Table of contents for Feburary 2017 in Reason

BARACK OBAMA, PRIVATIZER. That’s not how historians will likely describe him. But when Obama killed George W. Bush’s Constellation program— a roadmap for getting humans back to the moon and eventually on to Mars—he declared it “over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation.” In other words: a government program. Conceived in a state of panic triggered by the impending death of the space shuttle program, Constellation was larded up with space pork. By the time Obama got around to scrapping it in 2010, the effort had already burned through $9 billion with little to show for it. Anything that Washington touches pretty much immediately turns treyf; a certain amount of bacon buildup around any appropriations bill is inevitable. After Obama nixed Bush’s pie-in-thesky scheme, stick-in-the-mud Republicans hustled to remind…

BETWEEN THE GREAT Lisbon Earthquake and the revolutionary year of 1848 the European chattering classes had three big ideas. One was very, very good. The other two were very, very bad. We’re still paying. The good one, flowing from the pens of such members of the clerisy as Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and above all the Blessed Adam Smith, is what Smith described in 1776 as the shocking idea of “allowing every man [or woman, dear] to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.” Admittedly, true liberalism took a long time. “All men are created equal” was penned by a man who kept in slavery most of his own children by Sally Hemings, not to mention Sally herself. Even…

ON JUNE 26, 2006, then–Sen. Barack Obama took the stage at a conference hosted by the Christian social justice organization Sojourners and gave what would become the defining speech on religion of his young career. With Americans increasingly curious about this rock-star politician with the funny name, Obama discussed how he had found a deep faith during his time working with black church leaders as a community organizer in Chicago. “The questions I had didn’t magically disappear,” he said. “But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt that I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.” It was enough to give many Christians hope that the future president would have their backs. But a decade later,…

A MOTHER IS puttering in the kitchen, waiting for her daughter to come home from school. We see the clock on the wall. We see her expression grow from cheer to terror. And somewhere in the streets below, we see a man buy a little girl a balloon. If your pulse is racing already, thank Fritz Lang, director of M, the 1931 picture that taught filmmakers everywhere to hook audiences with the primal emotion of heart-stopping fear for our kids. The latest iteration of this formula is Kidnap, wherein loving, gorgeous Halle Berry takes her loving, gorgeous son to the park, where they decide to play hide-andseek. “Marco!” calls the beatific mother. “Polo!” replies her cherub, peeking around a post. “Marco!” calls Berry. “Polo,” comes the child’s reply. “Marco!...Marco?... MARCO!”…

 TWO DAYS BEFORE the election, and just minutes before a Gary Johnson rally at Colorado Christian University, I asked the Libertarian Party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, Judge Jim Gray, what he thought went especially well with the party’s historically successful yet emotionally disappointing run at the White House this year. The answer surprised me. “I really believe that Bill Weld was a really great addition to the campaign,” volunteered the anti–drug war Orange County jurist, who had been hoping to repeat as veep nominee until the better-known ex-governor of Massachusetts became available. “I didn’t get any national media, particularly, on my own in the 2012 campaign. Tried it, didn’t work. When Gov. Johnson and Gov. Weld decided to do this, I think he was on [television] like 25 times before…

A S YOU MIGHT expect of a volume with the word dull in the title, Dull Disasters? is not a sexy book. The authors, Daniel J. Clarke and Stefan Dercon, are an actuary and an economics professor, respectively. Their thesis is that with better planning and coordination, natural and humanitarian disasters can become less exciting TV viewing and more, well, dull. In a good way. “Be prepared” is sound and uncontroversial advice, but which people do the preparation matters. The correct dispute, F.A. Hayek wrote, is not “whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally... or is to be divided among many individuals.” Therein lies the tension in Clarke and Dercon’s book, and in disaster policy more…

 IN 1971, RICHARD Nixon vowed “a national commitment for the conquest of cancer” as he signed the law establishing the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Fortyfive years later, Barack Obama declared in his 2016 State of the Union address that our country would embark upon a “new moonshot” with the aim of making “America the country that cures cancer once and for all”; Vice President Joe Biden would be in charge of “mission control.” In its October 17, 2016, report, the Cancer Moonshot Task Force declared that its goal is “to make a decade’s worth of progress in preventing, diagnosing, and treating cancer in just 5 years.” How? The usual federal bureaucratic efforts of “catalyzing,” “leveraging,” and “targeting” are promised. But there is some meat to the proposals. For example, the…

