Tag: news

“Nevada’s the last of the live and let live states,” says Dennis
Hof, the self-described “Brothel King” and owner and proprieter of
Nevada’s Moonlite Bunny Ranch, made famous as the setting for the
HBO documentary series, Cathouse
(2005-2008). “I don’t care if you smoke weed. Don’t bother me
because I have a safe full of guns and work in the sex
business.”

Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller sat down with Hof in his brothel
for a wide-ranging interview about sex, prostitution, black
markets, politics, and more.

Hof acquired the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in 1992 and systematically
pushed it into the public eye through a blend of showmanship,
attention-seeking, and media outreach he calls the “PT Barnum/Andy
Kaufman” school of marketing and publicity. In fact, he claims that
Andy Kaufman gave him the initial idea to buy the Bunny Ranch when
they partied there together in the late ’70s. 

 ”In about ’78, Kaufman said, ‘Dennis, let’s buy this place
and make it our den,'” says Hof (1:30).

Since then, Hof has gone on to acquire six more brothels, giving
him a huge share of a national market that only includes 17 total
brothels. This is because Nevada is the only state in the U.S. that
has legalized prostitution, and only in counties with populations
of less than 400,000. This, of course, rules out Clark County,
where Las Vegas is located.

“It’s illegal in Las Vegas, and look what you’ve got,” says Hof.
“You’ve got 2,000 girls a month being arrested. Lots of guys being
arrested, lives being ruined… Las Vegas is the sexual cesspool of
America.” (24:20)

He also points to the
remarkably high rate of HIV infection among prosititutes in Las
Vegas. By contrast, he says, under the state’s regime of
mandatory STD testing, there has never been a
documented case of HIV among licensed workers in Nevada’s
brothels.

Watch the whole interview above to hear Hof talk more about what
it’s like to run some of the country’s only legal brothels, as well
as stories about his run-ins with Sen. Harry Reid (7:10), his advice for
Anthony Weiner and Elliot Spitzer (17:45), and why he
started the group “Pimpin’ for [Ron] Paul” (18:17).

Click the link below for downloadable versions of this
video.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Sharif Matar and Will
Neff. Approximately 27 minutes.

Subscribe to Reason TV’s
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material goes live.

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In an important ruling
yesterday, a federal judge declared that the government must
actually fix the problem when it puts people on its “no-fly”
terrorist watch lists when it turns out they have no reason to be
on them.

From the
San Jose Mercury News:

The federal government violated a former Stanford University
doctoral student’s legal rights nine years ago when it put her on
its secretive “no-fly” lists targeting suspected terrorists, a San
Francisco federal judge ruled Tuesday.

In a decision for the most part sealed, U.S. District Judge
William Alsup disclosed that Rahinah Ibrahim was mistakenly placed
on the controversial list and said that the government must now
clear up the mistake. The decision comes in a case that has for the
first time revealed how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
assembles the no-fly lists, used to tighten security in the
aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The Obama administration has vigorously contested the case, the
first of its kind to reach trial, warning that it might reveal
top-secret information about the anti-terrorism program. As a
result, Alsup sealed his ruling until April to give the government
an opportunity to persuade a federal appeals court to keep the
order from being released publicly.

The administration’s efforts to “vigorously” contest the case
went so far as to ordering an airline to
not let Ibrahim’s daughter board a flight to San Francisco in
December to testify at the trial. Given the petty tactics used by
the feds in this case, one wonders if they even have any reason
other than “OMG! Terrorists!” to keep the order sealed. If, for
example, you were an actual terrorist, wouldn’t you
already know why you’re on the no-fly list and once you found out,
wouldn’t you be able to figure out what information the feds would
likely have on you to keep you from flying? Are the feds trying the
argue that the average terrorist has so many balls in the air −
like the evil mastermind in some television spy serial − that he or
she needs to sue the government to find out which ones they’ve
figured out? The existence of the no-fly list itself and the
discovery that one is on it provides enough information to create
concerns for any actual terrorist that the feds know something is
going on.

