Tabla de contenidos para January 2021 en Reason

THE GOOD NEWS is, everybody lost in the 2020 election—at least a little bit. Donald Trump lost the White House, Democrats lost ground in the House, and the Senate remains in contention with the most likely outcome being Republican control and therefore divided government. The most sought-after prize in politics is a mandate: a win so big that it justifies ramming through an ambitious political agenda. The idea of being in such a position is so alluring that politicians who just barely managed to eke out a victory—or parties that are barely clinging to a majority—will sometimes still try to claim a mandate. It was a thorn in Trump’s side that he lost the popular vote so spectacularly while winning the presidency in 2016, for instance, because it made claiming…

AS THE FEDERAL government responded to the 2008 mortgage crisis by piling new regulations on the financial system, a new study reports, lower-skilled finance employees were replaced by workers with degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Christos Makridis and Alberto Rossi, researchers with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, found evidence that “financial services firms may have sought to ‘escape’ regulatory exposure by hiring STEM workers who could automate more tasks and pursue activities outside the scope of existing regulation.” The influx of STEM workers and ensuing automation following the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act may have “productivity-enhancing effects,” they note. But “this has come at the expense of low- and middle-skilled workers in the sector.” The tradeoff has not necessarily helped consumers.…

REGAL CINEMAS ANNOUNCED in early October that it will temporarily close all 536 of its U.S. locations as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to keep customers away. This move affects about 40,000 employees across the country. Yet nobody in Congress is talking about a bailout for theaters. Now compare that with the airline industry. In April, Congress passed a $50 billion bailout for the airlines, including $25 billion in subsidized loans and another $25 billion meant to keep most airline workers employed until the end of September. As predicted, since consumers were not yet ready to fly, this taxpayer-funded band-aid only postponed the inevitable. American Airlines and United Airlines furloughed 32,000 employees in the fall, claiming they had no choice without another $25 billion. So House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), President…

KIM DAVIS, THE former Kentucky county clerk who attracted national attention in August 2015 when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, was briefly back in the news in October. Davis had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to override a lower court decision that said she could be personally sued by people whom she had denied marriage licenses. The high court declined to take up her case. Without dissenting from that decision, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, wrote a statement arguing that the Court has still not properly addressed the concerns of people who object on religious grounds to the legal recognition of same-sex marriage mandated by the Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. “If the States had been allowed to resolve this question…

ONE OF THE first coronavirus outbreaks in the United States was in a nursing home in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland, Washington. On the same day that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the country’s first COVID-19 death, it also reported two cases linked to Kirkland’s Life Care Center, where two-thirds of residents and 47 staff members would eventually become infected with the virus. Of those, 35 would die. COVID-19 deaths in America’s nursing homes are appallingly common. Many of those deaths could have been prevented if families had better options for keeping grandpa closer to home and out of crowded elder care. But building regulations passed—ironically—in the name of public health make that difficult or impossible in many cities. Kirkland requires that any accessory dwelling units…

IN 1977, THE American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) went to court to defend the rights of American neo-Nazis to march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago home to many Holocaust survivors. The group defended the Nazis’ right to demonstrate and won the case on First Amendment grounds, but 30,000 members quit the organization in protest. The Skokie case cemented the image of the ACLU as a principled defender of free speech. The following year, Ira Glasser was elevated from head of the New York state chapter to the national organization’s executive director, a position he would hold for the next 23 years. Now he’s the subject of a new documentary, Mighty Ira, that celebrates his time leading the charge against government regulation of content on the…

TWO YEARS AFTER Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn broke ground in Wisconsin, the massive LCD factory and accompanying tech campus the company promised to build in exchange for $3 billion in state subsidies does not exist and “probably never will,” The Verge reported in October. The company’s Wisconsin outpost was supposed to create 13,000 jobs; as of this year it employed no more than 281 people. Brokered by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, the subsidy deal with Foxconn is now in serious jeopardy. Current Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, is refusing to pay, due to the company’s unilateral decision to abandon or change many of its planned projects, including the pictured “globe.” Originally pitched as “a network operation center for a complex of data centers,” according to The Verge, the…

