Table of contents for February 2020 in Reason

“THIS COMMITTEE IS not a court, nor is it a jury,” Sen. Howard Baker (R–Tenn.) informed millions of television viewers on May 17, 1973. It was opening day of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the latter three words of which would soon be condensed to just “Watergate”), and Baker, the ranking committee member from President Richard Nixon’s Republican Party, was there both to reassure Americans about the sobriety of the investigation and to suggest that the exercise of bipartisan congressional oversight might even reinvigorate the country’s political and constitutional norms. “I intend to pursue, as I know each member of this committee intends to pursue, an objective and even-handed but thorough, complete, and energetic inquiry into the facts,” Baker declared. “The very fact that we are now…

WHEN IT COMES to the country’s urban housing shortage, California gets all the headlines. Yet the situation is not much better in New York City, where surging employment growth is outpacing new construction, leading to longer commutes and higher housing costs. Since 2008, the 22.6-million-person New York metro area has added 924,000 jobs. Despite this growth, the region has built only 457,000 units of housing, or about one new home for every two jobs. The ratio is even more skewed in New York City, where only one unit of housing has been built for every 3.55 new jobs, according to the city’s Department of Planning. Northern New Jersey is responsible for the lion’s share of new residential development, building 40 percent of the metro’s post-recession housing despite having only 30…

A NEW FEDERAL gun control bill calls for banks and credit card companies to provide transaction data to the feds on some firearms purchases. The Gun Violence Prevention Through Financial Intelligence Act, introduced by Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D–Va.), would require the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to “request information from financial institutions for the purpose of developing an advisory about the identification and reporting of suspicious activity.” The bill’s aim is to identify a consistent purchasing pattern among people who buy firearms and firearm accessories in order to conduct “lone wolf acts of terror.” “Banks, credit card companies, and retailers have unique insight into the behavior and purchasing patterns that can help identify and prevent mass shootings,” Wexton explained in a statement. “The red flags are there—someone just needs to…

NOBODY LIKES LOSING his job, but if there’s any country on Earth that’s copacetic about firing people, it’s these United States of America. Almost alone among industrialized democracies, the U.S. hews to the old-school regime of employment at will, which means most of us can be frogmarched out of the building at any time—for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all. Further up the food chain, “for-cause” termination is the norm; but with contracts that allow removal for offenses as vague as “moral turpitude” or “failure to perform,” that doesn’t shield CEOs from getting turfed out unceremoniously when they misbehave or don’t live up to expectations. Does it bother us when an old lech like Les Moonves of CBS or some new economy manchild like Adam Neumann of…

15 YEARS AGO February 2005 “If the Republicans started aggressively trying to overturn Roe v. Wade or to outlaw all legal protections for same-sex couples, it would likely alienate many moderates—particularly if national security became a less prominent issue, or a less advantageous one for the GOP. Meanwhile, a pro-choice, pro–gay rights Republican in the Arnold Schwarzenegger mold would lose some ‘values voters’ who would either switch to a more conservative third-party candidate or stay home, but [such a candidate] would likely pick up a lot of votes from the more libertarian independents uneasy with the influence of the religious right.” CATHY YOUNG “The ‘Values’ Panic” “There are three good reasons to be skeptical that November 3 sounded the death knell for oldstyle political journalism. First, every presidential election since…

ASSUME YOU ARE a 17-year-old licensed driver and your father’s driver’s license has been suspended. He hands you the keys to his car and asks you to run an errand. While completing that errand you are stopped by the police. You have not broken a single law. You were stopped only because the officer guessed that your father might be driving. Was the traffic stop lawful? The above scenario is hypothetical, but the questions it raises are genuine. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that asks whether the Fourth Amendment “always permits a police officer to seize a motorist when the only thing the police officer knows is that the motorist is driving a vehicle registered to someone whose license has been revoked.” The…

A BIPARTISAN PAIR of lawmakers wants to limit the use of facial recognition technology by federal law enforcement. In November, Sens. Mike Lee (R–Utah) and Chris Coons (D–Del.) introduced the Facial Recognition Technology Warrant Act. The bill would require federal officials to seek a warrant in order to use facial recognition technology to track a specific person’s public movements for more than 72 hours. The legislation does not prohibit the use of facial recognition technology to identify people. Indeed, it allows authorities to use facial recognition to identify people without a warrant so long as “no subsequent attempt is made to track that individual’s movement in real-time or through the use of historical records after the individual has been identified.” In other words, the bill requires law enforcement to obtain…

IN THE YEARS after World War II, flush with cash and optimism, American planners “skipped the messy iterations” of gradual urban and suburban growth, Charles L. Marohn Jr. explains. Instead, they subsidized ambitious new developments and saddled them with codes aimed at keeping them static. After all, once you’ve figured out the perfect design, why let anyone tinker with it? “There is no anticipation of change, incremental or otherwise,” Marohn writes of this approach in his book Strong Towns. “The building won’t adapt, the block won’t evolve, and the neighborhood won’t transform over time, at least not easily. As it is built, evermore will it be, world without end.” The design wasn’t really perfect, of course. These massive community plans made few accommodations for the human need to make adjustments…

