Program, which extended under-priced flood insurance offered by the federal government, to pretty much everyone, to any community that wanted to participate and met certain basic standards. The original idea was that it was going to encourage communities to invest in flood mitigation. I think it did a little bit of that early on, but it has not really served that purpose in the long run. It served the purpose of making it possible to live in places people never lived before, because now you have a mechanism to bail you out once things go wrong. The state of Florida, for sure, was built on the National Flood Insurance Program. It’s about one-third of national insurance program policies are here in Florida.

Gillespie: Wow, and is there any movement to restrict that or to peel it back? I mean, it sounds like farm subsidies in a way where … and obviously it’s not the only reason people flock to the water. It’s also true that construction methods get better.

Lehmann: It’s nice.

Gillespie: Yeah. People like the water and the weather and all of that, but it’s a contributing factor and it’s certainly one that’s under our control. Is there any sense that these are policies that can’t stand and why the hell are people who live in either parched areas of the country or places not prone to flooding are bailing out? People who tend to be wealthy are living on Long Island, living on the Jersey Shore, living in Florida?

Lehmann: Back in 2002, we had a bill called the Bigger Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, that passed and was signed by President Obama, and Bigger Waters took those policies that were not paying appropriate rates and put them on a path to gradually see their rates increase. Then just about immediately after that bill passed, you started getting scare stories that were distributed with the help of FEMA by not responding to them. Served the interest of home-builders and realtors who did not like that this was going to have an impact on housing markets, and people were told that their rates might increase to $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 … There was no evidence of this. Just none at all, but FEMA did not really do anything to provide clarity, and in the middle of that hysteria, we then got a second bill in 2014 called the Grim Waters Act, which is I think appropriately named. Also appropriate that Maxine Waters, who sponsored the original bill, was then on the second bill that largely repealed the Bigger Waters Act, or at least it slowed it down enormously. That was unfortunate.

It’s still the case that over the long term, these properties are seeing rate increases. They’re pretty modest and we will get to a point eventually where they’re paying what they should, and there’s also encouraging signs that we’re getting a private flood insurance market. It’s still new. It’s not very large. It’s not yet enough to take over completely, but it’s building and we’ll get there. There is legislation right now, flood insurance programs’ authorization expires at the end of September. There’s legislation right now that passed through the House Financial Services Committee a couple months ago, that would help with some of the key questions on private flood insurance like, “If you have a mortgage, does the private flood insurance count? What kind of private flood insurance do you need that would be equivalent to the NFIP?” There’s also rules like … Currently the NFIP policies are sold by private insurance agents who are usually affiliated with insurance companies. If you are an insurance company that takes part in that, what’s called the “write your own” program, then you are not permitted to write private flood insurance, so that’s another rule that would change in the House bill. And also just getting the data available from FEMA to the private market about flood losses and underwriting. All of that I think we will push forward towards a more robust private market that will hopefully more appropriately price

Gillespie: Right, and the goal of that is just that, to the extent that insurance is a risk management tool, we’ll get a fairer pricing of the cost and benefits of living in areas that are prone to extreme weather.

Lehmann: And if that happens, then there are projects that might otherwise take place if they’re subsidized by the government, that won’t take place as you see in the coastal barrier resources system, because if you have to pay your full freight, if you have to take account of what the real risks are, then at the margin, you’re gonna adjust your behavior. Which doesn’t mean no one lives at the coast. That’s sort of how the commanding control environmental movement would approach this. There are efficient ways to live at the coast. There are efficient losses to take, but at the same time, we don’t want this to be on the backs of taxpayers.

Gillespie: What are some other policies that would mitigate the effects, say, of hurricanes, of extreme weather and floods that we should be pursuing and that we should be talking about rather than arguing over whether or not Melania Trump should have worn stilettos or sneakers when she was leaving to visit Houston?

Lehmann: Right. Like Shakespeare said, “First kill all the lawyers,” I say, “First kill all the subsidies, then we can move on to stage two.” I think Libertarians will differ on the degree to which they think a lot of things are government responsibilities. I’m more or less okay with things like levies and other public construction. I’d like to see more things done at the local level where they can be more responsive, but I think that those are appropriate infrastructure projects to help protect communities. I think you can have some degree of land uses planning where it’s things like, for instance, if you have a repetitive loss property and the government’s gonna buy it and move this person somewhere else. Say, “Okay, you’ve flooded too much or you’ve suffered whatever sort of disaster too frequently, we’re gonna buy you out and move you somewhere else,” then maybe you don’t allow people to build there anymore. Move that money. Otherwise you’re creating an incentive to just keep moving in and taking the buyout.

