Inhoudsopgave van November 2020 - Reason

THEY SAY IF you don’t vote you can’t complain. They’re wrong. Complaining is prior to voting. It is deeper and more powerful than voting. It is the original act of politics. Before there was democracy, there was sitting around the campfire complaining about the way the headman allocated the shares of mastodon meat. Bellyaching about the boss is more than a political right. It is a human right. And so, in Reason’s 2020 election issue, we are here to complain. The candidates from the major parties are subpar. They display troubling authoritarian tendencies. Their records in office—one long, one short—are underwhelming and frequently self-contradictory. Their actions consistently fail to match their rhetoric. If they agree on one thing, it is that they have the right, and perhaps even the obligation,…

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is back in the business of executing prisoners. Prior to 2020, the last federal death row inmate to be executed was Louis Jones Jr., put to death by lethal injection in 2003. Only three federal prisoners were executed under GOP President George W. Bush, among them Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. None were executed under Democratic President Barack Obama. Seventeen years after Jones’ execution, on July 14, the United States government executed Daniel Lewis Lee. Just two days later, the feds executed Wesley Ira Purkey. The next day, the feds executed Dustin Lee Honken. On August 26, they executed Lezmond Mitchell. The Trump administration has now executed more death row inmates than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced in July 2019 that…

DURING HIS JULY eulogy for Rep. John Lewis (D–Ga.), a leading figure in the civil rights movement, former President Barack Obama expressed support for eliminating the Senate filibuster, which he called a “Jim Crow relic.” That position contradicted the one Obama took as a senator in a chamber controlled by Republicans, and his historical framing was more than a little misleading. In its current form, the filibuster prevents a vote on legislation without 60 votes to cut off debate. The maneuver, which was accidentally authorized by a rule change the Senate approved in 1806, was first used in 1837 during the controversy over the Second Bank of the United States. It has been deployed many times since for reasons having nothing to do with government-enforced white supremacy. Segregationists did use…

AMERICA EXPLODED WITH indignation in 2018, when the Trump administration initiated mass separations of border-crossing migrant children from their parents, shipping the kids to the federal equivalent of orphanages. The administration said the parents had broken a federal law that prohibits crossing the border without documents. Never mind that many, if not most, of the families intended to claim asylum, or that they handed themselves to Border Patrol agents as soon as they traversed the international line. Never mind that when claiming asylum, a person without papers can legally cross at any place on the border whatsoever. These parents had broken no law, but the administration defined them as criminals subject to arrest and trial. While in jail they couldn’t care for their children, officials said, so the government needed…

“We are neither pro-gun nor anti-gun,” proclaims the Gun Facts Project, an organization launched by San Francisco writer Guy Smith two decades ago. “We are pro-math and anti-BS.” Smith, a marketing consultant with a background in quantitative management, stays true to that ethos in Guns and Control, which summarizes reams of relevant data while evenhandedly faulting advocates on both sides of the debate for manipulating numbers to fit their agendas. The book nevertheless is apt to leave open-minded readers more skeptical of conventional responses to gun-related deaths. That problem, Smith emphasizes, is multifaceted. In the United States, suicides account for nearly two-thirds of the deaths that gun control advocates misleadingly describe as the toll from “gun violence.” The gun homicide rate has fallen dramatically since the early 1990s, although polling…

“It’s the state, Emily. The power of the state wants to crush you. No matter how minor your transgressions might seem to be.” If HBO’s exquisitely produced revival of Perry Mason has a mission statement, it’s in those few lines. The scene comes at a pivotal moment near the end of the fourth episode, in which defense lawyer Elias Birchard consults with Emily Dodson, a client wrongly accused of abetting the kidnapping and murder of her own infant son. The crime was actually a product of corrupt cops and church elders, and Dodson was fingered for the murder not only because she’d had an affair with one of the kidnappers but because a sleazy district attorney thought pinning the crime on an unfaithful woman would be attention-grabbing—and thus politically useful…

