Índice para July 2020 em Reason

AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, huge swaths of the federal government reorganized around the idea of fighting terrorism. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) became a maximally intrusive and minimally effective part of every traveler’s life. The FBI, which had failed to connect the dots on the 9/11 plot, received billions more in funding. The Department of Homeland Security, a shiny new Cabinetlevel bureaucracy with an Orwellian name, grew at a rate that would make Clifford the Big Red Dog turn green with envy. The PATRIOT Act whisked away Americans’ privacy, and the Authorization for Use of Military Force plunged the nation into a new type of endless war. The security state that had been unable to prevent a terror attack on American soil was showered with gross sums of money and…

AFTER 2017’S MASS shooting in Las Vegas, President Donald Trump vowed to ban bump stocks, a type of firearm accessory that the shooter reportedly used. “We can do that with an executive order,” Trump declared. “They’re working on it right now, the lawyers.” The lawyers at the Department of Justice (DOJ) came up with a new Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulation “to clarify that [bump stocks] are ‘machineguns’ as defined by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968” because “such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.” The federal ban on machine guns, in other words, would be interpreted by the Trump administration to ban bump stocks…

AS FEDERAL, STATE, and local governments respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, some are loosening rules to ensure consumers can get adequate sustenance. Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) temporarily relaxed food-labeling rules to allow some companies to sell things that are not labeled for individual sale. That includes foods such as those that had been labeled for sale to a restaurant, hotel, or university food service provider, which typically don’t contain the Nutrition Facts labels that are required to appear on items sold directly to consumers. That has given states and cities leeway to allow the restaurants they regulate to sell groceries that don’t comply with some current FDA labeling rules. Many states have also relaxed liquor laws during the pandemic by…

ARE YOU AGAINST gerrymandering? Of course you are! You’ve laughed at the shapes of districts with nicknames like the Praying Mantis, the Steam Shovel, and Goofy Kicking Donald Duck. Like almost everyone who follows politics, you agree that it’s wrong to fiddle with legislative maps to help a favored party or candidate. Or do you? To test your commitment, here’s a composite example from a fictional 51st state of the union we’ll call the State of Madison. Public opinion in Madison is strongly opposed to extreme partisan gerrymandering, the sort where the more powerful of two major parties redraws the map to hurt the other. The leadership of the state legislature has taken this to heart and entrusted the task of drawing the next set of district lines to a…

THE PAST IS a different country, one I used to live in. In that country, as I remember it, people moved about and met with others freely, passing close to strangers on the sidewalk, wearing gloves and scarves only when the weather required it. They rode crowded buses and packed subway trains, commuting to their offices so they could sit through meetings in close proximity to their yawning colleagues. They stood in lines and watched kids climb on playground equipment. They went to restaurants with dates and had intimate conversations over dinners prepared by someone else, delivered by platoons of waiters whose hands touched each and every plate. They shared sips of expensive cocktails with fussed-over garnishes containing liquors imported from all over the world. They propped themselves up on…

IN APRIL, THE rule-making body that oversees California’s courts issued emergency rules for the COVID-19 pandemic that included a blanket extension of deadlines for filing civil actions until 90 days after the current state of emergency ends. For housing construction, alas, this new and longer statute of limitations applies to lawsuits filed under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). CEQA requires local governments to study proposed development projects for potentially significant environmental impacts. It also gives third parties the power to sue the government for approving a construction project if they feel that a particular environmental impact wasn’t looked at carefully enough. The law has become a favorite tool of NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) interests to delay unwanted developments or to extract concessions from developers. Anti-gentrification activists use CEQA…

WITH THE WORLD experiencing the worst pandemic since 1918, people may be wondering whether our way of life is secure. Looking at how civilizational breakdown has happened before can help us understand what causes it, the forms it may take, and whether it’s in our future. Civilizational crisis and collapse were given a formal scholarly definition in Joseph A. Tainter’s 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. The model works this way: Since at least the advent of agriculture, people have responded to challenges and sought to improve their condition. One form this takes is through social cooperation, an approach that leads to more complex forms of economy, society, and politics. In the abstract, complexity means higher levels of heterogeneity, as opposed to uniformity. In concrete economic terms, it means…

