Archives: The Best of Brian Doherty

In March, longtime Senior Editor Brian Doherty died in a hiking accident. He was 57. To celebrate his life, this month’s archives are excerpts from his 30 years of work at Reason.

3 years ago
March 2023

“In the post–Donald Trump GOP, support for the Iraq War has largely become anathema. Yet the U.S. has still not fully internalized that war’s lessons. The Iraq debacle should have taught the U.S. it can never again scare itself into war based on guesses about how sinister some enemy is or will be. It should have taught Americans the damage that can be done by treating a foreign bogeyman as inherently intolerable—whether it’s Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin or the mullahs of Iran, a nation whose feared pursuit of nuclear weapons has vexed Washington for many years.”
“The Iraq War at 20”

6 years ago
December 2020

“If you actually care about a functioning civilization, it is never enough to have the state controlled by the ‘right side.’…In a more libertarian world, police would not be continually engaged in overly aggressive assaults on citizens, whether those citizens were suspected of crimes or not. We suffer that now because police, as representatives of the state, are not subject to the same discipline that the rest of us are, and because they’re charged with enforcing, potentially through violence, all sorts of petty or flagrantly unjust dictates, from traffic laws to drug laws. In a more libertarian world, we also would not see angry, threatening mobs insisting that random fellow citizens join them in public expressions of political piety or setting fire to buildings and breaking windows. However honorable the cause may be, such actions tear at the roots of our prosperity: the ability to possess wealth and space and to use them to offer goods and services for a price, helping others while peacefully bettering ourselves.”
“Bourgeois Libertarianism Could Save America”

8 years ago
January 2018

“There are a number of qualities people might seek in a currency—such as relative stability in value—that bitcoin definitely lacks. But if you measure ‘better’ by an ability to acquire more in goods and services, bitcoin so far has proven far superior to the U.S. dollar and other countries’ government-issued ‘fiat’ currencies. Less than a decade into its life, the digital token has enjoyed what is likely the largest, quickest rise in asset value in the history of the human race.”
“In Search of the Elusive Bitcoin Billionaire”

12 years ago
December 2014

“In January 2015, a 30-year-old libertarian named Ross Ulbricht is scheduled to go on trial in federal court in New York for narcotics trafficking, running a ‘continuing criminal enterprise’ of drug selling (known colloquially as the ‘drug kingpin’ statute), computer hacking, and money laundering. The jury will be told that he also contracted hitmen to commit murder on his behalf, though he is not being charged with that crime in this trial. Ulbricht….faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. In the course of its war on Silk Road, the FBI has collared a handful of other defendants and shut down all activity at the site’s original address. But the crackdown has done little to slow the growth of anonymous, encryption-enabled drug sales on the secret Internet. Silk Road is dead. Long live Silk Road.”
“How Buying Drugs Online Became Safe, Easy, and Boring”

14 years ago
November 2012

“The future may be unknowable, but you can always guess. And thanks to prediction markets, your guesses, in conjunction with the guesses of others, can beat predictions made by professional forecasters. Just as money creates incentives in other realms of the economy, putting money or other stakes on guesses encourages better guesses. Hence the development of ‘prediction markets,’ where people bet money—sometimes real, sometimes fake—on specific future outcomes.”
“Money Talks”

16 years ago
October 2010

“McDonald v. Chicago….established that the gun rights recognized in the District of Columbia because of [D.C. v.] Heller must also be respected by states and cities outside the purview of the federal government. The Second Amendment’s protection now applies not just to D.C.’s 600,000 residents but to more than 300 million people across the country. The magnitude and reach of this earthquake in American law, which has touched off slow-motion aftershocks throughout the 50 states, are still uncertain. But whatever the future holds, Americans’ ability to own guns has, at long last, taken its place among the other individual rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights.”
“You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby”

18 years ago
December 2008

“When reason began in 1968, it was just one of many mimeographed zines then pushing a mostly obscure political and philosophical vision known as libertarianism…..During the intervening decades, the broader civilization has, in fits and starts, heeded much of the message that reason has been pushing since that first mimeographed edition. From the deregulation of airlines to the decriminalization of sodomy, from the fall of communism to the rise of dot-coms, the world is in many ways much freer than it was in 1968. It’s easy to get caught up in those many restrictions on liberty that remain—including new ones that have arrived since 9/11—but the big picture reveals a happier story.”
“40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets”

26 years ago
October 2000

“Pop music—especially that expansive, vague subcategory known as rock—is universally recognized as the soundtrack of rebellion, whether the authority in question is Daddy taking the T-bird away or the Soviet Union. (The former Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution was so named in part because its participants drew inspiration from those poster children of bourgeois decadence, the Velvet Underground.) While rock hugely, hilariously upset right-wing record burners in the ’50s and ’60s, it was also officially outlawed in all the great Worker’s Republics of the same era—indeed, it was seen as the very apotheosis of capitalist hedonism. (But then if only Richard Nixon, that notable Elvis fan, could go to China, then perhaps only Rage Against the Machine, those millionaire communists, could bring Mao back across the Pacific.) As important, rock and the larger pop music scene are so clearly a function of the wealth, innovation, and leisure time thrown off by capitalism that it should be nothing less than mind-boggling that pop stars themselves mutter incessantly about toppling the very system that pays them so well.”
“Rage On”

26 years ago
February 2000

“Certainly, Burning Man has changed from a truly anarchistic event—an anything-goes party of pyrotechnics and drive-by shooting ranges done off the grid, with no official approval sought and none granted—into a limited–liability corporation that charges admission and devotes a huge amount of resources to placating government agencies at all levels…..But the story is more complicated than a simple tale of unfettered liberty clashing with immovable and hidebound forces of government and social conformity. The agencies that sign off on Burning Man’s permits have come to see the festival more as an opportunity than as a problem and have thus forged a relatively easygoing relationship with the openly danger- and drug-filled event. And Burning Man’s gradual evolution of rules is more properly seen as an extended experiment in community building than as a case study in the suppression of liberty.”
“Burning Man Grows Up”

31 years ago
February 1995

“With the self-interest of many industries, a new congressional majority, and the ever-declining power of private-sector unions all converging, it has never been more possible to harness a powerful political alliance for free trade, uniting ideology and interest. While free trade allows changes that can cost jobs in the short run, in the long run allowing capital and labor to move freely where its owners want it to go is the key to generating prosperity for everyone. The United States wisely eliminated trade barriers between states in the union, and we’ve all prospered for it. It’s time to do the quickest, purest, and most effective thing we can to extend these benefits to our trade with the rest of the world. No complex negotiations are needed: End all tariffs and other policies that block the flow of goods immediately, and regardless of what other countries do. For the future of free economies the world over, there is no more important battle.”
“No Deals”