Sommaire pour April 2022 de Reason

FOR YEARS, IMMIGRATION restrictionists have borrowed arguments from the environmentalist fringe to make their case against allowing immigration to developed nations. Using a concept that British researchers Joe Turner and Dan Bailey call “ecobordering,” proponents of low immigration say Western countries must impose intake restrictions because immigrants from poorer countries pollute and degrade natural spaces. While that argument is not new, it does seem to be evolving. In April 2021, for example, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich sued the Biden administration over immigration policies he claimed violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969. NEPA requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of infrastructure construction, land management actions, and other projects. Brnovich’s suit argued that the administration had failed to “even [engage] in the pretense of performing any…

SEVERAL RECENT SUPREME Court decisions have made it nearly impossible to sue a federal officer for alleged violations of constitutional rights. Now the Court is weighing a new case, Egbert v. Boule, that could continue this sorry trend. Robert Boule is the owner of a bed-and-breakfast in Washington state near the Canadian border. Border Patrol agent Erik Egbert sought to question one of Boule’s guests, a Turkish national, about his immigration status. Boule told the agent to leave his property. Egbert refused, then allegedly shoved Boule against a car and pushed him to the ground, injuring his shoulder. After Boule complained to Egbert’s superiors, the agent allegedly retaliated by asking the IRS to investigate Boule, who was audited. Boule sued Egbert in federal court under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named…

AFTER CALIFORNIA VOTERS decided to legalize the cultivation and sale of recreational marijuana in 2016, the vast majority of the state’s cities banned those activities within their borders. But Adelanto’s leaders were eager to embrace the newly legal market. The small desert town of 31,000, best known for its nearby prisons, had a reputation for poverty and emptiness. Local politicians hoped legal marijuana would change that. In May 2017, the Adelanto City Council approved a plan to license recreational growers and retailers, making the town one of the first in the state to do so. That early, atypical choice attracted a lot of national press coverage. In an interview with The New York Times, then-Mayor Richard Kerr predicted that Adelanto could raise $10 million annually by taxing local marijuana businesses.…

IN DECEMBER, SAN Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the city’s Tenderloin district, which will lead to increased police presence in the epicenter of the city’s homelessness crisis. It was a major turnaround for Breed, who after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 called for “ending the use of police in responding to noncriminal activity.” The move was criticized by groups like the Coalition on Homelessness, which called it an “expansion of strategies that have been tried and failed” that would contribute to the “instability and poor public health outcomes” of people living on the streets. Michael Shellenberger, author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, called Breed’s new “tough love” approach a “big step in the right direction.” The homelessness crisis, he argues,…

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE conventional home and the houseboat, there are entire neighborhoods of floating domiciles that are fixed to the shore but rise and fall with the water. “In the Netherlands,” Yale Environment 360 reports, “they are often prefabricated, squareshaped, three-story townhouses built offsite with conventional materials.” These innovations are now being mimicked elsewhere, from Norway to the Maldives, as coastal communities adapt to rising sea levels. Dutch officials, meanwhile, are currently “working to update zoning laws to make the construction of floating homes easier.”…

SOUTH DAKOTA VOTERS made history in 2020 by simultaneously approving ballot initiatives aimed at legalizing recreational and medical use of marijuana. The success of the broader initiative, Amendment A, was especially striking because it prevailed by an eight-point margin in a state that is mostly Republican and largely conservative. Thanks to a legal challenge backed by Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, however, Amendment A was immediately tied up in litigation. Last fall the South Dakota Supreme Court definitively overturned it, ruling that the measure violated the “single subject” rule for constitutional amendments. The court’s 4–1 decision did not affect Measure 26, which authorizes medical use of marijuana. But unless the state legislature independently implements the policy embodied in Amendment A, the ruling means supporters of recreational legalization will have to try…

HIGH HOUSING PRICES have reached crisis proportions in much of the country. You can blame the war on sprawl for that. Since the 1960s, planners have convinced many state and regional governments to limit the physical spread of urban areas. They called this “growthmanagement planning,” and the most common growth-management tool was an urban growth boundary. Outside such boundaries, development was practically forbidden. About 99 percent of Oregon, for example, is outside of an urban growth boundary. In most of those places, families cannot build houses on their own land unless they own at least 80 acres, actually farm it, and have thereby earned $40,000– $80,000 per year (depending on soil productivity) in two of the last three years. Hawaii passed the nation’s first growth-management law in 1961. By…

DURING THE SECOND half of 2021, economists debated whether inflation in the U.S. would be “permanent” or “transitory.” Inflation hawks argued that massive fiscal and monetary stimulus was the obvious cause of price hikes. Inflation doves replied that rising prices were primarily due to pandemic-related supply chain disruptions. In early December, the debate suddenly shifted: Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told legislators, “it’s probably time to retire that word”—transitory—and the hawks took a victory lap. It is easy to see why Powell was concerned. With inflation running at 7 percent, we are experiencing the strongest price pressures in nearly 40 years. But inflation is tough to fully explain and even harder to predict. Partisans in the inflation battle frequently fail to acknowledge that their stories are not mutually exclusive. If…

