Tabla de contenidos para January 2018 en Reason

“THESE ARE CHALLENGING times,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.) said with a little selfeffacing chuckle. “The definition of what it means to be conservative has shifted dramatically over the last year or so.” We were at that most oxymoronic of Washington, D.C., events—a libertarian fundraiser for a major-party elected official. There are only about five people I’d consider doing this for, I have heard almost verbatim from hosts at two separate such gatherings in the grim political year of 2017. Los cincos amigos: Sens. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and Mike Lee (R–Utah); Reps. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) and Thomas Massie (R–Ky.); and Flake. And then there were four. One week after the fundraiser, Flake made his exit from the world of electoral competition, announcing in an emotional Senate speech that he was no…

Obamacare supporters argued that these actions amounted to intentional sabotage. The reality is likely to be less dramatic. IN OCTOBER, AS Republicans in Congress moved on from a failed effort to pass health care reform legislation, President Donald Trump took a series of steps to alter the administration of the Affordable Care Act on his own. He issued an executive order to create additional paths for individuals and small businesses to purchase insurance that does not comply with all of the law’s regulations. He also cut off a series of subsidy payments to health insurers that a federal court had ruled were illegal. These moves were preceded by a decision in September to reduce the money spent encouraging people to sign up for insurance through government-run exchanges. Supporters of the…

THE U.S. SUPREME Court will hear a case this term that could deliver a death blow to the legal privileges enjoyed by public sector unions. The case is Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31. At issue is whether it is constitutional for state governments to require government workers to pay union fees as a condition of employment, even when those workers are not themselves union members. The case was brought by Mark Janus, a state employee in Illinois who objects to paying mandatory fees to a union that he refused to join. Janus argues that this violates his First Amendment rights by forcing him to financially support political speech and activity he does not agree with. Janus’ overarching goal is to overturn the Supreme…

IF YOU’RE READING this, the U.S. and North Korea have not embarked on an apocalyptic nuclear war. There’s actually very little chance humanity won’t make it to this magazine’s publication date, but news consumers could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. An October poll found 65 percent of Americans thought President Donald Trump was making the situation between the U.S. and North Korea worse. More than two-thirds of respondents said they were either very or extremely concerned about this issue; 40 percent were worried about their personal safety. They’re wrong about the threat North Korea poses to the mainland United States, where more than 99 percent of Americans live. And the bluster from North Korea is nothing new, even if the bluster from America is. Ultimately, Trump’s provocative comments aimed at…

I AM NOT A bitcoin multimillionaire. I could have been: I was aware of the cryptocurrency’s existence in July 2010. I should have been: Dozens of smart people with sympatico worldviews to my own eagerly explained to me how the creation of an online “blockchain”—a reliable yet anonymous ledger of transactions—had the potential to change the world. And I would have been: Had I shelled out, say, $2,000 on this innovative, anti-inflationary currency even a lazy six weeks after I was introduced to it, today I would be sitting on 28,571 bitcoins, the equivalent at press time of over $212 million in cash. But I didn’t. Libertarians have long contemplated the potential power of a currency free of government interference, control, or devaluation. Unsurprisingly, I found early bitcoin fanatics galore…

WHEN HE LAST spoke with Reason in 1973, Daniel Ellsberg was on trial for leaking the Pentagon Papers. The Harvardeducated military analyst at the RAND Corporation had long wrestled with many of the moral quandaries of war, but was a consummate Washington insider up until the moment he decided to release a classified Department of Defense study of the Vietnam War, with its damning proof that President Lyndon Johnson had misled Congress and the public about the conflict. While it looked like Ellsberg might spend the rest of his life behind bars, he was saved—ironically—by Richard Nixon’s paranoid dealings, which included sending goons to break into Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist’s office and allegedly plotting to have him killed. If the original leaking plan had gone Ellsberg’s way, he suspects he might…

IF YOU WANT to sell a book about tech policy these days, there’s an easy formula to follow. First you need a villain. Google and Facebook should suffice, but if you can throw in Apple, Amazon, or Twitter, that’s even better. Paint their CEOs as either James Bond baddies bent on world domination or naive do-gooders obsessed with the quixotic promise of innovation. Then you repackage some old chestnuts about commercialism or false consciousness. Add a dash of pop psychology and behavioral economics. Be sure to include a litany of woes about cognitive overload and social isolation. Finally, come up with a juicy Chicken Little title. Maybe something like World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. Wait—that one’s taken. It’s the title of Franklin Foer’s latest book, which…

