Table of contents for Feburary 2018 in Reason

WHEN LARRY KRASNER, a longtime Philadelphia civil rights lawyer, announced he was running to be the city’s next district attorney (D.A.), the local establishment treated his candidacy more like a punchline than an actual threat. Could a guy who’s sued the Philadelphia Police Department dozens of times and represented Black Lives Matter protesters really be serious? Who in their right mind runs for district attorney on a platform of not pursuing the death penalty and of refusing to put low-level drug offenders in jail? The president of the local Fraternal Order of Police called Krasner’s candidacy “hilarious.” When he beat six opponents in the Democratic primary, Philadelphia’s biggest newspaper endorsed his Republican opponent. Nobody’s laughing anymore. On November 7, Philadelphia voters made Krasner the city’s top prosecutor—the latest, most high-profile…

CHRIS CHRISTIE, THE outgoing governor of New Jersey, has repeatedly told the story of a law school classmate who died of an overdose after getting hooked on oxycodone prescribed for back pain. A recently released final report from the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, which Christie chaired, wrongly implies that such cases are typical. “A widely held and supportable view is that the modern opioid crisis originated within the healthcare system,” the report says; the problem began with “a growing compulsion to detect and treat pain.” According to this narrative, doctors in the late 1990s began to underestimate the risk of addiction and overdose among patients prescribed narcotics for pain. Responding to advocacy on behalf of pain patients and deceptive marketing by drug companies, they…

IT HAS BEEN a little over a year since the death of 6-year-old Zymere Perkins. The boy, who died in Harlem at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend, had been smacked as many as 20 times in a row in front of witnesses, beaten with a belt, placed under cold showers, and denied food as a punishment. In addition to bruises and broken bones, he was missing all of his front teeth. But apparently all his mother had to do was tell the city social workers that he had fallen—down the stairs, off a scooter, whatever—and they would close the case. According to a report released by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services in December 2016, 10 children died in the 12 weeks before Perkins, despite…

BY MY COUNT, there are already well over a dozen books about the 2016 presidential campaign. The first to appear was CNN reporter Thomas Lake’s Unprecedented: The Election That Changed Everything, published just a week after Election Day. Technically speaking, Unprecedented wasn’t even the first: Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins wrapped up his book The Wilderness in late 2015, a full year before Election Day. And though there are many things to be praised about The Wilderness, its prescience is not among them. The journalist who invented the quick campaign history, Theodore White, couldn’t find a publisher in 1959 when he first came up with the idea of writing an entire book on the 1960 election. Friends warned him that such readers as he could scrape up would be jabbing hot needles…

FILM THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE ED KRAYEWSKI There are no human antagonists in Thank You for Your Service (out on DVD in January), the fictional film based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Washington Post reporter David Finkel. The book follows members of the 2nd Battalion of the 16th Infantry Regiment after they returned to Kansas following a tour of duty in Iraq. Two short scenes in Iraq bookend the film, but the bulk of Thank You for Your Service focuses on the veterans’ struggles against other unseen enemies—the Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.), post-traumatic stress disorder, the aimlessness of the Iraq War. “He did his job, now do yours!” one veteran’s wife yells at a V.A. bureaucrat while trying to get her husband mental health…

Cynthia Lopez had a buyer willing to pay her $265,000 for her house. But just days before the sale closed, Denver officials informed her that the home was part of an affordable housing program and she could sell it for no more than $186,000. Officials admit that none of the paperwork Lopez signed when she bought the property indicated it was part of such a program, but they say that doesn’t matter. In fact, now that it has been brought to their attention that her income didn’t qualify for the program, they say she must sell the house. Palm Beach County, Florida, sheriff’s deputy Jason Cooke has resigned after he was caught on security video entering a dying man’s home and stealing his medication. Officials in the Biloxi, Mississippi, school…

THE SINGLE LARGEST government program in the United States will soon have an annual budget of $1 trillion a year. Yet even that amount isn’t sufficient to fulfill the promises it has made. If Congress doesn’t address its insolvency issues, payouts will need to be slashed by a quarter starting in fewer than 20 years. The program is Social Security, and our national pastime seems to be turning a blind eye to its dysfunctions. The problems with this entitlement aren’t unique. Obamacare is also a mess, while cumulative government spending on Medicare and Medicaid is growing at a faster rate than Social Security is, and eventually will consume a larger share of the economy. But that’s no reason to ignore the serious fiscal issues with America’s main retirement program. Since…

WHEN PRESIDENT RONALD Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, he said his nominee was “widely regarded as the most prominent and intellectually powerful advocate of judicial restraint.” It was no exaggeration. Bork routinely preached the virtues of a judiciary that’s deferential to lawmakers, arguing that in the vast majority of cases, “the only course for a principled Court is to let the majority have its way.” Where Bork led, most conservatives were ready to follow. Judicial deference, or restraint, became a rallying cry on the legal right. That philosophy still holds sway in some quarters today. But it’s increasingly under fire from legal thinkers who want the courts to play a more aggressive role in defense of individual liberty and against overreaching majorities. Case in…

