Tabla de contenidos para December 2015 en Reason

ON SEPTEMBER 29, Republicans in the House of Representatives conducted a theatrical grilling of Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards after a series of underground sting videos showed her organization’s employees haggling over fetal body parts. Two days later, a gunman at a rural community college in Oregon killed nine people and wounded 20 others in a depressingly familiar school shooting. Clever culture warriors attempted to link the two stories as an indictment of the opposing side’s hypocrisy. “If pro-lifers would just redirect their power toward gun violence, the amount of lives they save could reach superhero levels,” said Trevor Noah, new host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. “They just need to have a superhero’s total dedication to life. Because right now they’re more like comic book collectors: Human life…

Illinois Lottery officials say they don’t have the legal authority to pay their big winners right now because the state legislature hasn’t passed a budget yet. They do, however, apparently have the authority to continue to sell lottery tickets. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey has taken Officer Matthew Zagursky off the street and confiscated his weapon. Zagursky was caught on video telling a driver he would have his vehicle towed if the driver didn’t buy tickets to a police union fundraiser. The Israeli government has ruled that Heinz must call its ketchup “tomato seasoning.” Acting on a complaint from a local competitor, the government ruled that Heinz doesn’t have enough tomato concentrate to be labeled ketchup under Israeli law. Police in Leicestershire, England, refused to fully investigate burglaries in…

AT A 2014 Q&A session in Dallas, Rand Paul expressed skepticism about whether the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) posed “a threat to our national security.” Hours later, at another event in Dallas, the Kentucky senator said that if he were president he “would lay out the reasoning of why ISIS is a threat to our national security and seek congressional authorization to destroy ISIS militarily.” Paul’s sudden conversion on the merits of war with ISIS made me worry that, in catering to Republican primary voters, he would lose his distinctive voice on foreign policy, which urges caution and modesty instead of the heedless interventionism advocated by his rivals. But September’s Republican presidential debate showed that Paul still offers a desperately needed alternative to the mindless militarism favored…

ON MARCH 27, 1866, President Andrew Johnson sent a message to Congress vetoing the landmark civil rights bill it had just passed. Among the provisions “which I cannot approve,” Johnson wrote, was the first section, which stated, “All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” Not only would this grant of birthright citizenship make citizens out of “the entire race designated as blacks,” Johnson protested, it would also make citizens out of “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, [and] the people called Gipsies.” He wouldn’t sign it. So the Republican-controlled 39th Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over the president’s veto. As Sen. Lyman…

SOMETIME IN THE 1980S, Tom Harkin became convinced that bee pollen extract had cured his lifelong bouts with hay fever. The capsule-delivered supplement—which has also been touted as a source of longevity, a cure for PMS, and a way to enhance athletic prowess in runners—contains a variety of the pollen collected by worker bees on their daily rounds, plus nectar and bee saliva. “It’s the most bizarre thing that ever happened to me,” Harkin once told USA Today. “But I want you to know something: I’ve had my allergies completely cleared up. My nose doesn’t run. My eyes are cleared up. I don’t sneeze any longer.” Ordinarily, such a miracle-cure story would be an amusing dinner party anecdote (or a tiresome one, depending on your point of view). But Harkin…

Todd Krainin Veronique de Rugy Jack Solowey Reason TV producer TODD KRAININ, 43, got his start in the world of daily newspapers. But coming to reason allowed him to engage in “a more expressive and honest form of journalism than typical daily news work,” he says. “I can tell a great story and advocate for what’s right, without compromising [my] integrity.” One story he was itching to tell was how the federal government got into the business of funding, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars every year, research and training for “complementary and integrative” medical treatments that have never been shown to work. He does so in “The Alternative Medicine Racket” on page 28. VERONIQUE DE RUGY is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at…

“If there are 10 people who have been accused [of rape], and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people.” —Rep. Jared Polis (D–Colo.) during a hearing on dealing with sexual assault on college campuses, September 10 “Like with a cloth or something?” —former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, after Fox News’ Ed Henry asked at a press conference if she “wiped” the server housing her official email correspondence, August 18 “You know, when you’re asking me about who’s running this, this, this, that’s not, that is not, I will be so good at the military, your head will spin.” —Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in an interview on international affairs with conservative radio show host Hugh…

