Inhaltsverzeichnis für June 2016 in Reason

“For you, the Internet is like water,” our tour guide told us as we barreled through Havana’s storied La Rampa neighborhood after a night out. “For us, it is like caviar.” She motioned out the bus window where packs of happy-looking Cuban youths were clustered together around the magic blue-green glow coming from their iPhones, the light piercing through the man-made darkness of yet another local power outage. Like the open presence of Miami tourists and the American flag over the nearby U.S. embassy, civilian Internet access in Cuba is an absurdly recent phenomenon. Only last year did the omnipresent government open a few dozen wireless shops where Cubans can buy access to the information superhighway for the dear price of $2 an hour, roughly 8 percent of the average…

“In Washington, D.C., and many state capitals, the best you can say is that some of the lawmakers read some of the bills some of the time. The rest rely on staff-written summaries and wordof-mouth descriptions from colleagues and lobbyists. They often don’t know what they’re doing, and then they can’t remember why they did it.” —John J. Pitney Jr., “Don’t Vote for Me” “In other words, protection not only compels consumers to pay more than they should for the products they buy; it deprives future consumers of the main benefit of competitive capitalism: continued product and process innovation.” —Joel Mokyr, “Future Enemies” “Procedural reforms can do a lot—but we can never be entirely sure what they will do. We can reason out the advantages of not having legislators rooted…

The tension between data privacy and government intelligence gathering boiled over in February thanks to a locked iPhone the FBI claims it is unable to hack its way into. The dispute has brought publicity to a government-waged war on encryption that goes all the way back to the dawn of the age of consumer computer technology. In the January 1981 issue of reason, Sylvia Sanders delved into the brewing battle. The National Security Agency (NSA) was attempting to manipulate patent regulations with “secrecy orders” to try to keep new encryption inventions from entering the marketplace. Sanders saw the future of digital data and warned what was coming if the NSA succeeded in keeping encryption out of consumer electronics: “Legal suppression of cryptography will only serve to drive it underground, into…

Many very rich people in America—including a certain presidential front-runner on the Republican side—were born into their wealth. But others started with nothing and, through talent and effort, worked their way to the top of the heap. From Andrew Carnegie to Sam Walton to Oprah Winfrey, our history is bursting with rags-to-riches stories of people who achieved “the American dream.” Winfrey was born dirt poor to unwed teenage parents. She suffered abuse, had to leave her home, and got pregnant at 14, only to lose the child. None of that stopped her from rising to head a multimillion-dollar media operation. The idea that anything is possible here has attracted millions of immigrants to U.S. shores— but increasingly the political left has fretted that “income mobility,” or the ability to rise…

The film Whiskey Tango Foxtrot tosses Tina Fey (of SNL and 30 Rock fame) into a war zone, as reporter Kim Baker, a desk jockey turned adrenaline junkie. While Fey has been careful to say in the media that the film “has nothing to do with what should be done about Afghanistan—it is 100 percent not that,” the whole plot turns on how difficult it is for people who are caught up in the heat of battle—combatants, civilians, and press—to keep perspective. “I’ve gotta go. I’m starting to feel like this is normal. You know this is not normal, right?” Baker says to her war photographer friend-withbenefits (played by a casually debauched Martin Freeman) as she tosses clothes into a suitcase in her grimy Kabul bedroom. Unremarked upon— though the…

“Empathy games” are among the more interesting genres to emerge from the world of independent and small-studio video games. These intimate interactive experiences put the player in the shoes of others dealing with difficult life situations. Game designers Ryan and Amy Green used the structure of a game to tell the deeply personal story of losing their young son, Joel. That Dragon, Cancer makes its “player” a participant as Joel is diagnosed with terminal cancer. The player witnesses the family’s unsuccessful fight to save him. Through the familiar design of a point-and-click adventure game, players journey through parks, cancer wards, and imaginary landscapes borne of the couple’s frustrations. It’s a game you can’t win. The player’s options are limited, much like the Greens’ were in life. But through the journey,…