 ON HIS FIRST day in office, President Barack Obama pledged to run “the most transparent administration in history.” As he prepares to move out of the White House, the phrase will probably be remembered as a sarcastic punchline. It was hard not to snicker when one of the beleaguered White House press secretaries would stand in front of the journalist corps and claim that the executive branch was blazing new trails in openness. Despite some promising open data initiatives, the executive branch under Obama was, on the whole, more secretive than ever. Since 2009, press access to the White House has been notably restricted, whistleblower prosecutions have spiked, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits against the federal government have reached an all-time high. In 2013, the Committee to Protect…

WHEN LIONEL SHRIVER took the stage at the Brisbane Writers Festival this fall, her speech was billed as a talk on “community and belonging.” And in a way, it was. Modern writers, she argued, have been put in an untenable position. In our age of “supersensitivity” about identity politics, we insist that novelists populate their books with diverse casts of characters, while simultaneously warning that writing a character from a different background than their own may carry the taint of “cultural appropriation.” Shriver raised the specter of being “obliged to designate my every character an aging 5-foot-2 smartass, and having to set every novel in North Carolina,” which would surely make for dull reading. “We fiction writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats,” she said in closing.…

20 YEARS AGO February 1997 “More broadly, the GOP agenda is not entirely consistent. Rep. Christopher Shays (R–Conn.) admitted to reporter Elizabeth Drew that Republicans ‘have some conflicting interests, and we want block granting and freedom for local and state governments when it fits our agenda, and we want restrictions when that fits our agenda.’” JOHN J. PITNEY JR. “The Many Faces of Newt Gingrich” “Judging from poll data, there is currently little support for legalization. But as the passage of Props. 200 and 215 forces prohibitionists to justify their policies, and the country’s experience with the open medical use of illegal substances gets underway, that debate should prove to be one full of possibilities.” NICK GILLESPIE “Prescription: Drugs” “Although everyone ‘knows’ that science must be publicly funded, everyone also…

BEFORE MOVING INTO the White House, Barack Obama described the war on drugs as “an utter failure,” candidly discussed his own youthful drug use, criticized our excessively punitive criminal justice system, called for the decriminalization of marijuana, and rejected federal interference with state-authorized medical use of the plant. But with the exception of a crack sentencing reform bill he signed in 2010, Obama’s first term was a big disappointment for those who expected him to de-escalate the war on drugs. Some reformers held out hope that once Obama was safely re-elected, he would finally act on his avowed belief that the war on drugs is unjust and ineffective. To some extent, those optimists were proven right. During his second term, Obama tolerated state-level legalization of marijuana, talked honestly about the…

A FEW MILES WEST of Berlin, a little house sits on Groß Glienicke lake, a quiet eye in the storm of Europe’s worst century ever. Nazi bureaucrats arrived at their Final Solution at nearby Wannsee. The Red Army poured through at the end of World War II. Churchill and Truman drove past on their way to meet Stalin in Potsdam. The Berlin Airlift rattled the cupboards as planes landed at and left Gatow airfield. Secret policemen lurked as the Berlin Wall rose. The house endured the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War, the fall of the Wall, and the reunification of Germany. In 1927, during Germany’s sunny Weimar interlude, Dr. Alfred Alexander, head of Berlin’s Chamber of Physicians, commissioned a simple wooden cottage as a family retreat. When he…

In 2015, the Pentagon admitted to accidentally shipping live anthrax spores to labs in all 50 states and nine foreign countries. The labs expected the spores to be dead. In 2008, officials in Tempe, Arizona, said they needed more housing for deaf senior citizens. So with the aid of $2.6 million from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Cardinal Capital Management and the Arizona Deaf Senior Citizens Coalition built a 75-room apartment building just for the elderly deaf. The apartments have lights that flash when the doorbell rings and other amenities designed for the hearingimpaired. But then, in 2012, HUD said that because management prefers to rent to deaf tenants, the building violates federal civil rights law. The agency demanded that the owners take steps to make…