Eight years ago, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani enjoyed a handsome lead in Republican presidential primary polling. This September, real estate mogul and reality TV celebrity Donald Trump had an even more commanding lead, despite a larger field of candidates. As David Weigel reported in “The Liberal Candidate,” reason’s December 2007 cover story, Giuliani’s interest in politics was first sparked watching Robert Kennedy, then a lawyer, questioning Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa at a 1957 Senate hearing. By 1964, as a Bobby-inspired Democrat attending Manhattan College, Giuliani was writing columns railing against Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, whose view of government he found “coldhearted” and “standoffish.” Later, at the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, he made a name going after Wall Street types. “Giuliani’s…

AS JEB BUSH vies for the spotlight in a crowded presidential primary field, the former Florida governor is hoping his tax plan will help set him apart. Bush’s proposal would lower rates on individuals and corporations— standard conservative fare—while limiting or killing many popular deductions and exemptions, something Republicans like to talk about but few actually seem willing to do. Complying with tax laws shouldn’t be complicated or punishing. But the process is anything but simple, and the price tag of that complexity can be enormous. According to a 2012 study from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury Department, titled “Taxpayer Compliance Costs for Corporations and Partnerships: A New Look,” corporations alone spent $104 billion complying with the tax code in 2012. That’s a ton of money, especially…

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, by Kevin M. Kruse, Basic Books, 352 pages, $29.99 One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History, by Peter Manseau, Little, Brown and Co., 469 pages, $28 IN HIS MUCH-LAUDED new book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse promises to tell us the real reason so many people think America is a “Christian nation.” As telegraphed by his bolderthan-the-evidence subtitle, Kruse believes that modern American Christian religiosity was not grown organically from native soil but planted in our minds with malice aforethought by corporations in the 1950s. Their secret purpose: to crush the New Deal. Many historians—particularly Jonathan Herzog, in his 2011 book The Spiritual-Industrial Complex—have made a thorough case…

Uber vs. DUI Apps Save Lives Brian Doherty AS THE struggling members of outmoded urban taxi cartels fight to hobble smartphone apps such as Uber, more data are backing up the intuition that making it easier to summon a ride home could diminish drunk driving and save lives. A new study by Brad N. Greenwood and Sunil Wattal of Temple University’s Fox School of Business looked at California cities where Uber operates. They found a life-saving benefit in Uber’s presence: “a 3.6%–5.6% decrease in the rate of motor vehicle homicides per quarter in the state of California.” There are around 1,000 alcohol-related auto accident deaths in California every year, so dozens of lives are at stake. The researchers also found price sensitivity. The effect is clearer with the cheaper UberX…

ECONOMISTS AGREE: PUBLICLY FINANCED SPORTS STADIUMS ARE A BUST Since 1997, 20 new NFL stadiums have been funded with a total of $4.7 billion in taxpayer funds. In publicly financed sports stadium agreements, teams on average only pay 22 percent of the costs. Tax exemptions for municipal bonds to pay for stadiums cost the U.S. Treasury $146 million a year. Backers often tout the tourism benefits stadiums will draw, but only 10 percent of attendees at professional sporting events are out-of-town visitors. 86 percent of economists agreed that local and state governments should eliminate subsidies to professional sports franchises. Only 5 percent disagreed. for sources visit www.reason.com/sportsstadiumsbust…

Jim Grant Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer and the author of America’s Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself (Simon & Schuster), spoke with Editor in Chief Matt Welch in August about money and policy. For a video version of the interview, visit reason.com. Q: As someone who observes interest rates… A: Actually, there’s very little to observe. We don’t have interest rates anymore. And don’t we miss them. What we need, Matt, are natural, organic, free-range interest rates. You know, sustainable, local interest rates. The kind that grow spontaneously in the market, not the hothouse kind that the federal government imposes. Q: How much do you see of the last six years, more or less, of a bull market being the artifact of zeroed-out interest…

