Indice dei contenuti per June 2017 in Reason

Most of Trump’s budget cuts take the targeted agencies back to federal funding levels of the mid-’00s— hardly a Hobbesian state of nature. PRESIDENTIAL BUDGETS HAVE all the legal force of a letter to Santa—they’re essentially the White House asking Congress for a pony. The “skinny” blueprint released by the Office of Management and Budget in March is the result of even less consultation and collaboration than usual with the legislators who hold actual budget-making power, which makes wish fulfillment even more unlikely Nevertheless, when President Donald Trump announced $54 billion in cuts to several federal agencies, the press immediately got to work on its own form of slash fiction, fetishizing the appropriations status quo and moaning over any possibility of budgetary restraint. “Donald Trump Budget Slashes Funds for E.P.A.…

Reason magazine is published with the help of supporters who invest more than the price of a subscription by making contributions to Reason Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. We are grateful for their support of our journalism and public policy research. In this issue of Reason, we acknowledge members of our Torchbearer Society, a community of people who advanced the cause of Free Minds and Free Markets by making a contribution of $1,000 or more in 2016. COUNCIL John Aglialoro & Joan Carter Anonymous Armstrong Fdn The Beach Fdn The Bond Fdn Chase Fdn of VA (M/M) Derwood S. Chase Jr.) Cintra CLAWS Fdn Adolph Coors Fdn Peter Copses & Judy Mueller E.L. Craig Fdn Dunn’s Fdn Bob & Sandy Gelfond Gleason Family Fdn Paul F. Glenn The Honorable C.…

SORRY, FLORISTS: YOU may see yourselves as artists, but the state of Washington does not see bouquets as a form of expression. What’s more: Regardless of how you feel about same-sex marriages, you must provide your services to gay couples or face punishment. A unanimous Washington State Supreme Court in February held that a florist, Baronnelle Stutzman, violated the state’s public accommodation antidiscrimination laws when she declined to create floral arrangements for a same-sex couple planning a wedding The florist, owner of Arlene’s Flowers, said she was not discriminating against gay people, which is forbidden under state law. Rather, she argued, she had religious objections to recognizing same-sex marriages. By forcing her to provide her services for one such celebration, she felt she was being compelled to use her artistry…

YOU HAVE THE right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you. So goes the the Miranda rights spiel heard on 1,000 cop shows. But in many parts of the U.S., it’s not quite true. Those who cannot afford a lawyer are left waiting for months to meet with public defenders already buried under other cases. After Shondel Church was arrested for felony theft in 2016, the Missouri public defender service told him his case was winnable, but he would have to sit in jail six months before an attorney could prepare it. After waiting three months without a job and away from his family, Church took a plea deal. He’s now the lead plaintiff in a federal class action lawsuit filed in…

FAILURE DROVE MY father’s success. Just weeks before he died on February 16, he finished writing his last book. It’s a history of the Bonus Army—the military veterans who demanded cash payment of the benefits promised to them for their service in the First World War. They were brutally dispersed by troops and tanks commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was honing the skills he’d apply to more deserving targets in the Pacific later in his career. I doubt my old man would have been motivated to labor on that book, through complications associated with multiple myeloma, if he’d earlier achieved his goal of writing a major bestseller. His writing career started with politics: magazine articles, newspaper op-eds, and the books—Radical Libertarianism (1970) and It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand…

THANKS TO A long-standing border dispute between two parts of the former Yugoslavia, there was a little slice of unclaimed land on the west bank of the Danube River. Croatia would prefer recognizing a border more closely corresponding to an older flow of the Danube, while Serbia is happy with the current Danube-defined border. That leaves a teardrop-shaped piece of land about 7 square kilometers on the Croatian side that neither country wants to claim. In April 2015, Vit Jedlicka, a Czech activist and market analyst, declared the disputed turf terra nullius and established his own country there: Liberland. In contrast with the gradualist approach taken by seasteaders and charter city founders, Liberlanders essentially came at Croatia “with both middle fingers up right away and just talked to the press,”…