YOU PROBABLY REMEMBER the story of King Solomon and the baby. Two women come before the monarch claiming to be a child’s mother. Neither has evidence to show. So Solomon proposes the following: He’ll cut the baby in half. Each woman will receive an equal share. This will be equitable, if a bit messy. On the face of it, the king was either a baby-hating madman or an idiot. Killing an infant and divvying up its corpse hardly seems like a reasonable response to a maternity dispute. But if you know the story, you know what Solomon had in mind: The baby’s true mother would rather sacrifice her child’s custody than her child’s life. She would turn down the king’s proposal, and then he would award the baby, in its…

OH, THAT H.L. Mencken were alive today! You don’t hear that wistful resurrectionary sentiment voiced much anymore. A modern newspaper columnist writing in Mencken’s gleeful style, with its joyful savagery, its jocose sesquipedalianism, its sheer delight in the American language, would be met with astonished horror on the order of Henry James watching a Sam Kinison video or Robby Mook meeting a man who owns a pickup truck. (I should warn you that one cannot write about Mencken without aping him, however clumsily.) The longtime Baltimore Evening Sun columnist, American Mercury editor, and rumbustiously splenetic critic, who graced this orb from 1880 to 1956, would not be published in any major newspaper today. The reasons he foresaw over a century ago, when he decried the “cheap bullying and cheaper moralizing”…

25 YEARS AGO February 1993 “The conservatives who are entering political exile might find that their time would be well spent trying to produce art instead of constantly whining about the fiendish liberals. The right has too many policy analysts and not enough novelists and screenwriters.” MARTIN MORSE WOOSTER “Culture Class” “In the ’80s, capitalism won its long political conflict with socialism. Nations in the former Soviet bloc abandoned their commitment to command economies, as the rest of the world rushed to embrace private property, free markets, and limited government. Meanwhile, an unprecedented wave of innovation swept over the capitalist West.” DAVID KELLEY AND JEFF SCOTT “Gekko Echo” “Ethnic loyalties are not only compatible with but essential to an international order based on individual liberty and the free flow of…

IF DECORATING A cake counts as constitutionally protected speech, what doesn’t count? That was the question at stake during Supreme Court oral arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The case—which centers on whether a state may, in the interest of preventing discrimination, require a private baker to produce a custom wedding cake for a same-sex marriage celebration—was heard in early December. As Jack Phillips, the baker in question, put it in a recent USA Today op-ed, his creations are “not just a tower of flour and sugar, but a message tailored to a specific couple and a specific event—a message telling all who see it that this event is a wedding and that it is an occasion for celebration.” Such a message in the case of a…

THE RENT IS too damn high—so each year Congress appropriates billions of dollars to address the nation’s collective housing needs. The programs vary from loans to tax credits to straight-up subsidies, but a common feature is that federal taxpayers pony up the dough and then a motley collection of state-level politicians, financing agencies, and housing authorities decide how it’s spent. Can you guess where things go wrong? In theory, oversight is provided by bureaucrats in Washington tracking every dollar and by local leaders increasing their re-election prospects by providing housing assistance to their constituents as effectively as possible. In practice, the feds turn a blind eye to inefficient uses of the funds while local officials gleefully engage in politically advantageous graft. Take California Treasurer John Chiang. By virtue of his…

LIBERTARIANS LIKE LARRY Sharpe. It was nearly impossible to attend a state-level Libertarian Party (L.P.) convention in 2017 and not see the affable former Marine and 2018 candidate for governor of New York laying out his seven-year plan to transform the party from a distant third-place finisher to the country’s decisive swing bloc at all levels of government. When I asked former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld how Libertarians could best build on their momentum, he began his reply with: “You want to get out more candidates like Larry Sharpe.” Of course, Bill Weld is the only reason a normal consumer of politics might have heard of Sharpe in the first place. Weld was the Libertarian vice presidential nominee in the 2016 race—by far the most famous and electorally successful candidate…

IN SHORT: MILLENNIALS are over,” Taylor Lorenz wrote in BuzzFeed in October. “It was fun while it lasted. But like a slice of avocado toast left too long in the sun, our cultural relevance has begun to rot.” The year 2018, Lorenz argues, will be the year the media obsession with the selfie generation (birth dates: roughly 1982 through 1999) finally fades. Arriving during this transition period between millennialism and whatever comes next is Kids These Days, Malcolm Harris’ thoughtful and deeply researched portrait of the cultural, political, and economic factors that shaped the millennial generation. In his telling, it’s not a pretty picture: Millennials are anxious, depressed, and above all financially screwed by an American system that increasingly produces rampant economic inequality. There’s plenty right with this thesis, even…

In November, writer Andy Weir released a new novel, Artemis, about a settlement on the moon. His first book, The Martian, which you may remember from the blockbuster movie version starring Matt Damon, was powered by plot-driving engineering mishaps and triumphs. Artemis instead gave Weir a chance to unleash his inner “economics dork,” he says. This fall, Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward talked with the author about what he thinks the political economy of the moon would look like. Q: You’ve described yourself as being a writer of hard science fiction, which is a sub-genre that’s been neglected of late. A: There isn’t nearly as much of it out there as I’d like, because that’s what I’d like to read. I’d actually, deep down, hoped that the success of The…