Gillespie: Does that happen frequently? I seem to recall, somewhat dimly, stories about like whole towns on the Mississippi kind of getting bought out, people being relocated …

Lehmann: There are two programs within FEMA. One is within the flood insurance program and one is just disaster and mitigation in general, that do have authority to do buyouts. In the National Flood Insurance Program, it was back in 2004, Congress passed this bill … I can’t even remember the name, Jim Bunning and Earl Blumenauer were two of the sponsors … that, the intent was that if you had three losses, then you would be bought out. You would either have to raise your home or be bought out, but I don’t think they ever funded it, and so lacking any funding, it never really happened. So there’s a limited number of buyouts that happened through FEMA, but it’s not terribly much.

Gillespie: Right. What about on a … and I’m thinking three … and especially Jim Bunning, a Hall of Fame baseball pitcher, you would think three strikes and you’re out, like you get nothing, you are now officially owned by the government or something.

Lehmann: Of course that was the name of the bill.

Gillespie: Three strikes and then …

Lehmann: “Three strikes and you are out of the National Flood Insurance Program.”

Gillespie: I thought it was like, “Three strikes and we bring out the tee and you just keep hitting until you get on base.”

Lehmann: Right, exactly.

Gillespie: What about on a global level? What are your preferred ways to deal with climate change? It seems to me there are, within the broader Libertarian community or the broadly-defined Libertarian community, there are some people who still say that global warming isn’t happening or it happens all the time and we have nothing to do with it, and so why talk about it at all? Most people I know who are Libertarians say, “You know what? Climate change is happening. It’s observable. Human activity is contributing to it, and then, what do you next?” One of the things that I find very attractive is the idea that, to the extent if … I mean if we go with a massive global program that slows down economic innovation and economic activity, suddenly instead of living in South Florida we’re living in Bangladesh, and we have fewer resources to kind of be resilient and to build better buildings and come back with weather events. Is that kind of your approach to global warming, or what are the ways that we should deal with climate change as a planet?

Lehmann: What we certainly agree with is that we think the greatest response to climate change is to be wealthy and to have the resources to be able to deal with the effects, which are still largely, right? You can’t know what you’re going to need to do, but having more money always helps. We also … This is not a secret. We support a carbon tax, one that does not in any way raise taxes. In fact, we have proposed replacing the corporate income tax entirely with a carbon tax. Carbon tax, we will fully admit, does not actually reverse global warming. It may help at the margin, but it is unlikely to mean that we have no effects. We’re gonna have effects that we’re gonna have to deal with, but if you do it in the right way, if you de-regulate, you use this to get rid of the existing regulatory structure, and to zero out a tax that is more destructive to capital. We think that you can still grow and still be prosperous and at the margin, control some of the worst effects.

Gillespie: So in R Street’s plan for slowing carbon emissions, it would be … I mean, you tax everybody who is emitting carbon, you raise the price of carbon so you get less of it, that’s the plan.

Lehmann: Yes, correct.

Gillespie: The purpose of the tax then is to shut down carbon emissions or to lower that in the hope or the idea that it will on some level help mitigate climate change. What happens to that money? Does that just go into a general revenue stream or does it get earmarked or does it … What happens?

Lehmann: There’s a lot of proposals that have come forward by a lot of different people. Al Gore wants to use it to offset the payroll tax. There’s others who come up with what they call a taxing dividend system, which essentially means you apply the tax and then you give it back to people, presumably based on their income. We have proposed using it to replace the corporate income tax, and what we think is an advantage of that is, replacing the corporate income tax actually raises some money in and of itself. If you just repealed it, because of how inefficient it is, and so that helps take care of some of the problem, because if you got rid of the corporate income tax, then a good portion of that income would instead be earned by corporate CEOs or shareholders through dividends and through capital gains and you could capture the money that way at the individual level. We think it’s always gonna be the case that corporations will have more lobbying power than people, and so any time you create a new corporate tax, any time you try tax reform, it does not take very long for that get mucked up with all sorts of exemptions and special treatment. Get rid of the corporate tax. Use this tax instead.

Gillespie: How do you levy a carbon tax? How do you identify the sources and then say, “Okay, you owe this much, you owe that much”?

Lehmann: Generally you want to do it as close to the source as possible, at the level of, either say the refiner if you’re talking about motor fuels, or at the level of the generator if you’re talking about electricity. There are other sources of carbon, other sources of greenhouse gases. Smarter people than I would tell you the most efficient way to deal with them, but that’s the broad strokes of it.

Gillespie: But essentially it would be like putting a meter on devices that produce carbon so it’s kind of like an electric meter or gas meter, something like that.

