Reason Magazine - All Reason Articles from the Past Year: Page 1

Reforming Forensics

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:09:00 EDT

Fairleigh Dickinson Professor Roger Koppl argues for a significant overhaul of forensics in the U.S. in the current issue of Forbes. Forbes editor William Baldwin was alarmed enough at Koppl's examples of forensics malfeasance to write a sharply-worded editorial of his own.

Koppl wrote a study on forensics reform for the Reason Foundation, and wrote a summary of the study for the November issue of reason. Koppl and I have also co-written an article touching on similar themes that will appear in an upcoming issue of Engage, a journal published by the Federalist Society.

Koppl's work deserves more attention. Controlled studies have shown that the bias forensic experts absorb even by such seemingly innocuous interactions as speaking with police and prosecutors before running tests can have a disturbingly significant impact on their results. This bias exists even in well-intentioned, professional scientists. That's bias that's independent of the more egregious examples such as Dr. Hayne in Mississippi, or cases where prosecutors put ethically dubious pressure on forensics experts to tailor their findings to help the prosecution's case.

Koppl's proposals employ competition, proper incentives, and strategic manipulation of information (that is, separating information about the crime from the analysis of the evidence) to produce more accurate results—results less likely to be influenced by unintended bias, and that also would also go a long way toward uncovering the more egregious offenders. Koppl estimates that the cost of implementing his ideas would be less than the cost of just a couple wrongful convictions.

The most urgent of Koppl's reforms is the idea of giving forensic vouchers to indigent defendants. We need a Gideon v. Wainwright for forensics. Until defendants are given access to their own experts, far too many criminal cases will feature testimony only from state forensic scientists, and all the problems that come with that. When only one guy with letters after his name is testifying, jurors are going to tend to put quite a bit of faith in what he says. We've seen this even when what the expert is saying is absurd, and scoffed at by just about everyone else in the scientific community. When poor defendants aren't given access to their own experts, then, it calls into question whether we really have an adversarial criminal justice system.

Unfortunately, too many people think all of the country's forensic labs work like the ones they see on CSI. I'm not sure it's enough to merely ask that judges take a more aggressive approach to weeding out the frauds. First, judges can be duped, too. Second, even competent, professional forensic scientists can make mistakes. The changes need to be more radical. Another of Koppl's suggested reforms essentially applies the idea of peer review to the criminal forensics process. That would go a long way toward cutting down on mistakes, intentional and otherwise.

Marion Barry for School Vouchers

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:20:00 EDT

Former Washington, D.C., mayor and current D.C. Council Member Marion Barry comes out in favor of school vouchers, provided the money does not come from the existing public school budget. That proviso relieves much of the competitive pressure that otherwise might encourage public schools to improve, but at least Barry acknowledges the desirability of choice and diversity in education:

I support this package [$74 million in federal money for public schools, charter schools, and private school scholarships] because it provides much-needed financial support to all D.C. schools and because it offers parents a choice without hurting public schools. That's a win-win situation. We must make sure that children in the District are given every chance to attend schools that work for them. To do anything else is wrong.

Is it too much to hope that, if voucher-equipped students leave D.C.'s public schools in droves, the reduced enrollment will one day lead to a lower budget? The Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson estimates that "DC public schools are spending about $24,600 per pupil this school year—roughly $10,000 more than the average for area private schools."

How Hysterical Do You Have to Be for Newsweek to Suggest That You're Overreacting to a Drug Menace?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:20:00 EDT

This doesn't quite make up for Newsweek's anti-crack hysteria circa 1986 or its anti-meth hysteria circa 2005, but the magazine's latest issue includes a careful, balanced story about Salvia divinorum that could serve as a model for how the press should handle controversies involving psychoactive substances. Noting salvia's longstanding use as a Mazatec folk remedy, its modern use as an aid to introspection, and its medical potential, author Brian Braiker says media attention attracted by YouTube videos of teenagers smoking salvia "is spooking legislators and law enforcement" into banning the plant and arresting people for possession. A few excerpts:

Used in small amounts, salvia...contains no known toxicities. But when its extract is smoked in larger dosages, it can yield frightening results....
But is strict regulation the best way to deal with salvia? Obviously, any impairing agent could lead to accidents. But there have been no recorded injuries or deaths resulting from its use, as drug-reform activists like Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance point out. "Most people who do it don't want to do it again," says Nadelmann. The salvia panic "is essentially an extension of the old drug-war debate in that there's this knee-jerk reflex on the part of legislators to criminalize first and ask questions later, if ever. There's no stopping to listen to scientific evidence, no cost-benefit analysis of the effect the law would have." California wants to ban the sale of salvia only to minors, a move that Nadelmann supports....
Condemning the drug to Schedule I status (the same class as heroin or cannabis), as some legislators have suggested, would make it virtually impossible for the medical community to obtain for research. It seems that sober thinking is needed on both sides of the debate.