HERE IS AN ambiguity, if not a bait and switch, at the heart of Maxine Eichner’s The Free-Market Family. In her telling, the last 40 years of American public policy have left families to fend for themselves in the marketplace while providing little in the way of support for children and working parents. Filled with both broad data and specific anecdotes, the book argues that we are failing to raise healthy, well-adjusted children because market incentives and poor public policy make it hard for parents to juggle work and child care, even as growing economic inequality, driven by free markets, has made it harder for lower-income adults to find good jobs. Eichner, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, proposes several comprehensive, European-style government programs to address these…

EXHIBIT PHILIP GUSTON NOW RONALD BAILEY In an act of self-censoring condescension, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and three other leading galleries postponed from June 2021 until 2024 a major retrospective exhibition of the works of American artist Philip Guston. The show, which was to be called “Philip Guston Now,” included several works depicting hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. Curators feared their audiences would not be sophisticated enough to perceive and appreciate the manifestly anti-racist intent of the artist’s works. Supposedly in light of the “racial justice movement that started in the U.S. and radiated to countries around the world,” the directors of the four galleries in a September press release declared they were “postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful…

MORE THAN 7,500 Americans died in jail during the last decade, and two-thirds of them were never convicted of a crime. Those are the stunning topline numbers from an investigation that Reuters published in October. Anyone who has paid attention to the issue has known for a long time that jail deaths from neglect and occasional malevolence are a nationwide problem—especially when jails become the de facto solution to mental health and drug addiction crises. Last summer, for example, Reason reported on the story of 46-year-old Holly Barlow-Austin, who suffered from medical neglect for months at a Texarkana, Texas, jail before being transferred to a hospital and eventually dying of sepsis due to fungus, cryptococcal meningitis, HIV/AIDS, and accelerated hypertension. A 2016 HuffPost investigation found more than 800 jail deaths…

K-12 STUDENTS IN large public school districts across the country spent much of the fall semester at home, a less-than-ideal result of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Zoom learning was hardly the only significant change to the education system. Some school districts are embracing trendy but dubious ideas about how to fight racism in the classroom. The San Diego Unified School District, for instance, moved this fall to abolish its traditional grading system. Students will still receive letter grades, but they won’t reflect average scores on papers, quizzes, and tests. Under the new system, pupils will not be penalized for failing to complete assignments or even show up for class, and teachers will give them extra opportunities to demonstrate their “mastery” of subjects. What constitutes mastery is not quite clear, but…

15 YEARS AGO January 2006 “It’s a valuable exercise to follow the tortured life of a T-shirt as it navigates the perversions of international trade. But to see what we are sacrificing by embracing protectionism while preaching free markets, Americans need look no further than their closets.” KERRY HOWLEY “I, T-Shirt” “Not every book for young readers fits those stereotypes. During the last 12 years, two popular, critically acclaimed authors have written series that combine the familiar themes of rebellion and coming of age with some of the most subversive story lines seen in juvenile fiction. The novels of Lois Lowry, 68, and Margaret Peterson Haddix, 41, are thoroughly skeptical of the idea that the state should be an all-powerful benefactor. They have gained a large and loyal following, striking…

French President Emmanuel Macron announced plans to ban homeschooling as part of a draft law to combat radical Islam and religious separatism. Under his proposal, starting with the 2021 school year, all children over age 3 will have to attend a school registered with the government unless the child has a medical exemption. Six officers of the Los Angeles Police Department have been charged with falsifying information they placed into a state database. Prosecutors accuse the defendants of claiming that people admitted to being gang members “even though body-worn camera video showed the defendants either never asked the individuals about their gang membership or the individuals denied gang membership if they were asked.” When Harris County, Texas, sheriff’s deputies arrived at his home seeking a man named Curtis Rogers, Louis…