Sommaire pour March 2019 de Reason

ONE OF THE few liberalizing policies contained in the Trump administration’s rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) amounts to little more than “a drop in the milk bucket,” according to one new analysis, while other measures will significantly limit free trade. Allowing American dairy farmers to export more of their goods to Canada, tariff-free, was a major goal for President Donald Trump in his yearlong effort to replace NAFTA with the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). The president has often harped on Canada’s dairy protectionism, citing it as a problem with the trade compact he famously described as “one of the worst deals” during his campaign for the White House. It was a rare instance in which Trump—who has described himself on Twitter as “Tariff Man”—took the side…

LET’S SAY YOU’RE a fertility doctor advising would-be parents who have exactly two viable embryos ready for implantation. The parents want to implant only one embryo. This is not an uncommon scenario; more than 71,000 babies were born in the U.S. via assisted reproduction in 2016. For several decades now, folks using in vitro fertilization (IVF) have also tested for the single genes associated with certain heritable genetic diseases (such as cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, or hemophilia) and chromosomal abnormalities (such as those that cause Down syndrome). Nearly three-quarters of Americans approve of this pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) testing for diseases that are fatal early in life, according to a 2015 survey in the Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics, and two-thirds support it for conditions that cause lifelong disability.…

MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN had been crown prince of Saudi Arabia for only a few months, but he was already on his second U.S. visit. In March 2018, the young monarch (usually known as “MBS”) spent three weeks on a whirlwind P.R. tour of America, meeting everyone from Jeff Bezos to Morgan Freeman. But the trip was about more than photo ops and hobnobbing. In the month leading up to the visit, the Saudi government had retained three American law firms—David Kultgen, King & Spalding, and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman—to advise it on and lobby for a potential bilateral agreement on nuclear research. On March 7, a Canadian law firm called Gowling WLG likewise signed a $66,000-per-month contract with the Saudi government related to “the development of a civil nuclear program.”…

THERE IS NO more satisfying description of democracy than Winston Churchill’s declaration that it “is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Among compliments, backhanded ones are the loveliest, first making a show of retreating and then, like a boomerang, returning to hand. One cannot deny that democratic electorates occasionally lurch into unfortunate decisions, but Churchill consoles us that other systems are prone to worse. (He also thereby consoles himself two years after being turfed out of office by an electorate asking, “Yes, but what have you done for us lately?”) The theoretical case for democracy is not undermined by such wayward episodes because the system’s excellence is comparative, not absolute. Democracy embodies the virtue of moderation in its…

EVERY POLICY PROPOSAL is, in a direct sense, an attempt to solve a problem. Poverty, ignorance, hunger, sickness, danger, pollution—in the realm of politics, to name a problem is to call for a solution, to demand that action be taken by someone or something, which always turns out to be the government. In his new book, The Once and Future Worker, Oren Cass, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute and a former policy adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, offers a slew of policy proposals, from loosening environmental regulations to reshaping collective bargaining to overhauling the process by which the federal government funds state-based poverty programs to creating new wage subsidies for low-income workers. Each of these ideas is an attempt to address a little problem, all of which…

A couple in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood wanted to add a garage with a ramp and elevator to their home for their daughter, who uses a wheelchair. But some neighbors opposed it, saying it’s not in keeping with the historic nature of the neighborhood. “I understand that the people who purchased the house have a child that requires special needs,” Steve Weiss, president of the Old Town Triangle Association, wrote in a letter to his alderman. “I don’t mean to be heartless or uncaring but this is not the neighborhood for that.” Leaders of London’s police union have warned they may tell officers to stop arresting subjects who resist—unless the public starts pitching in. The remarks came after several officers were injured in violent confrontations while nearby civilians filmed the…

TEN RESIDENTS OF Tokyo, all of them paralyzed, spent several weeks in November and December working as waiters at an establishment called DAWN Café. Except they weren’t actually there in person. Instead, they did their serving and order taking using the 4-foot-tall OriHime-D robot, which they controlled from their homes. Those with the most severe paralysis can direct the waiter bots using only simple eye movements. The pop-up restaurant, which could become permanent in 2020, shows just how far robotic technology has come.…

IT WAS SHORTLY after Donald Trump took office that the father of one of my son’s taekwondo classmates approached me in our small, reliably Republican Arizona town to chat about the new White House resident. “I’m actually a Democrat,” he whispered conspiratorially. “I don’t talk much about that here.” Soon thereafter, another friend confided that the leftier-than-thou neighbors in her Chicago suburb also had her watching what she said. “I’m surrounded by liberals and progressives until I drive a few miles west or south,” she told me. Both feel besieged but were comfortable turning to me because I don’t share in our age’s deep tribal divisions along political and cultural lines. The two leading factions of American politics can’t stop fighting each other. But if anybody can keep the peace,…