“Bourgeois Equality” (page 38) is an excerpt from the third book in Contributing Editor Deirdre McCloskey’s series exploring the underrated “bourgeois virtues.” Although McCloskey’s Ph.D. is in economics, the 73-year-old distinguished professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago is deeply committed to interdisciplinary pursuits. “The logic and stories and evidence come from all directions,” she says. “For example, if we’re really going to understand the economy we need to realize that people talk in it….The departments that deal with talk in a serious way, communications and English, therefore need to be in the conversation.” McCloskey’s bourgeois values have no place in the hit AMC series The Walking Dead, according to Timothy Sandefur. In “Anarchy, State, and Zombie Dystopia” (page 52), he wrangles history,…

“The whole point of our Constitution is to keep limits on the government so we have space for our individual liberty.” —former George W. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo, author of the infamous memos justifying the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” against terrorism suspects, at the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference, March 3 “I will not be used as a tool for their purposes. I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head.” —former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, in a letter to colleagues announcing she would not appear on her show the following weekend, February 26 “Again, Non-natives are not entitled to our stories, cultures, histories, imagery & identities, not even in the name of artistic freedom.” —tweet from activist Johnnie Jae complaining about a short story from…

Second-term congressman Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) may be the staunchest defender of liberty most people have never heard of. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology grad lives off the grid on a cattle farm in a solar-powered home he built himself. He commutes to Washington, where he serves on three committees. A supporter of fellow Kentuckian Rand Paul’s bid for president, Massie sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie at the International Students for Liberty Conference in February to discuss what comes next now that Paul has dropped out of the race. Q: What are the most important votes coming up for a libertarian-leaning Republican? A: I think we can force some votes on the privacy issue. Last year and the year before, I forced a vote on an appropriations bill…

“I’ll tell you...one thing that no Cabinet has ever had is a Secretary of the Future, and there are no plans at all for my grandchildren and my great grandchildren,” the novelist Kurt Vonnegut once groused. Vonnegut’s comment came up on the public radio show Marketplace this March, when the program asked, “What if we had a Secretary of the Future?” Well, it would be a disaster. Human beings are terrible at foresight, and marrying our purblind premonitions to government power would be more terrible still. Vonnegut was far from alone in pining for some sort of far-seeing federal planner. For the past half-century, the chief motive for establishing planning bureaucracies has been an allegedly impending ecological and economic catastrophe. For example, in the 1968 book The Population Bomb, the…

Contrary to economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty, our riches cannot be explained by the accumulation of capital, as the misleading word capitalism implies. The Great Enrichment did not come from piling brick on brick, or bachelor’s degree on bachelor’s degree, or bank balance on bank balance, but from piling idea on idea. The accumulation of capital was of course necessary. But so were a labor force and the existence of liquid water. Oxygen is necessary for a fire. Yet it would be unhelpful to explain the Chicago Fire of October 8–10, 1871, by the presence of oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere. The modern world, in other words, can’t be explained by routine brick piling, such as the Indian Ocean trade, English banking, canals, the British…

Now closing its sixth season, AMC’s The Walking Dead has received the highest ratings of any cable drama ever, and its writing and acting have been showered with awards. That’s impressive, given that the series is also a deadly serious examination of the nature of political society and the virtues necessary to sustain it. The series begins, appropriately enough, with what Albert Camus called the only genuine philosophical problem: Why not commit suicide immediately? In one early episode, the survivors of the zombie apocalypse are trapped in a lab that’s set to self-destruct by a scientist who, unable to pursue his research further, prefers death to a world without hope of cure or rescue. “Wouldn’t it be kinder? More compassionate, to just hold your loved ones and wait for the…

Veteran graphic novelist Chester Brown’s new book, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus: Prostitution and Religious Obedience in the Bible (Drawn & Quarterly), presents comic-book versions of Bible stories involving prostitutes. The libertarian-leaning Brown is a partisan for the quasi-heretical belief among some outré Bible scholars that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a prostitute. But Brown’s larger message goes beyond just whether God can forgive, or even glorify, women who sell sex for money—though Brown is sure He can. In a detailed prose afterword, Brown offers up evidence for his own esoteric take on scripture: From Cain and Abel to Job to Jesus’ parables of the Talents and the Prodigal Son, Brown insists the Bible tells us that God admires and rewards those who don’t follow the rules.…