My previous post on "the salvia panic" are here, here, and here.

[Thanks to the Drug Policy Alliance's Tony Newman for the tip.]

Edwards for Obama

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:11:00 EDT

Marc Ambinder thinks he's uncovered the Mystery of Barack Obama's 6:30 p.m. "major endorsement." A top staffer is out of the office today. And...

What's Wendy Button, Edwards's longtime speechwriter, been doing lately? I hear she's been writing a secret speech... (Her facebook profile includes this entry for 3pm: "Wendy just finished writing the speech.")

How come Edwards's brain trust -- all of them -- are unreachable?

Who's on this flight?

That's some pretty good reporting. A little while after Ambinder posts a link to a lear jet flightpath from North Carolina to Michigan, the Associated Press reports that Edwards will endorse Obama.

reason's coverage of Edwards, never very positive, is collected here. The network chatter right now seems to focus on Edwards' appeal to white voters, and indeed, Clinton's recovery of late has come from downloading Edwards rhetoric and booting it up on her system. Something that really drives a stake into Hillary: Edwards has delegates. He has a mere 19 left over from the four primaries he participated in, but he has, at the lowest estimate, 13 delegates from currently-disqualified Florida. If Clinton succeeds in seating all of Florida's delegates as elected in the state's non-contested primary, she'll net only 28 delegates more than Obama and Edwards combined. Joe Trippi's fantasy about his ex-client as a kingmaker isn't that far-fetched.

Everyone Hates a Sad Professor

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:53:00 EDT

I think culture wars progress on a bell curve. A decade or ago conservatives ran Colorado from stem to stern and routed liberals on taxes, abortion law. In the late 90s and early 2000s the culture wars simmered down (we can argue about the role Columbine had in this) and the Democrats became more competitive. In 2004 the Democrats wrested a Senate seat and the state legislature from Republicans, and voila: the Ward Churchill scandal erupted. The fight is back in conservatives, but the stakes and gains are smaller.

Churchill's gone, and the University is poking around for a "professor of conservative thought." Tom Tancredo applies (with his tongue firmly in cheek):

I should be the clear favorite for the job, Tancredo said. Who doesnt want a slightly used Congressman, with a 98% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, educating their children?

As for his references, Tancredo listed conservative commentator Pat Buchanan as well as the entire Minutemen organization.

The Tancredo suggested curriculum would include Western Civilization and the threat of Islamofascism, English Only 101, and American Assimilation, which would replace Chicano and ethnic studies.

Tancredo also plans to secure the border around the CU campus with a 20 foot high fence.

Tancredo concluded, In addition to my experience as a teacher and politician, I promise to have immigration officials check every student prior to all my classes.

Via Michelle Malkin.

Attention D.C. Reasonoids: Come hear Bob Barr, Mike Gravel, Wayne Allyn Root, and Vern McKinley Discuss the Future of Libertarian Politics, Tuesday, May 20!

Wed, 14 May 2008 16:15:00 EDT

As the Republicans settled on John McCain to carry their banner into the 2008 presidential election, three things happened. First Mike Gravel, the iconoclastic former senator from Alaska, left the Democratic race to fight for the Libertarian Party nod. Then, former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, a Libertarian Party member since 2006, announced a bid for the party's presidential nomination. Finally, as the GOP's primaries wrapped up, Rep. Ron Paul notched a total of 1 million votes—just as his book The Revolution became a nationwide bestseller.

Paul has rebuffed multiple requests to run as a third party candidate, so what will happen to his supporters, donors, and voters? Why did Gravel and Barr join the Libertarian Party? Why do both of them want to see their former parties defeated at the ballot boxes? Should libertarians (note the small l) stay within the GOP ranks, as Paul has opted to do? Should they bolt for the Libertarians? The Democrats?

