Reason Foundation

see also Magazine (7/14) [i confused with Human Events?] and

Reason Public Policy Institute and Reason Magazine, Reason Foundation makes an unparalleled contribution to the cause of liberty."

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Politicians want to fix the economy. So why do they keep making it worse?

REASON

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2025

https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1743&context=lawreview

Uncharitable Think Tanks 207

Institution—also led in the earlier one, with only slight shifts otherwise.229 • From 2010 on, the top funders were Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, and the Scaife, Bradley, and Koch family foundations. The Devos family foundations rose to join the ranks of the top ten. • Grants channeled through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund accounted for 13.7% of the total. • 74% of all contributions came from completely unidentified sources. • }:}:

After AEI, Heritage and Hoover, the largest recipients were Cato, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Mercatus Center, the Acton Institute, the State Policy Network, the Reason Foundation, Heartland, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. From 2003 to 2018, Brulle and his co-authors tallied total gifts to this cohort of $9.77 billion 230—a sum that refutes the mistaken notion that charitable giving is small dollars, and influential only at the margin. Now for the thought experiment.

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During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan led a fragile right-wing coalition that included everyone from neocons to libertarians to evangelical Christian fundamentalists and the Religious Right. There was plenty of infighting within the Reagan coalition back then; Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and the Moral Majority's Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. were bitter foes. Now, in 2026 — more than a year into Donald Trump's second presidency — divisions on the right persist.

Some of Trump's most enthusiastic supporters are Religious Right evangelicals, while Never Trumpers include a variety of neocons and libertarians. In an op-ed published by the New York Times on February 9, Reason editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward lays out a variety of ways in which Trump's second presidency embodies everything that libertarians oppose.

"On immigration, speech and trade," Mangu-Ward warns, "Americans are living in a libertarian's nightmare. Masked federal officials are swarming areas far from the border, shooting American citizens and whisking away children in the name of immigration enforcement. Armed National Guardsmen walk the streets of several cities under the banner of vague emergency mandates to maintain law and order. Legal visa holders are being deported for expressing their opinions on Gaza and Charlie Kirk. Tariffs on China have been set at 10, 20, 54, 145 and 30 percent in just the last few months. The ownership of TikTok, Intel and U.S. Steel have all become matters in which the president has taken a personal interest — and threatened dire consequences if his wishes are not taken into account."

The Reason editor-in-chief continues, "These stories represent a terrifying pattern and an undeniable vindication of the long-held libertarian view that the steady growth in the size of the federal government and executive power would lead to precisely this kind of runaway authoritarianism."

" Trump 2.0," according to Mangu-Ward argues, "has made the libertarian case more obvious, even as libertarians have been consigned to the fringes."

"Consider Mr. Trump's record on free speech," Mangu-Ward argues. "For years, he has been threatening to give libel laws more bite and pull licenses from unsympathetic broadcasters…. Mr. Trump has a record of threatening media and platforms under various statutory and emergency authorities…. The good news is that Americans are increasingly waking up to the dark reality of our overbearing federal government."

The Reason editor-in-chief adds, "A Gallup survey released in October 2025 found that a record-high 62 percent say the federal government has 'too much power,' up from 51 percent a year ago and the highest since the question was first asked in 2002…. Similarly, Americans of all stripes have turned dramatically against Mr. Trump’s ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) enforcement actions. There could be — a libertarian can still dream — a grass-roots movement to shrink government that doesn't end up co-opted by one of the major parties, as the Tea Party was."

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AN 9 24

alternet-no lnx

Inside the billionaire's trick to keep people from voting

Thom Hartmann

September 23, 2024

Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.

Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.

In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it strong over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:

In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35

It means nothing, in other words, if average people are ground into the dirt. But when people who inherited wealth face challenges, particularly those from average working families, they should be able to utterly destroy them.

ALSO READ: Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push

In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge, and greed.”

While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.

Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.

That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.

The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.

The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.

As Mark Ames wrote:

The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism and neoliberalism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.36

Friedman was later implicated in the aftermath of the brutal and violent takedown of democracy in Chile, and his acolytes helped privatize the state-owned properties of the Soviet Union, creating the kleptocratic and oligarchic government that now runs Russia and many of the former Soviet states. Libertarianism, it turns out, has had real-world impacts, which include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

No country has ever successfully established a libertarian form of economy or governance; it was, after all, a scam set up to front for the very rich, and the corporations that made them that way. But that hasn’t stopped libertarian and corporatist ideologues from trying.

While Chile and Russia are well-known examples, few Americans seem to remember how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld simply stood on the sidelines watching as the treasures of Iraq were looted after the United States took down their government.

It was to be a Grand Experiment: they’d finally prove that without government interference in a nation’s economy or social systems, an utopia would emerge. L. Paul Bremer was their front man, arriving in Iraq on May 2, 2003, to begin the process of “freeing” the country’s economy so that the world’s corporations would flood in and create a paradise.

As Naomi Klein wrote for Harper’s Magazine in an article titled “Baghdad Year Zero”:

The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”

One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.37

Once again, Milton Friedman, the FEE’s heirs, and libertarianism made a few more billionaires and destroyed the lives of literally millions of people.

The source of the funds being channeled to Friedman back in 1949 was a man named Herbert Nelson, who was the chief lobbyist and executive vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which not only was opposed to rent control laws but also had one of the largest lobbying budgets in Washington, DC.

Congressional investigators found a letter he wrote in 1949 saying:

“I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote.

“I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”38

Although the details are still a bit fuzzy, it appears that libertarianism (and the creation of a political party using that name) was Nelson’s idea, or at least one he promoted vigorously. With a budget of over $60 million (in today’s dollars), Nelson hired the FEE to come up with a third party that would argue for the interests of the wealthy developers and landlords he represented. The FEE, in turn, hired Milton Friedman.

Reason Magazine, heavily funded by the Kochs, was the main voice of the libertarian movement in the 1970s, and in 1977 it published a fascinating article by Moshe Kroy that described how libertarians should market their free-market fundamentalism to skeptical Americans.

Noting that it was important not to lie to people outright, Kroy wrote:

“The point is that you can use tricks—and you’d better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance.”39

The tricks involved repackaging and reframing libertarian dogma and using “salesmanship.”

For example, Kroy asserted that the average person wouldn’t understand an abstraction like individual rights. So don’t even bother explaining how libertarianism would shrink government and empower corporations and the rich. “Instead,” Kroy wrote”

“[W]hat you can do is to explain to him that libertarianism is just against one thing: CRIME. By crime you mean just what he means: theft, robbery, kidnapping, enslavement. He will of course agree, because he thinks this is obvious. Then you just explain (at great length, and with many examples) that taxation is armed robbery, that inflation through deficit spending and money printing is theft—as well as forgery of money—that draft is basically kidnapping, etc.”40

This was something the average person could understand. The government that people thought would protect them from polluting corporations, would provide an efficient court and fiscal system to protect their jobs and bank accounts from corporate grifters, and would defend their lives in war if necessary—that government was, in fact, an evil thing.

If the billionaires could get the average American to look at government the way that oil, chemical, real estate, and banking industry billionaires did, and just elect politicians who were bought and paid for by those industries, then things would get very, very easy.

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CA stinktank

https://californiapolicycenter.org/ill-timed-fossil-fuel-pension-disinvestment-bill-threatens-economy/

as international tensions threaten US and global energy supplies, the California State Senate is considering legislation that would compel public pension funds to divest from fossil fuel companies, potentially starving these firms of capital. The Senate bill is the latest in a series of initiatives designed to replace traditional portfolio management with a set of shifting environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment mandates that could harm public employees, taxpayers, and the nation’s economy.

