Inhaltsverzeichnis für January 2019 in Reason

IN JULY, 23ANDME and pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced a $300 million collaboration that will focus on research and development of new medicines and cures, using insights from human genetics as the basis for discovery. GSK will have exclusive access for four years to 23andMe’s huge human genetic database, whose 5 million customers make it about “10 times larger than some of the other databases that are out there,” GSK’s chief scientific officer said in a CNBC interview. Not everyone was pleased. In Time, Peter Pitts, president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest think tank, argued that “if your data is going to be used for commercial purposes, you should be compensated.” That’s not, however, the bargain that was struck between 23andMe and its customers. The company’s…

POLICE IN ORLANDO, Florida, are using a powerful new tool to identify and track folks in real time. Video streams from four cameras located at police headquarters, three in the city’s downtown area, and one outside of a recreation center will be processed through Amazon’s Rekognition technology, which has been developed through deep learning algorithms trained using millions of images to identify and sort faces. The tool is astoundingly cheap: Orlando Police spent only $30.99 to process 30,989 images, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). For now the test involves only police officers who have volunteered for the trial. But the company has big plans for the program. In a June meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Amazon Web Services pitched the tech as part of a…

IF YOU ARE going to judge a book by its title, you better also include a judgment about its author. Hillsdale College’s Bradley Birzer is one of the most thoughtful conservative historians writing today, and his In Defense of Andrew Jackson challenges us to rediscover our own values by comparing them to those of America’s seventh president. If you also accept those values, then no doubt you will find Birzer’s case extremely convincing; if you reject those values, you will nonetheless be sharper for having wrestled with Old Hickory’s ghost. Few people today would set out to write a defense of Andrew Jackson, but this one deserves to be read. Following Russell Kirk’s John Randolph of Roanoke, the book is written with more empathy than detail. That makes for a…

It’s been a while since America’s budget deficit has been in the headlines, but the gap between how much money the federal government brings in and how much it spends is growing once again. During fiscal year 2018, which ended on September 30, Washington ran a $779 billion deficit—the largest since 2012. We are likely to hit $1 trillion in deficit spending in the current fiscal year. Even those massive numbers have struggled to break through in a news environment dominated by presidential tweets and the culture wars. The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl is trying, however, to keep lawmakers’ eyes on the challenge. In a recent paper, he floats several ways the United States could change course before it hits the financial iceberg. But talking with Reason’s Eric Boehm in…

PROGRESSIVE URBANISTS AND Ben Carson, President Donald Trump’s conservative Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), hardly seem like bosom buddies. That makes Carson’s embrace of a core item on the progressives’ wish list all the more surprising. In August, Carson announced that he would be revising Obama-era HUD regulations that required local governments to perform extensive (and expensive) studies of how concentrated their neighborhoods were along class and racial lines, and then come up with plans to remedy the housing segregation they found. In their place, Carson wanted HUD to issue new rules that would put the emphasis not on integrating housing but on building new housing, period. For Carson, that means cracking down on byzantine local zoning codes. “I want to encourage the development of mixed-income multifamily dwellings…

AMERICA DOESN’T HAVE enough dentists, and Ahmed El Zawi could be part of the solution—if only the federal government would let him. El Zawi emigrated from Libya to attend the University of Washington’s dental school. He graduated in March 2017 and is licensed to practice dentistry in Washington state and Virginia. But it is illegal for El Zawi to work as a dentist—to work at all, actually—because his student visa expired in March. Though he found an employer willing to sponsor him for an H-1B, his name was not selected in the annual lottery that determines who receives one of those valuable government permission slips. El Zawi was able to renew his student visa to stay in the country legally. He’s taking business classes while biding his time until next…

THE ECONOMY IS thriving, unemployment rates are low, and companies that have to compete for quality employees are expanding benefits, including paid time off. That makes this an odd moment for conservatives to shift their position on whether the government should implement a family leave mandate. A 2017 working group made up of representatives from the center-left Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute outlined the need for a federal paid family leave law. They point to Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that only 13 percent of private sector workers receive paid leave. This number ignores a multitude of paid leave options and other benefits that frequently are provided by employers, however. In a new report, the Cato Institute’s Vanessa Brown Calder corrects the record. Citing more comprehensive…

IN 1992, FRANCIS Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, an extended argument that the combination of liberal democracy and market capitalism could represent the end state for the evolution of human governance. The book was an influential, much-discussed hit, with its central idea—“the end of history”—becoming popular shorthand for the triumph of liberal democratic capitalism. In the process, Fukuyama became one of the nation’s most widely recognized thinkers. Fukuyama, notably, did not argue that other, more totalitarian forms of government could never return—only that in the very long term, market capitalism would prove more durable. Yet more than a quarter-century later, with the rise of populist political campaigns and democratic unrest throughout the Western world, some have wondered whether his most well-known idea remains relevant. In…