Joining Barr and Gravel will be:

- Wayne Allyn Root, a former Republican and self-described Goldwaterite who's also running hard for the Libertarian nomination.

- Vern McKinley, a "Ron Paul Republican" who's challenging incumbent Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) for a House seat in northern Virginia.

Be part of a live reason.tv audience and watch Barr, Gravel, Root and McKinley discuss these and related topics on Tuesday, May 20 at reason's DC HQ. Space is limited and RSVPs are mandatory.

What: The Future of Libertarian Politics
When: Tuesday, May 20, from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Where: reason DC HQ, 1747 Connecticut Avenue NW (near S Street)
RSVP: events@reason.com

Chicago Reverses Foie Gras Ban

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:12:00 EDT

A rare bit of sanity in the Windy City:

With Mayor Richard Daley running the vote, the Chicago City Council on Wednesday repealed its controversial ban on foie gras.

Over the shouted objections of Ald. Joe Moore (49th), the ban's sponsor, the council used a parliamentary manuever to put the ordinance on the floor for a vote.

The council voted 37-6 to repeal the two-year-old ban, which critics argued had made Chicago--and the City Council--a national laughingstock.

"National laughingstock" honors now fall on the entire state of California, which passed a fois gras ban set to take effect in 2012. Ald. Moore is apparently furious:

Moore, whose pleas for a debate were ignored by Daley, warned fellow aldermen "tomorrow it could happen to you."

I'm guessing Moore was referring to the parliamentary meneuver, and wasn't insinuating that America may one day crave the fatted livers of Chicago politicians over fava beans and a nice Chianti.

reason.tv chatted with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain about foie gras bans last November.

Beware, He's Possessed to Skate

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:42:00 EDT

It isn't easy being green. Just ask Al Gore. But for one eco-friendly Canadian, the price is 15 hots and a cot. Via Breitbart:

Lee Breen, 25, was ticketed in August 2007 for skateboarding on Fredericton City streets in easternmost Canada, but refused to pay the fine, and so a judge ordered him jailed for five days.

[...]

"The city says it wants its citizens to find alternative forms of transportation, and so I did," Breen said by telephone from outside Fredericton city hall, prior to his arrest.

"I completely bought into the 'green lifestyle.' I run a gas-free lawn care company and I don't drive. And now, they're putting me in jail for actually embracing an alternative form of transportation that cuts down on (CO2) emissions."

Whole thing here.

Oh, Ziggy, Will You Ever Win?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:32:00 EDT

Can anybody figure this out?

Writes the Comics Curmudgeon: "AOL-themed joke from 1998 + talking feces = desperate, desperate cry for help."

I tend to agree, but I'm not sure why.

Update: The Onion, of course, publishes Ziggy in Spanish, which makes it at least 15 percent funnier. Though I'm not sure why of that, either.

Alaska-Size Chutzpah

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:15:00 EDT

Congress Daily reports that Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, grilled Transportation Security Administrator Kip Hawley yesterday over his agency's plans for a 50-cent increase in airline passenger fees to pay for baggage screening equipment:

[Stevens was] adamant in opposing the 50-cent-per-flight fee increase, claiming that his constituents have to fly more intrastate than other Americans because of the size and difficult terrain of Alaska and are seeing none of the security improvements. "I don't know why we have to pay intrastate charges for security we don't get," he said.

And exactly what value would most Americans have gotten from the "bridges to nowhere" that Stevens notoriously championed a few years ago? With a price tag of $453 million, they would have cost every man, woman, and child in the country $1.50, three times the proposed TSA fee that riles Stevens. (Alaska ultimately got the money without explicit earmarks; one of the bridge projects has been canceled, while the other may yet proceed.) Even without those projects, Alaska excels at fleecing U.S. taxpayers, pulling in $1.84 for every dollar it sends to Washington, D.C., according to the Tax Foundation's numbers for 2005, when it ranked third by that measure, thanks largely to Stevens' tireless pork pulling.