The proposed law, Senate Bill 1173, apples to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), which collectively manage close to $800 billion of taxpayer funds intended to provide pensions for state and local government employees, as well as teachers and professors across California. Both pension funds have far less money than they need to cover promised retirement benefits over the coming decades and are largely relying on strong investment returns to close their funding gaps.

Limiting the discretion of pension board members and investment managers to maximize risk-adjusted returns could ultimately lead to tax increases or lower-than-expected benefits for retirees if these pension systems don’t have the money to provide benefits already promised to workers. While public employee pensions enjoy strong legal protections in California, they are not guaranteed to keep up with inflation, and insufficient funding restricts the systems’ ability to provide cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) to retirees.

Historically, California lawmakers have understood that public pension systems have a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers, employees, and retirees. Article XVI, Section 17b of the California State Constitution includes the following:

The members of the retirement board of a public pension or retirement system shall discharge their duties with respect to the system solely in the interest of, and for the exclusive purposes of providing benefits to, participants and their beneficiaries, minimizing employer contributions thereto, and defraying reasonable expenses of administering the system.

Employer contributions as mentioned in this section refer to pension fund payments made by state and local governments, as well as local education agencies, mostly with taxpayer funds. The authors of SB 1173, State Sens. Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) and Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco), seem to understand that the state constitution imposes a fiduciary responsibility on the state’s pension boards, but try to exclude fossil fuel investments from this mandate, stating in the bill:

The purpose of this section is to require the Public Employees’ Retirement System and the State Teachers’ Retirement System, consistent with, and not in violation of, their fiduciary responsibilities, to divest their holdings of fossil fuel company investments as one part of the state’s broader efforts to decarbonize the California economy and to transition to clean, pollution-free energy resources.

Given this potential conflict the senators have included provisions in SB 1173 indemnifying CalPERS and CalSTRS board members, employees, and contractors from any legal liability if pension fund stakeholders decide to sue them for failing to meet their fiduciary responsibilities by liquidating fossilfuel investments.

CalPERS and CalSTRS are tasked with providing the pension benefits they’ve promised to workers, not promoting the state’s energy or climate change goals. With Russia invading Ukraine and international sanctions ratcheting up, it is possible that Russia, the world’s third largest energy producer, may eventually be ejected from global energy markets for an extended period.

California’s gas prices, currently nearly $5 per gallon, highlight the need a robust domestic energy market. Although some may see high gasoline prices as a good way to combat climate change by reducing driving, Californians on modest incomes may not be able to use public transit or buy a pricey new electric Tesla. Many Californians have little choice but to pay more at the pump to get to work and essential locations, thus reducing their spending on other items. Ultimately, efforts to prevent capital from making its way to companies that provide oil and gas could hurt the pocketbooks of California’s families.

To be clear, CalPERS and CalSTRS do not need to go out of their way to invest in oil and gas companies, they should simply invest in whatever will best ensure they’ll have the assets to pay for the pension benefits promised to workers. And state lawmakers shouldn’t restrict those efforts or force their environmental or social goals onto pension fund managers.

Entrepreneurs are developing many tools to transition us away from fossil fuels, if that’s what Californians want. The best options involve private capital and innovation reducing the cost and increasing the availability of renewable energy sources, including wind, solar, and nuclear. However, forcing public pension funds to potentially undermine the US domestic market for oil and natural gas before the economy is ready to fully replace these alternatives would be an unforced error that could also hurt taxpayers and pensioners.

Marc Joffe is a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation.

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Resistance from the Right

Ambitious rail plans have been subjected to a fierce campaign of disparagement in recent months. The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Reason Foundation have worked particularly hard to defeat the Obama rail plan, Todorovich told the gathering of about 30 journalists from around the country.

For companies that profit from the highway system and automobile-reliant means of transportation, the libertarian or conservative foundations have proven to be useful torch-bearers. SourceWatch, part of the Center for Media and Democracy, reports that Ford Motor, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell Oil, and theWestern States Petroleum Association have been among the donors to the Reason Foundation. David H. Koch of Koch Industries,  once described by the Center for Public Integrity as "the biggest oil company you have never heard of," is a Reason trustee.

SourceWatch says Chevron, ExxonMobil, and the auto-maker Honda have been among Heritage’s contributors, though corporate donations to Heritage are small when compared than those made by individuals and foundations. Over the years, Heritages backers in the foundation world have included the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and three Scaife foundations.

Cato, founded by Edward H. Crane and Charles Koch, has over the years received donations from corporate supporters including the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil,General Motors, Honda North America, Toyota, Volkswagen of America, and Wal-Mart Stores, according to SourceWatch.

Nonetheless, Todorovich thinks rail projects can gain considerable support from the populace and some of it from Republicans who hold elective office.  After the new governor of Florida, Rick Scott, rejected $2.4 billion in federal funds for the Orlando-Tampa rail route, 24 states, including 11 with Republican governors, applied for portions of the money that Florida gave up.

Debunking high-speed rail myths

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ron b

ExxonMobil has been a supporter of the Reason Foundation. Folks at the foundation confirmed when I called yesterday that the company has donated a little over $250,000 since 2000. The company's latest contributions were $10,000 in 2003 and $20,000 this past January. The last contribution poses a possible conundrum for hard-line corporate conspiracy theorists because it arrived about five months after I declared, "We're All Global Warmers Now." I would suggest that ExxonMobil supports the Reason Foundation because my colleagues robustly defend the free enterprise system. "Follow the money" is often pretty good advice when evaluating the source of information, but in the think tank and public policy magazine realm money tends follow opinion, rather than the other way around.

As further disclosure, I have worked with various organizations that I am told have also received grants from ExxonMobil, including CEI and the online publication TCSDaily (formerly TechCentralStation

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Who is Richard Fink?

Charles Koch and Richard Fink go back forty years. Fink recently retired as vice president of Koch Industries where for decades he had held a seat on the board of the second largest privately controlled corporation in the U.S. Koch has been the CEO of the family business for more than 50 years. Fink began his career of political influence as an economics professor at Rutgers University and then George Mason University, where he helped launch what became the Mercatus Center with Koch to help operationalize his agenda through training a “cadre” to influence national policymakers in D.C.

In 1979, Koch created a group called Council for a Competitive Economy and Fink testified before the House Subcommittee on Postal Operations and Services calling for Congress to repeal the government “monopoly” on first class mail. In 1984, Charles Koch staked Fink at the successor to that group, dubbed Citizens for a Sound Economy (which is now called Americans for Prosperity), as a vehicle to influence the Reagan administration to advance Koch’s goals on privatization and other libertarian theories...

Alhough Koch had largely abandoned the Libertarian Party around this time in favor of trying to move the GOP toward his wide-reaching agenda, he did not abandon his policy goals. His agenda was to seek radical changes to limit the power of democratic government, using large steps and small steps to carve or chip away at it through any means available. (ITPI Executive Director, Donald Cohen, has documented how privatization as an economic strategy has grown into a political strategy.) Fink was also the Director of the Koch-funded and -created Center for the Study of Market Processes at George Mason University, which started in 1980. It is now known as the Mercatus Center.

Koch began funding his pet projects at that little-known public school in the D.C. suburbs four decades ago. To date, more than $100 million has come from the Koch fortune to the university, its law school, and other entities associated with the campus, like Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies. In the 1970s, Koch had focused his energies on building up the Libertarian Party (founded by another MIT grad, David Nolan, who joined the fraternity the Kochs had) and creating his own foundation, which became the Cato Institute. Back then, Cato operated almost as an adjunct to the Libertarian Party, with key staff like Ed Crane revolving between the two entities depending on the election season.

