Table of contents for January 2020 in Reason

YOU NEED TO be inoculated from some strange but popular notions about the economy. After the inoculation—it won’t hurt much—you can turn off CNBC and skip over most of the economic chatter. It’ll give you time to read Moby Dick. You really should. It’s amazing and is markedly less fictional than the notions here. Let’s begin with this one: The stock market is predictable. CNBC specializes in it, with its talking, or sometimes shouting, heads. People want certitude, and stock tips provide the illusion. The industry of stock tipping came out of some century-old court decisions that trustees be prudent. The idea was to prevent the trustees from making off with the assets of widows and orphans yet allow for regrettable but unforeseeable losses. Preventing an agent from cheating the…

I WAS WORKING in Silicon Valley when my mother called me from back home in Caracas with some alarming news: My father had experienced sudden kidney failure. I immediately flew from San Francisco to Miami, where I had to wait two days until I could get one of the few flights left to Caracas. Since the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 ushered in successive waves of nationalization, inflation, and recession, international airlines—American, Delta, United Airlines, even carriers from next-door Colombia and Brazil—had been steadily reducing, canceling, and eventually abandoning all routes to my once-prosperous country. I slept in the Miami International Airport with many other desperate Venezuelans. Finally I was able to purchase a ticket for an exorbitant sum from Santa Barbara Airlines, a Venezuelan carrier that has since…

EDMUND WILSON, THEN one of America’s top literary critics, took to the pages of The New Yorker in 1945 to denounce a dead horror writer named H.P. Lovecraft. “The only real horror in most of these fictions,” Wilson sniffed, “is the horror of bad taste and bad art.” Wilson was outraged at the thought that Lovecraft, who had died, broke, in 1937, might enjoy posthumous success thanks to the recent publication of his collected writings. These stories, Wilson declared, “were hack-work contributed to such publications as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, where, in my opinion, they ought to have been left.” Wilson was a big deal in his day, the sort of critic whose reviews could help make or break an author’s career. But he was simply no match for…

THE OVERDOSE-REVERSAL drug naloxone is available without a prescription at most CVS and Walgreens pharmacies. It’s legal to carry it, and having some on hand could help you save a life. Naloxone comes in two formulations: an intramuscular injector and a nasal spray. That means reversing an overdose is as simple as jabbing a needle into someone’s arm, thigh, or buttocks or squirting the drug up the person’s nose. Signs of an overdose include nonresponsiveness, cold and clammy skin, and shallow or stopped breathing.…

CONGRESS PASSED ITS first ever standalone bipartisan marijuana legalization bill in 2019. The House of Representatives voted in September to approve the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act, a bill that would allow state-legal marijuana businesses to access financial institutions without running afoul of federal law. Currently, nearly all transactions carried out by such businesses must happen in cash: Due to the federal prohibition on marijuana, any financial institution that does business with a pot shop could be charged with violating the federal Controlled Substances Act, the USA PATRIOT Act, the Bank Secrecy Act, and/or the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Allowing marijuana businesses access to the banking system would make it easier for them to pay their taxes and their employees. Supporters say it would also cut…

IN ZELMAN V. Simmons-Harris (2002), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Cleveland, Ohio’s school choice program against the charge that it was unconstitutional to provide tuition aid to parents who opted to send their children to religiously affiliated magnet schools. So long as “a government aid program is neutral with respect to religion, and provides assistance directly to a broad class of citizens who, in turn, direct government aid to religious schools wholly as a result of their own genuine and independent private choice,” the Court said, the program passes constitutional muster. The Supreme Court is now weighing the constitutional merits of another school choice initiative. At issue in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue is a 2015 scholarship program created by the Treasure State’s legislature “to provide parental and student…

I BECAME A United States citizen on Friday, September 29, 2017. If I wanted to put a romantic gloss on my story, I could note how I arrived 22 years earlier via a one-way ticket to Detroit on a student visa with just a small bag of clothes, some philosophy books, and $97 in cash. Or how I lived on $10 a week after the rent and bills were paid. How—in the tradition of all good immigrants!—I buckled down and worked hard and graduated with a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University in three years. How I beat the odds and secured a tenure-track job my first time on the market and then met the woman who was to become my wife on the first day of faculty orientation. To…

THE AGE OF climate panic is here,” declared David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books), in a February 2019 New York Times op-ed. He’s certainly right about the panic. University of Cumbria Professor of Sustainability Leadership Jem Bendell predicts that man-made climate change will result in a “collapse in society” in about 10 years. Novelist Jonathan Franzen has warned that it will soon produce “massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought.” Are they right? My first article in Reason related to global warming appeared in 1992. It was a report on the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change…

MARIANA, A DOMINICAN mother of four in New York, says being an Uber driver is the best job she’s ever had. “I love it,” she enthuses to Alex Rosenblat, an ethnographer at the Data & Society Research Institute. “You can have your own schedule. You met many different people.” On the other hand, the ride-sharing company has been careless with its customers’ personal data and made misleading income promises—claiming, for instance, that New York drivers were earning a median $90,000 a year—a practice that got the company slammed with a $20 million fine from the Federal Trade Commission. The rhetoric in Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work, Rosenblat’s interview-rich but analysis-thin book, is designed to make readers think concerns about privacy and corporate governance are more important…