WHEN PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS finally become legal in the United States and elsewhere around the world, the lion’s share of the credit will go to Rick Doblin. Since founding the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986, Doblin has argued forcefully for the benefits of frequently demonized substances such as MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, and ibogaine in helping people cope with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, and other debilitating problems. For decades, Doblin and MAPS have been pushing not just for social and cultural acceptance but also for legal and medical legitimacy. MAPS is currently sponsoring Phase 3 clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as a treatment for PTSD. Within the next few years, if all goes well, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to approve MDMA—a.k.a. Ecstasy, which…

THE CENSUS IS almost as old as the state itself: Leaders have long wanted to know how many people they can tax and how many men they can call up for military service. But as the economist Andrew Whitby details in The Sum of the People, attitudes toward such head counts vary widely from one culture to another. There is an Old Testament prohibition against counting the people, a restriction that lingered in Judeo-Christian cultures for centuries. The first modern census, Whitby argues, was an effort in 1703 to count the residents of Iceland (then a Danish colony with a small and starving population). Censuses can also have benign, practical purposes, unrelated to taxes or conscription. They can be used to determine political representation, as is the case in the…

TV TIGER KING CHRISTIAN BRITSCHGI There’s something for every libertarian in Tiger King, Netflix’s new docuseries on the lives and feuds of America’s tiger keepers. The star of the show is Joe Exotic, a gay, gun-toting, polyamorous former zoo owner who is currently serving out a federal prison sentence for an abortive murder-for-hire scheme targeting his longstanding rival, Carol Baskin, another zookeeper who also happens to be the target of (unproven) homicide accusations regarding her missing ex-husband. Lovers of both animals and freedom will feel vindicated by the fact that private entrepreneurs like Exotic are helping to keep the globe’s dwindling population of tigers alive, all while making a little profit on the side. Libertarian Party enthusiasts might be glad to see their outfit name-checked heavily in the series’ coverage…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S “America First” agenda has reignited conservatives’ love affair with nationalism, with National Review’s Rich Lowry (a onetime NeverTrumper) and Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony publishing books in the last few years arguing that America needs a nationalist revival to rebuild fraying social cohesion. The truth is the opposite: Cultural nationalism will dissolve the glue that binds Americans—namely, their commitment to the founding principles of equality, individual rights, and human dignity. When I came to America 30 years ago, it was obvious to me—as it was to French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville 200 years earlier—that Americans not only love but also like their country. American patriotism, Tocqueville observed, is very different from the Old World variety that regarded the nation as the father and citizens as his offspring.…

SIXTEEN LATIN AMERICAN countries severely restricted their borders in mid-March, creating a physical firewall against the coronavirus that they hope will allow them to avoid the fate of countries such as Italy, Spain, and the United States. Nine nations—Honduras, Colombia, Suriname, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina—have closed their borders completely, leaving many travelers and foreign citizens trapped for the foreseeable future. The most dramatic closure occurred in Colombia, which for years had maintained an open border with Venezuela amid the worst refugee crisis in modern Latin American history. Since 2015, over 6 million Venezuelans have fled their collapsing state, mostly through Colombia, where 1.7 million have taken up permanent residency. That is no longer a legal option, and the closure has put millions along the Colombian-Venezuelan border at…

Lucio Delgado was proud to have the chance to become an American citizen after moving to the U.S. from Mexico six years ago. But his dreams were dashed when he flunked the reading portion of the naturalization test. Delgado is blind, but examiners refused to provide that portion of the exam in Braille. Delgado says he was told he needed a doctor’s note. An arbitrator has ordered the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to reinstate an officer who was fired for hesitating to respond to the mass shooting at the Mandalay Bay casino in 2017. Bodycam video showed Cordell Hendrex leading a rookie officer and three casino security officers one floor below where the gunman was. They stopped when they heard gunfire and remained in the hallway for five minutes.…