They make it their business to mind your business, and this month America’s busybodies have been working overtime.
Lawmakers are no longer loco for just one brand of energy drink. Illinois State Rep. Luis Arroyo (D-Chicago) has penned a bill that would make it illegal “to sell, offer for sale or deliver” just about any kind of energy drink to anyone under age 18 (Arroyo’s championing another top-tier issue–outlawing lion steaks).
Meanwhile, dog lovers in Oklahoma are sounding off against a plan cooked up by State Sen. Patrick Anderson (R-Enid) to allow cities to ban specific breeds of dogs (stay tuned for the surprise twist!).
But this time the Nanny of the Month comes to use from Shelton, WA where city commissioners and townspeople alike have united against a threat of bikini baristas!
“I think there’s every reason to believe that Seattle will be the capital of social entrepreneurship in the next ten years,” says Brian Howe, an adjunct professor at Seattle School of Law and founder of Hub Seattle , which rents space to social entrepreneurs.
Reason.tv sat down with Howe and Michael “Luni” Libes, a “serial entrepreneur” who has helped build five technology start-ups, to talk about #SocEnt Weekendan an event modeled on the very popular Startup Weekend that endeavors to offer an environment for entrepreneurs to collaborate and bring their ideas to fruition.
Libes and Howe discussed the idea of the “social enterprise,” which involves using for-profit enterprise to solve social problems.
“Business men and women think about, ‘How am I going to take this small thing and create leverage? How is this going to scale?’” said Howe.
In the northernmost reaches of California’s Ventura County, a two-lane rural road called Highway 33 runs into the rugged and mostly undeveloped Transverse Mountain Range. Though it’s mostly raw wilderness, a few businesses catering to adventurous explorers have long existed there, some for more than a century.
But now the local government is shutting those businesses down, one by one, using arcane zoning and building-code laws to get the job done.
“If there isn’t someone complaining, and there isn’t really a serious public health and safety issue, why do they spend so much of their time pursuing these kinds of cases?” asks Lynne Jensen, executive director of the Ventura County Coalition of Labor and Business (COLAB).
Tom Wolf owns the Pine Mountain Inn, a restaurant that’s been serving biker groups and local community organizations since the 1930s. Wolf temporarily had to shut the doors when he suffered a heart attack in 2002, and he was never able to reopen when the county informed him that his property had been rezoned as an “Open Space” back in the 1980s without his knowledge.
“[The county] wanted everybody out of here,” says Wolf. “And they wanted a complete open space with nothing but deer and frogs… and no people.”
No matter how hard Wolf tried to comply with the ever-changing codes, the county just wouldn’t relent, at one time even ordering him to remove a chicken coop that had never actually existed on the property.
Wolf isn’t alone, says Jensen. Several other small businesses along Highway 33 have been hit by multiple county agencies for no apparent reason.
“They had every department hit us with violations to make sure that they shut us down,” says April Hope, who, along with her husband Bob, owns a bed and breakfast called The Wheel, which has existed in the area since the 1890s.
Since the Hopes purchased The Wheel in early 2000, they’ve never been able to open it to the public. While officials from the county supervisor’s office and the planning department refused to speak with ReasonTV for this story, Jensen says that the county is using code enforcement to drive these businesses off the land without compensation.
“This rezoning is really a way to get around eminent domain, because eminent domain means you give up your entire property. And here, you only give up part of your rights,” says Jensen.
Invoking eminent domain to seize private property would not only require the county to compensate landowners, but also to demonstrate that the taking served a “public use.”
“They have been very successful in taking people’s property in a number of different ways without compensation as long as they don’t take ownership of it,” says Jensen.
“Many libertarian men are fairly ignorant about women’s issues. Some of them are outright hostile to feminism because they’ve never bothered to find out what it is,” says Sharon Presley, Ph.D.
In his new book, First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity, Stanford University professor of economics John B. Taylor, details the not-so-secret ingredients to rebuilding American’s economic future: predictable policy, rule of law, strong incentives, reliance on markets, and a clearly limited role for government. “America can be great again, economically speaking,” Taylor explains, “it’s just more recently where we’ve gone off track.”
Taylor sat down with Reason Magazine Managing Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward to discuss his book, the principles that underlie America’s economic supremacy and what’s gone wrong over the past decade.
A Supreme Court ruling upholding the individual mandate “will really be, if not a death blow, then certainly a very severe blow to the whole idea that the federal government’s powers are limited and that it’s not the case that the federal government can do pretty much whatever it wants,” says George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, author of an amicus brief in U.S Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, a challenge to the Affordable Care Act that the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear later this month.
Reason.tv sat down with Somin to discuss why his brief focuses on the individual mandate, what the chances of success are, and whether or not a mandate to buy insurance could empower Congress to pass a mandate that all Americans buy a health food like broccoli.
“There’s a lot of industries that have a lot of lobbying power and interest group clout that could promote mandates for themselves,” says Somin.
On February 23, 2012, Reason’s Nick Gillespie appeared on Fox Business’ Stossel show that was taped at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C.
Co-author with Matt Welch of “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America,” Gillespie explained why the historic rise in independent voters, massive deficits at all levels of government, and growing visibility of politicians such as Ron Paul and Gary Johnson make him optimistic about the future.
Douglas Rasmussen is a professor of philosophy at St. John’s University. In this lecture given at an International Society for Individual Liberty conference in 1991, he introduces subjective value to the general concept of human flourishing. He references F.A. Hayek’s article “The Use of Knowledge in Society” to make the argument that a familiarity with and respect for concrete particular knowledge is necessary not only for market economies to emerge but is also important when applied to the human matrix of decision-making for leading a moral and fulfilled life. Basically, each individual and each individual alone has the particularized local knowledge to make the determinations about which proportions of competing value classes will lead to fulfillment in their lives; thus there is no ‘one size fits all’ standard of happiness that can be provided by prescriptive institutions.
Reason Magazine Editor in Chief Matt Welch appeared on Freedom Watch With Judge Napolitano to discuss the treatment of what guest host Elizabeth MacDonald calls, “OWS pests”, the economics of security surrounding the TSA and how the super committee’s failure may jeopardize payroll tax cuts. Air Date: November 22, 2011