Cato also advanced Koch’s privatization ideology and continues to do so to this day, attacking the Postal Service in numerous ways. With Koch also becoming the biggest funder of the Libertarian Party in 1976,  its platform expanded to include a host of items aligned with Koch’s agenda. For the first time that year its platform provided: “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service…. Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free private competition in all aspects of postal service.” That was also in the party’s 1980 platform. That’s the year David Koch ran for vice president and spent more than $2 million to fund the party’s bid for the White House and to pull Reagan to the right.

Although it garnered less than 1 percent of the vote, the Libertarian Party’s sentiments were embraced by Reagan in many ways, such as his famous line at his inauguration that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Reagan created the Grace Commission, using the phrase “drain the swamp,” to deputize corporate leaders to identify government functions that could be outsourced or sold off to the private sector. Fink along with Citizens for a Sound Economy used the Grace Commission’s efforts to press for wide privatization. That Commission expressly recommended that the Postal Service outsource thousands of post offices (primarily rural ones) to the private sector to operate as limited service contract stations. That would have been a major step toward privatization, in the early 1980s, while yet another Koch man was pushing to privatize public institutions and functions at all levels of government, at home and abroad...

the  Postal Service was not always the target for privatization or the equivalent by GOP-aligned policymakers. That agenda took hold in the 1980s. But the seed was planted a decade before that. In 1968, the libertarian Reason magazine published one of the first articles in the country asking “Why Not a Laissez Faire Postal System?”

Reason embraced the radical idea of getting rid of this public institution as part of its devotion to the libertarian theory that the free market knows best and can do best. This is rooted in part in Friedrich Hayek’s “Constitution of Liberty” (1960) and Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” (1962), two economists Koch has heavily promoted over the years. This line of attack on the Postal Service was very much against the tide of strong bipartisan public support for the post office. In 1970, Congress reaffirmed that the Postal Service was an essential public institution and public service.

Congress also limited its ability to close post offices, particularly in rural areas, even as the Postal Service changed in 1970 from a cabinet position to a government-owned corporation. (Federal Express [now FedEx] was launched in 1971 to provide private courier services for a premium.) In 1970, Congress affirmed that: “The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people.”

Congress also said the Service's mission is “to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.” In 1970, MIT engineer Robert Poole bought Reason and, with Tibor Machan and Manny Klausner, began operating it as a for-profit under the rubric Reason Enterprises. Reason needed ad revenues to survive, and it turns out Koch supplied a substantial portion of them along with loans.

It was Koch who staked Poole at the fledgling Reason in the early 1970s. In Poole’s history of the magazine marking its 10th anniversary in 1978, he thanked Koch, writing: “In the first few years of Reason’s California existence, one of its important sources of security was the long-term commitment of advertising by the Institute for Humane Studies and the Center for Independent Education. Ken Templeton, George Pearson, and Charles Koch of those institutions have been loyal friends and supporters over the years.” Koch himself founded the Center for Independent Education with Pearson in 1970, and then took over the Institute for Humane Studies after F.A. “Baldy” Harper died in 1973. In his tribute, Poole also singled out Koch as among a handful of individual donors who personally supported Reason in its first decade...

who is poole?

privatization was not even a gimmick let alone a word in the dictionary until a business writer named Peter Drucker predicted “reprivatization” of public functions in Europe in the late 1960s.Robert W. Poole Jr., an MIT engineer and fan of Ayn Rand, took it a step further in 1980 by popularizing the term “privatization.” After Robert Poole took over Reason magazine, Koch and his personal assistant, George Pearson, submitted articles to the magazine from its early days. In 1978, after consulting with Charles Koch, Poole co-founded the Reason Foundation, serving as its president and CEO from then until 2000.

He has advised the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations on privatization and transportation policy. With Koch’s investment in Poole and Reason as his platform, Poole became the national expert on privatization. However—as Mark Ames noted in his profile of how Poole’s fee-based government helped spawn unjust municipalities like Ferguson, Missouri—Poole may have popularized the term but it was Nazi Germany that had coined the word “privatization.” Koch and Poole were aligned in other ways, with both of these MIT-trained engineers seeking to systematically inculcate people with libertarian theories and get those true believers into power.Poole described this goal in his 1971 essay “Leverage Points for Social Change” where he promoted the “permeation” of libertarians into key policy positions, noting that they only accounted for at most 0.05 percent of the U.S. population. 

Koch would later note that permeation, or, in his words, “infiltration,” of government would only be successful if the libertarians who got in “reduce[d] government,” unlike Friedman whom Koch said did not. To help mark Reason’s 10th anniversary, Koch also engaged in a colloquy with Poole and others, about the “radical” nature of their theories and the need to attract followers. Koch noted: “For example, with Social Security, we can be very radical and say, ’Abolish Social Security’ … Or we can say, ’Well, it’s very complicated, and therefore we have to one-percent-a year move out of Social Security.’” That issue of the magazine also reprised one of the attacks on the Postal Service’s “first class mail monopoly.” As Poole recently wrote: “From January 1971 through June 1978 we published every month, like clockwork, but by 1977 it was clear that for Reason to have serious impact, we needed full-time paid staff and a serious budget for growth. Tibor, Manny, and I developed the plan for what became the Reason Foundation.

Thanks to an angel investor, we had enough funds to make the transition, and we opened our doors in downtown Santa Barbara in July 1978.” Thanks to research by Nancy MacLean in her book “Democracy in Chains,” we now know who that investor was. None other than Charles Koch—whom Poole didn’t mention in that 2016 retrospective; by that by the time the Koch name had become infamous. I had several visits … to discuss specific ideas the Reagan administration was considering, such as devolving federal functions to state and local government and privatizing the Postal Service. A Think Tank for Liberty (2018), p. 135. inthepublicinterest.org | The 

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“On the tenth anniversary of Reason, in 1978, Poole convened a strategy session. Every man in the room looked to Charles Koch when talk turned to funding an infrastructure of ’professional libertarians,’ for who else could? The Wichita CEO was willing to commit the resources needed, he said, but with one condition: ’that libertarians must remain uncompromisingly radical.’ They had to forswear “the temptation” to “compromise” with those currently in positions of power. Any such conciliation, Koch warned, would ’destroy the movement.’ With Koch’s backing, Poole ’started working full-time for the cause,’ enlisting ’economic reasoning and evidence.’” 

It was that meeting that led to the creation of the Reason Foundation, with Poole at the helm. The foundation became the publisher of the magazine and its own “think tank.” In 1979, Reason Foundation started full-scale operations and Poole devoted time to his opus on privatization, a book that melded his prior consulting work with the mission of Reason magazine. That book, “Cutting Back City Hall,” was published in 1980. Poole’s “catalytic” work on privatization helped spur more calls to privatize an array of public functions, including public schools. In his acknowledgements, Poole thanked “the Reason Foundation for allowing me to use their facilities during much of the time this book was in preparation.” But that sentence elided the reality, which was that Poole was the Reason Foundation and Koch was the angel investor in that enterprise to radically change American government. Poole’s book also contained a forward by William E. Simon, president of the John M. Olin Foundation, which had begun funding chairs for “free market” professors at universities across the country.

