Reason的March 2023目录

WHEN I LOLLYGAGGED or dragged my feet as a small child, my mom used to say, “You have two choices: You can do it happily, or I can make you.” Even as a preschooler, I understood that wasn’t a choice at all, only a warning about how unpleasant things could get for me if I failed to comply. Employees at Twitter—and Facebook—chose to censor, suppress, and undermine dissenting viewpoints happily. But they were always facing a false choice. The public has now had the chance to peek at thousands of communications between government officials of various stripes and employees of Twitter (the so-called Twitter Files), released by Elon Musk after his acquisition of the social media company. The messages reveal the ways the lines between public and private were consciously…

IN 2020, THE Supreme Court held that firing an employee for being gay or transgender violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers from discriminating against a job applicant or employee “because of” that individual’s “sex.” While “those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority in Bostock v. Clayton County, “the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.” For Gorsuch, the choice was clear: “When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.” Judging from October’s oral…

AT THE END of 2021, not quite a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, something unusual happened: Congress actually allowed a massive government program to expire. That program was the expanded child tax credit, which had been enacted as a temporary program under the American Rescue Plan (ARP), a roughly $2 trillion spending package passed exclusively with Democratic votes in March 2021. A year after the expansion expired, however, Democrats began looking for ways to bring it back. The cost of doing that would be very high. The ARP raised the maximum child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,600 per child for families making up to $150,000 a year. The one-year program made the credit fully refundable, meaning that people would qualify for it even if they owed no income taxes.…

AMERICANS PURCHASED MORE than 500,000 fully electric vehicles in the first three quarters of 2022, accounting for more than 6 percent of all U.S. vehicle sales. The Biden administration wants that number to exceed 50 percent domestically, and the International Energy Agency projects it to exceeed 60 percent globally by 2030. But getting those cars on the road—and storing increasing amounts of intermittent energy generated by solar panels, hydro plants, and wind turbines—would require a lot of lithium-ion batteries. With current technology and lithium resources, that would be a daunting challenge. But ongoing battery innovation promises to address the gap. Lithium prices rose from around $5,000 per ton in 2010 nominal dollars to more than $74,000 per ton in 2022. At the 2019 mining rate, according to a 2022 study…

ON MARCH 20, 2003, what was officially one of America’s shorter wars began with an airstrike on Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace in Baghdad. U.S. armed forces, 160,000 strong, moved out of Kuwait and across Iraq, and after overcoming a few small roadblocks along the way took the capital city within three weeks. On May 1, President George W. Bush declared victory from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, off the coast of San Diego. With combat over, “our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country,” Bush said. “In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world.” As it turned out, neither the U.S. military mission nor the broader cause of liberty and peace were accomplished by May 2003,…

FLORIANÓPOLIS, SANTA CATARINA—in some ways, this large island on the Atlantic coast is the opposite of what people imagine when they think of Brazil. Sure, it has white sand beaches and clear waters, but it is largely free of the crime and chaos found in big Brazilian cities—a low-key vacation respite for the nation’s elite. But having been invited here to speak at a conference and assigned a driver for the week, I ask him if there’s another side of Florianópolis that doesn’t show up on brochures. “Oh, do I have a neighborhood for you,” says Alan Esteves, a rare English-speaking Brazilian cabbie. Crossing the bridge from Florianópolis’ charming historic centro, Esteves drives down the highway ramp and into a working-class barrio on the city’s western edge. This, he tells…

IN 1940, DURING the twilight between peace and war, a divided Congress passed a law to conscript young men into the Army—the first federal “peacetime” draft, which lasted throughout American participation in World War II. Congress accommodated young pacifist men whose consciences wouldn’t let them take part in the fighting: If they could convince the government that their pacifism was sincere, conscientious objectors would be assigned to either noncombatant military service or noncombatant civilian service. Noncombatant military service generally meant being a medic, getting shot at without doing any shooting oneself. If a young man thought wearing a military uniform was too much of a concession to the war machine, he would be assigned to civilian service on the home front—usually working in rural work camps, doing difficult forestry work,…

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY announced in December that researchers at the National Ignition Facility had, for the first time ever, achieved “ignition” in a fusion reaction, meaning researchers created a fusion reaction that releases more energy than it consumes. Physicist Tom Hartsfield wrote in Big Think that the laser-powered reaction “would not quite power one 40-watt refrigerator light bulb for a day” and that commercial opportunities remain decades away, at best. Meanwhile, the two fission reactor units at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Rhea County, Tennessee, power roughly 1.3 million homes. Including new plants expected to come online later this year In Georgia, the U.S. has completed construction on three fission units in the 21st century while retiring over a dozen with no plans to replace them.…

THE 37 STATES that allow medical use of marijuana do not include Kentucky, where polling suggests that 90 percent of residents favor that policy. Because state legislators have not delivered a reform that the vast majority of voters say they want, Gov. Andy Beshear has issued a conditional pardon aimed at protecting people who use marijuana for medical purposes from prosecution. “Kentuckians throughout the Commonwealth suffer from a multitude of medical conditions from which they deserve relief,” Beshear, a Democrat, said in his November 15 executive order. He noted the failure of “past efforts to legalize medical cannabis” in Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature, including two bills that passed the House of Representatives with bipartisan support but died in the Senate. Contrary to what some news outlets reported, Beshear’s order did not…