EVERY MONTH IN Louisville, Kentucky, Abdi Mohamed does a little bit of family banking. The 32-year-old Somali man with dark, deep-set eyes and a cleanly trimmed goatee opens an app called Wave. Foremost in his mind are his wife, his 6-year-old stepdaughter, and his 3-year-old daughter. He tries to figure out how much money they need: Did they run out of toiletries? Any hospital visits? Have the girls grown out of their clothes? After running through his mental checklist, Mohamed determines a number, navigates the app, and taps his finger on the screen to send his family what they will need this month. The money withdraws from his bank account in Louisville. Eight thousand miles away in Nairobi, Kenya, Mohamed’s wife Sophia gets a notification on her phone that the…

EVER MIND THE First Amendment; the United States has an official religion after all. It’s a civil religion, and the deity’s role is to bestow blessings on the state. The “Supreme Architect,” “the Almighty Being,” “the Infinite Power,” and “the Being Who Regulates the Destiny of Nations” are just a few of the sobriquets that Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison gave to the nation’s nondenominational guardian spirit. For some the civil religion might be mere symbolism; others might conflate it with Christianity. Either way, it helps give the nation a sense of purpose, or so historian Walter McDougall contends. In The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy, McDougall traces how changes in the American civil religion (or “acr”) have shaped the country’s attitudes toward war and peace.…

PAUL DIMARCO HAS been selling ice cream in Poughkeepsie, New York, for two decades. He owns a fleet of trucks. When one mom confided to him, “You gotta be careful because there’s a lot of pedophiles in this world,” he recalls replying, “That attitude falls into the same category as ‘All black people that drive Cadillacs are pimps,’ and ‘All clowns kill little kids.’” Of course, some real-life ice cream men do have soft-serve for brains. There were the guys in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, who sold weed from their truck. Elsewhere in New York, an ice cream guy named Kenneth Leiton was busted in 2009 for selling pills and coke; cops caught him when he was dumb enough to park the truck in front of his dealer’s house. In Philadelphia in…

THIS MARCH AT the technology conference South by Southwest, a group of international dissidents collected usb drives to be wiped clean, filled with news and other media, and smuggled into countries with oppressive governments. Passersby who wanted to donate a drive could do so by shoving it into the mouth of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il. “The struggle for freedom used to be about who has more guns,” says the Human Rights Foundation’s Thor Halvorssen. “Now information is a key component.”…

IF YOU LIKE social engineering done through the tax code, you’ll love the House Republicans’ health care plan. It takes the refundable tax credit that Obamacare provides to most people who get their coverage through a government-run insurance exchange and replaces it with a refundable tax credit available to anyone who buys a plan on the individual market. The bill, which has yet to make it to a floor vote, would if passed make our already nightmarish Internal Revenue Code even more complicated and tax season even more painful. Regular tax credits allow an amount to be deducted directly from income taxes owed. Unfortunately, they’re often poorly designed: They introduce unnecessary complexity and ambiguity to the tax code while usually failing to properly target the desired activity or population. In…

ON DECEMBER 6, 2016, the Cato Institute, Washington, D.C.’s venerable libertarian think tank, held its first staff meeting since the election of Donald Trump. Normally such office gabfests tend to be “boring” and “routine,” says Peter Van Doren, longtime editor of the Cato-published magazine Regulation. But after a presidential campaign that was anything but standard, featuring an improbable victor whom Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz had called “an American Mussolini” in National Review, emotions were running a bit high. President Trump devoted three paragraphs of his first big speech to a joint session of Congress to saving lives through FDA reforms, a topic that libertarians, often alone in the wilderness, have been howling about for years. Peter Goettler, the cheery investment banker who became president and ceo of Cato…