Tracy Ingle Gets a Lawyer

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:15:00 EDT

Tracy Ingle is the Arkansas man I wrote about last week. He was shot five times during a no-knock drug raid on his home. Though police found no drugs, they charged him with running a drop operation, anyway, due they said to a scale and some plastic bags they found in his home. He's also charged with assaulting the police officers for pointing a broken gun at them when they broke into his bedroom and woke him. A few updates on his case:

• First, the good news. A couple of weeks ago while still researching the raid on Ingle's home, I called Arkansas defense attorney John Wesley Hall to get his thoughts on the case. This week, Hall agreed to represent Ingle. Hall is one of the best defense attorneys in the country. He's a former executive with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and argued the landmark no-knock raid case Wilson v. Arkansas before the U.S. Supreme Court. Ingle's defense (and possible lawsuit) is in good hands.

• I also spoke late last week with the prosecutor in the case, John Hout. Hout wouldn't go into the details of the case with me, but did confirm that (1) he plans to go ahead with both the drug and assault charges, (2) the officers who shot Ingle have been cleared of any wrongdoing, and (3) he can't release the affidavits from the raid despite the fact that they're public record, because the case is "an ongoing investigation." He did say the affidavits will be available to Ingle's attorney through discovery. I also spoke with the information officer of the North Little Rock Police Department. He also told me that the affidavits are off-limits.

• Finally, members of Ingle's family say the North Little Rock SWAT team visited Tracy Ingle again last week. This time, they came to his house asking for a man named Shawn Anthony Turner. Turner is Ingle's cousin, and has had frequent problems with the law—he has actually served time on drug charges. When Turner was released from prison several years ago, Ingle's mother agreed to have him released into her custody, mostly, she says, because no one else in the family would take him. For a short while, Turner lived in the home Ingle's mother (Turner's aunt) owned, along with Ingle and a few other roommates who came and went.. This is the same home the police raided in January. When Turner didn't clean up his act, the family threw him out. Turner continued to pester Tracy Ingle about letting him move in, the family says, and Ingle continued to refuse to allow it.

Tracy Ingle's family members now speculate that Turner somehow factored in to the January raid on Ingle's home. Ingle's house is Turner's last known address, though he hasn't lived there since mid-2006. Ingle's sister and mother believe either the police mistakenly raided the house while looking for Turner, or that Turner told the police Ingle was making methamphetamine in retaliation for Ingle's refusal to let Turner live in his home. Tracy Ingle's name doesn't appear anywhere on the search warrant for the raid.

Last week, when the police saw Ingle, they apparently recognized him, realized this was the same house they had raided months ago, realized Turner no longer lives at the address, and left.

A Crock of a Doctrine

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:45:00 EDT

My friend and former colleague Johan Norberg has just a devastating, 20-page debunking of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, a book he rightly calls "hopelessly flawed at virtually every level," with a thesis that rests on a "malevolent distortion" of Milton Friedman's views. The full report, released as a Cato Briefing Paper, is available here. A representative sample of Norberg busting Klein on bowdlerizing Friedman's writing:

When Klein talks about Friedman's suggestions to reduce inflation, she writes, "Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that ‘facilitate the adjustment.'"
Klein gives the impression that Friedman was brutal and wanted to inflict pain to disorient people and push his reforms through. The use of the words "psychological reactions" is also important, because Klein tries to associate liberal reforms with psychological torture and electrical shocks. But the quote in its entirety shows that Friedman had something very different in mind. He actually wrote that if a government chooses to attack inflation in this way: "I believe that it should be announced publicly in great detail . . . . The more fully the public is informed, the more will its reactions facilitate the adjustment."
In other words, if the people are not ignorant, and not disoriented, but fully informed of the reform steps, they would facilitate the adjustment by changing their behavior when it comes to negotiations, saving, consuming, and so on. Friedman's view was the complete opposite of what Klein pretends it is.

I wrote previously about Klein's book here and here. Matt Welch on "disaster capitalism" here.

Another Reason Long-Distance Relationships Don't Work

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:21:00 EDT

Domenico Salerno, a 35-year-old Italian lawyer, comes to Virginia several times a year to visit his American girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper, a 23-year-old copy editor he met a couple of years ago in Rome. Evidently that travel pattern triggered the suspicions of a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent, who stopped him from entering the country when he arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport on April 29. Although visitors from Italy do not need visas, CBP agents have the discretion to deny them entry—and exit. Instead of being sent back to Rome, Salerno was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which shipped him off to a jail in Virginia, where he was detained for 10 days, still officially not in the United States and therefore without legal recourse. The CBP agent claimed he thought Salerno would turn out to be an asylum seeker because he expressed a fear of being killed if he returned to Italy. Salerno, whose English is spotty, told Cooper he never said anything of the kind. ICE kept Salerno on ice despite the intervention of Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) and the efforts of two former immigration prosecutors hired by Cooper's family. After Cooper contacted The New York Times, he was finally released and driven to Dulles, where he caught a flight back to Rome on Friday. Cooper is thinking of following him there, and staying.

