Indice dei contenuti per May 2019 in Reason

WHEN BERNIE SANDERS and Tucker Carlson agree on something, be afraid. The democratic socialist senator and the populist conservative pundit are not natural allies. But recently, they have converged on a single point of consensus with potentially terrifying consequences: Americans have too much stuff. The far left of the American political spectrum is the longtime home of Starbucks-smashing protesters, militant recyclers, Naomi Klein acolytes, and Walmart boycotters—people who believe we are destroying the planet with our overconsumption of cheap stuff at the expense of workers’ well-being. On his 1987 folk album (yes, such a thing exists), Sanders pinpointed “consumerism, the futile striving for happiness by earning more and more money to buy more and more things,” as one of the world’s great problems, a theme the Vermont independent has returned…

DEFENSE DISTRIBUTED LAUNCHED in 2012 with the goal of making a usable plastic handgun with a 3D printer. Founder Cody Wilson fired the first of those weapons, which he dubbed The Liberator, in front of reporters in May 2013. The company and its mediagenic leader soon became the living symbol of—depending on your perspective—either the possibilities for human liberation or the threat of violent chaos inherent in the rise of affordable home 3D printing and the unstoppable spread of computer files. For Paloma Heindorff, who took over as head of the company last year after stints as director of development and vice president of operations, these innovations are an important part of keeping the powerful in check. “We’ve got to be developing technologies in the independent sector to be able…

JUST AS A building has a structure that allows the people within it to pursue their own happiness without obstructing the movements of others, a free society has a structure defined by the natural rights of first possession, private property, freedom of contract, restitution, and self-defense. These rights—all of which can be loosely characterized as “property rights”—distinguish liberty from license. License is the freedom to do whatever you desire. Liberty is the freedom to do whatever you desire with what, according to these principles, is rightfully yours. In the Hobbesian state of nature, liberty is conceived as the liberty do anything at all, including the freedom to use other people’s bodies. So government is needed to limit this liberty to avoid life being solitary, nasty, and short. By contrast, the…

The price of college has inflated enormously for decades, and many students have had to take out increasingly large loans to pay for higher and higher credentials demanded by employers. It’s not surprising that people would demand an end to the cost insanity. How has this happened? What can be done? Before we leap at simple solutions, we ought to determine what the problems are and think clearly about the unintended consequences our solutions might have. This new edited volume from the Cato Institute, Unprofitable Schooling: Examining Causes of, and Fixes for, America’s Broken Ivory Tower, looks at the issues facing higher education from the perspectives of both economics and history. Each chapter explores crucial aspects of the provision of higher education with an eye to bringing about innovation, improved…

AMERICANS ARE DODGING income taxes at a growing pace. They have good reason to do just that. Taxes are, as per a handy Internal Revenue Service (IRS) guide for students, “required payments of money to governments that are used to provide public goods and services for the benefit of the community as a whole.” Yet our politically divided countrymen find little agreement over what constitutes “benefit” or “appropriate payments” and often act as if government is better used to punish enemies than to help anybody. That has, in turn, fueled an understandable reluctance to cough up cash for what’s offered. In the latest IRS figures, voluntary tax compliance for 2008–10 is 81.7 percent of the revenue the federal government believes it’s entitled to collect. That’s down from 83.1 percent in…

THE GREEN NEW Deal—proposed in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Sen. Edward Markey (D–Mass.)—would require a vast expansion of coercive government power in order to achieve its goal: “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” in only 10 years. The plan, which has been endorsed as of this writing by at least six Democratic presidential candidates, would not only require a complete reordering of the American economy; it could happen only by trampling over property rights, local and state control, and the autonomy of the American private sector. Consider the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts. First proposed in 2001, it would have spent $2.6 billion to build 130 wind turbines that could have generated 468 megawatts of…

THERE’S A PERSISTENT American fantasy of a CEO president: a corporate Cincinnatus uncorrupted by elected experience who steps in to right the ship of state through sheer executive will. In the 1980s, the chatter centered around Chrysler chief Lee Iacocca, who polled well but refused to run. In the ’90s, it was Electronic Data Systems founder Ross Perot, who actually entered the ring. Our current president is also a businessman, and a lot of his fans seem to imagine him as the hyper competent executive he played on The Apprentice rather than the bankruptcy court regular he was in real life. You might expect Donald Trump’s performance in offce to have taken the luster off the CEO-savior fantasy, if not universally then at least among Trump’s critics. But at least…

CALIFORNIA GOV. GAVIN Newsom has made some bold promises about fixing the state’s housing shortage. Unfortunately, most of the Democrat’s solutions are heavy on government spending and light on the regulatory reform that would bring rents and home prices down. “No one should live in constant fear of eviction or spend their whole paycheck to keep a roof overhead,” Newsom said in his inaugural address. “We will launch a Marshall Plan for affordable housing and lift up the fight against homelessness from a local matter to a state-wide mission.” A budget proposal released by Newsom on January 10 calls for an additional $1.3 billion in state funding geared toward kickstarting new housing production. Of that amount, $250 million will go to local governments as “technical assistance”—allowing them to hire more…

