Inhaltsverzeichnis für December 2019 in Reason

FOR THE PAST 20 years, Tom Messina has run Tom’s Diner, a popular 24-hour eatery in Denver, Colorado. After two decades behind the grill, Messina decided to hang up his apron and retire. “I’m a restaurateur who’s worked his life flipping pancakes and selling eggs. I have a beautiful family I want to spend time with,” says Messina, 60. Local developer Alberta Company offered to buy Tom’s Diner for $4.8 million in order to redevelop the site into an apartment complex. Messina planned on pocketing the money and enjoying some quality time with his grandkids. It was shaping up to be a win-win deal until five local activists filed an application in June to declare Tom’s Diner a historic landmark. They argued that the mid-century “Googie” architectural style of Messina’s…

ON AUGUST 21, an inmate at Lowell Correctional Institution, Florida’s largest women’s prison, was transported to the hospital with a broken neck. According to eyewitness accounts that immediately began to leak, she was yet another victim of brutality at the facility. The inmate, 51-year-old Cheryl Weimar, is now a quadriplegic, according to her lawyer. A lawsuit Weimar filed claims she was beaten by four guards after complaining that she couldn’t clean toilets because of chronic hip pain. Weimar’s beating put a gruesome spotlight on the slow-motion disaster unfolding inside Florida’s prison system. Inmates face sweltering heat and poor conditions. Low wages and high turnover mean persistent staff shortages, and guards engage in violence and cover-ups. “I don’t know what to tell you, but this is a culture in Florida that…

STEPHEN R. PLATT believes that the so-called Opium War of 1839–1842 was one of the most “shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history.” The central question, he writes in Imperial Twilight, is a moral one: How could Britain—a country that had just abolished slavery—so hypocritically turn around and push drugs onto “a defenceless China”? Platt, a University of Massachusetts Amherst historian, thus joins a long list of writers who have portrayed the Opium War as one of the worst crimes of the modern era. Karl Marx, for one, believed that the slave trade was merciful compared to the opium trade. Forty years ago, John King Fairbank, doyen of modern Chinese studies, called the opium trade “the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times.” If this were…

AMERICANS ARE PROBABLY accustomed by now to President Donald Trump lashing out against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Twitter. In one recent tweet, Trump asked his followers which man is America’s “bigger enemy”: Powell, or Chinese President Xi Jinping. In another tweet, Trump wrote that “China is not our problem.…Our problem is with the Fed” and called Powell “clueless.” The Fed’s biggest crime, according to Trump, is that Americans would be richer and the economy would grow faster if only Powell would cut interest rates by a full percentage point. After months of resistance, Federal Reserve officials in September announced a reduction of interest rates by a quarter of a point. That wasn’t enough for Trump, who now demands that “The Federal Reserve should get our interest rates down…

PARVEZ MANZOOR KHAN, a 62-year-old Pakistani truck driver, has lived in the U.S. for nearly three decades. He has an American wife and three American children. In 2006, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. But Khan is facing “denaturalization” and deportation due to an error of omission on his application for citizenship. Denaturalization—or stripping naturalized immigrants of their citizenship—is an extreme measure typically reserved for Nazis and terrorists. But in a little-noticed initiative called Operation Second Look, President Donald Trump is rummaging through past naturalization applications looking for reasons to remove the citizenship of nonheinous individuals. In the early ’90s, Khan filed an asylum petition under a different name but missed his asylum hearing. He says his lawyer failed to notify him. Unbeknownst to him, Khan told The Intercept, he…

SINCE THE FIRST papal encyclical on modern economic questions, Rerum Novarum, was promulgated in 1891, Catholic pontiffs have had harsh words for “unbridled capitalism” and “philosophical liberalism.” In Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Pope Pius XI wrote that “the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching.” In Octogesima Adveniens (1971), Pope Paul VI argued that “structures” should be set up “in which the rhythm of progress would be regulated with a view to greater justice.” The upshot—that a capitalist system cannot be trusted automatically to produce what the Church views as morally acceptable outcomes—may seem to require Christians to support a robust central government. If…

I HAVE A confession to make. It’s 2019, and I don’t know what television is anymore. Oh, sure, I know what a television—the physical object, the thing you order from Amazon after checking it out at Best Buy—is. I am even reasonably comfortable with the notion of shows or series, those half-hour and one-hour productions that come in sequential, chapter-like installments, much like they did 30 or 40 years ago when a handful of broadcast networks ruled the airwaves and pay cable channels such as HBO and Cinemax were still niche services for well-off movie nuts and people too embarrassed to rent softcore porn at video stores. (Remember those?) But television? As a concept? As a means of cultural connection, a system for mass entertainment? A way of organizing the…

