Inhaltsverzeichnis für April 2019 in Reason

A RECENTLY ADOPTED IRS rule for tax-exempt organizations seems to violate the First Amendment by taking aim at groups that support drug policy reform. The rule, described in an Internal Revenue Bulletin dated January 2, 2018, says the IRS will deny tax-exempt status to “an organization whose purpose is directed to the improvement of business conditions of one or more lines of business relating to an activity involving controlled substances (within the meaning of schedule I and II of the Controlled Substances Act) which is prohibited by Federal law regardless of its legality under the law of the state in which such activity is conducted.” As Washington, D.C., lawyers David Rivkin and Randal Meyer pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, that language arguably covers organizations that advocate legalization of…

ROBERT TILLMAN’S IDEA of converting a coin-operated laundromat into a new apartment building initially had a lot of things going for it. Except for his laundromat—one of three within a 100-yard radius in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District—no businesses or tenants were located on his property, meaning no one would be displaced by its redevelopment. The site was already zoned for housing and was close to a major commuter rail stop, big pluses in a highly regulated, transit-obsessed city. Best of all, the new building would bring 75 additional apartment units to a city suffering from a severe housing shortage and some of the highest rents in the country. But instead of sailing through the permitting process, Tillman has spent five years and over $1 million just trying…

WHEN LISA WEISS and her family decided to adopt a dog a few years ago, they contacted a rescue organization near their home in Chappaqua, New York, and were told to fill out a form. “It was, like, 20 pages!” Weiss, a lawyer, recalls. “It took me an hour. I was very honest and very detailed because I was pretty proud of what great pet parents we are. I thought we were fantastic. We had a Lab rescue who had lived to 13, which was well past her sell-by date. She died of old age, no illnesses. She was a happy, outside dog. We had an electric fence and she came and went as she pleased. She was a completely independent soul.” Right on—free-range! And yet there was still more…

AT FIRST GLANCE, Mitch Daniels seems rather bland. His hair is straight and tidy. His suits are understated but tasteful. He speaks slowly and in quiet tones. He gently declines to answer questions about the failings of other politicians. And he seems genuinely mortified when he accidentally refers to his interviewer as Meghan. But Daniels’ record as governor of Indiana could best be described as radical. During his governorship, which ran from 2005 to 2013, he decertified all government employee unions on his first day in office, managed to defeat teachers unions in a pitched battle for school choice, imposed tough spending austerity and raised taxes to balance the books, and inspired the Democrats in Indiana’s legislature to walk out at the beginning of his second term over a right-to-work…

Fire officials showed up at the UpperWest wine bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and told the owner the restaurant could no longer use candles at tables, citing a city ordinance. The ordinance turned out to be a new paragraph on the fire department’s website that had been added without public comment or notice. “Some person put a sentence on the website,” UpperWest owner Kim Courtney told a local news station. “That does not create a law.” The city’s licensing commission disagreed, suspending the bar’s alcohol license for three days for the violation. Health officials fined a Quebec theater $500 after an actor lit a fake prop cigarette during a performance of the play Conversations Avec Mon Pénis. Marc Gourdeau, artistic director of the Premier Acte theater in Quebec City, said the…

OUT IN THE CALIFORNIA desert, on the site of an abandoned military base, you’ll find Slab City, where a mix of full-time squatters and transient retirees in RVs live without immediate access to either the electric grid or formal government. In Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place (MIT Press), author Charlie Hailey and photographer Donovan Wylie explore the site, from the volunteer-run library to the informal swap-dump-or-recycle center called Slab Mart. And the homes: jerry-rigged places for people who value both the right to express themselves and the right to be left alone.…

SINCE AT LEAST 2004, when the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to Pennsylvania’s congressional district boundaries because there was not a good enough way to quantify gerrymandering, the problem facing would-be reformers is this: How do you measure something that’s best understood by how it affects other things? Last year, reformers thought they had solved that conundrum. Armed with a new metric called the “Efficiency Gap”—a formula that claims to demonstrate how gerrymandering makes congressional races less competitive—they asked the Supreme Court to toss out Wisconsin’s congressional map. The court refused, emphatically. In a unanimous ruling, the nine justices agreed that the Supreme Court would not be responsible “for vindicating generalized partisan preferences.” The court could, however, be interested in adjudicating specific cases of disenfranchisement as a result of unfairly…