THE WORD NEOLIBERAL is academia’s most reviled poltergeist. The term’s definition is notoriously fluid, though it usually involves a litany of tropes about globalization and “market ideology” leaving a destructive trail of exploitation and inequality around the world. The scholarly literature on neoliberalism is as vast as it is vacuous, typically deploying its subject as a pejorative stand-in for free market economics. But neoliberalism isn’t much more than a ghost of an ideology—or at least it doesn’t have many claimants. There are no self-identified neoliberal schools of thought today, excluding minor attempts to appropriate the phrase. A small group of academics, among them Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, did briefly bat the term around in the late 1930s as they tried to carve out a place for free market…

Michael Zydeck was just about to pour cement on a new driveway when East Lansing, Michigan, officials told him they’d erroneously issued a permit for a driveway larger than allowed in that neighborhood. So he went through the process a second time, got another permit for a smaller driveway, and had it poured. Officials now say they screwed up again and the driveway is still too big to be in compliance; he must fix it or face jail time. They’ve offered him $1,500 to offset the cost, which Zydeck says is about a tenth of what he’s already paid. A new Scottish law bars government agencies from putting the Shetland Islands in a separate box on maps. The islands are about 150 miles from the Scottish mainland. Mapmakers say putting…

SEN. MICHAEL BENNET (D–Colo.) says the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has assured him that an upcoming report on marijuana legalization “will be completely objective and dispassionate.” That claim is hard to take seriously, since it contradicts the ONDCP’s statutory mandate to oppose marijuana legalization by any means necessary. BuzzFeed reported in August that the office was coordinating the collection of “data demonstrating the most significant negative trends” that have followed marijuana legalization in states such as Colorado, with an eye toward illustrating the “threats” posed by that policy. The effort, which reportedly involved the Drug Enforcement Administration and 14 other federal agencies, seemed to be aimed at encouraging President Donald Trump to reconsider his promise to let states go their own way on marijuana. In an August…

“HE’S GOING TO finish certainly no worse than second, and maybe first,” Libertarian Party (L.P.) 2016 vice presidential nominee Bill Weld enthused about Massachusetts state auditor candidate Dan Fishman in mid-October. And once Fishman grabs all those votes, Weld declared, “[We’re going] to make a list of every campaign for whatever office this year that Libertarians fare no worse than second, and then we’re going to take that and publicize it strongly. I think that’s going to be a crevasse in the two-party monopoly.” It looked like Weld might be onto something two weeks later when The Boston Globe took the highly unusual step of endorsing the L.P. candidate for a job that’s been held, in all living memory, by Democrats. “Fishman would bring a sorely needed independent streak to…

JERRY RABINOWITZ, 66, lost his life in the October mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. According to his nephew, Rabinowitz was shot and killed while searching for victims in need of a doctor. Those who knew him as a physician remembered his dedication to patients and were not surprised he remained committed to helping those in need until the very last seconds of his life. There is a cruel irony in Rabinowitz’s death: He had spent his career treating gay men with HIV and AIDS, yet many gay men were not permitted to help the victims of the Tree of Life massacre. Following the tragedy, city officials asked for blood donations to assist in treating the wounded—but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) heavily restricts gay…

BEHIND THE GRAY stone walls of the 900-year-old Grande Chartreuse monastery, high in the French Alps, two monks dry, crush, and sort 130 herbs and spices into burlap bags. The “plants room” where they work is accessible to them alone, because they are the only people on Earth who know exactly which ingredients are in Chartreuse, the bright-green liqueur produced exclusively by their religious community. Beneath their robes, Father Benoît and Brother Jean-Jacques wear rough sackcloth shirts meant to prevent them from ever getting too comfortable. They are among the 30 or so monks who live in almost total silence on the premises—vowed members of the Carthusians, often referred to as the most ascetic of the Catholic monastic orders. In her book An Infinity of Little Hours, Nancy Klein Maguire…

LATE EVERY SUMMER, there’s a breadfruit festival in Humacao, a Puerto Rican town not far from where Hurricane Maria made landfall on September 20, 2017. The leftist journalist Naomi Klein describes the scene when she visited, months after the storm struck: “Women who usually do the cooking for the festival came together, pooled whatever food they could find, and made hot, healthy meals for about 400 people a day. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. They are doing it still.” Maria struck Puerto Rico with sustained 175 mph winds, damaging half a million dwellings and decimating the island’s electrical grid and cellphone infrastructure. About 80 percent of the harvest was lost. After initially claiming the storm killed 64 people, the government posted a preliminary report online in…