TV MINDHUNTER PETER SUDERMAN In Mindhunter, everyone’s a pervert—but that’s what makes them normal. The Netflix original series, whose second season dropped in August, chronicles the origins and development of the FBI’s profiling unit and its quest to identify the serial murderers who haunted the American landscape and cultural imagination in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The investigators’ goal is to learn what drives killers, to understand not just how but why they do what they do. Their primary method is to conduct extensive interviews with multiple murderers who have already been convicted. That means lots of tense, unnerving interviews with men who, inevitably, have deeply disturbed psyches and immense psychosexual hang-ups. Most obtain sexual satisfaction from hunting down their victims or fantasizing about violence. They get off on…

In Colorado, officials at Loveland High School barred Nathan Myers from classes after someone used an anonymous tip service run by the state attorney general’s office to report he was planning to attack the school. Myers had posted a video to Snapchat before a family trip to a gun range; it showed some of his mother’s firearms and was captioned “Finna be lit,” slang meaning that he was going to have a good time. Police were summoned, and while they quickly determined nothing was amiss, the school did not allow Myers back until it had conducted a threat assessment. Police in Ipswich, England, arrested Lindsey Webb for putting out her recycling in the wrong color bags. Prosecutors say the change from black to orange and clear bags had been clearly…

THE AMAZON-OWNED SECURITY firm Ring wants to let police know what’s happening in your neighborhood. Law enforcement agencies that sign up are provided with a web-based map showing which homeowners have installed Ring doorbell cameras. They can request access to recorded videos—bypassing that pesky step of obtaining a search warrant first. “We just like the fact that Ring wants to work with law enforcement and the citizens and bring us into the same forum to try to keep our community safe,” Tony Botti, public information officer for the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office in California, told Government Technology. “It lessens the work we have to do; maybe we have to knock on a few less doors to get the video.” When police use Ring’s so-called Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal to request…

POSTAL AGENCIES AROUND the globe sighed in relief this October as the Trump administration allowed America to remain a member of the Universal Postal Union (UPU). Founded in 1874, the 194-nation organization guarantees the delivery of international mail by brokering shipping rates across borders. The Trump administration said in 2018 that if rates didn’t change (for China in particular), the US. would withdraw from the group. UPU Director General Bishar Hussein said America’s withdrawal from the union would be “a nightmare scenario” that would make it impossible to deliver foreign mail destined for, or originating from, the U.S., leading to “total disruption of service.” Hussein was right, but so were White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and other critics of the UPU. For decades, the U.S. Postal Service has charged…

CITY TRANSPORT REGULATORS have banned or hindered Uber and Lyft from operating, even though the public loves their convenience and drivers find the apps a good way to make money on their own terms. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prevents sick people from trying certain drugs that their doctors would like them to try and drug companies would like to sell them; many Americans who can afford it travel to other countries to get medicines the FDA denies them here. Banking regulation in America now prevents community bankers from making loans based on their judgment and knowledge of their would-be borrowers; the rules force lenders instead to follow formulas imposed by the regulators. Government regulation is a problem. Through restrictions and mandates, it prohibits exchanges that peaceful people would…

STOP ME IF you’ve heard this one before: An environmentalist walks into a federal auction and buys up the drilling rights to thousands of acres of public lands. But instead of developing the leases, he decides to keep the oil and gas in the ground, because to him the landscape is more valuable conserved than developed. Funny, right? Anyone who follows environmental politics knows that environmentalists have a reputation for being more likely to lobby, litigate, or regulate than to simply pay for what they want to protect. Yet when Tim DeChristopher went to protest an energy lease auction by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 2008, he tried the more direct approach. DeChristopher walked into the lease sale in Salt Lake City and ended up outbidding developers…

15 YEARS AGO December 2004 “The Free State Project is the most recent and successful face of libertarian separatism—or, as some call it, libertarian Zionism. To be sure, many involved in the search for new libertarian communities reject such terms. Roderick Long, a philosophy professor at Auburn University and the brains behind the Libertarian Nation Foundation, a group dedicated to theorizing about the possibilities for libertarian polities, tells me he doesn’t like the term separatist because ‘the attraction is not that I don’t want to live near or interact with nonlibertarians. Most of my best friends are nonlibertarians. We don’t want to live by ourselves but simply want a chance to demonstrate to the world that libertarian principles actually work. We want to escape from government, not escape from ordinary…