“The politician creates a powerful, huge, heavy, and unstoppable Monster Truck of a government,” “At the core of libertarianism—as an attitude and as a way of thinking about politics—is the idea that people are assets. The liberal idea is that people are burdens.” P.J. O’Rourke writes in his new book, How the Hell Did This Happen? (Atlantic Monthly Press). “Then supporters of that politician become shocked and weepy when another politician, whom they detest, gets behind the wheel, turns the truck around, and runs them over.” In the book, O’Rourke’s 19th, the former editor in chief of National Lampoon uses his celebrated blend of acerbity and warmth to explore the 2016 election, which he refers to as a “rebellion” against people in control. O’Rourke, a regular panelist on npr’s Wait…

WHEN NED DECIDED to try anabolic steroids for the first time, his goal was to “be bigger and look better.” He had friends who used, and they seemed no worse for wear. The college sophomore was already training smart and eating right. “I felt like the pieces were in place to accelerate the process,” he says looking back. That left the question of acquisition: He knew he could use the internet to illegally buy drugs from overseas, or he could invest some social capital in befriending a muscle-bound gym regular who might be able to hook him up. Still, he hesitated, until a fellow lifter revealed that he could obtain the same drug—testosterone, the paterfamilias of anabolic steroids—legally. If Ned could convince an M.D. that he had low testosterone, he…

SOME DECADES AGO, the great divide in New York City culture was between uptown and downtown. The former contained the prominent museums, the commercial publishers, and the wasp establishment. The latter held the less established artists and writers, the best galleries for selling recent art, and the independent intellectuals. Uptown New Yorkers often took pride in never going downtown, where people lived in shabbier lodgings, often renovated from factories. Those of us residing downtown, as I did from 1966 to 2010, thought we might get a nosebleed if we traveled north of 14th Street. Toward the end of the last century, as downtown Manhattan became slicker, uptown people and institutions started to move downtown, often creating replicas of the areas they had left in a process commonly called gentrification. SoHo,…

15 YEARS AGO June 2002 “Ashcroft’s immediate response to the 9/11 attacks was to sink into a dark Orwellian morass of secret detentions, warrantless wiretaps, and eavesdropping on lawyers.” BRIAN DOHERTY “John Ashcroft’s Power Grab” “Havana is famously seething with Cubans trying to pump dollars from tourists. Walk through the central city as a blond man in a white T-shirt, and you’ll spend your days hearing the hissing ‘kss-kss!’ sound of people trying to grab your attention. It isn’t all about money scams, cheap cigars, and prostitutes. Just as often—maybe more often—the approaching strangers and instant friends just want to talk, to practice their foreign languages, to pepper you with questions about the outside world.” MATT WELCH “Foul Ball” 20 YEARS AGO June 1997 “Personally, I don’t care whether the…

It starts out as a typical music video. A camera follows a rapper into an abandoned warehouse, where artists thrash their heads in time to a Richter-magnitude rock riff. But this is no ordinary rap-metal group. For starters, the song is called “Statism.” Listen closely and you’ll hear the emcee, 27-year-old self-identified anarcho-capitalist Eric July, railing against handouts and arguing that taxation is theft. His band is Backwordz, and it recently signed to Stay Sick Recordings, a record label launched by Chris Fronzak of the immensely popular metalcore band Attila. Q: Tell me about your upbringing. A: It’s just a typical story: Young black kid, no father around, ends up being a knucklehead. My mother was working two or three jobs at a time just for me. I was getting…

A judge in Providence, Rhode Island, has dismissed a ticket and fine issued to a woman for parking in a spot two seconds before it became legal to park there. When members of the North Carolina Military Commission saw that press and members of the public had actually showed up to a public meeting where a presentation on a wind farm would be held, they pulled that item from the agenda and told everyone it would be discussed at a later date. Then, after the public and the media left, members of the commission heard the presentation anyway. For almost a decade, Montreal has hosted the Canadian championship in Brazilian jujitsu. But organizers had to cancel this year’s tournament at the last minute after cops told them it would violate…