Or, like analysis of NSA’s bulk metadata collection program

shows, will public release of information about the “no fly”
list reveal it has not actually played any significant role in
stopping terrorist activity?

In August, a judge ruled that fliers are entitled to
due process and that the federal “no fly” list must have a
redress procedure to clear the names of people who shouldn’t be on
there.

(Hat tip to CharlesWT.)

Last year, the Heritage Foundation’s Index of
Economic Freedom ranked the United States as the
tenth freest economy in the world; in this year’s just-released
Index, it comes in at
number 12. This sort of slide actually isn’t a new phenomenon;
Jesse Walker noted
when the Index first dropped the U.S. out of the top ten, which was
“partly a matter of other countries getting better, as opposed to
the United States getting worse.” Since then, though, the land of
the brave and home of the free-ish has been sliding on its own
merits, “with particularly large losses in property rights, freedom
from corruption, and control of government spending.” Even non-fans
of the Heritage Foundation’s number-crunching style should note
that an even more dramatic decline in America’s economic freedom is
reported by Canada’s Fraser Institute.

According to the 2014 entry
for the United States at the Index of Economic Freedom:

The U.S. is the only country to have recorded a loss of economic
freedom each of the past seven years. The overall U.S. score
decline from 1995 to 2014 is 1.2 points, the fourth worst drop
among advanced economies.

Substantial expansion in the size and scope of government,
including through new and costly regulations in areas like finance
and health care, has contributed significantly to the erosion of
U.S. economic freedom. The growth of government has been
accompanied by increasing cronyism that has undermined the rule of
law and perceptions of fairness.

This is after a gradual rise in the country’s economic
freedom ranking relative to other countries during the first ten
years of the index. While sniffer-outers of partisanship may wonder
why government spending received a better (though sliding) score
during George W. Bush’s not-so-frugal years than during Barack
Obama’s continuation of those policies, Bill Clinton’s tenure looks
like one of moderate improvement.

It’s probably not a shocker that property rights have suffered a
steady decline through the years—not just in the U.S. but around
the world.

The Index of Economic Freedom doesn’t stand alone in its
assessment. 

The Fraser Institute’s Economic
Freedom of the World: 2013 Annual Report (PDF) agrees that
the country is slip-sliding in the rankings.

Throughout most of period from 1980 to 2000, the United States
ranked as the world’s third-freest economy, behind Hong Kong and
Singapore. As Exhibit 1.5 indicates, the chain-linked summary
rating of the United States in 2000 was 8.65, second only to Hong
Kong. By 2005, the US rating had slipped to 8.21 and its ranking
fallen to 8th. The slide has continued. The United States placed
16th in 2010 and 19th in 2011. The 7.74 chain-linked rating of the
United States in 2011 was nearly a full point less than the 2000
rating.

What accounts for the decline of economic freedom in the United
States? While the US ratings and rankings have fallen in all five
areas of the EFW index, the reductions have been largest in Legal
System and Property Rights (Area 2), Freedom to Trade
Internationally (Area 4), and Regulation (Area 5). The plunge in
Area 2 has been huge. In 2000, the 9.23 rating of the United States
was the ninth highest in the world. But by 2011, the area rating
had slid to 6.93, placing the United States 38th worldwide. The
2.30-point reduction in the Area 2 rating of the United States was
tied with Venezuela as the largest reduction among the countries
rated.

That’s an even more dramatic fall from grace than the Index
indicates.

The U.S. now ranks behind Canada economic-freedom-wise in both
the Fraser and Heritage assessments. In fact,
U.S. federal policies now threaten the competitiveness, Fraser
reports, of U.S. states that seek to make it easier to earn and
keep money and property.

Some Virginia public
officials seem to have trouble grasping an extremely simple
concept: Protecting children from sexual predation does not require
drawing distinctions among different types of sex. Had he
emphasized that point more, state Sen. Tom Garrett might have
spared himself a great deal of grief. A. Barton Hinkle discusses
regulating the “who” and “where” of sex, without getting involved
in the “how” of it.

View this article.