Simon suggested that municipal fire departments and tennis courts were “a form of local socialism.” Simon noted that Poole’s objective “is truly to subvert” local government functions by replacing them with private businesses, and he expressed the hope that it would “serve as a wellspring for changes that reach state and federal government as well.” Poole’s Koch-backed strategy and tactics would also reach governments beyond these shores, far exceeding Simon’s wishes. According to a biographer of United Kingdom Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher, Poole’s book was seminal to her efforts to privatize or contract out key public functions—except that she refused to privatize the Royal Mail:“The intellectual case for ’contracting out’ came from an American MIT-trained policy wonk, Bob Poole, head of the Reason Foundation in Santa Barbara and author of a little book called ’Cutting Back on City Hall’… Everything—literally everything—could be outsourced and he littered his book with examples and figures…” Twenty-five years later, Thatcher would join Poole in celebrating privatization at the 20th anniversary of Reason’s Annual Privatization Report.”

That annual report was launched a few years after Poole’s book. Reason’s 1986 ”report on the status of privatization to date and important developments of that year … garnered enough attention from policymakers that Messrs. Koch and Poole determined that it was worth continuing.” The Koch that Reason was thanking for that publication was not Charles, however: “Reason owes a debt of gratitude to David Koch, and APR would not have flourished without his commitment to market-based tools that enable individuals, institutions, and societies to survive

[ inthepublicinterest.org | The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service 16]

and prosper. It is thanks to Mr. Koch’s vision and support that the Annual Privatization Report has become the nation’s foremost publication on privatization, outsourcing, and government reform.”

This report was issued on the eve of the push by Charles Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy, by his operative Richard Fink—and by James Miller, the OMB director Fink had helped win confirmation— to launch the Commission on Privatization. That commission, created by President Reagan, would recommend privatizing the Postal Service and other government functions. Koch family-controlled foundations have given the Reason Foundation at least $3 million— that is excluding more than a decade of tax filings that are unavailable. That tally also does not include funding from Koch Industries, if any, or from any personal checks from Charles or David Koch. It does not include the amount Charles Koch’s various groups spent on advertising in Reason over the past 40 years. …

Conclusion

The Postal Service has withstood more than two hundred years of dramatic changes in our country—until its very existence became a target of a billionaire devoted to the theory of privatizing government’s public functions in every way possible....

democ chains

b/c can't win democ, hired Rothbard, M fan of lenin, need movement, so cadre; Crane also rad; on surface ref to cato's ltrs FF, but also Cato elder; "Carthage must be destroyed"[scife fdn?]; overthrow unions, corps that want gov't $ and intellectuals who support gov't action 141 parasites; shocked conserv when called for no foreign war, weed, prostitution;

Reason fdn: pvtize all Poole YAF; pvtize bit by bit

==

PIC  http://web.archive.org/web/20080408184808/http://www.apcto.org/pdf/Segal-Commission-on-PrisonAbuse.pdf

Comparing Public and Private Prisons on Quality

Geoffrey F. Segal

Director of Government Reform

Reason Foundation

The most important body of evidence on the relative quality of privatized correctional facilities

comes from a wealth of studies performed by government agencies, universities, auditors, and

research organizations. In 2002 Reason Foundation conducted a literature review of all available

studies comparing public and private facilities.1

We identified 17 studies that use various

approaches to measure the relative quality of care at correctional facilities managed by

government vs. private firms—15 of which conclude that quality at private facilities is as good or

better than at government-run facilities...

AlterNet [1] / By Steven Rosenfeld [2]

Non-Violent Offenders Fill Jails in Prison Nation’s Worst State: Louisiana

October 30, 2013|

The United States is the world’s foremost prison nation—with the highest percentage of people behind [3] bars—and Louisiana is its capital, with the most senseless mix of lengthy sentences for non-violent crimes, skyrocketing prison costs, and little evidence that its “lock ‘em up and forget ‘em” policies have reduced violence.

That’s the conclusion by a coalition of libertarian groups seeking [4] sentencing reform in the state with highest incarceration rate—especially for non-violent drug offenses—who, along with Louisiana’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter, have launched a joint campaign to try to unwind one of America’s nastiest prison systems.

“When thePelican Institute and the ACLUcombine on a topic, comedians may lick their chops,” wrote [5] James Varney, a New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist. “Or folks could conclude, ‘It’s time…’

Time is a curious word to use when describing how terrible Louisiana’s court system is. Despite some recent attempts to give judges some discretion in sentencing non-violent offenders, decades of mandatory sentencing laws—overwhelmingly snaring [6] the state’s African-American population—add up to years in jail. According to a Mother Jones analysis [6], Blacks make up 33 percent of the population, but 76 percent of prisoners.

ACLU Executive Director Marjorie Esman told a recent sentencing forum that one-in-86 Louisiana adults are in prison—double the national average, Louisiana Weekly reported [7]. “Esman said that one out of three black men in Louisiana are under some kind of correctional control… and the fact that Black men are more likely to go to jail for pot than white men.”

“As of December 31, 2012, there were approximately 242 inmates serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for non-violent drug and property crimes,” the “Smart on Sentencing, Smart on Crime” report [4] from theReason Foundation, Pelican Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation said. “These laws have been disproportionately applied to non-violent crimes, nonviolent offenders now account for the majority of inmates and admissions to prison in the state.”

Elsewhere in the country, the Reason Foundation has promoted [8] privatizing prisons.But their latest report emphasized that Louisiana was wasting tax dollars and not stopping the most serious crimes.

This has produced a number of unfortunate consequences, such as an increase in the state’s prison population from 21,007 in 1992 to 39,709 in 2011 and a $315 million increase in correction expenditures during the same time period, from $442.3 million (in 2011 dollars) in 1992 to $757.4 million in 2011. Meanwhile, there is little evidence that the laws have done anything to reduce Louisiana’s violent crime rate, which remains considerably above both the national average and the rates in its neighboring states. Today, Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the country, with 868 of every 100,000 of its citizens in prison.

What’s particularly eyebrow-raising is that “numerous violent crimes, such as negligent homocide, manslaughter, aggravated assault with a firearm, aggravated battery, simple rape and simple kidnapping carry no mandatory minimum at all,” Reason reported. In contrast, Louisiana law—especially drug laws—draw “essentially trivial lines between degrees of criminal activity that can result in dramatic differences in punishment.”

The report offers glaring examples. Possessing 199.9 grams of cocaine has a mandatory minimum sentence of five year of hard labor plus a $50,000 fine, while possessing 200 gram doubles the time at hard labor sentence and fine. Five years of hard labor and a $50,000 fine is also the penalty for “offenders convicted of growing or selling any amount of marijuana,” it notes.

The analysis goes on to describe how repeat offenders face complex sentencing formulas that add up to years, if not decades, spent in jail—often at hard labor.

“To see how this works, consider a defendant who is convicted of distributing or cultivating any amount of marijuana as a first offense. She will then be subject to serve a mandatory minimum sentence of five years of hard labor in prison. If within 10 years of release, she is convicted for the same offense, she will then be required to serve a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 15 years, which is one-half the maximum sentence prescribed for a first conviction. If within 10 years of release for this second conviction, she is again convicted of distributing or cultivating any amount of marijuana a third time as a habitual offender, she will be subject to serve a mandatory minimum sentence of 22.5 years of hard labor in prison, which is two-thirds the maximum sentence prescribed for a first conviction.”

Many of Louisiana’s drug laws date back to the early 1970s when then President Richard Nixon declared [9] “war on drugs” and states responded by enacting harsh sentences, Reason noted. In Louisiana, the result of this legacy is predictable—jails filled with people who did not commit violent crimes but are treated as harshly as rapists and murderers.