THE YEARS FROM 1815 to 1845 are usually called the Jacksonian Era, but no one person can define the lives of millions. If someone could, the better icon for that age might be Samuel Morse, who invented the most transformative, revolutionary device of the entire century. Even the railroads pale in comparison to Morse’s telegraph. It was a time of decentralized and dispersed but consequential activities. Innumerable tinkerers worked in shops littered across the land, and every day some new machine hit the market—some contraption to repair clothing, protect your hats, heat your home, cook, clean. Undergirding it all was the revolutionary system of cheap and effcient communications: first the steam presses and cheap newspapers, then telegraphy. It was America’s first singularity. In geometry, a singularity is the point on…

“HARRY ANSLINGER MIGHT have been a racist jerk,” Alex Berenson writes in his anti-pot polemic Tell Your Children, but “he was right about marijuana.” It’s a bold thesis given some of the things Anslinger said about marijuana while he was running the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. In a 1934 report to a League of Nations committee, Anslinger wrote that “fifty percent of the violent crimes committed in districts occupied by Mexicans, Turks, Filipinos, Greeks, Spaniards, Latin-Americans and Negroes may be traced to the abuse of marihuana.” He quoted a California police official who said the weed “gives men the lust to kill, unreasonably, without motive—for the sheer sake of murder itself.” In a 1937, Anslinger warned in The American Magazine that marijuana users “may often develop a delirious rage during…

MOST PEOPLE LIKE new stuff more than they like paying for it. Poll a few thousand Americans about whether they’d enjoy having a BMW, and most would probably say yes. Ask how they’d feel if told it would cost them $40,000, and the prospect of a new 3 Series would likely become markedly less popular. This facet of human nature explains an iron law of American politics: People like government benefits; they just don’t like paying for them. Ask people whether they like Medicare for All, as the Kaiser Family Foundation did in January, and you’ll find a clear majority—56 percent—giving it the thumbs up. Tell them it would require higher taxes, and support plummets to 37 percent. Everyone wants a BMW; few people want to pay for one. Granted,…

ON FEBRUARY 2, Gov. Ralph Northam (D–Va.) held a now-infamous press conference at which he admitted to having once “darkened” his face with shoe polish while dressing up as Michael Jackson. For his sins, he faced calls to resign from a range of erstwhile allies, including Hillary Clinton, Planned Parenthood, and the Virginia state House Democratic Caucus. (He has so far declined.) Two days earlier, many of the same state House Democrats had stood proudly behind Northam, vigorously applauding, during another press conference at which he defended himself. The difference was that the first controversy was over his views on abortion—specifically his support for a bill to legalize the procedure in Virginia through the end of the third trimester. For many people, that policy is morally indistinguishable from infanticide: If…

MANY PEOPLE WARNED that the Fight Online Sex Traffcking Act (FOSTA) would endanger the lives of adults who consensually exchange sex for money. Ten months after its passage, CBS San Francisco reported that the city saw a whopping 170 percent “spike in human traffcking” last year. But there are reasons to be wary of the CBS story and the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) data it relied on. While ample signs point to negative effects from FOSTA, which made it a federal crime for websites and other online platforms to facilitate prostitution, this probably isn’t one of them. What it does illustrate is that increased police attention to the “problem” doesn’t equate to more people helped or justice served. According to a year-end report, SFPD opened 40 sex-traffcking investigations in…

IF YOU WANT to find a federal court case—say, to look up the latest juicy filing in the prosecution of one of Donald Trump’s indicted cronies—odds are you’ll hold your nose and log on to the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) website, a system run by the federal judiciary. It’s an old and clunky platform, running on the best interface the mid-1990s had to offer. Which might be excusable if it were free, but it’s not. PACER charges 10 cents a page for court records and searches. There’s a $3 cap on large documents, and users pay nothing if their bill is under $15 per quarter. This keeps most casual users from needing to pony up—but for news organizations, researchers, and legal professionals, costs can pile up quickly.…

MOVIE GREEN BOOK STEPHANIE SLADE In a sense, it’s no surprise that Green Book—a feel-good dramedy about a mob adjacent family man (Viggo Mortensen) who takes a job as chauffeur and bodyguard for a black concert pianist (Mahershala Ali) on tour in the 1960s South—won this year’s best-picture Oscar. After all, Driving Miss Daisy charmed audiences and the Academy of Motion Pictures with a similar plot involving a driver and a passenger from different backgrounds getting to know and like each other. But that movie, released in 1989, came at a moment when Americans were apparently eager to celebrate long decades of racial progress. In 2019, the kumbaya ethos seems decidedly less prevalent. For many in U.S. politics today, clashes between worldviews—along the lines of race, class, gender, or partisan…

Police in Normandy, Missouri, issued a warning to a boy for shoveling snow from his grandmother’s home without a permit. The authorities defended the move by saying they’ve gotten calls about teens pretending to offer snow shoveling services while actually casing homes for potential theft opportunities. The Okaloosa County, Florida, sheriff’s office has charged a teacher and two aides at a school for the disabled with abusing autistic students. Deputies say they locked a 10-year-old and two 8-year-olds in a dark room as punishment. In addition, deputies say they blew a whistle close to one child who is sensitive to noise and held his arms down to keep him from covering his ears. An Australian police offcer has been sentenced to six months in jail for illegally using police databases…