Inhaltsverzeichnis für March 2018 in Reason

RICHARD THALER WON the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. It’s not an original Nobel prize, as recipients in the other fields will be glad to inform you. Alfred Nobel detested economics. Nonetheless, since 1969, some 79 prizes have been given by the Swedish National Bank to economists, and one to a psychologist in economists’ clothing. Thaler is distinguished but not brilliant, which is par for the course. He works on “behavioral finance,” the study of mistakes people make when they talk to their stock broker. He can be counted as the second winner for “behavioral economics,” after the psychologist Daniel Kahneman. His prize was for the study of mistakes people make when they buy milk. Thaler’s is the 10th Nobel for finance. (What, labor economics doesn’t exist? Public finance…

WHEN DONNA JAMES’ fourth-grade son told her his teacher was taking his recess time away, the Fort Wayne, Indiana, dispatcher assumed this was so he’d have extra time to finish his assignments. “I was OK with it,” she says. “Then one day I asked him, ‘So what did you get done during recess?’ And he said, ‘Nothing.’” Why not? “Because she makes me stand against the wall,” he answered. Welcome to the wonderful world of recess withholding. Most child development experts believe that kids need some unstructured run-around time during the day. The American Academy of Pediatrics has declared that “recess is a crucial and necessary component of a child’s development and, as such, it should not be withheld for punitive or academic reasons.” And yet schools aren’t just shrinking…

FROM THE BEGINNING of his political career, Donald Trump has articulated a view of immigrants that could lead only in one direction: toward policies to rid the country of them. The president started 2017 by ordering a “travel ban” that barred nationals of six majority-Muslim countries. By November, he had substantially reduced the number of people allowed in from all Muslim-majority countries and cut Muslim refugee admissions by 94 percent. (Christian refugees have not benefited either—he slashed their admissions by two-thirds.) Trump’s promises of a “merit-based” system haven’t spared skilled immigrants. Administration officials are harassing employers of H-1B workers, redefining which occupations qualify as “skilled,” and challenging an unprecedented number of applications. They also rescinded a rule that authorized 100,000 spouses of H-1B holders to find jobs in the country.…

IN 2015–16, DONALD Trump proved he understands that politics is about tribal allegiance. By seizing control of one of the two main parties, you can rise to power. In 2017, Trump smashed the remnants of Republican opposition and cemented his role as the tribal warlord chieftain of a MAGA-ified GOP. By this standard, he’s had a successful year. Trump’s weakness in elite circles has bred a narrative that the Republican Party is coming apart. But 90 percent of Republicans voted for him in 2016, and if anything, the GOP is becoming more united—not around shared philosophical beliefs, but around Trump. Unfortunately for Republicans, he has accomplished this in part by making the party smaller. In Gallup’s daily tracking surveys, the share who self-identify with the GOP has fallen from 42…

IT WAS NOT unreasonable to hope that President Donald Trump might improve on the foreign policy performance of his predecessors. Sure, the hopeful were grading on a curve that included George W. Bush and Barack Obama. But what gave a sliver of hope to those who yearned for greater realism and restraint were candidate Trump’s counter-establishment pronouncements about the “big, fat mistake” of Iraq and the problems posed by our wealthy, free-riding allies. Unfortunately, Trump’s first year has been full of missed opportunities and worrying signs that this presidency won’t provide the change required to make American foreign policy great again. A huge whiff came on Afghanistan, where Trump had the chance to draw down U.S. commitments or even end the longest war in American history. Against his better instincts,…

PORTFOLIO SCHOOL LOOKS and sounds like a Silicon Valley tech firm’s rec room—except that almost everyone is under the age of 10. The building’s walls double as whiteboards, with nearly every inch covered in colorful, hand-drawn diagrams of constellations and planetary orbits. Along one side, kid-sized scissors and glue sticks are piled neatly next to a 3D printer and laser cutter. During my visit, a boy with an explosion of brown hair skidded up to me. “We’re making movies!” he announced. Around the room, other students were reading, completing lessons on educational software, working on tinker toys. Without the unconscious kid-adult barriers that traditional schools often create, the chatty boy felt free to talk my ear off about how he and a group of his classmates had created characters for…