A report by Chicago’s Office of Inspector General found that city police officers regularly use department-issued placards to park personal vehicles in department lots when they attend Cubs and Bears games. The lots are supposed to be used only by on-duty officers. An Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, judge sentenced Cody Gregg to 15 years in prison after Gregg pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. Days later, a drug test found that the “cocaine” was actually powdered milk. Gregg withdrew his plea, and the judge dismissed the charge. Gregg had initially pleaded not guilty, but he changed his mind after spending two months in the Oklahoma County jail. Australia’s Department of Home Affairs says it wants to use facial recognition technology to limit children’s access to online pornography.…

IN AMERICA, YOU can grow up a brave, blustering bear of a kid ready for anything nature unleashes, or a sallow, soft sad sack of a sniffler afraid of the first flake, and it may all depend on one thing: Your school’s outdoor recess policy. Consider the fact that one mom from Fairbanks, Alaska, told me that outdoor time gets canceled there only when it hits 20 below zero, while in Corpus Christi, Texas, another mom said her son’s kindergarten class had to stay inside when it dipped below 60. Brrrr. “I live in Washington state and moved to a new school district,” April Doiron wrote to my Facebook page when I asked about local weather policies. (Hundreds of parents responded to the query.) “I was showing up to volunteer…

ALTHOUGH PRESCRIPTION PAIN medication is commonly blamed for the “opioid epidemic,” such drugs play a small and shrinking role in deaths involving this category of psychoactive substances. A recent study of opioid related deaths in Massachusetts underlines this crucial point, finding that prescription analgesics were detected without heroin or fentanyl in less than 17 percent of cases. Furthermore, just 1 percent of decedents had prescriptions for the opioids that showed up in toxicology tests. Alexander Walley, an associate professor of medicine at Boston University, and five other researchers looked at nearly 3,000 opioid-related deaths with complete toxicology reports from 2013 through 2015. “In Massachusetts, prescribed opioids do not appear to be the major proximal cause of opioid-related overdose deaths,” Walley et al. write in Public Health Reports. “Prescription opioids were…

A PLAN TO tap reserves on the far-flung northern coast of Alaska is expected to produce about 80 million tons of liquid natural gas (LNG) over the next 20 years—but thanks to a protectionist shipping law, it’s likely that Americans won’t have access to a single drop. There are no pipelines serving the Arctic coast of Alaska, where a joint effort by ExxonMobil and Qilak LNG, an Alaska-based subsidiary of a Dubai-based energy firm, will be extracting the gas. Instead, the companies plan to use ships to get LNG to market. That’s where the Jones Act comes into play. Passed nearly a century ago to protect U.S. shipbuilders, the law requires that ships carrying goods from one American port to another must be American-built, must be American-flagged, and must have…

WHEN THE CHILEAN government announced on October 4 that it was hiking subway fares by roughly 4 cents in the capital city of Santiago, high school students started jumping turnstiles en masse. Adults soon joined in, sparking protests that have injured more than 2,500 and killed 20. Protesters have set subway stations on fire. They have looted grocery stores. And some have even raided La Asuncion, a Catholic church, dragging pews and statues of Christ into the streets and incinerating them. Many protesters are using cacerolazo, or the banging of pots and pans, a form of protest spawned in 1971 by food shortages during President Salvador Allende’s administration. The fare hike—since rescinded—kicked off the protests, but the movement is animated by deeper populist forces. Chile’s economy has grown significantly in…

SANDY ROZEK IS the polar opposite of what comes to mind when you hear the word activist. A 78-year-old great-grandmother and retired high school English teacher who lives in Houston, Rozek is not woke, doesn’t post on Twitter, and spearheads a movement you’ve probably never heard of. Rozek works with the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws (NARSOL). She is one of several women who lead an effort to oppose the unjust, irrational, and ineffective laws that continue to punish sex offenders long after they have served their time. All 50 states have sex offender registries, and the U.S. Justice Department combines them in a single national database. The information, which is available online to the general public, covers nearly 1 million people, whose crimes run the gamut from…

COMIC OPEN BORDERS KATHERINE MANGUWARD George Mason economist and recreational controversialist Bryan Caplan has teamed up with artist Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame to create a surprisingly readable visual case for open borders. Overall, the arguments in Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration are rather sophisticated—much more so than skeptics of the genre might expect. A red devil in a necktie fights with a cartoon Caplan about the impact of immigration from low-trust societies. Caplan digs into the infamous Skittles metaphor (“If you have a bowlful of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”) to talk about crime rates and terrorism risk. A cartoon Lant Pritchett in a Harvard sweatshirt (it’s hard…