IN 19TH CENTURY America, insults and other forms of disrespect often provoked violence ranging from a punch in the nose to a duel. By the mid-20th century, minor offenses were treated as boorish and mostly shrugged off. But a new norm is emerging in which bothersome, often unintended slights, now styled as “microaggressions,” are reported to authorities who then reprimand and punish the offenders. In “Microaggression and Moral Cultures,” the California State University, Los Angeles sociologist Bradley Campbell and the West Virginia University sociologist Jason Manning identify a “culture of victimhood” that they distinguish from the “honor cultures” and “dignity cultures” of the past. In a victimhood culture, they write, “individuals and groups display high sensitivity to slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties, and…

ON APRIL 23, 1980, at a Republican presidential primary debate, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush discussed America’s southern border in a way that sounds like science fiction to our modern ears. Bush presented illegal immigration as a problem of prohibition, not criminality: “As we have kind of made illegal some kinds of labor that I’d like to see legal, we’re doing two things: We’re creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law, and secondly we’re exacerbating relations with Mexico,” he said. Reagan, meanwhile, wanted to tear down the notion of a border wall: “Rather than talking about putting up a fence,” he said, “why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems? Make it possible for them to…

Home Wreckers In HBO’s Show Me a Hero, TV auteur David Simon (The Wire) offers yet another panorama of urban unrest and institutional dysfunction. The six-hour miniseries, based on a 1999 book by journalist Lisa Belkin, tells the real-life story of the divisive political process that resulted when a court ordered Yonkers, New York, to build approximately 200 units of affordable housing. Simon’s screenplay, co-written with William F. Zorzi, tilts toward support of the housing project, but makes its case without being overly preachy, mostly because of its journalistic interest in the mechanics of government. As in his previous work—The Wire looked at Baltimore’s failed drug war through the eyes of both cops and criminals, and Treme was a sprawling picaresque about life in post-Katrina New Orleans— Simon remains deeply…

VOICE OF AMERICA DJ Willis Conover is up for a postage stamp to honor his work in exporting jazz, especially to short-wave radio listeners in the old Soviet Bloc. A stamp would be a minimal tribute, given the remarkable role Conover played during the Cold War, though it would be just about the only “official” recognition he has ever received. During Conover’s four decades as a Voice of America (VOA) disc jockey from 1955 through the mid-1990s he upended communist cultural policy just by playing the prohibited, “degenerate” American music that his overseas audience longed to hear. Most Americans have never heard of him, but in the postwar era he was one of the best-known, and certainly one of the most popular, Americans in the world. He had millions of…

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE now take it for granted that Netflix knows more about their specific tastes in gory revenge thrillers than they do themselves. When a woman starts buying unscented lotion and cotton balls, Target’s analytics team will ensure she receives ads targeted at pregnant women. Perhaps inspired by such feats of Holmesian deduction, police departments across the country are increasingly incorporating predictive algorithms into their law enforcement efforts. According to PredPol, a Santa Cruz, California, software developer that uses data about past crimes to predict, very specifically, the places and times in a given city where future crimes are most likely to occur, more than 60 police departments in the U.S. are now using its product. In general, cops use new technologies to expand the scope of their power…

“FUCK YOUR SHITTY TOWN BITCHES,” Willian Barboza wrote across the payment form he mailed to the town of Liberty, New York, after receiving a speeding ticket in 2012. For good measure, the 21-year-old Connecticut resident also crossed out Liberty and replaced it with “TYRANNY.” Five months later, as if to confirm that description, local police arrested Barboza for “aggravated harassment in the second degree”—a charge that was ultimately dismissed by a municipal judge who commented that “no citation is necessary for this Court to determine that the language under the circumstances here, offensive as it is, is protected” by the First Amendment. Last September a federal judge agreed, allowing Barboza’s lawsuit against the town and a local prosecutor to proceed. “Plaintiff ’s arrest violated his clearly established constitutional right to…