IN JANUARY, THE New York Times reported that free speech had suffered a setback when Netflix restricted access to an episode of a comedy act at the request of the government of Saudi Arabia. The episode of Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act, which included impolitic remarks about the Saudi crown prince, remains available to Netflix subscribers elsewhere. The Times underscored its displeasure by publishing an opinion piece attacking “Netflix’s supine compliance” in the face of a “dictatorial crackdown,” with a historical Hitler reference tossed in for good measure. A few days later, the Times published a second opinion article lamenting that the “streaming giant has set a disturbing precedent” and has “lent some legitimacy to the claim that it is wrong for Saudis to ever hear their leaders criticized.” It’s true,…

LUNCH LADIES, SCHOOL staff, and political partisans were polarized by Obama-era attempts to put healthier fare on school lunch menus. The Trump administration’s revision to those rules has received equally mixed reactions from folks on the frontlines of the food fight. Supporters of the old rules contend that school meals should be nutritious, that the feds know best what this means, and that deviation from federally approved meal plans is just asking for trouble. “When it comes to our children’s health, there should be no ‘flexibility,’” the American Heart Association responded last December, after Megan Gibbons, executive director of the Illinois School Nutrition Association, told a local paper that changes weren’t a rollback but simply offered more “flexibility.” But the Obama-era rules had led to less lunch revenue for schools,…

POT IS BULKY and pungent. That makes it difficult to conceal in, say, a suitcase or a truck. For that reason, marijuana traffickers tend to avoid legal ports or entrances, preferring instead to traverse the expanses of deserts and canyons where Border Patrol agents are often the only signs of human life. To the extent that other drugs cross outside normal entry points, they are most often hitch-hikers along for the ride with the weed. In 2013, for example, Border Patrol agents seized 274 pounds of marijuana for every one pound of other drugs. So for those familiar with the history of drug smuggling, there was a dog that didn’t bark in Donald Trump’s early January Oval office address, which was intended to frighten Americans into supporting a border wall…

WHEN LIBERTARIANS DOLE out blame for the growth of government, perhaps we should take a look in the mirror. Is it possible that our arguments—correct and widely accepted though they are—about government inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and incompetence have had the unintended consequence of fueling government’s growth? For 50 years, Reason writers and other libertarians have preached that government at all levels is bad at what it does, a view that virtually every poll finds to be widespread among Americans of all political persuasions. In his first inaugural address in 1981, Ronald Reagan famously declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That’s a tight summary of what not just a majority of libertarians but most Americans believe these days. But has all this declining trust…

IN 2017, THE journal Child Development published results from a study showing that young children worked more diligently at difficult tasks when dressed as Batman. Research like this can feel a little bit gimmicky, but the essential idea is easy enough to understand: Superheroes are simplified models for living, showing us what we can aspire to when we adopt their values and mindset. I There’s a similar idea at play in SpiderMan: Into the Spider-Verse, a Academy Award–nominated animated movie that works from the notion that anyone can be—or at least be like—Spider-Man. It’s a movie that casts Spider-Man not as a specific, singular hero but as a symbol of a set of eternal values, and it’s a pop-culture parable about choice, responsibility, and the power of individuals to construct…

HEN I WAS a little girl, my country held its first democratic election after more than a decade of military rule. The bald, mustachioed general who had led Pakistan for my entire life had died in a plane crash a few months earlier. A woman, the daughter of a previously slain prime minister, led her party to an electoral majority, and on a pleasant December morning we watched her sworn into office. This, we were told, was history. This was democracy. This was the beginning of freedom. The people of my city, Karachi—particularly those who had voted for the new prime minister—decided to use their freedom right away. Large groups of them climbed onto motorbikes and into the backs of pickup trucks; they took over the city streets, waving flags…