“Between 1994 and 2011, violent offenders made up an average of only 17.3 percent of prison admissions in Louisiana; 37 percent of prison admissions were for drug offenses, and 33.6 percent for property offenses,” their report states. “Between 1994 and 1996, during which time the state experienced some of its highest violent crime rates, the average percentage for inmates admitted for violent crimes was 23 percent lower than those admitted for drug crimes, 18.4 percent lower than those admistted for property crimes, and 0.6 percent lower than inmates admitted for all other crimes.”

These statistics mean that Lousiana’s drug and property offenders keep getting caught and throw back into the prison system’s jaws. Reason interprets the state’s high rate of recidivism as a waste of taxpayer dollars—especially for non-violent drug crimes.

“With 50 percent of inmates returning to prison after five years, a violent crime rate well above its neighboring states, high corrections expenditures, and a majority of inmates incarcerated after nonviolent offenses, it makes one wonder whether Louisiana is effectively prioritizing its criminal justice expenditures,” they conclude.

Reason said it was “beyond the scope of this study” to analyze why Louisiana’s violent crime rates have risen and fallen. Beyond their high cost to taxpayers, its report never mentions race or poverty as factors in the state’s court system—although it has appeared at forums with the ACLU where those factors have been raised and discussed.

But it is not unreasonable to suggest that many of the state’s drug offenders are railroaded into jail, where they should never be in the first place, and then, after exiting with prison records, can’t find a decent job. Thus, they revert to dealing drugs—or theft, what the report calls property crime—to survive. There was anecdotal evidence of that pattern in Times-Picayune column [10].

The Pelican Insititute President Kevin Kane and ACLU’s Esman have been holding [7] forums across the state to call for sentencing reforms. Last week, they were joined by Judge Fredericka Wicker, who heads a non-partisan Louisiana Sentencing Commission. In one sessions, the Times-Picayune reported [5] that Esman asked “the audience who among them knew someone who at one time in their life possessed marijuana. Every hand in the room went up. When she extended her question to three times, the yes answer was again 100 percent.”

At that meeting, an ex-sheriff’s office employee, Republican state Representative Joseph Lopinto, told the paper’s columnist, “It’s not as if Louisiana’s jails are stuffed with guys who got pulled over three times and happened to have dime bags on the passenger seat. More common… is the burglar who got probation twice and, the third time arrested, also had marijuana and winds up getting multiple billed and facing a 30-year term.”

The Reason report noted that Louisiana’s Legislature has passed and their Republican governor has signed piecemeal sentencing reforms, reducing some mandatory terms and turning to probation and parole, but only under very strident conditions. What it has not done is repeal mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenses, reform its Habitual Offender Law that compounds jail terms, and also reform parole rules.

“Either of these changes would ensure that violent criminals continue to be punished for their crimes, while nonviolent offenders face sentences that are more proportionate,” they conclude. But those obvious steps will be difficult, the Times-Picayune notes, because “housing prisoners has become a key source of cash for politically powerful sheriffs, and elected officials fear the vulnerability attached to a soft on crime label.”

Indeed, the estimated 2013-2014 budget for Louisiana’s Department of Corrections (DOC) is [7] $390,625,856. That nearly doubles [4] when including all the police, prosecutors and public defenders. As the Pelican Institute’s Kane noted, the DOC pays $24.39 per diem to sheriffs to warehouse prisoners, compared to $11.25 a day for the DOC’s transitional work programs, or $15.39 for locally run transitional programs.

In other words, crime and punishment pays in Louisiana—not for prisoners, but for the jailers who keep them behind bars.

See more stories tagged with:

Reason Foundation [11],

Louisiana ACLU [12],

prison nation [13],

race and incarceration [14],

U.S. prison nation [15],

Louisiana prison system [16],

Louisiana incarceration rate [17]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/liberals-and-libertarians-try-lower-louisiana-prison-rates

==

https://web.archive.org/web/20140313162653/http://cahsr.blogspot.com/2008/10/oil-auto-and-airline-companies-vs-prop.html

oppose high speed rail CA w/ jarvis

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2008

Oil, Auto, and Airline Companies vs Prop 1A?

NOTE: We've moved! Visit us at the California High Speed Rail Blog.

For several months we kept hearing there was "no funded opposition" to Proposition 1A. There are several committees spending money FOR Prop 1A, including Californians for High Speed Trains, funded by a cross-section of Californians but definitely including labor unions and engineering companies that may benefit from Prop 1A. There's nothing illegal or unethical about that - these contributions are publicly disclosed for everyone to see.

There is no committee registered with the state of California to oppose Prop 1A. But there are two groups that have been rather active in opposing Prop 1A - the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and the Reason Foundation. Both are right-wing think tanks determined to undermine government in the state of California through tax cuts that force reductions in government spending and other government programs. The Reason Foundation in particular promotes privatization of government services and less regulation on business, which of course worked out brilliantly with the financial industry.

Both groups were behind the thoroughly discredited Cox-Vranich report on high speed rail. The Reason Foundation in particular has been using its staffers to flood the state media with misleading claims and outright lies that find their way to both opinion pages and even news articles about Prop 1A.

Neither group discloses its donors on its website and only a few details about Reason's funders have emerged over the last few years. But what we do know suggests that the Reason Foundation's campaign against sustainable transportation is being funded by the very companies that oppose sustainable transportation - oil companies, automakers, and airlines.

Some of the most reliable information about the Reason Foundation's funding comes from Media Transparency, a watchdog on the conservative media movement. Their reports show that long-time right-wing organizations such as the Koch Foundation, founded by oil and gas billionaires, alongside groups like the Castle Rock Foundation, a project of the far-right Coors family.

The Reason Foundation also receives corporate contributions. A list of these has not been made public since the year 2000. But the most recent list, compiled by Source Watch, shows that oil, auto, and airline companies figured prominently in their funding, such as:

:{American Petroleum Institute

Chevron

Continental Airlines

DaimlerChrysler

Delta Air Lines

ExxonMobil

Ford Motor Company

GM

Shell Oil

Western States Petroleum Association}:

We don't know if that money has continued over the last 8 years, but that money has continued to seed ongoing program operations for the Reason Foundation. Right-wing foundations and oil, auto and airline companies have been paying for Reason's attack on high speed rail.

Given current campaign finance laws Reason does not have to disclose any of this as a campaign expenditure. And so the public doesn't realize that when they see misleading anti-transit propaganda spread by the Reason Foundation, that it's coming from the far-right and from the very companies whose business model depends on prolonging our dependence on oil - even when that dependence destroys our economic prosperity.

By contrast we at this blog have nothing to hide. This blog is hosted free of charge by Blogger.com, which offers free blogs to pretty much anyone who wants one. I work on this in my spare time and neither this blog or my time on it are funded by anyone. Yet we manage to get the facts right, instead of the Reason Foundation's constant misleading of voters. Funny how that works.

==

NIH Director Regrets Taxpayer-Funded Hatchet Job Linking Tea Party to Big Tobacco

Jacob Sullum|Mar. 7, 2013

 At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said he was "quite troubled" by a taxpayer-funded study that tarred the Tea Party movement as a pawn of Big Tobacco. Collins called the study, led by anti-smoking activist Stanton Glantz, "an unfortunate outcome," saying, "We thought we were funding a different kind of research when those grants were awarded." Science Insider reports that Collins was responding to concerns raised by Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) at a hearing before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee:

"They allege that somehow the Tea Party had its origin in the 1980s with tobacco funding, which is pretty incredible," Harris said. "Because I mean, I'm a Tea Party guy. I was there when it was established in 2009. I know the origins. I find it incredible that NIH funding is funding this," Harris said, adding that the study reflects "a partisan political agenda."