THANKS TO THE overspending of Congress and successive presidential administrations, America’s debt totals $22 trillion, and it is projected to grow faster and larger in the years to come. Legislators have been shielded from the consequences by three decades of low interest rates and the fact that the United States is still one of the best places in the world for foreigners to invest. However, a time will come when no level of cheap debt will make up for Washington’s fiscal recklessness. Permanent low economic growth, stifled entrepreneurial spirit, and high unemployment are looming—not to mention the risk of a full-on, debt-driven financial crisis. The way to prevent such outcomes is clear. We must deal with the drivers of our future debt: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. But for those…

15 YEARS AGO March 2004 “Why does Uncle Sam offer me cheap insurance? ‘It saves federal dollars,’ replied James Lee Witt, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), when I did a 20/20 report on this boondoggle. ‘If this insurance wasn’t here,’ he said, ‘then people would be building in those areas anyway. Then it would cost the American taxpayers more [in relief funds] if a disaster hit.’ That’s government logic: Since we always mindlessly use taxpayer money to bail out every idiot who takes an expensive risk, let’s get some money up front by selling them insurance first.” JOHN STOSSEL “Confessions of a Welfare Queen” “Exacerbating the pain of many Iraqis is a keen awareness of the world’s record of apathy toward their plight. ‘Where were the U.N.…

IN JUNE, SECRETARY of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen was heckled out of MXDC, an upscale Mexican eatery in the nation’s capital. In September, Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and his wife were hounded from Georgetown’s Fiola. In each instance, protesters associated with the group Smash Racism D.C. entered the restaurants and harangued their targets until they left. The incidents provided further fodder for a newly heated national conversation about “civility” under Donald Trump’s presidency. Critics of the protesters bemoaned the radical left’s lack of good manners, while defenders argued that, with family separations at the border and the confirmation of an accused rapist to the Supreme Court, the time for politeness had passed. Both sides seemed to think the other was crossing lines that had previously been inviolable. But such a…

CLINT BOLICK, A co-founder of the Institute for Justice, was for years one of the libertarian movement’s most successful trial lawyers. In 2002, his advocacy for school choice culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, in which Cleveland’s pioneering school voucher program was upheld. Three years later, he argued and won Granholm v. Heald, in which the Court struck down protectionist state laws that banned the direct sale of wine to consumers from out-of-state wineries. In 2007, he joined the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, as vice president for litigation. But now Bolick is shaping the law from the other side of the bench. In 2016, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey appointed him to the state Supreme Court. Under the terms of the Arizona Constitution, a justice…

“TRIED TO RESIST using @ work, but ended up failing,” the forensic chemist scribbled on a diary worksheet she kept as part of her substance abuse therapy. “Going to use phentermine,” she wrote on another, “but when I went to take it, I saw how little (v. little) there is left = ended up not using.” The chemist, Sonja Farak, worked at the state drug lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, for more than eight years. Her notes record on-the-job drug use ranging from small nips of the lab’s baseline standard stock of the stimulant phentermine to stealing crack not only from her own samples but from colleagues’ as well. On another worksheet chronicling her struggle not to use, she described 12 of the next 13 samples assigned to her for testing…

FACEBOOK AND TWITTER have acquired reputations as the Boris and Natasha of our day, spreading fake news the way British colonists handed out smallpox-infested blankets to Indians. Yet disinformation is a lot older than social media. Modern Americans could also be forgiven for thinking the 2016 election was the first time a foreign country made an organized attempt to affect a stateside political outcome. But in fact, we’ve spent decades swimming in false stories spread by governments from Moscow to London (and, for that matter, Washington). Journalists have frequently served as those governments’ partners in their propaganda and espionage efforts—sometimes unwittingly and other times with full intent. Bits and pieces of this reality have emerged via news reports, particularly some 1970s stories by John Crewdson in The New York Times…

EXHIBIT ANDY WARHOL—FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN NICK GILLESPIE “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good,” observed Andy Warhol in 1975. “What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest.” That quote suggests at least some of the reasons why Warhol, who died in 1987, has remained the most influential visual artist of postwar America. More than most, he understood the leveling promise of the place. Born to immigrant, impoverished parents outside of Pittsburgh in 1928, he was a sickly gay kid who fell…

For book lovers, the Strand near Manhattan’s Union Square is a more treasured landmark than the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. The hallowed haunt was opened in 1927 by Lithuanian immigrant Benjamin Bass, who initially filled its shelves with his personal collection of titles. While the store can’t match the convenience of Amazon, its patrons are invited to spend hours browsing in its narrow passageways. “Eighteen miles of books” (as the tote bags say) are stuffed into towering cases and every flat surface across four floors. Already a cultural landmark, the Strand is now asking the city not to declare it one officially. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has proposed making it a protected building—but as store owner Nancy Bass Wyden, wife of Democratic Oregon…