Reason April 2017

THE KIDS THESE days are incredibly lame. They barely do drugs. They hardly have sex. When they do finally get around to doing the deed, it’s at much later ages than previous generations. They’re responsible about birth control and disease prevention. They probably even make it home in time for curfew. Skeptical? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the average age of self-reported virginity loss is now nearly 18 years old. The percentage of high school students who say they have had intercourse has been falling for two decades. Two-thirds of the students who are having sex say it’s with a steady romantic partner. Eighty percent say they used contraception their first time, up from less than 50 percent in the ’80s. They’re also using more effective…

PLAYBOY MAGAZINE USED to be the contraband men of all ages hid in their sock drawers. Now it might as well be another pair of socks. It’s hard to get excited by a nudie magazine anymore—especially one without any nudes. Since March 2016, Playboy no longer features naked ladies, which is kind of like Hershey’s still selling almonds without the chocolate. But props where props are due: It’s unlikely we would be as blasé as we are today about sex, porn, and even women’s lib if it weren’t for Hugh Hefner and his crazy 1953 creation. Hef was a frustrated cartoonist at the time, working in the Esquire subscription department because that was the closest he could get to the world of publishing. When his request for a $5 a…

IN NOVEMBER 1848, a socialist activist gave a speech at the 13th annual meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society. “Mr. Inglis” began his remarks well enough, reported the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, who was also there to give a speech that day, “but strangely enough went on in an effort to show that wages slavery is as bad as chattel slavery.” Douglass soon became infuriated with the socialist speaker. “The attempts to place holding property in the soil—on the same footing as holding property in man, was most lame and impotent,” Douglass declared. “And the wonder is that anyone could listen with patience to such arrant nonsense.” Douglass heard a lot of arrant nonsense from American socialists. That’s because, as the historian Carl Guarneri has explained, most antebellum socialists…

SOMETIME IN 2017, the total U.S. national debt will hit $20 trillion— more than the total gross domestic product (gdp) of the country in a year. That figure is projected to keep growing over time, thanks to rising annual deficits. Debt held by the public, a measure that counts all federal securities sold to individuals, corporations, and state and local governments, plus foreign investors, currently clocks in around $14 trillion. That figure is expected to hit $23 trillion in 2026. There are risks to carrying a debt burden this big. It increases the nation’s susceptibility to a fiscal crisis if interest rates rise, and it limits the sorts of projects government can take on in a constrained fiscal environment. The greater the debt, the greater these risks become. One of…

ON THE EVENING of November 8, 2016, as it became clear that assumptions about Hillary Clinton’s certain electoral victory were wrong, investors began to squirm. Dow futures dropped by more than 700 points that night, and the liberal economist Paul Krugman wrote at The New York Times that “if the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” The next morning, however, the stock market completed a stunning reversal to end at a record high. What some have called a “Trump rally” has continued ever since, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average hovering just above the 20,000 mark at press time. One explanation for Wall Street’s seeming euphoria is that investors believe they’re now less likely to see the continuation of tax hikes and micro-regulation desired by…

DURING THE LAME duck session in December, Congress did something amazing: It actually passed a criminal justice bill. Tucked among the provisions of the bipartisan law were new state reporting requirements on prison rape. While that’s great, there’s a lot more that could be done if the federal government is serious about stopping this heinous crime. Back in 2003, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions worked across the aisle with Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy to pass the Prison Rape Elimination Act (prea). Evangelical Christians, led by Chuck Colson—the former Watergate conspirator who turned to prison ministry after his own stint on the inside—were instrumental in whipping gop support. But the Justice Department didn’t adopt national prea standards until 2012. Four years after they went into effect, the Associated Press reported that only…