When the study was published in the journal Tobacco Control last month, one of Glantz's co-authors declared, "The records indicate that the Tea Party has been shaped by the tobacco industry and is not a spontaneous grassroots movement at all." As I noted at the time, Glantz et al. tried to make the case that the Tea Party was funded and largely created by Philip Morris but ended up arguing that anyone who disagrees with them on issues such as ObamaCare, smoking bans, and cigarette taxes is carrying water for Big Tobacco, even if he does not realize it. 

Glantz told Science Insider he was "very troubled" by Collins' comments. After all, when Glantz said in his grant proposal that he planned to study the influence of "third parties" funded by cigarette manufacturers, the NIH should have realized that included political hatchet jobs aimed at discrediting supporters of limited government as shills or dupes of Big Tobacco. It's not his fault that the people he attacked happen to be critics of the current president, which makes it look like the Obama administration is using taxpayer money to pay for opposition research.

[Thanks to Christopher Snowdon for the tip.]

==

Comedian Remy Munasifi is the new face of the libertarian think tank scene.

The Washington Post recently noted that he has teamed with Reason TV, linked to the libertarian think tank Reason Foundation, to createshort rap parody videos.

Says the Washington Post:

He has lampooned the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, the debt ceiling, Jay Z and Beyoncé’s Cuban vacation, and, most recently, Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal. One of his catchier spoofs, “Tap It: The NSA Slow Jam,” satirizes the National Security Agency’s electronic-surveillance program.

Here is the debt ceiling rap video mentioned in the article above, and here is the one on Anthony Weiner.  Here is one called the TSA Pokey Pokey.  Here is one called Why They Fought.  Here is one called The Equality Song.  Here is the one called Jay-Z's Cuba State of Mind.

The Reason Foundation, based in Los Angeles, California, publishes the magazine Reason.  That magazine was first published in 1968, and the Reason Foundation was created in 1978.  The think tank also has an office in Washington, DC.

David Nott has served as Reason Foundation's President since 2001.   Previous presidents of the think tank include Reason founder Robert Poole, now director of transportation studies, andLynn Scarlett, who left Reason in 2001 and served as Assistant Secretary of Policy, Management and Budget at the Department of the Interior for the George W. Bush Administration.

...He was born in Washington and grew up in Virginia with his Iraqi Muslim father, a doctor, and Christian Lebanese mother, a Pilates instructor. He shied away from discussing religion, saying his parents taught him about it in a "unique way".

His younger sister followed the more traditional path expected by their parents and is a lawyer. But Mr Munasifi got hooked on stand-up comedy when he was supposed to be studying business at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia.

He bought himself a video camera in 2006 and has been making rap videos ever since. After college, he moved back home to save money and lived off credit cards. He gained national exposure when his video question was chosen as one of 39 out of 3,000 submitted to a CNN/YouTube debate of all eight Democratic Party contenders for the presidential nomination in 2007. His question was a song about being overtaxed and all the candidates, including Barack Obama, the US president, laughed.

"It was so cool doing that and being super-close to all the candidates," he said. "A lot of people saw it and I managed to get some side work doing videos with think tanks like the Tax Foundation."

He was also invited to become a partner in a programme run by YouTube and Google in which producers of original content share revenue from advertisements. Although Munasifi would not say how much money he makes, he now lives in a flat in Arlington doing what he loves full-time.

"It's a very generous programme and lets creative people be creative," he said. "It's the best feeling to be doing this, looking at your furniture and knowing you got all this from jokes."

After an initial wariness, his parents are also supportive of his career choice. He likes to say when people ask if he has a recipe for tabouleh: "Step one: beg mum to make tabouleh."

Munasifi thanks a group of American Arab comedians who broke new ground and achieved success before him. They include Ahmed Ahmed, Aron Kader and Maz Jobrani, whose Axis of Evil comedy tour in 2005 received critical acclaim.

Habib Abdul Habib, or "Baghdad's worst comedian", is Munasifi's comedic alter-ego and it is in this persona that he makes jokes about US security screening, for example, in his stand-up routine.

The latest video from The Falafel Album, a song called Saudis in Audis, was released last week. Munasifi steers away from any serious political messaging and described his lyrics as "ridiculous". These are some lines from Hummus: The Rap.

"Saddam, Iran, Osama. Baby bomber drama, little peace. It's on your TV but believe me, there is good in Middle East, it's... Hummus. I'm eating hummus. With Thomas Jefferson-us."

Munasifi said he was overwhelmed by the positive e-mails he had received from across the world including the Middle East and the US. "The most negative I hear is if someone says they prefer baba ganoush to hummus," he said.

He very much hopes to tour the Middle East but he was unable to perform in Lebanon before his grandmother died there last year. "I've been to Lebanon several times and now have a lot more family there who left Iraq in 2003," he said. "I would love to keep making people laugh. Anything bigger would be great but it all derives from people sharing videos online and it's the greatest feeling."

:{

Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/on-stage/remy-munasifis-falafel-songs-dispel-arab-stereotypes#ixzz2eXTlcyaW

Follow us: @TheNationalUAE on Twitter | thenational.ae on Facebook

}:

==

PIC:

New at Reason: Privatization Developments in Criminal Justice and Corrections

• Katie Furtick

Policy Analyst

atie Furtick is a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, where her work focuses on regulatory issues, state and local privatization and government reform. Furtick is also an associate in the Koch Associate Program.

She previously worked to improve government accountability as a research analyst at Florida TaxWatch Research Institute in Tallahassee.

Katie holds a M.S. in Applied Economics, as well as a B.S. with a double major in English and Economics from Florida State University.

Leonard Gilroy

Director of Government Reform

Adrian Moore

Vice President, Policy

Robert Poole

Searle Freedom TrustTransportation Fellow and Director of Transportation Policy

Anthony Randazzo

Director of Economic Research

Adam Summers

Senior Policy Analyst

• Adam Summers is a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation, a nonprofit think tank advancing free minds and free markets. He has written extensively on privatization, government reform, law and economics, and various other political and economic topics.

Summers' articles have been published by the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Orange County Register, Los Angeles Daily News, Baltimore Sun, and numerous others.

Summers earned an M.A. in Economics fromGeorge Mason Universityand Bachelor of Arts degrees in Economics and Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

May 6, 2013,

Leonard Gilroy

The rollout of Reason Foundation'sAnnual Privatization Report 2013 continues today with the release of the Criminal Justice and Corrections section, which which provides an overview of the latest on privatization and public-private partnerships in criminal justice and corrections.

• Read Full Column
• * * *

Developments in Criminal Justice and Corrections

Annual Privatization Report 2013 examines criminal justice and corrections trends

May 6, 2013

Leonard Gilroy, Harris Kenny, Alexander Volokh, Andrew Livingston

This section of Reason Foundation's *Annual Privatization Report 2013* provides an overview of the latest on privatization and public-private partnerships in criminal justice and corrections. Topics include:

A. 2012 Corrections Privatization Overview

B. State and International Corrections Privatization Update

C. State and Local Correctional Healthcare Privatization Update

D. ANALYSIS: Recent Developments in the Federal Civil-Rights Liability of Federal Private Prisons

E. FOCUS: The Emergence of Social Impact Bonds: Paying for Success in Social Service Innovation

F. FOCUS: Colorado, Washington State Vote to Tax and Regulate Recreational Marijuana for Adults

» Return to Annual Privatization Report 2013 homepage

• Read Full Column

hodad:

ALEC member Koch-funded organizations include: Americans for Prosperity (which was largely responsible for mobilizing “Tea Party” movement support for GOP candidates in 2009/2010. David Koch has served as the chairman of this organization. Koch Industries Executive Vice President Richard Fink has served as a longtime board member of Americans for Prosperity), the Cato Institute (an offshoot of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. David Koch is a longtime director of this organization), the Heritage Foundation (which was co-founded by ALEC founder Paul Weyrich), the Reason Foundation (David Koch is a longtime trustee of this organization. Reason has been one of the leading proponents of the privatization of public services. The organization is known to have received financial support from private prison corporations,

Phoenix Police Department officers moments before November 30, 2011 incident. PPD Sgt. Eric Harkins at fore, PPD Violent Crimes Bureau Det. Gregory Liebertz fourth from front.