Salerno had the benefit of affluent, well-connected American friends. Other visitors who are arbitrarily detained are not so lucky:

"We have a lot of government people here and lobbyists and lawyers and very educated, very savvy Washingtonians," said Jim Cooper, Ms. Cooper's father, a businessman, describing the reaction in his neighborhood, the Wessynton subdivision of Alexandria. "They were pretty shocked that the government could do this sort of thing, because it doesn't happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans."

New at Reason

Wed, 14 May 2008 12:30:00 EDT

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) both have new books out. But while Paul's has raced to the top of the charts, Hagel's is already long forgotten. Associate Editor David Weigel explains why.

You Won't Fool the Children of the rEVOLution

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:30:00 EDT

Before there was Ron Paul the New York Times best-selling author—go on, keep rolling that around on your tongue—there was Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who made floor statements in the House of Representatives when no one was listening. Before that there was Ron Paul, the roving libertarian politico and the publisher of countless monthly newsletters written in a voice curiously wittier than his own. And before that there was Ron Paul, founder of the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, table-pounding advocate for the gold standard, a lecturer to anyone who would listen.

Paul is 72 years old. He has been reading libertarian philosophy for close to 50 years and writing it for more than 30. That his labors should finally bear fruit now, at the end of a presidential bid where he succeeded beyond a fool's dream by simply reiterating all those decades' worth of opinions, carries a kind of irony. All of the quirks of his presidential bid make more sense. Why did he give the same dense, 40-minute speech at every stop? Why didn't he get into the muck with the rest of the GOP candidates, even when he started to out-fundraise them? Hey, he was trying to tell you people: He wasn't running for president; he was spreading a message.

It is impossible to imagine his new book, The Revolution: A Manifesto, selling in droves, or even being published at all, if Paul had not run his quixotic presidential race. We have proof. Sharing the shelves with Paul's book is another political tome that, if you based your judgments on the elite-media love machine, you'd assume would be racing up the charts. Republican Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel's policy sheaf-cum-memoir, America: Our Next Chapter, (with the additional and aggrandizing subtitle Tough Questions, Straight Answers) comes after three fat years of Sunday show bookings, warm profiles in magazines such as GQ, and unkillable rumors that he was about to announce a presidential bid. Released two months ago, the book is already forgotten.

Hagel was supposed to be the Republicans' anti-war presidential candidate. Failing that, he was supposed to be the natural vice-presidential candidate of a third party "unity" candidacy. The praise and hopes cascaded because Hagel, who voted for the 2002 Iraq resolution, was nonetheless the highest-profile and most-credible (by dint of his service in Vietnam) Republican critic of the war in Iraq.

High-profile does not necessarily mean high-minded. In an early, critical profile of Hagel, National Review's John J. Miller bitingly labeled the senator's attacks on Bush policy as "Hagelian dialect" and "declamations that may sound weighty when spoken but become insubstantial on the printed page." God only knows why Hagel decided to prove this by putting words on a page. There are two recurring motifs in America: Our Next Chapter, and both are devastating to Hagel's image as a deep political thinker.

The first is simple banality. There is enough corn in these pages to solve the world food crisis and forge ethanol with the leftovers. "I remember the first time that I had a real sense of the stakes in global power politics," Hagel writes. "I was in Mr. Sheridan's history class at St. Bonaventure High School, in Columbus, Nebraska." How does he view the Senate? "The floor...is a more majestic setting than a crab bucket, but the behavior of the inhabitants is quite similar."

The second Hagelian device is what I'd call the "outsight"—the opposite of an insight, already quite obvious to readers but thuddingly profound for him. Yes, Hagel was right about Iraq, but the way he writes about foreign policy starts you wondering if he just lucked out this time. "Like its rival India," he writes, "Pakistan is an enormous, sprawling, chaotic land." Albeit one-quarter the size of India and the victim of four successful military coups to India's none. When Hagel isn't thumbing a world almanac, he's recounting the meetings he's held with world leaders, diplomats—people who, in their wisdom, agree with him about most things.