“Self-driving cars are going to be the effort of a lot more than one small startup,” George Hotz says. “Download our stuff, build it into your cars, don’t give me anything.” Known online as “GeoHot,” Hotz became one of the world’s most famous hackers at age 17, when he broke into an early iPhone and reconfigured it to be compatible with providers other than AT&T. He was also the first to jailbreak the PlayStation 3. Now 28, the technical wunderkind is going up against Tesla founder Elon Musk and the entire auto industry in a race to build the first fully operational autonomous vehicle. While bigger companies such as Google develop complex systems that rely on expensive light detection and radar (LIDAR) sensor systems, Hotz is trying to bring plug-and-play…

ALL OVER THE world, in carefully delimited areas, governments have carved out exceptions to their own rules. These special economic zones, better known as SEZs, come in many sizes and types, ranging from simple dutyfree warehouses to jurisdictions the size and complexity of entire cities. Host governments typically roll back taxes, customs, and similar barriers to trade in their zones, but sometimes offer special labor, environmental, or financial regulations, too. You probably live within a short drive of an SEZ: The United States has more than 400 of them, in the form of Foreign Trade Zones. Today most countries—about 75 percent—host SEZs of some sort. Worldwide, they number well over 4,000, and if you count micro-zones, some of them no bigger than parts of buildings, over 10,000. Though the core…

In December, the cast of characters known collectively as The Volokh Conspiracy left The Washington Post—where they have made their home since 2014—and moved to reason.com. Shortly before the eclectic crew of legal bloggers began their migration, the conspiracy’s namesake and unofficial ringleader, University of California, Los Angeles law professor Eugene Volokh, talked with Reason’s Nick Gillespie about life, liberty, and the law. Q: The contributors to The Volokh Conspiracy are mostly libertarianish, but not exclusively so. Is that accurate? A: That’s right. We’re basically moderates, libertarians, and conservatives. Some of us are more on one side than another, but I like “libertarianish.” That’s how I think of myself. For the purposes of our blog, we never feel we need to toe the party line. Sometimes I talk about court…

CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE is one of the most destructive and flagrantly unconstitutional government practices occurring in the United States today. It lets law enforcement agencies seize cash, cars, homes, and other property from innocent people who have been neither charged nor convicted of any underlying crime. The property is then either sold, with the government pocketing all or most of the proceeds, or put to use by the agency that took it. Either way, the police profit from their own policing. All this, even though the Constitution clearly forbids the government from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. How did we get here? The U.S. Supreme Court deserves a share of the blame. In 1996, the country’s highest court issued a far-reaching opinion…

IN NOVEMBER, THE Omaha World-Herald sent a simple records request to the Nebraska state government. Along with several other news outlets, the paper wanted to know the source of the drugs to be used in an upcoming execution—the first in the state in more than 20 years. In the past the Nebraska Department of Corrections would have provided this information, but now it refused. Officials there insisted that the supplier of the drugs the state intended to use, in the name of its citizens, to sedate, paralyze, and stop the beating heart of an inmate were exempt from Nebraska’s public record law. In December the Nebraska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued to challenge the denial. Nebraska is just the latest state to decide the executioner’s black hood…

AT THE BEGINNING of 2017, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan told GOP lawmakers that the new Congress would repeal Obamacare and pass deficit-neutral tax reform by August. At summer’s end, Republicans, despite holding majorities in both chambers, had accomplished neither. But eventually they would accomplish parts of each. In March, the House was set to hold a vote on legislation that would have repealed much of the Affordable Care Act while setting up a new system of related federal tax credits. Ryan was initially forced to pull the bill from the floor due to lack of support, but after making a series of tweaks intended to provide states with more flexibility, the body passed a health care bill in May. GOP leaders congratulated themselves for making progress on the…

SOMETIMES THE BIG stories are the ones that don’t happen. Days after his election, Donald Trump went on 60 Minutes and said of the gay marriage legal cases: “They’ve been settled, and I’m fine with that.” I predicted at Overlawyered that of the many reasons to worry about his incoming administration, “so far as I can see, anti-gay policies aren’t in the top 25.” How’d that stand up? By and large, the “assault on LGBTQ equality” predicted by the Huffington Post and many others hasn’t happened. True, Trump appointees pulled back from several controversial Obama positions. They withdrew an ill-considered plan to impose a nationwide school bathroom code. They refused to back the Democrats’ Equality Act, which would nationalize public-accommodations law and minimize exemptions. They dis-endorsed an ambitious theory that…