Photo: Ezra Kaplan

47

such as Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group), and the State Policy Network (which also had close ties to ALEC during 2011 through Doner Fundraising, an event planning and fundraising firm that works with closely with “issue-based” not-for-profits and GOP candidates).

ALEC holds three major conferences

Of course, given the tricks that we play on ourselves, it's entirely possible that Begley did not accurately capture the gist of Penn and Teller's remarks, but even if they both said they "don't know" at TAM6, it's a lack of knowledge that rather curiously didn't prevent them from spending the past five years mocking climate change concerns.

Ron Bailey, science correspondent for Reason, another libertarian climate skeptic who prominently changed his mind two years ago, summarizes here, where he quotes from both Begley and Penn.  Bailey both schools and chides Penn, while acknowledging that there is ample room to debate policy:

Is it happening? Did we cause it? Yes, the balance of the evidence is that it is happening. Is it bad? Relative to what? Can we fix it? Maybe. But at what's the best way to do so? Are immediate deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions necessary? Some analysts don't think so. Government-forced conservation? Perhaps there is another way. Skepticism is certainly merited when it comes to proposals that aim to solve global warming.

Finally, is it OK to disdain Al Gore? Sure it is. But even an annoying self-important scold can be right sometimes.

It seems to me that Penn and Teller's defensiveness clearly signals a shift in their position from broad disagreement with global warming, both on science and on policy, towards conceding the core of the science while focussing on policy.

  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not to be confused withBastian Prize.

The Bastiat Prize is a journalism award given annually by the Reason Foundation. In 2011 and before it was given by the International Policy Network.^[1] The Bastiat Prize recognizes journalists whose published works "explain, promote and defend the principles of the free society."^[2][3] The award comes with US$15,000.^[4]

Instituted in 2002, the Prize has been inspired by the 19th-century French philosopher Frédéric Bastiat and his defense of liberty. Bastiat's use of satire and allegory enabled him to relate complex economic issues to a general audience. In keeping with his legacy, Bastiat Prize entries are judged on intellectual content, the persuasiveness of the language used and the type of publication in which they appear.

Judges have included Margaret Thatcher, James Buchanan, and Milton Friedman.^[5]

The prize has been embroiled in a controversy after it emerged that Indian leftists gamed the system and entered for consideration of the award. ^[6] As the award is named after a libertarian, the entry of left-liberals and their acceptance as legitimate by the awarding organization has raised eyebrows among libertarians around the world. An Indian journalist has reputedly described the organizers as useful idiots. ^[6]

Prize Winners[

• 2011: Tom Easton and Virginia Postrel
• 2010: James Delingpole^[5][7] and Bret Stephens
• 2009: John Hasnas, Shikha Dalmia and Daniel Hannan^[7]
• 2008: Barton Hinkle.
• 2007: Amit Varma^[8][9]
• 2006: Tim Harford and Jamie Whyte.
• 2005: Mary Anastasia O'Grady.^[3]
• 2004: Robert Guest.
• 2003: Brian Carney.
• 2002: Sauvik Chakraverti and Amity Shlaes.

References[

1. ^ Scribblers and Society
2. ^ IPN announces the winner of the 2009 Bastiat Prize, Economic Freedom Network Asia, October 28, 2009.
3. ^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastiat_Prize#cite_ref-About_Mary_Anastasia_O.27Grady_3-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastiat_Prize#cite_ref-About_Mary_Anastasia_O.27Grady_3-1) About Mary Anastasia O'Grady, The Wall Street Journal
4. ^ 2009 Bastiat Prize competition, International Freedom of Expression eXchange, May 27, 2009.
5. ^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastiat_Prize#cite_ref-Thompson_2010-11-12_Telegraph_5-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastiat_Prize#cite_ref-Thompson_2010-11-12_Telegraph_5-1) Thompson, Damian (2010-11-12). "Telegraph blogger James Delingpole wins Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism".telegraph.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2010-11-12. Retrieved 2010-11-12.
6. ^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastiat_Prize#cite_ref-centreright_6-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastiat_Prize#cite_ref-centreright_6-1) http://centreright.in/2012/02/salil-tripathi-is-he-truly-a-libertarian/
7. ^ ^a(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastiat_Prize#cite_ref-Oliver_2010-11-12_Journalism_7-0) ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastiat_Prize#cite_ref-Oliver_2010-11-12_Journalism_7-1) Oliver, Laura (2010-11-12). "Telegraph blogger James Delingpole wins Bastiat Prize". journalism.co.uk. Archived fromthe original on 2010-11-12. Retrieved 2010-11-12. "Freelance writer, journalist and Telegraph blogger James Delingpole has won the online journalism category of the Bastiat Prize for Journalism. … It is the second year running in which a Telegraph blogger has taken the online award. In 2009 controversial MEP Daniel Hannan won the prize for his blog for the title."
8. ^ Amit Varma wins Bastiat prize
9. ^ Celebrity Indian blogger publishes first novel

External links[

• Bastiat Prize Policy Network 2011 and prior
• Bastiat Prize Reason Foundation 2012

Categories: 

• Journalism awards
• Awards established in 2002
• Libertarian organizations based in the United States
• 2002 establishments in the United States

http://www.**sourcewatch**.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundation

Reason Foundation

From SourceWatch

Jump to: navigation, search

It's a myth that wind turbines don't reduce carbon emissions

Conclusive figures show that the sceptics who lobby against wind power simply have their facts wrong

The assertion that wind turbines don't reduce carbon emissions is a myth, according to conclusive statistical data obtained from National Grid and analysed here in the Guardian for the first time. With a new wind generation record of 4,131 megawatts set on 14 September, the question of how far the UK's wind generation fleet can help in meeting our climate targets is increasingly controversial. Now it can be shown that the sceptics who lobby against wind simply have their facts wrong.

On 14 September, wind turbines connected to the National Grid produced over 80 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity, just over 10% of total UK generation. This was far from being a one-off: with more than 4,000 turbines both on and offshore now connected to the grid, wind produced 48 GWh of usable electricity per day on average during September, adding up to about 6% of overall daily national electricity requirement. On many days, wind is now the fourth-largest source of UK electricity, after coal, nuclear and gas. Indeed, this figure is a significant underestimate, because about two gigawatts of wind are connected directly to local networks and so not directly visible to National Grid.

However, according to increasingly vocal critics of wind power, the intermittent nature of wind generation means we must burn more gas to provide backup. According to Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker:

"Ramping the back-up gas plants up and down would mean running them very inefficiently, and give off so much CO2 that we could end up increasing our overall emissions rather than reducing them"

Journalist and author Matt Ridley asserts that:

"The total carbon emissions saved by the great wind rush is probably below 1%, because of the need to keep fossil fuels burning as back-up when the wind does not blow. It may even be a negative number."

The climate-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) recently gave evidence to the House of Commons energy and climate change committee, stating:

"There is a significant risk that annual CO2 emissions could be greater under the wind scenario than under the gas scenario".

The essence of the wind sceptics' case is that a scaling up in wind power will have to be "backed up" by massive investment in gas-fired open cycle turbine (OCGT) plants, which are cheap to build but considerably less efficient than the combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants which deliver the vast majority of the UK's gas-fired electricity supply.

Their arguments are not borne out by current statistics, however. If the sceptics were right, the recent windy conditions would have seen considerable use of less-efficient OCGT as wind input to the grid ramped up and down. In actual fact, during the entire June-September period, OCGTs and equally dirty oil-fired stations produced less than one hundredth of one percent of all UK electricity. In total they operated for a grand total of just nine half hour periods in the first 19 days of the month – and these periods had nothing to do with changing windspeeds.

From analysing National Grid data of more than 4,000 half-hour periods over the last three months, a strong correlation between windiness and a reduction in gas-fired generation becomes clear. The exchange rate is about one for one: a megawatt hour of wind typically meant the UK grid used one less megawatt hour of gas-derived electricity. This means that actual CO2 savings can be calculated from the data with a high degree of accuracy – these are not guesstimates from models, but observations of real-world data.

Over a year, based on the amount of electricity wind is currently generating each day, wind turbines save around 6.1m tonnes of carbon dioxide, or about 4% of the UK's emissions from electricity (based on CCGT plants emitting around 350 kg CO2 per mWh). This figure provides independent confirmation for the trade body RenewableUK's estimate of a current reduction in annual emissions from the entire UK wind fleet of about 6m tonnes.

Looking to the future, about 26 gigawatts of onshore and offshore wind is expected to be connected to the grid by 2020, nearly four times today's capacity. Even so, National Grid expects to be able to handle the increased wind generation without major new investment in dirty open-cycle gas backup, contradicting the claims from the GWPF.

The National Grid's Gillian West says:

As more wind connects, there will be a need for additional back-up for that intermittency ... [however] there will be more interconnection with mainland Europe and new storage technologies may also emerge (eg battery) or additional pumped storage hydro which can provide short term response.

National Grid is also improving its wind forecasting system to make coping with times of low demand and high generation easier.

Indeed, the wind sceptics may have their case backwards. The biggest blackout risk is not intermittent wind but the threat of total loss of a single giant power source, such as a large coal or nuclear plant, possibly within just a few seconds. But the grid is already engineered to withstand this catastrophic loss with existing back-up – and wind is unlikely to change this picture for the foreseeable future.

The intermittency of wind is balanced both by the inertia of the turbines themselves and by multiple wind installations over a wide geographical area. In addition, wind is now forecasted with reasonable accuracy at least a day in advance, allowing National Grid to plan the right generation mix to accompany it. Indeed, the most difficult issues for the Grid come from the demand side – commercial breaks in Downton Abbey can lead to sudden demand spikes of hundreds of megawatts in just a few seconds. Wind, in contrast, fades up and down much more slowly.

The researcher Damon Hart-Davis, who maintains a real-time website showing the grid's carbon intensity called Earth Notes, confirms separately that when the wind is blowing the UK emits less CO2 per unit of electricity generated. This is much more visible currently than it has been in previous years because wind is now a significant enough player to stand out from the statistical noise, which include electricity produced by Welsh pumped-storage hydroelectricity and imports and exports from France, Holland and Ireland.

The UK may be the windiest country in Europe, but other nations already have much greater installed capacity. Spain, for example, occasionally produces 50% of its power from wind turbines with no impact on its electricity grid.

Continued fast expansion in offshore and onshore wind is good news for carbon emissions and can be accommodated without major problems by the grid. Data, not assertions, are what must win the argument over wind – and the data is very clear.

The Reason Foundation describes itself as a "libertarian" ^{[1]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundation#cite_note-0) think tank which challenges strict environmental regulations: "A national research and education organization that explores and promotes public policy based on rationality and freedom."[1] The Reason Foundation's projects include NewEnvironmentalism.org and Privatization.org. It is part of the

About Reason Foundation

From the Reason Foundation web pages:

"For 22 years, Reason Foundation has led the fight for freedom in America. Our unique combination of a top-tier, well-respected think tank, Reason Public Policy Institute (RPPI), and a major political and cultural commentary magazine, *Reason Magazine*, gives us an unmatched pair of platforms from which to champion liberty and its essential role in human progress. Through Reason Public Policy Institute, with its emphasis on empirical results, practical innovation, and a burgeoning national reputation, we get new policy ideas implemented. Through Reason Magazine, with its growing and increasingly influential audience, we shape public opinion in favor of individual liberty in all areas of human activity.

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Reason Foundation and tobacco issues

Jacob Sullum is the senior editor of Reason,, a monthly magazine published by the Reason Foundation. Sullum's positions on tobacco issues have consistenly been supportive of the tobacco industry. The Advocacy Institute, in their November, 1994 Directory of Tobacco Industry Spokespersons, Front Groups and their Allies, says,

The Reason Foundation received at least $10,000 from Philip Morris in 1993. He [Sullum] wrote an article for Forbes Media Critic which was later used in a week-long advertising series by Philip Morris; the report argued that the EPA findings on secondhand smoke were one-sided and represented the "corruption of science by the political crusade against smoking." He also wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal criticizing the EPA, claiming that the agency based its findings on ETS on "several controversial assumptions;" this op-ed was later featured in an RJR advertisement. Both of these articles cited the work of Dr.Gary Huber, a scientist funded by various tobacco companies, who had found the risks of ETS to be only minimal. The Media Critic article also cited the work of Alvan Feinstein, who received at least $700,000 from Brown &Williamson between 1985 and 1990. Sources:Extra, September/October 1994, p.18; Wall Street Journal,3- 24-94, p.A23.at Bates Page --4660]

Board of Trustees

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Funding

Between 1985 and 2006, the Foundation received $6,318,421 in 162 separate grants from only eleven foundations. ^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundation#cite_note-1)

• Earhart Foundation
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References

1. ↑ "Frequently Asked Questions About Reason: Is Reason libertarian?", accessed August 2007.
2. ↑ "Reason Foundation", Media Transparency, accessed August 2007.

External links

• "Forging a World of New Choices", Reason Foundation Annual Report, accessed 7/23/03

• [2], Links to an interactive network of friendsters for the Reason Foundation

Reason Magazine is a libertarian monthly print magazine produced by the Reason Foundation.

The magazine claims to provide "a refreshing alternative to right-wing and left-wing opinion magazines by making a principled case for liberty and individual choice in all areas of human activity." [1]

Tobacco industry documents

From an article titled, The Fraser Institute: Economic Think Tank or Front for the Tobacco Industry? by Mary Jane Ashley, M.D., Professor of Public Health Department of Public Health Sciences, and Chair, Expert Committee, Ontario Minister of Health's Advisory Panel on the Review of the Ontario Tobacco Strategy, et al (Canadian Nonsmokers Rights Association):

Like several other speakers at the Conference, Jacob Sullum has also been the benefactor of tobacco industry largesse. He first came to the attention of the health community when he was the managing editor of Reason magazine .Articles which he published in The Wall Street Journal and Forbes Media Critic were republished by the tobacco industry in full page ads in US papers. The ads,of course,failed to disclose that his employer,The Reason Foundation,received donations from the tobacco industry and that he personally was paid by R.J. Reynolds for the rights to republish his articles.(see The Cigarette Papers) Since 1994 and publication of the ads, Sullum has continued his attack on the scientific literature related to environmental tobacco smoke.[2]

Personnel

The magazine is edited by Nick Gillespie who took over from tobacco defender Jacob Sullum.

Contact details

Web: http://reason.com/aboutreason.shtml

Nick G interviewed south park guys at conf