For the past 10 years, the reality TV show Shark Tank has entertained and edified millions of viewers by dramatizing how entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to venture capitalists. None of the “sharks”—the investors who compete with each other to fund businesses they think will be successful—is more entertaining or edifying than Kevin O’Leary, whose signature insult to unsuccessful contestants (“you’re dead to me”) has become a pop-culture catchphrase. But O’Leary isn’t just a small-screen blowhard. Born and raised in Canada, the 65-year-old got rich developing educational and family-oriented computer software in the ’80s and ’90s and holding firm to a gospel of thrift, savings, and reinvestment that he has outlined in bestselling books such as Cold Hard Truth on Men, Women, and Money. Nick Gillespie spoke with O’Leary in August…

WE DON’T NORMALLY associate Republican lawmakers with former Mexican leaders. But similar to the way many Latin American ex-presidentes suddenly discover an interest in legalizing marijuana once safely out of office, GOP members of Congress have an uncanny way of finding reasons to oppose Donald Trump right around the time they announce retirement. Rep. Francis Rooney (R–Fla.) on October 19 became the 21st Republican member of the 116th Congress—compared to just seven Democrats at the time and nine as of press time—to announce that he will not seek that which politicians otherwise live for: re-election. The move came precisely one day after the southwest Floridian became the first current member of the House Republican caucus to declare openness to impeaching the president over the question of whether he made delivery…

NATIONALISTS TO THE right of us and progressives to the left of us sneer at the idea that people should be left alone to do their own thing. It can be a little demoralizing. But another year dawns, and with it comes the opportunity for a fresh take on the world in which we live. Yes, New Year’s resolutions are a bit of a cliché, but they can help us break bad habits and reboot our lives. What you do is up to you, of course. But you might resolve to: Get some perspective. TOO MANY OF your friends and neighbors are tribal idiots, but they’re not the worst tribal idiots in recent memory, by any means. Friedrich Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom at a time when trendy thinkers agreed…

AN ORLANDO POLICE officer was fired in September after he handcuffed and arrested a 6-year-old girl at school for throwing a temper tantrum. The arrest sparked national outrage, but it was just a single instance of a widespread problem. ABC News reported in October that, according to FBI crime data, 30,467 children under the age of 10 were arrested in the United States between 2013 and 2018. During the same period, 266,000 children between the ages of 10 and 12 were arrested. The good news is that the rate of juvenile arrests has dropped significantly since its peak, from roughly 8,500 arrests per 100,000 individuals between the ages of 10 and 17 in 1996 to 2,400 in 2016. The bad news is that law enforcement officers feel more emboldened than…

AT SOKO YA Nadhif market in Garissa, Kenya, the ones who come to buy the drugs are men. They arrive early in the morning, sometimes before dawn, waiting in the hot dark air for a good deal. New white Land Cruisers pull into the market, kicking up clouds of red dust behind them. The ones who rush to offload the cargo are men, too. They toss heavy bags of leaves over their shoulders before sorting them into sections: Sareye, Khadija, Fatuma. Each bag is marked with a woman’s name. Because although almost everyone who comes to Soko ya Nadhif market is a man, the ones who sell the drugs are women. Sareye Budul Shafat, 52, is a soft-spoken mother of 10 who favors neon technicolor hijabs. While she calls herself…

LESS THAN 100 hours before 2008’s critical Super Tuesday vote, Samantha Power, the Pulitzer-winning author of ‘A Problem From Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide, stared plaintively into the eyes of Armenian-American YouTube viewers and delivered a heartfelt testimonial to a “true friend of the Armenian people,” Barack Obama. Past presidents have shied away, she said, from the “sometimes hard truth telling” of calling the Armenian genocide a “genocide.” But not the junior senator from Illinois, as evidenced by his “very forthright statement on the Armenian genocide, his support for the Senate resolution acknowledging the genocide all these years later, his willingness as president to commemorate it.” Fourteen months after Power’s promise, Obama finally got his big chance to deliver. And he whiffed. “I have consistently stated my own…

15 YEARS AGO January 2005 “Perhaps in their ideal world, where President Kerry and Secretary of State Biden run the show, such precision is possible. In the event, they must now either admit they were wrong or stick with the war Bush delivered for them. If it succeeds, perhaps they’ll take some of the credit. They’ve already shown they won’t take any of the blame.” TIM CAVANAUGH “Iraq’s Summer Soldiers” 20 YEARS AGO January 2000 “It’s no wonder, then, that the conservative movement seems intellectually and politically moribund so soon after rising to electoral power in the mid-1990s. Even as conservatives wrap themselves in the mantle of Reagan, they cannot fully embrace his rejection of tax policy as a means of social engineering, perhaps because it would mean renouncing control…