ON DECEMBER 14, the president held a little ceremony in the White House Roosevelt Room to highlight his administration’s efforts in slowing the growth of the regulatory state. This being Trump, he illustrated the point by cutting a red ribbon with a pair of giant golden scissors and making the absurdly undeliverable promise that “when we’re finished, which won’t be in too long a period of time, we will be less [regulatory] than where we were in 1960.” The media being the media, most coverage focused on the crude props and inflated claims. But somewhere between the bluster and the skepticism lies a humdinger of a story: Trump’s first nine months in office, the Competitive Enterprise Institute concluded in October, qualified him as “the least regulatory president,” with significant enacted…

A YEAR AGO, many conservatives and some libertarians held their noses and voted for Donald Trump on the theory that even if they didn’t like the man himself, he’d likely make good appointments—or at least better appointments than his rival. For some, Trump’s early Supreme Court pick of Neil Gorsuch vindicated that voting strategy, which was particularly prevalent among constitutional conservatives. So pleased were these supporters with his choice that references to the jurist became a bit of a joke in Washington: “Sure, Trump’s tweets are disconcerting. But Gorsuch!” The president doesn’t just appoint Supreme Court justices, however. Several of Trump’s high-level taps, including Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education and Ajit Pai at the Federal Communications Commission, have become liberal bugaboos for their deregulatory impulses. But the appointee…

OSCAR IS A white guy living in Austin, Texas, with a penchant for Japanese-style tattoos. A huge black and white dragon arcs over his left shoulder. The dragon’s scales subtly change shape as he moves, and the beast’s eyes are beady and glaring, nestled below spiked eyebrows and above bared fangs. The tattoo is lightly shaded, darker around the perimeter of the dragon, with a background of stylized leaves and waves that add depth and complexity to the piece. What Oscar knows about the origins of Japanese tattooing, he likes: “It’s associated with outlaws and outcasts—there were all these merchants and gangsters in Japan that were shunned from the societal hierarchy. Some people think the tradition began as a way for those merchants to show off their wealth privately, and…

TELEVISION THE GIFTED SCOTT SHACKFORD For decades, the mutants of Marvel’s X-Men comics have served as a metaphor for a host of different civil rights conflicts. Mutants got their superpowers not from technology or lab accidents but from genetic quirks—who they were, not what had happened to them. They fought not just megalomaniacal supervillains but also a government that deemed them a threat to society. Mistrust and fear of mutants have been a stand-in for mistreatment of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities in the United States wherever X-Men stories are told. The Gifted, a new series on Fox, focuses on an “average” family with mutant children, who have been deliberately deprived of their rights to life and liberty in the name of “protecting” public safety. The canonical X-Men themselves are…

The City of Malibu in California has pressured the United Methodist Church into ending its twice-weekly dinners for the homeless. Officials were worried that the meals would attract more homeless people to the area. An Egyptian court has sentenced singer Shaimaa Ahmed to two years in prison for inciting debauchery and publishing an indecent film. Specifically, one of her music videos features her wearing underwear and suggestively eating a banana. Kevin Smith spent almost eight years in a New Orleans jail awaiting trial for possession of crack cocaine before the Louisiana 4th Circuit Court of Appeal ruled that the repeated delays violated his Sixth Amendment rights. Last year, a Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, probation officer tore a pair of pants while chasing someone. A judge said the county should reimburse him…

HAWAII IS ONE of 29 states that allow medical use of marijuana. It’s also the only state that requires registration of all firearms. If you are familiar with the criteria that bar people from owning guns under federal law, you can probably surmise what the conjunction of these two facts means for patients who use cannabis as a medicine, which Hawaii allows them to do only if they register with the state. “Your medical marijuana use disqualifies you from ownership of firearms and ammunition,” Honolulu Police Chief Susan Ballard said in a November 13 letter received by about 30 people on Oahu. “If you currently own or have any firearms, you have 30 days upon receipt of this letter to voluntarily surrender your firearms, permit, and ammunition to the Honolulu…

“PEOPLE ARE PROUD to be saying Merry Christmas again,” President Donald Trump bragged, predictably, on December 24. “AP FACT CHECK: Trump on making Christmas great again,” came the even more predictable reply from the Associated Press. This is no way to watchdog an administration, let alone celebrate a beloved holiday. Trump, an outsider con man who hustled his way into the most prestigious insider job in America by mastering the art of the troll, has not to date found his social media equal among the hydra-headed opposition. The president pecks out impotent bluster designed to inflame the haters, and Democrats, journalists, and establishmentarian Republicans take the bait every time. So instead of firing up the hyperbole machine after each fatuous tweet, perhaps we should work our way backward from the…

IN ITS FIRST year, the Donald Trump administration has appointed good people and enunciated market-oriented principles on transportation policy. But the acid test will come when we see how much congressional support can be won for the president’s forthcoming infrastructure plan. Since “people are policy,” transportation-related appointments count as a positive. Elaine Chao as Department of Transportation (DOT) head and D.J. Gribbin as White House infrastructure sherpa are highly qualified choices with sound policy ideas. Other senior appointees also look good. Early on, the White House endorsed an effort to “corporatize” the poorly run Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control system, which raised that reform’s priority with House GOP leadership. But this further politicized the issue for Democrats in Congress, and if the lower chamber passes the bill, there…

BEFORE ELECTION DAY, I found the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency almost as ridiculous and terrifying as the idea of Charlie Sheen with nukes. Things haven’t gone as badly as I feared: Our political system—on the home front, at least—has been surprisingly resistant to one-man rule. In part, that’s because being a successful autocrat requires a modicum of competence and self-restraint, qualities Trump lacks. A competent authoritarian wouldn’t dare “so called judge[s]” to overturn his edicts; fantasize on Twitter about silencing critics and prosecuting political foes; or confess to obstruction of justice on national TV, as Trump practically did when he told NBC News that he fired former FBI Director James Comey over “the Russia thing.” Imagine Dick Nixon being dumb enough to attach the Enemies List to a…

DONALD TRUMP’S VERY first campaign speech fanned fears of foreign subversion: Mexico, he suggested, was deliberately dumping its criminals on our side of the border. A year after he became president, many Democrats have found it convenient to challenge him by...fanning fears of foreign subversion. It’s a sign of the Trumpian times that so much of the “resistance” can’t resist the rise of paranoid nationalism. The problem here isn’t that Democrats are investigating Trump and his cronies’ possible conflicts of interest in the former Soviet Union. It’s always good to keep an eye on any signs of public corruption, and the president’s circle has certainly done business with more than its share of sleazy operators, from Russia to Turkey to New Jersey. What’s ugly is the narrative that’s grown up…

IN THE LAST year, both the stock market and the bitcoin world have been powerhouses. As of press time in January, the S&P 500 had seen a 35 percent increase since election night. Over that same period, the price of a bitcoin went up by more than 1,700 percent, from $721 to $13,310. Trump has often said the stock market’s performance should be viewed as a proxy for his administration’s accomplishments. Is there anything to that? Perhaps. One possibility is that the rally is a sign of a growing economy fueled by the promise of big corporate tax reductions and the regulatory diet Trump has put the federal government on. In addition, entrepreneurs are probably breathing a sigh of relief that the anti-business climate so palpable during the Obama years…

HUMANITY ISN’T DESTROYING the natural world. We’re changing it. And in many ways, our changes are creating richer and more vibrant ecosystems. That’s the persuasive and liberating argument advanced by the York University conservation biologist Chris D. Thomas in his riveting new book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. “It is time for the ecological, conservation and environmental movement—of which I am a life-long member—to throw off the shackles of a pessimism-laden, loss-only view of the world,” he writes. Instead, he thinks a thriving world of exotic ecosystems and biological renewal is at hand. By the time readers have finished this carefully researched treatise, they should agree. Thomas’ thesis isn’t exactly the conventional wisdom. In her Pulitzer-winning 2015 book The Sixth Extinction (Henry…

15 YEARS AGO March 2003 “The openness, freedom, and plenitude that lead radical Islamists to hate America are precisely what draw so many people from around the world to live here. Among them, do not forget, were the hundreds of foreign nationals who were among those killed in the World Trade Center.” CATHY YOUNG “Guilt by Association” “Michael Greene, then president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences... was not referring to international terrorism. ‘The most insidious virus in our midst,’ he said sternly, ‘is the illegal downloading of music on the Net.’” DOUGLAS CLEMENT “Creation Myths” “What [Woodrow] Wilson’s election meant to the South was ‘home rule’—that is, license to pursue its racial practices without concern about federal interference. That is exactly what the 1948 Dixiecrats wanted.”…