Indice dei contenuti per May 2017 in Reason

GOOD FENCES MAKE good neighbors, or so Robert Frost reminds us in his annoyingly overused and frequently misquoted high school literature class staple. The poem that made the adage famous actually offers a more ambiguous take on the utility of border barriers than its signature line would suggest, with the speaker musing: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offence.” The question of what exactly is being walled in or walled out by Donald Trump’s barrier—he issued commands for the “immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border” in a January 25 executive order—is trickier to answer than it initially appears. The short answer, illegal immigrants, is an…

WHEN THE NATIONAL Survey on Drug Use and Health (nsduh) indicated that marijuana use by teenagers in Colorado rose after the state legalized the drug for recreational use in 2012, prohibitionists trumpeted the results, even though the change was not statistically significant. Drug warriors were notably quieter when subsequent nsduh data indicated that adolescent consumption in Colorado fell after state-licensed marijuana stores began serving the recreational market. That change was not statistically significant either, underlining the uncertainty about the impact of legalization on underage consumption. It is plausible that legalization would increase adolescent use by making marijuana more socially acceptable (although probably not cooler) or by making it available from legal buyers 21 or older. But so far there is little evidence that is happening. The Colorado Department of Public…

A LEAKED PRESIDENTIAL memo and several Republican bills suggest the gop is taking aim at high-skilled visa holders, especially those with H-1Bs. President Donald Trump’s memo ordered the eventual elimination of all regulations “not in the national interest” that allow foreign nationals to work in the United States. That likely means scaling back the program that allows foreign students at American universities to work on their student visas for three years after graduating— a crucial grace period that allows them to find permanent jobs. It would also step up “site visits” by government inspectors to make sure companies are not illegally replacing American workers with cheaper foreign labor. The Republican bills go even further. One, co-sponsored by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions (now attorney general), would…

IN 2005, WHILE an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands- Posten, Flemming Rose commissioned a series of cartoons about the prophet Muhammad. His goal was to highlight the dangers of self-censorship in an age of political correctness. The response was explosive: Islamic terrorists greeted the cartoons with violence, riots, and attacks on western embassies that left at least 200 dead, according to The New York Times. Rose has been under threat ever since, frequently traveling with bodyguards. Yet he remains one of the planet’s most committed and articulate defenders of free speech, the open society, and the enlightenment values of tolerance and universal rights. Rose sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie in February to talk about his book The Tyranny of Silence (Cato), a defense of his decision to…

John Pfaff is here to tell you everything you know about mass incarceration is wrong. In Locked In (Basic Books), the Fordham law professor takes a hard look at thea prevailing narrative about America’s unparalleled boom in incarceration, then compares it with the actual data underlying the spike. What he discovers goes against most of what the public has heard from criminal justice reform advocates, the media, and even former President Barack Obama. The poster child for reform, the “first-time, nonviolent drug offender,” is relatively insignificant as a factor in the increase in mass incarceration, he finds. Nonviolent drug offenders make up only 16 percent of the total state prison population. Lengthy mandatory minimum sentences also had a surprisingly small effect on prison populations. Instead, Pfaff points to unchecked aggressiveness…

Set in a near-future Chicago, the new Fox drama apb imagines what might happen if an arrogant tech billionaire, driven by the unsolved murder of a friend and by the woeful state of the local police’s outdated gear, lets the cops use his gadgets. It’s an interesting premise, but so far the show has failed to deliver on its promise. The tech includes drones, fancy cars, a crime-reporting app, body cameras, protective vests, and software that lets officers use the massive amount of data being collected. It all seems very impressive until certain issues become conspicuous by their absence. Naturally, apb shows police using their new tools to catch people who viewers know are the bad guys. But as the newly outfitted officers of Chicago’s 13th District drive around in…

Cogently evaluates Thomas Piketty’s work .... should be widely read. “ “ —PASCAL SALIN, Paris-Dauphine University Eminently readable and precise. It is superb! “ “ —DOUGLAS B. RASMUSSEN, St. John’s University Brings together many of the best criticisms of Thomas Piketty. “ “ —PETER BOETTKE, George Mason University Thomas Piketty’s well-received book Capital in the Twenty-First Century provided a new theory about wealth and inequality. However, there have been major criticisms of his work. Anti-Piketty: Capital for the 21st Century brings together key criticisms from 20 specialists who provide rigorous arguments against Piketty’s work while examining the issues of inequality, growth, wealth, and capital AVAILABLE AS A PAPERBACK AND EBOOK FROM RETAILERS NATIONWIDE.…

ADAM SMITH FAMOUSLY used a pin factory to illustrate the advantages of specialization, choosing this “very trifling manufacture” because the different tasks were performed under one roof: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two…

DONALD TRUMP’S CHAMPIONS and critics agree: He is rewriting the relationship between the press and the presidency. On the pro-Trump side, Newt Gingrich claims that the president’s “brilliant” use of Twitter allows him “very quickly over and over to set the agenda at almost no cost,” while Press Secretary Sean Spicer says it gives him a “direct pipeline to the American people.” Critics highlight how Trump sidelines the press by bullying his critics, rebuffing hard questions, and favoring sympathetic outlets such as Breitbart. They have expressed alarm about Trump’s call to “open up” libel laws as a means to quash “horrible and false” stories. Another president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, revised the media rules in equally profound ways. Like Trump, he feuded with the mainstream media; like Trump, he used a…

THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO, Kirkpatrick Sale set out to write a comprehensive compendium of the evils of things pushed far beyond their natural “scale,” coupled with pungent arguments for why these baneful developments are destructively anti-human. The result, Human Scale, weighed in at a hefty-scaled 523 pages. The present work, Human Scale Revisited, is a slimmed down and updated reissue, adding a plethora of examples of things that Sale believes have run far beyond our ability to comprehend, cope, and pay for. Sale is an independent journalist whose ideological proclivities are difficult to characterize. Depending on the passage, he can appear as a Bill McKibben environmentalist, a Peter Kropotkin anarchist, a Wendell Berry communitarian, an Albert Jay Nock libertarian, and, now and then, a cryptoauthoritarian. His other volumes range from SDS,…

Everybody’s favorite libertarian economist and blogger, Tyler Cowen, is back with his signature mix of despair and optimism, following up on The Great Stagnation and Average Is Over. His latest book, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream (St. Martin’s Press), tells the story of various American subtypes of the rich (“the privileged”), poor (“those who are stuck”), and middle class (“those who dig in”). These classes, Cowen says, have historically contained larger shares of big-thinking go-getters, but they are increasingly reconciled to the status quo. We don’t lack in innovation, reports the Marginal Revolution founder, but our innovators are more likely to pursue comfort and convenience than to look for ways to revolutionize the world. Ironically, our politicians, entrepreneurs, and pundits are more prone than ever…

While Donald Trump uses Twitter to delight his fans and aggravate his foes, a host of parody accounts have arisen to torment him where he lives. @MatureTrumpTwts rewrites Trump’s posts to make them sound more presidential. Accounts like @reaIDonaldTrunp strive to out-Trump him. “I’m burning through pens in my first month as President faster than Bill Clinton burned through chubby interns!” a typical tweet reads. These are the accounts most often mistaken for Trump himself. Meanwhile, accounts like @Donaeldunready, which wonders what Trump might sound like as a medieval king, are more high-concept: “Canute. What a loser. Can’t even hold back the sea. It’s just water. We’re going to be so tough on the sea. Canute was too soft. Sad.” Some didn’t make it to Election Day. One account, @ArtHouseTrump,…

NEW YORK PASSED one of the nation’s most onerous anti-homesharing laws last year, but residents don’t seem to be taking it all that seriously. There were more than 55,000 Airbnb rentals in the Big Apple on the final night of 2016, the San Francisco–based homesharing service reports, up from about 47,000 on December 31, 2015. That made New York City the world’s top Airbnb destination on New Year’s Eve, despite the state law that prohibits the advertising of short-term rentals and the threat of $7,500 fines. It was a fitting end to 2016, a year that saw more people than ever before using homesharing applications such as Airbnb and HomeAway, even as many states and cities cracked down on the practice. Other cities have been less straightforward about it. In…

IN APRIL 1990, a guidance counselor at a Searsport, Maine, elementary school summoned a fifth-grader to her office. The counselor asked the 11-year-old, Crystal Grendell, whether her parents used drugs. After the counselor reassured her that “nothing would happen,” Crystal eventually admitted that her parents occasionally smoked pot. At school a few days later, Crystal was greeted by three d.a.r.e. police officers, who interrogated her about her parents’ drug use. The officers threatened Crystal, saying her parents would be arrested if she didn’t tell them everything she knew about her mother and father’s recreational drug habits. The officers then warned her against telling her parents about their encounter, claiming that “often parents beat their children after the children talk to police.” Scared, the girl agreed to carry out a spy…

Martin Scorsese’s Silence, about two 17th century priests who travel to Japan during a period of brutal Christian persecution, shows how difficult it is to create art from a worldview that won’t be shared by many in the audience. For a nonbeliever, the premise may well read as lacking heft. What’s the big deal about stepping on an image of Jesus, anyway? Surely it’s worth doing to keep dozens of your followers from being tortured and killed? Yet for people of faith, watching the protagonist inch toward apostasy as a broken man can be a soulcrushing experience. Silence is an instance of pop culture grappling with impossible theological questions about the demands of morality, and yet it has gone unnoticed by most of the population. It’s a box-office flop that…

A Canadian cybersecurity expert working with the Chinese government to build an electronic surveillance tool suffers unexpected heart failure. He’s able to get a heart transplant within mere hours because of his importance to the project— and then discovers that the replacement organ was harvested from one of the country’s thousands of political prisoners That’s the plot hook of The Bleeding Edge, a film from the Canadian director Leon Lee. This fictional story is based on Lee’s award-winning 2014 documentary Human Harvest, which claimed that thousands of imprisoned practitioners of the religion Falun Gong have been killed to supply organs to Chinese hospitals. Officially, the country has no organ donor program; the government maintains that hospitals are supplied only with organs from executed criminals. The movie tells two parallel stories…

What happens when you combine vinyl record collectors, cult movie obsessives, and a pair of savvy entrepreneurs? You get Waxwork Records, a New Orleans–based imprint founded in 2013 by musician Kevin Bergeron and artist Suzy Soto. The label specializes in exclusive vinyl reissues of film scores and soundtracks, featuring elaborate original artwork and liner notes by cinema icons such as Martin Scorsese and George Romero. Looking for the C.H.U.D. (“Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers”) soundtrack in “toxic waste puddle”– colored vinyl? What about the Friday the 13th Part II score in “camp counselor blood splatter”? Perhaps you’d like to own the Taxi Driver soundtrack in “taxi driver yellow”? Waxworks Records has got you covered. Waxworks’ biggest success to date came in February, when it reissued the long-unavailable Ennio Morricone score to…