Microsoft Word’s spell check has come a long way from when a googly-eyed paper clip unfailingly assumed you were writing a letter. Now it accurately spots grammatical mistakes, autocorrects misspelled words, and alerts the user to improper spacing. The latest version even offers to catch a social error: sexism. If you scroll through the grammar settings of Microsoft Word 2016, you’ll find an option titled “gender-specific language,” which promises to convert the basic spell check from a simple copy editor to a fully woke word processor. Toggle it on and be amazed at the number of words that fail its exacting gender-neutral test. Clippy’s descendant goes well beyond suggesting alternatives for professional roles whose old names include the word man. Take landlord. When you type this problematic term, a red…

OREGON RESIDENT KIM Sordyl had a hunch. The outspoken education activist thought Portland Public Schools might be using lengthy and expensive paid leaves to avoid firing problem employees. So she filed a public records request, looking for data to back up her suspicion. Instead of forking over the info—even after the county district attorney declared it part of the public record—the district sued Sordyl, along with a reporter who’d requested similar information, asking a judge to review the case in April. Being named in a lawsuit for filing a public records request was “just more of the same” from a school system that “goes to great lengths to protect themselves and administrators at the expense of students, staff, and taxpayers,” Sordyl says. But transparency advocates argue cases like hers are…

CAPITALISM IS WHAT the Dutch call a geuzennaam—a word assigned by one’s sneering enemies, such as Quaker or Tory or Whig, but later adopted proudly by the victims themselves. The word is a Marxist coinage. Karl Marx himself never used the word capitalism, but let’s not get pedantic: He freely tossed around capitalist to describe the bosses who were busily reinvesting surplus value on top of their original accumulations of capital. Like economists and others before and after, Marx claimed that the accumulation of capital was the watchspring of wealthy modernity. The Marxian sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, for example, wrote in 1983 that “the word capitalism is derived from capital. It would be legitimate therefore to presume that capital is a key element in capitalism.” Actually, it wouldn’t. That we insist…

AFTER A SQUAD of federal agents detained the Anchorage sex worker “Alanna” in October, she described the experience as a “scary” one that left her feeling “violated.” The agents reportedly failed to take her claims of asthma and anxiety attacks seriously, refusing to call for medical help until she dialed 911 herself. They also seized her phone—confiscating irreplaceable family photos—despite the fact that she was not arrested or charged with a crime. Alanna’s offense was agreeing to meet with an undercover agent who had responded to her online ad for sensual massages. She was caught up in Operation Cross Country (OCC), the FBI’s massive, annual, multi-day, national vice sting conducted under the guise of stopping sexual predators. In October, federal officials announced the end of this round of stings on…

ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1926, Roger Baldwin set sail for the Soviet Union, a man adrift. Nearly seven years before, he had helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He had been a hands-on executive director for the upstart organization, which had had an immediate impact with its unapologetic First Amendment defenses of labor radicals. The early ACLU wasn’t in any way a neutral defender of the Bill of Rights. As ACLU counsel Walter Nelles put it, “We are frankly partisans of labor in the present struggle, and our place is in the fight.” But in 1926, Baldwin took a leave of absence from the organization as personal crises mounted. He was battling depression. His marriage was on the rocks. A close friend had died of a drug overdose. Later…

Willy Ley was an early mover and shaker in the 1920s German Rocket Society. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1935, he became the most enthusiastic and most-heard public voice promoting rocketry and the exploration it would enable. Against the inclinations of nationalists both German and American, Ley pushed an open, international brotherhood of rocket scientists to speed up what he saw as a transcendent accomplishment for the human race: to promote rockets for space travel and not war. Willey Ley: Prophet of the Space Age (University Press of Florida), by the historian Jared S. Buss, is his first academic bio. Ley’s rocket education and advocacy operated on every level of American culture, from department store displays to cereal boxes, from leftist newspapers to MIT journals, from Disneyland to the…

Actual rats helped compose the soundtrack of Rat Film, a meditation on urban planning and pest control in Baltimore. Musician Dan Deacon ended up giving a pack of rodents free run of a theremin—a rare electronic instrument typically controlled by a musician’s hand gestures—to generate the basis for a piece called “Redlining.” Theo Anthony’s film is impressionistic rather than argumentative, and it would have benefited from a slightly more conventional human being somewhere—anywhere!— in the production process to check its excesses. But give Anthony credit: He has combined raw and compelling human stories about poverty with floods of data about the ways governments and other entangled institutions reinforce segregation, even in an era that theoretically frowns on the practice of sorting white from black and rich from poor. Plus, there’s…

Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D–N.J.) and Emanuel Cleaver (D–Mo.) have warned Twitter officials that if the company does not do more to stop “racially divisive communications,” Congress will regulate the service. The ethics committee at Bath Spa University, a public university in England, barred a graduate student in psychotherapy from studying transgender people who regret having reassignment surgery. James Caspian says he was told that allowing him to pursue such research could offend people and expose the university to criticism on social media. Following a 14-month investigation, Canada’s Competition Bureau has closed a probe of three groups accused by environmentalists of making misleading claims about global warming. But the bureau says it may reopen the investigation if it receives new information. United Kingdom Home Secretary Amber Rudd has called for…

THE DIVIDE BETWEEN people on either side of the political aisle is now larger than at any point since 1994. The share of Democrats expressing very unfavorable attitudes toward Republicans grew from 16 percent to 44 percent over that period, according to Pew Research Center. The percentage of Republicans holding very unfavorable views of Democrats rose from 17 percent to 45 percent. “Partisan hostility in America today is not entirely rooted in different views of the world,” the researchers found. At least part of the problem is people’s “powerful but substantively vacuous” desire for tribal belonging. New research in Public Opinion Quarterly identifies what could be a significant factor fueling this rise: Americans’ authoritarian tendencies. Authoritarians are predisposed toward a group-centrism that is grounded in a need for order and…

Ah, fall. Students heading off to campus protests, football players kneeling as the national anthem plays, the smell of burning flags. It’s the season of free speech madness. Republicans, as is their habit of late, have positioned themselves as the defenders of First Amendment freedoms in a time of runaway political correctness. This plays well on television: Footage of college students shouting down speakers they don’t like, staging sit-ins, and brandishing protest placards runs on an endless loop at Fox News while chyrons blare, “Free Speech Under Fire on Campus.” And when a demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, spiraled out of control, it was primarily right-leaning lawmakers and pundits who stood up for the right of white supremacists and Nazis to express their vile opinions about race and Confederate statuary. Meanwhile,…

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Henry David Thoreau was in high school English class. I was charmed, but also puzzled, by his experiment of living alone in the woods so he could “drive life into a corner” and by his gift for pithy statements that forced me to do a mental double take. Some of them, I realized after a little reflection, Thoreau believed are literally true— such as “The swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot” or “Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist.” Others I found more difficult to grasp: “It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you.” Or worse yet: “For the most part, we are not where…

Tom of Finland is the Norman Rockwell of gay sex. His artwork— drawings worshipping the male physique in unabashedly exaggerated masculine and sexual form—has retained cul tural gay prominence decades after the artist’s death in 1991. Tom (actual name: Touko Laaksonen) is an iconic enough figure that his birth country sold postage stamps in 2014 bearing his work. Now a new biopic aims to capture his life, and Finland has submitted it as its country’s nomination to the Academy Awards for best foreign- language movie of 2017. Appropriately named Tom of Finland, the film illustrates Laaksonen’s life from his time as a military officer during the 1930s and ’40s to his stretch as an advertising graphic designer to his eventual international fame as an erotic artist in the 1970s and…

Respected indie rock songsmith Ted Leo gives the Libertarian Party a new kind of popculture attention: a wounded attack song on its 2016 vice presidential candidate, former GOP Massachusetts Gov. William Weld. As a synecdoche for the party’s inability to gain political or cultural traction, the song “William Weld in the 21st Century” has seemingly nothing to do with Weld’s role as a third-party candidate. Though the lyrics seem inspired by a possibly true incident of running into Weld at an airport, Leo said in a Slate podcast that his ire stemmed from seeing the man as a representative of a patrician Republican class that didn’t do enough to stop Donald Trump. Weld did actually run against Trump, but Leo says in his lyrics that Weld “felt he could save…

20 YEARS AGO January 1998 “At the risk of simplifying a complex story (if only by reducing it to two players), the bottom line is this: Apple acted— and continues to act—like a smug, self-righteous monopolist. Microsoft acted—and continues to act—like a scrambling, sometimes vicious competitor.” VIRGINIA POSTREL “Creative Insecurity” “China’s dictatorship will corrode with the drip of free trade water torture far faster than by ill-fated attempts at isolation.” THOMAS WINSLOW HAZLETT “Peking Duck” “The 30th anniversary of Che’s death occasioned a fistful of adulatory reminiscences here and abroad....Unsurprisingly, the legends surrounding Che— including the inevitable one that he escaped death—shroud a mundane legacy of failure. As Castro’s one-time top economic planner, he helped preside over the demise of the Cuban economy. And his subsequent attempts to foment revolution…