Lehmann: Right, and you want it as far from the consumer as possible. You don’t want it to be like, at the pump the way a gas tax is, because the further down the stream it is, first of all the more chances that it’s gonna get multiplied, and also that you change behavior in ways that are inefficient.

Gillespie: Do you worry at all in … I mean, it almost sounds the way you’re talking about it is that the way you see the carbon tax as almost a way of buying off environments, especially if it’s not gonna have a profound impact. It’s more like, “Okay, here’s a way that we can shut them up for a while and get rid of the corporate tax,” which virtually … even a lot of progressive economists will say, is almost completely a stupid tax. It doesn’t raise as much money as it should because of lobbying power and it just gets in the way of business development.

Lehmann: I think we … That’s not unfair as a characterization. If you go back to the Waxman-Markey bill, the cap and trade bill, they wanted to do the same things. It was just with their own priorities. They wanted to use cap and trade to raise some money, spend it on solar projects and other things that were important to their base and their donors. Climate change was the issue, but cap and trade was the mechanism to get other things they wanted done. Well, there’s other things we want done and we can think we can use this to get those things done.

Gillespie: Alright. Well, as long as we’re keeping dry. Last question. We have had, at least each of the previous two presidents, George Bush with Katrina which was his response … and he certainly was not the only major political figure going back to the governor Louisiana as well as the mayor of New Orleans, they all handled Katrina very poorly … Barack Obama, it’s not clear to me I think, or a lot of people whether or not Sandy was his finest hour, but also the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico where he talked about he was gonna go looking for asses to kick in his administration, because the federal response was terrible to it. What’s the essential thing? What does Donald Trump as president need to do to kind of break the chain of bad responses to major breaking environmental events?

Lehmann: One thing you notice with … certainly with George W. Bush, and that is an issue now with Donald Trump, is that at the time of the storm, they were already fairly unpopular. So I think from a political perspective, the first thing you should do is no harm. Donald Trump would help himself to show more empathy than he has, but otherwise, he has a pretty good FEMA director, which is something that you could not have said probably of anybody since James Lee Witt, with Clinton. Craig Fugate under Obama was also quite competent, but it is pretty common for the FEMA director to be some political hack, and Director Brock under Trump is a guy who has experience from FEMA, has experience as Alabama’s manager during the oil spill, and Texas, I’d say more than Louisiana, has competent state government and they are gonna be able to respond more competently, so Trump should mostly stay out of the way, but rather than being weatherman and bragging about the size of the storm, I think he’d do himself some favors to try to show that he’s a human being who actually is concerned about other human beings.

Gillespie: So that may be his toughest challenge yet, right?

Lehmann: Yes.

Gillespie: So we will leave it there. I want to thank Ray Lehmann. He’s a senior fellow at R Street, where you can check out, rstreet.org. He’s also a co-founder. Ray, thanks for talking to us about Houston and the causes and best responses to massive flooding in the Gulf of Mexico.

Lehmann: Thank you.

Gillespie: This has been the Reason podcast. I’m Nick Gillespie. Thanks so much for listening. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you’re there.

Imagine the melancholy passage this picture has endured in the three years since it was shot: Left to snooze on a high shelf, occasionally pulled down to be poked and prodded by a team of editors in search of a graceful narrative through-line, or at least a few shapely scenes…all in vain. Finally, defeated, the filmmakers gave up and just put the damn thing out. And here it is.

Unlocked is an international-espionage thriller in the very long line of the Bond and Bourne movies, and I hear you stifling a yawn. But this one’s different. Because in this one, the international kickass at the center of things is…a woman. That’s right. And that might’ve sounded sort of bold three years ago, but now it’s come a little late—Atomic Blonde kicks this movie’s butt all over the lot.

It’s not just that dragon-tattoo girl Noomi Rapace is about five inches shorter than Charlize Theron—she’s about seven inches shorter than Orlando Bloom, the most action-y of her costars here. And so she never seems in any way formidable—a quality that Theron can summon with just a lopsided lift of her lip, writes Kurt Loder in his latest review for Reason.

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The Juggalos aren’t just ICP fans— they’ve built a cultural identity around the music, the rap duo, and what it represents. In turn, ICP has stood up for its followers as they’ve been harassed and profiled all over the country. Unwittingly, these two white rappers from Detroit have become some of the nation’s most determined advocates for free expression.

“[If] Juggalos are being fucked with, we got to do something about it,” says Violent J’s partner Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler). “If that ties us into some First Amendment movement, whatever, we’re First Amendment warriors. I don’t know.”

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