Genetically modified crops Greener Pastures Ronald Bailey In the United States, modern biotech crop varieties make up 89 percent of the corn planted each year, 94 percent of the soybeans, and 91 percent of the cotton. In February, agricultural researchers at Purdue University investigated what would happen if anti-biotech activists were successful in getting such crop varieties banned. Their study calculated that eliminating all genetically modified crops in the U.S. would reduce corn yields by 11.2 percent, soybean yields by 5.2 percent, and cotton yields by 18.6 percent. To maintain current production, U.S. farmers would then have to plow down an additional 250,000 acres of forests and pastureland. A global ban would require the conversion of 2.7 million acres of forests and pastures into cropland. None of that would be…

Edin Mehic received a 70-euro fine after burping near a police officer in a public amusement park in Vienna, Austria. The officer said the burp violated public decency. On one single day, Tennessee Circuit Judge John McAfee overturned three rulings by General Sessions Judge Amanda Sammons that had removed a total of four children from their homes over the objections of the Department of Children’s Services. The agency told Sammons not only that it did not wish to remove the children from their homes but also that it saw no legal grounds to do so. McAfee says he routinely has to issue emergency stays of Sammons’ removal orders. Officials in West Chester Township, Ohio, conceded that Melissa Warren and Eric Adams did everything by the book when they issued them…

“If you want someone to grab a beer with,” Ted Cruz said during the third Republican presidential debate last October, “I may not be that guy. But if you want someone to drive you home, I will get the job done.” The president as Uber driver is a refreshingly modest view of the job, especially compared to the grandiose dreams of Donald Trump. The boastful billionaire probably would not drive you home, and he definitely would not have a beer with you. Although he once had a vodka named after him, Trump does not drink, which may be just as well, given the appalling things he says when he’s sober. Trump’s impromptu approach to public policy suggests that if he were in the driver’s seat, he would be guided by…

Tattoo artists Tom and Elizabeth Preston jumped through every regulatory hoop that the city of Tempe, Arizona, placed in their way. The couple filed the necessary paperwork for opening a tattoo parlor on the north side of town, paid the necessary fees, and obtained the necessary permits before breaking proverbial ground on a studio called Body Accents. But then, after the Prestons had spent more than $30,000 on renovations, permits, and related costs, Tempe abruptly changed its tune. Their original operating permit was revoked, the Prestons were told, because the proposed tattoo shop might attract an unsavory clientele. The message was clear: Take your inky business elsewhere. Tattoo artists have been hassled by clueless health departments, shut down by moralizing zoning boards, and outlawed entirely by busybody city councils and…

FX’s 10-part series The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story avoids the fate of so many cheesy “ripped from the headlines” TV dramas by being both well-crafted and admirably true to the facts. It’s fascinating to watch how the trial’s relitigation of Simpson’s history of domestic violence changed public opinion about spousal abuse, taking what was previously considered a behind-closed-doors family matter and rendering it socially unacceptable even for popular celebrities. Most striking is the specter of police brutality and racism hovering over the trial. Prior to joining the prosecution, Christopher Darden is shown working in the D.A.’s Special Investigations Division, desperately trying to hold officers who shot a black woman in the back accountable for their actions. When defense attorney Johnnie Cochran gets a detective to admit he…

The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, by Rajan Menon, Oxford University Press, 224 pages, $27.95 “We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi—a city nearly the size of Charlotte—could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” Barack Obama’s rationale for intervening in Libya in 2011 is a succinct summary of the logic of humanitarian intervention: When mass atrocities occur, it suggests, the world community has a responsibility to intervene. That intervention ended up exacerbating rather than ending the conflict, and Libya has since dissolved into chaos and grinding violence. Tens of thousands of people have died, and a second civil war launched in 2014 is still ongoing. In The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, City College of New York political…