RANKED CHOICE VOTING is relatively new, and most voters likely don’t know about it, but it is seeing a surge of attention after its role in the 2022 midterms. On a ranked choice ballot, rather than choosing only one candidate from a list, voters rank each candidate on the ballot in order of preference, regardless of party. If one candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, that candidate wins. If no candidate exceeds 50 percent on the first count, then the candidate who received the fewest firstchoice votes is eliminated from contention, and all of the ballots with the eliminated candidate listed first are re-tallied, this time counting the second-choice candidate. This process repeats until one of the remaining candidates passes 50 percent. Maine became the first state to use…

SHORTLY AFTER BECOMING a mother in summer 2013, Jennifer Schroeder was arrested for a drug charge. Schroeder, who lives outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve 365 days in Wright County Jail. And 40 years on probation. Probation terms vary by state. They can include curfews, restrictions on travel, submitting to warrantless searches, paying court fees, holding down a job, and abstaining from alcohol and drugs, to the point of being prohibited from even entering a bar. For Schroeder it means a near-lifetime ban on voting or owning a gun, and the looming threat of eight years behind bars if she ever violates her terms. For the privilege of being subjected to all this, there are also fees owed to the state—all to live on the…

WITH FREEDOM’S FURIES, Timothy Sandefur shows how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand defended individualism and free markets while America was in the grips of Depression and war. Although these three furies have long been identified as the founders of modern American libertarianism, Sandefur treads new ground by exploring their relationships with each other and by tracing the evolution of their thought. All three women offered their own unique defenses of individual liberty, and their disagreements anticipated the differences among libertarians and classical liberals today. Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, begins with the trio’s literary influences, particularly the novelist Sinclair Lewis. All three, he writes, appreciated how Lewis’ books “expressed the way modern mass culture penalized originality and integrity, and rewarded obedience…

15 YEARS AGO March 2008 “Today, workplace drug testing is a billion-dollar industry. It has also spawned a thriving antitesting industry and entirely new crimes. In Indiana, simply owning a Whizzinator—a comically complex but allegedly effective device that consists of a fake latex penis, a harness, synthetic urine, and heating pads—can lead to a 180-day jail term and a $1,000 fine. (This law hasn’t stopped people from buying the $150 unit. The company that produces the Whizzinator says it has sold more than 300,000 of them since 1999.) In 2004, a South Carolina man got six months in a state prison simply for selling his clean urine over the Internet.” GREG BEATO “The Golden Age” 20 YEARS AGO March 2003 “Indeed, a wholesale crackdown on illegal immigration could, by consuming scarce…

I AM NOT an enthusiastic air traveler. Bustling through airports, getting probed by security, and standing in lines leave me cold. But road trips are different. While the transit time is longer, opportunities to get off the beaten path make it worthwhile. I see places and interact with people and cultures that I otherwise tend to miss, rediscovering how far you can go and how much you can experience without leaving the United States. So when my son said he wanted to tour the Kansas State University campus after receiving an admission offer, we threw our luggage and a case of bottled water in the car and hit the highway. One attraction of traveling at the speed of a car is the transitions. Arizona’s Meteor Crater, Two Guns, and Painted…

ANTHONY FAUCI, THE federal government’s most prominent authority on COVID-19, had his final White House press conference two days before Thanksgiving 2022. The event served as a send-off for the longserving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was finally stepping down after nearly four decades on the job. Ashish Jha, the Biden administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, hailed Fauci as “the most important, consequential public servant in the United States in the last half century.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described him as a near-constant “source of information and facts” for all Americans throughout the pandemic. Indeed, the U.S. public’s understanding of COVID-19—its virality, how to prevent its spread, and even where it comes from—was largely controlled by Fauci and bureaucrats like him, to a…

IN SUMMER 2012, about 27 million Britons tuned in to the London Olympics’ opening ceremony, dreamed up by the Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle. Central to the show was an homage to the National Health Service (NHS), the United Kingdom’s singlepayer health care system, that featured hundreds of volunteer nurses dancing around bedridden children. Transcending political affiliation, support for the NHS may be the strongest uniting force in the United Kingdom. As the Conservative Party politician Nigel Lawson put it in a thinly veiled shot at the Church of England, the NHS is “the closest thing the British have to a religion.” Less than a decade after the London Olympics, the COVID-19 pandemic deeply strained the system’s human and financial resources. The number of British doctors considering early retirement doubled over…

TV INSIDE JOB EMMA CAMP The premise of Netflix’s Inside Job gives what sounds like an inventive twist to the workplace comedy. Its shenanigans are set at Cognito Inc., a shadowy government cabal that secretly controls world politics. While the premise seems rife with potential, the show ultimately fails to use its opportunities—or even to be funny at all. Despite portraying selfprofessed deep state overlords, the show never strays from H.R.-approved jokes with all the smugness of a BuzzFeed listicle. A particularly groaninducing sequence includes a feckless security guard exclaiming “Aliens? A woman in charge of a team? No one will believe this!” The show’s version of the deep state unwittingly comes across as a slightly highertech version of our surface government bureaucracy, where the strings are pulled primarily by…

Juniors at New York City’s Edward R. Murrow High School told the New York Post they were told to read “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and “The Tortoise and the Hare” for their American literature course. They were asked to answer basic questions and write a onesentence summary of each work. A Department of Education spokesman declined to answer questions about it, but he tweeted that the assignment was preparing students for tougher work, to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and answer similar questions. Students in the class told the newspaper they didn’t actually read The Scarlet Letter but a sevenpage summary of the novel. While attorney Matt Tucker was in a hospital bed recovering from a stroke, Clayton County, Georgia, Judge Shana Rooks Malone was attacking him on…