Hagel writes like this because his ideas are not powerful enough to inspire much more. He is not a non-interventionist; his big insight about America's proper place in the world is that the world is changing. "Of course I want our country to ‘win,'" Hagel writes, "but we must ask precisely what does ‘winning' mean and we need to ask that question before the first shot is fired." But this is the only problem Hagel sees with intervention. He has nothing to say about the interventions of the 1990s, even though he voted against them after entering the Senate in 1997. Hagel is a big believer in soft power. But if pushed, he says, "We would mount preemptive strikes against our enemy." The problem with the Iraqi preemptive strike was that the enemy we should have been preempting was stateless. This isn't much of an ideology. It's John Kerry's 2004 platform.

By contrast, Ron Paul's The Revolution could have been written if the congressman had passed on 2008. Paul's arguments about the money supply, foreign policy, and the Constitution have been honed for decades. The only new thing between these covers is confidence. "I have never seen such a diverse coalition rallying to a single banner," Paul writes of his campaign. "Republicans, Democrats, independents, Greens, constitutionalists, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, antiwar activists, homeschoolers, religious conservatives, freethinkers...these folks typically found, to their surprise, that they rather liked each other."

The Revolution is filled with long quotes from Paul's favored philosophers and economists. It is one giant annotation to his campaign speeches. It's also a correction to some parts of his campaign. The people who thought Paul's aggressive Tom Tancredo-esque push against illegal immigration was a mistake are proven right: There is almost nothing about immigration here. There is nothing you could call right-wing populism, and while this will probably become the most popular work of Murray Rothbard-inspired libertarianism, it rejects Rothbard's late-life strategizing about the benefits of resentment politics. The Revolution is as colorblind and class-blind as any Sesame Street script. The only people readers are told to resent are the politicians and the media bosses—whom Paul compares to Pravda editors—who tell Americans there is no alternative to fiat currency and American empire.

Hagel and Paul both confront readers who, like the rest of the country, have absolutely no confidence in their leaders and no trust in what they say. Hagel tells them to buck up: "The urgency of our unsettled times demands that America acts wisely, with resolve and a common purpose." Paul tells them that they're being lied to, and he's here to tell the truth. "Few Americans realize just how costly our foreign policy is," Paul writes, referring to human lives as well as trillions of dollars. "The terrorists have played us like a fiddle." Americans are also misinformed about how our current health care system evolved, or why their dollar is worth less. They're being lied to about trade: "True free trade occurs in the absence of government intervention in the free flow of goods across borders." Paul attacks the World Trade Organization because it "makes trade relations worse by providing our foreign competitors with a collective means to attack U.S. trade interests." In each case, a foreign or elite power is hoodwinking Americans into trading the system of the Founders for a system making them less free.

Paul never sounds as certain as when he gets to link this all to monetary policy. He's rarely less convincing. Paul sees a direct link between central banking, fiat currency, and the economic crises that he argues wreck the average American's prosperity and empower thugs. A financial collapse, he prophesies, "becomes more likely every day." He proposes legalizing precious metals as currency and killing sales and capital gains taxes on metals to stave off the crisis. It's all packaged as a monetary twist on Pascal's wager: "If we're wrong, then all we've done is eliminate some taxes on gold and silver. No harm done." This is awfully optimistic. The 19th century's booms and busts were far more damaging to livelihoods and to economic systems than anything in the fiat money era. They provided much steadier footing for radical movements. Paul's overheated worry about a Weimar Republic-style collapse kicks the legs out from underneath the argument.

That's what doesn't work. Paul's narrow-eyed certainty about the elites' concealment of the truth can be irritating, especially when he marshalls so many libertarian thinkers—Nozick, Hayek, Mises—to undergird an occasionally specious ideology. But it is an ideology. Paul has a grand unified theory to offer readers, knowing full well that he's opening minds, not programming them. Hagel offers his readers safe ideas and easy paeans to "leadership." Paul offers readers, first and foremost, the lesson that "leaders" and universally accepted concepts shouldn't be trusted. It is worried and informed neostructuralists who can change things, not historical "great men." If Ron Paul doesn't provide perfect solutions, he certainly provides a blueprint.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.