IT’S ROCKY TIMES for the conservative-libertarian partnership that characterized American right-of-center politics in the second half of the 20th century. Considerable attention has recently been paid to the rise of post-liberalism: the right-wing populists, nationalists, and Catholic integralists who fully embrace muscular government as a force for good as they define it. But there’s little evidence as yet that most conservatives share such an affinity for big government. The simpler explanation is more banal: Often, when conservatives reject libertarianism, it’s because of the cultural associations the word has for them. Conservatives, after all, are much more likely than other ideological demographics to believe in God and say faith is an important part of their lives; to feel unapologetically proud of American greatness; and generally to hold views regarding personal morality…

NAOMI NOVIK BEGAN her series of fantasy bildungsromans, in part, because she found Harry Potter extremely irritating. What annoyed her more than anything was the lack of economic thinking that went into J.K. Rowling’s world building. “The world, when you start poking at it, doesn’t work,” she explained in a September 2021 interview with Polygon. “Magic doesn’t cost anything, right? So why are the Weasleys poor? Half of them are adults, fully grown certified wizards, all of them apparently quite talented and smart. If magic doesn’t cost anything except the time it takes to learn it and cast it, then the more wizards you have, the richer you are, right? Wizards should be trying to have all the kids they could possibly have.” One doesn’t want to sound like a…

AS YOU MAY have noticed, trauma is everywhere these days, from the friend “traumatized” by her haircut to the talk show guest eager to share her traumatic past. Victims are allowed to “speak their trauma” in court. Conventional wisdom insists that anyone who experiences trauma will end up emotionally crippled forever. This belief has allowed us to become extremely unforgiving: If a victim is never going to have a good day again, why should the perpetrator? The idea that trauma changes everything is so common now that it is taken as gospel. A recent New Yorker article by Parul Sehgal traces how trauma became the all-purpose backstory for a huge swath of today’s TV shows, movies, and books. Peek into the past of characters from Claire Underwood to Ted Lasso,…

WHEN YOU PLUG your phone into your car to listen to your favorite band or podcast, you give police a way to rummage around in your personal data without a warrant. That includes not just GPS details but all the other information your phone shares with your car’s onboard computer. The Supreme Court has held that police generally need a search warrant to examine the information on a cellphone, to track a car by attaching a GPS device to it, and to obtain cellphone location data from service providers. But Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has not caught up with rapid advances in car technology, leaving the door open for police to extract data from vehicles without their owners’ knowledge. The Intercept reported in 2021 that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had…

NEWS OUTLETS HAVE long cited extreme weather events as examples of how greenhouse gas emissions affect the climate. In response, experts typically would emphasize the distinction between weather and climate, warning that any given hurricane or heat wave cannot be attributed to longterm changes in average temperatures. But it turns out that climatologists and meteorologists sometimes can establish such causal relationships. “First of all, it’s important to highlight that every climate extreme weather event has multiple causes,” Friederike Otto, an Oxford University climate researcher associated with the World Weather Attribution (WWA) collaboration, told MIT Technology Review in 2020. “So the question of the role of climate change will never be a yes or no question. It will always be, ‘Did climate change make it more likely or less likely, or…

TV THIS IS US BRIAN DOHERTY This Is Us, the addictive (or cloyingly annoying, depending on your ability to stomach unironic schmaltz about parenting, childhood, marriage, PTSD, and loss) program from NBC, launched its sixth and final season in January. The show’s delivery of a multigenerational family soap opera via Lost-style storytelling trickery and misdirection leaves many mysteries to be teased out between the tearjerker moments. The most challenging such conundrum: Is Randall Pearson—the adopted black son who replaced a dead white triplet at birth—a true selfless hero or at least in part a selfimportant villain? The show seems to accept Randall’s superior wonderfulness; casting the enormously strong and charming Sterling K. Brown puts a heavy thumb on that scale. Still, could there be hints of a subterranean jaundiced attitude…

As Jerod Draper was dying of a meth overdose, video shows that staff at the Harrison County, Indiana, jail did not immediately seek medical attention for him. Instead, they placed him in a restraint chair and placed a hood over his head, used their Tasers on him repeatedly, stomped his feet, and used pain compliance holds on him. Harrison County officials agreed to pay $1 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Draper’s family, but no one at the jail has been criminally charged in the incident. Hong Kong police have charged two former editors of the pro-democracy newspaper Stand News with sedition. Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, who face up to two years in prison and a fine of up to 5,000 Hong Kong dollars ($640), were denied bail.…