20 YEARS AGO November 2000 “You can see…why black reparations activists might get the idea that such political settlements, no matter how secure and final they looked at the time, are subject to perpetual reconsideration: They’ve been watching the stunningly successful campaign over World War II–era reparations. After the end of that war, American policy makers concluded treaties with the former Axis powers intended to resolve with finality questions of who owed what and to cut off the prospect of debilitating litigation. For about 50 years they thought they’d succeeded, until American lawyer-activists suddenly appeared on the front pages demanding separate, added reparations.” WALTER OLSON “Stale Claims” 25 YEARS AGO November 1995 “From the beginning, stories about ‘assault weapons’ blurred the distinction between semiautomatics and machine guns. Machine guns are automatics: They…

AMERICA’S MEAT SUPPLY has been hammered by COVID-19 outbreaks at many of the nation’s largest meat processing plants, and consumer meat prices have spiked as a result. The nation’s smalland mid-sized farms and ranches could help address these issues if ranchers and farmers had better access to small-scale slaughtering and processing facilities and to local and regional markets. But to get those things, they first need Congress to get off its rump and vote. Three very different meat processing reform bills are now before Congress. One is great. One is good. And one is suspect. Just what does each bill propose to do? THE NEW MARKETS for State-Inspected Meat and Poultry Act—the good bill—would foster regional food systems by lifting a senseless ban on the interstate sale of state-inspected meat.…

I WAS SCROLLING THROUGH the posts on my Maryland neighborhood’s Listserv this summer when a notice for a bake sale caught my eye. This was no brownies-on-a-card-table affair. It sounded like a banquet, with snickerdoodles, madeleines, pecan butterballs, lemon shortbread, and other treats spread out in a senior center’s parking lot. Anyone who lives in a middle-class suburb knows that when Type A parents organize to raise money for the PTA, nothing can stand in their way. But this was a fundraiser for an initiative called Bakers Against Racism. All of the proceeds went to Black Lives Matter DC and, more generally, to groups that are fighting police brutality. Suburbia is supposed to represent everything bland and boring, yet it still manages to surprise us. How can a place that…

“Ending mass incarceration is only the beginning,” write journalists Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law in Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms. The book delves into the many ways Americans are surveilled, separated from their communities, punished, and controlled by “prison alternatives” like probation, house arrest with electronic monitoring, mandatory drug treatment, and prostitution “diversion” programs. It also covers supposedly preventive measures (such as involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations and the sex offender registry) and state “care” systems such as child protective services. As a primer on the deep reach of our prison industrial complex and a roadmap for how to reform the reforms, the book works well. It’s less persuasive in its hostility toward incremental reformers; the authors seem to believe that abolishing prisons and all of…

Sometimes you just want a speedy, informative rage read—a book where you can learn a little something and also get your heart rate up. For people of nearly every political stripe, Welfare for the Rich should fit the bill. The subtitle is “How Your Tax Dollars End Up in Millionaires’ Pockets—and What You Can Do About It,” but the first bit is the most compelling and attention-grabbing. Longtime friend of Reason Phil Harvey and his co-author Lisa Conyers lay out in absolutely infuriating detail how the wealthy use the power of the state to snatch your money for their farms, stadiums, banks, real estate developments, and more. The topic is timely, but sadly most of Harvey’s and Conyers’ examples are both evergreen and bipartisan.…

THERE ARE 1.2 million foreign students in the United States, enrolled in 5,300 American colleges and universities. Most come to America on nonimmigrant F-1 and M-1 visas that require them to maintain a full course load at universities approved by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Student and Exchange Visitor Program. In order to guard against diploma mills, the program grants accreditation mostly to universities that offer classroom instruction and usually limits foreign students to three credit hours of online instruction per semester. When COVID-19 hit and colleges moved online, ICE did the sensible thing and allowed international students to finish their spring and summer semesters by taking their classes online without voiding their visas. The agency rescinded that guidance in early July, however, ordering international students attending online-only programs…

COVID-19 DIAGNOSTIC TESTING has been greatly scaled up from a few thousand tests per week back in early March to 2 million tests per week in early August. But the summer upsurge in COVID-19 diagnoses, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. highlights the fact that we still don’t have enough testing to provide individual Americans and health care professionals with the information needed to squelch the pandemic. A huge part of the problem is that most asymptomatic, presymptomatic, and mildly afflicted people don’t know they’re infected, even as they spread the virus to others while working, shopping, and gathering in enclosed spaces such as bars and restaurants. Making cheap, fast tests available for use at workplaces, schools, and homes could solve this information deficit problem. “The way forward is not…

SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY HAPPENED over the last few decades. For the first time in human history, a single global civilization emerged. “We are witnessing a cultural shift of world-historic proportions,” I wrote in an essay for Reason’s 20th anniversary. “East and West are fusing in the most momentous combination of powerful civilizations since Hellenism collided with the Middle East—leaving Christianity in its wake.” It was 1988, the last full year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and, we did not yet realize, of the Berlin Wall. The Soviet Union still existed. The internet as we know it—the World Wide Web, with its hyperlinks and browsers—did not. China was liberalizing but still awaited the economic reforms that would transform it into a global powerhouse and allow it to gain entry into the World Trade…

IT’S A DIFFICULT time to be a deficit hawk. In March, Congress passed the CARES Act, named to show what lawmakers on both sides of the aisle wanted to be seen to be doing in the wake of the economic devastation caused by the outbreak of COVID-19. They cared to the tune of about $2.2 trillion, all of it billed to the deficit, making it the single biggest legislative care package in history by a wide margin. It was the first time Congress had ever passed a bill with a trillion-dollar price tag. As a point of comparison, the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 health law that would be known as Obamacare, which was viewed as unusually costly, had to be whittled down during the legislative process so as not…

THE LATE THOMAS Naylor, gentle godfather of the modern Vermont independence movement, used to sign off with “God bless the Disunited States of America.” Naylor attracted a stalwart and colorful band to his project, ranging from the diplomat George Kennan (the author of the Cold War “containment” policy had come to view the United States as overly confining) to a delightful mélange of populist “woodchucks” (native Vermonters), organic-farming greens, Ethan Allen impersonators, and more. Naylor’s Second Vermont Republic had a merry, slap-happy, larkish feel, but Naylor, who died in 2012, was dead serious. And now, barely two decades since secession talk first scented the Green Mountain air, the entire country is getting an invigorating whiff. Break It Up—a book about America’s episodic secessionist flare-ups, by Nation contributor Richard Kreitner—may well…

We are frequently warned that humanity is beset by ecological catastrophes that could kill off civilization, perhaps even our species. Not so, insists environmental activist Michael Shellenberger in his new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Shellenberger, whose activism led Time to name him a “Hero of the Environment” in 2008, argues that while significant global environmental problems exist, they don’t constitute inexorable existential threats. Shellenberger’s analysis relies on largely uncontroversial mainstream science. He points out that climate change has not made natural disasters more harmful to human life and wealth, and that fires have declined 25 percent around the world since 2003. (They have become more frequent and dangerous in some specific areas in the past decade, though not to historically unprecedented levels.) He uses data…

In Russia’s Chechen Republic, gay people face violence not just from strangers on the street but from their own family members, encouraged by a culture that scapegoats and victimizes them. Welcome to Chechnya documents the sometimes harrowing efforts of activists running essentially a modern underground railroad to help at-risk gay citizens flee the predominantly Muslim country. Chechnian leader Ramzan Kadyrov famously said in a 2017 interview that there were no gay men in his country. Welcome to Chechnya reveals the purges that seek to make this absurd claim true. Dozens have been imprisoned and reportedly tortured. Some, like singer Zelim Bakaev, disappear and are simply never seen again. A young woman is blackmailed by her uncle in an effort to make her have sex with him. One man’s entire family…

A DEPUTY NATIONAL editor at The New York Times, Jia Lynn Yang is the author of a timely new book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924–1965 (W.W. Norton & Co.). The book begins at a dark moment in American immigration policy, when a restrictive law ended a long period of relatively open borders and effectively stopped mass movement to the United States for the next 40 years. It tells the story of the decadeslong process that led the U.S. to begin accepting foreigners once again. Yet almost nobody involved in that fight foresaw the extent to which the 1965 law finally signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson would open the door to large numbers of new immigrants, including Yang’s family. Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat…