Sommaire pour February 2019 de Reason

AS HIS LAST move before resigning as U.S. attorney general in October, former Sen. Jeff Sessions signed a memo making it much more difficult for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to enter into binding court agreements with police departments accused of civil rights violations. It was a parting shot at Sessions’ longtime ideological enemies, groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and his department’s own Civil Rights Division. The DOJ first began creating so-called “consent decrees” to rein in rogue police departments in the 1990s, following the Rodney King trial. But they were used sparingly until the Obama era, during which time the DOJ launched a record 25 civil rights investigations into state and local law enforcement agencies. Probes in Baltimore; Chicago; Ferguson, Missouri; and elsewhere revealed excessive…

DON WILLETT FIRST rose to fame as a libertarian-leaning Texas Supreme Court justice who penned constitutional defenses of economic freedom. Since joining the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in late 2017, Willett has been making a name for himself in another area of the law: criminal justice reform. In August 2018, Willett took aim at the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields police officers and other government officials from being sued when they violate citizens’ constitutional rights. “To some observers, qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior,” Willett wrote in a concurring opinion in Zadeh v. Robinson. “I add my voice to a growing, cross-ideological chorus of jurists and scholars urging recalibration of contemporary immunity jurisprudence.”…

TWO NEW RULES concerning employer-sponsored health insurance and contraception coverage, set to take effect in January, will finally allow conscientious objectors to opt out of the now-notorious Obamacare contraception mandate. But the feds shouldn’t consider the matter settled until women can buy birth control over the counter. Under the first new rule—issued jointly by the departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Treasury, and Labor—churches, religious orders and auxiliaries, nonprofit and for-profit organizations, nonpublic institutions of higher education, and “other non-governmental employers with religious objections” are allowed to opt out of offering insurance plans that pay for birth control “on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs.” Insurance issuers can also opt out if all of the companies they provide plans to are exempted. And individuals can opt out of…

INDEPENDENCE REQUIRES INFRASTRUCTURE.” That line captures the essence of The Design of Childhood. In this book Alexandra Lange, a design critic and mother, examines the history of how children’s items and spaces have been designed. These designs, she shows, can either expand or inhibit kids’ autonomy. Consider the Tripp Trapp, an adjustable child’s chair from the early 1970s. Designed to afford children more independence, the simple seat enabled kids of different sizes to comfortably navigate in and out, as it will never be too big or small. That was the original idea, anyway. The new versions have elaborate harnesses and straps; as Lange explains, the Tripp Trapp “now comes with more binding accouterments to meet the high chair safety standards of the United States and European Union.” The evolution of…

WE TEND TO think of political eras in terms of presidents: The 1980s remind us of Ronald Reagan, not Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. The same is true of the 1990s and Bill Clinton, the post-9/11 era and George W. Bush, the years after the financial collapse and Barack Obama. Now, it is assumed, we are in the era of Donald Trump. But are we? Trump is certainly the most visible elected leader in our national political life. But with his inescapably controversial persona serving as the starkest partisan dividing line in our polarized age, he is, perhaps more than any other modern president, also a figurehead—a president-in-name-only, elected to sit in the Oval Office and tweet into the abyss, which may or may not tweet back. Meanwhile, the real…

ELECTION RESULTS ARE rarely good news for libertarians—or for the economy. The 2018 midterm election was no different. The Republicans lost the House, an outcome they deserved thanks to their failure to repeal and replace Obamacare, their lack of opposition to President Donald Trump’s destructive trade policies and the resulting $12 billion farmers’ bailout, and their responsibility for the return of $1 trillion deficits three years ahead of schedule. Republicans also picked up two more Senate seats, giving them a comfortable majority to confirm new Supreme Court justices and other federal nominees. But even though divided government is generally thought to be good for fiscal restraint, that might not be the case for the next several years. As the late William Niskanen of the Cato Institute demonstrated, the slowest rates…

ON JUNE 14, 1993, President Bill Clinton announced his pick to replace retiring Justice Byron White on the U.S. Supreme Court. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or a conservative,” Clinton declared of his nominee. “She has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels.” The president was half right. Ginsburg, who was 60 years old at the time, already had a long and distinguished record as a litigator, a law professor, and a judge on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She was undeniably thoughtful. At the same time, Ginsburg was undeniably a liberal. Indeed, she was arguably one of the greatest liberal lawyers of her generation. Today, after serving 25 years on the high bench, Ginsburg stands as the outspoken leader…

DURING THE LAST century, everyone from John Maynard Keynes to The Jetsons predicted that in the future, technological advances would drastically cut down the number of hours the average person would need to work to keep the economy going. Why didn’t that happen? In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, suggests it did happen. Not that people are working fewer hours, but that fewer of those hours are actually needed. Graeber argues that much, perhaps most, of the waged labor in the world’s industrialized nations consists of “bullshit jobs”: jobs that are “so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify [their] existence.” These are not to be confused with “shit jobs,” which are unpleasant and poorly paid but often produce…

20 YEARS AGO February 1999 “In his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ Orwell cataloged some of the linguistic swindles and perversions that had long served powerful people. He wrote that ‘one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.’” JOHN J. PITNEY JR. “Tongue of Newt” “So-called economic nationalists like [Pat] Buchanan want to stop the world and get off—isolate the U.S. market behind protectionist barriers and let everybody else fend for themselves. Indeed, their hostility to trade liberalization is as much political as economic; they see the free trade cause as a cover for undermining U.S. sovereignty and expanding world government. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly…

Jim Mason was first profiled in Reason in 2008 when his early attempts at homemade power generation ran afoul of regulators in his hometown of Berkeley, California. He fought through and created a business, All Power Labs, which turns trash into fuel. In October, Mason and his crew were a core part of the Skysource/Skywater Alliance team that won a $1.5 million Water Abundance XPrize. Their gasification-powered prototype, called the WEDEW Watertainer, heats wood chips in a low-oxygen environment to generate gas that can be used to power an engine, providing the energy to extract at least 2,000 liters of water per day from the atmosphere at a cost of less than 2 cents per liter. This technology has the ability to produce cheap, drinkable water in areas far from…

The town of Bannockburn, New Zealand, has just one café, and the owners say it may go out of business if the city council insists on enforcing an ordinance limiting the establishment to 12 chairs for customers. The restaurant has been around for many years and easily seats more than 12 people at a time. One of the previous owners says she was unaware of any limit. It only became an issue when the new owners applied to renew their alcohol license and a neighbor complained. The Los Angeles City Council has unanimously voted to require those who do business with the city to disclose any ties—contracts or sponsorship—to the National Rifle Association. David Gabbard thought he’d been improperly pulled over by a Kentucky State Police trooper, so he complained…