Indice dei contenuti per June 2015 in Reason

CLOSE YOUR EYES. Take a deep breath. What comes to mind if you think about the word open? It’s probably a nice vision, right? A sweeping vista. The patio of a restaurant in Santa Barbara at sunset. A river that turns a final corner before pouring into the sea. The vibes are no less congenial when applying the word more metaphorically. “Open your heart to me,” Madonna promised, and “I’ll give you love, if you turn the key.” This contrast between openness and a prison-like alternative is a recurring motif. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, the Austrian philosopher of science Karl Popper posited that the free and vigorous exchange of ideas was the antithesis to, and antidote for, authoritarianism and totalitarianism. One of the great complimentary adjectives in…

Health care tax goof Obama Error Peter Suderman IN FEBRUARY, the Obama administration revealed that it had sent out roughly 800,000 tax forms containing erroneous information. The mistake affected people in the 36 states with federally run health insurance exchanges. An additional 100,000 people in California, which runs its own exchange, faced a similar problem. The forms, known as 1095-As, document the health insurance subsidies available to individuals under Obamacare, and they are required for tax returns. As a result, the administration asked those individuals who received the mistaken forms to delay filing. According to the Associated Press, which first reported the story, about 50,000 people who already did their taxes were expected to have to refile. The White House downplayed the scale of the error, saying that it only…

*States that do not permit pot in smokeable form **States awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on a court decision mandating recognition of gay marriages “I want gay married couples to be able to protect their marijuana plants with guns.” —Libertarian Party of Canada leader Tim Moen…

Austen Heinz is founder and CEO of Cambrian Genomics, a company that does genomic sequencing and can “laser print” custom DNA. The implications of such technology could be profound, theoretically allowing people to design new, more efficient forms of animal life—if opponents of genetic modification don’t get in the way. In February, Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller spoke with Heinz about his startup. To see more of the interview, go to reason.com. Q: What exactly is the product? A: With [the 3D printing company] MakerBot, you’d print out, say, a plastic dinosaur. With Cambrian, the idea is eventually you’d be able to print out your own little dinosaur that actually walks across the table. Q: Where are you in that development process now? What do you produce here in this laboratory?…

WHEN THE FEDS disappear huge amounts of data about a dysfunctional, cronyist federal agency without warning, it should raise a few eyebrows. When the bureaucrats evade questions about what happened to the trove of facts and figures, alarm bells should start ringing. And when they staunchly refuse to restore the missing data, despite an outcry from researchers and activists, it’s time to take matters into your own hands. For years, many in the free market movement— myself included—have argued in favor of abolishing the U.S. Export-Import Bank, a New Deal–era agency that exists to facilitate a relatively small number of domestic exports through its taxpayer-backed credit programs. The fundamental case against the Ex-Im Bank is simple: It’s not the federal government’s job to subsidize private businesses, period. Unfortunately, principled arguments…

HOW IMPORTANT is the open exchange of goods to the spreading of prosperity? This important: Since 1950, world trade in goods has expanded from $600 billion (in 2015 dollars) to $18.9 trillion in 2013. That’s a more than 30-fold increase, during a period in which global population grew less than three-fold. This massive increase in trade was kicked off in 1948 by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which began the liberalization process of lowering tariff and non-tariff barriers. As a result, autarkic national economies became more integrated and intertwined with one another. The World Bank reports that openness to trade—the ratio of a country’s trade (exports plus imports) to its gross domestic product (GDP)—has more than doubled on average since 1950. Immigration has also contributed significantly to economic…

GROWING UP AS “a gender nonconforming entity” in Eisenhower’s America wasn’t easy for cultural critic and best-selling author Camille Paglia. Her adolescence in small-town upstate New York was marked by rejection, rebellion, and cross-dressing, all in reaction to the stultifying social norms of the 1950s and early ’60s. She would go on to become one of America’s most famous academics and cultural critics, an “anti-feminist feminist” and an incendiary atheist who once wrote that “God is man’s greatest idea.” From her perch at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, Paglia has befuddled orthodox partisans and ideologues for decades. So what does this tireless provocateur think of contemporary culture, with its openness to a wide variety of ever-proliferating gender, racial, and sexual identities? Not so much. Whether the subject is feminism or…

Using Your Illusions Every element of Penn & Teller’s Las Vegas stage show, now in its 14th year at the Rio, proves the two are great entertainers. The longtime magic partners perform a variety of classic tricks, but always with a twist. A woman sawed in half ends with a burst of (fake) blood; a disappearing elephant is actually a cow in a silly costume; the method for making a ball float is revealed. It’s a funny, clever, deconstructionist approach to live stage magic. The show is often as pointed as it is entertaining. It begins with a declaration that the two are libertarians and features an extended gag making fun of Transportation Security Administration screening procedures. Other tricks include a riff on free speech that involves the suggestion of…

Hope: Entertainer of the Century, by Richard Zoglin, Simon & Schuster, 565 pages, $30 BOB HOPE LIVED to be 100. For most of those years he was one of the biggest celebrities in the world. But what mark has he left? Journalist Richard Zoglin tries to answer that question with his biography Hope: Entertainer of the Century. It’s the subtitle that intrigues—does Hope deserve the designation, and if so, what will people make of him in this century? Zoglin’s previous book was Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America, so it’s interesting to see him take on the man who helped create the world those comedians were reacting against. Long before Richard Pryor or George Carlin were performing, Hope was actually hip: When he was new…

IN 1935, the Supreme Court moved into its current home, a building designed to express as much majesty and unimpeachable authority as $3 million worth of marble could buy. (The overall budget for the project, in 1935 dollars, was $10 million.) According to a C-SPAN website devoted the Court, seven of the Court’s nine justices immediately “refused to move into their new chambers.” Frank Gilbert, grandson of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, has said his grandfather felt the plans for the building were “too grand.” Harlan Fiske Stone, another Supreme Court justice at the time, remarked in a letter to his sons that the palatial structure was “almost bombastically pretentious.” But if the structure’s deliberate magnificence struck many of its intended inhabitants as more fit for a king than…

Here’s How He’s Preparing… Dear Reader, According to Jim Rickards—who might be the world’s foremost expert on the subject—we are on the precipice of a major “currency crisis” here in America. What makes Jim Rickards analysis so alarming is that he is one of the most well-connected men in the financial community (he’s both a lawyer and a hedge fund manager) and also a key figure in the U.S. intelligence and national security community. For example… * He was involved in negotiating the release of the American hostages held in Iran in 1981. * He helped the CIA investigate the stock market “tells” that preceded 9/11, when al-Qaeda associates bet against airline stocks. * He helped the Pentagon conduct the first-ever financial “war game” at a top-secret facility a few…

It was bad enough that a man crashed his car into Aaron Shelton’s yard. It was even worse when the Hamilton County, Tennessee, sheriff’s deputies pursuing the driver tackled Shelton to the ground and beat him with their batons even as he and his wife tried to explain that Shelton was not the man they were looking for— indeed, that he was a fellow deputy. After his coworkers realized their mistake, Shelton says they tried to keep him quiet, telling him they were “all brothers, man.” An officer in Wiltshire, England, told a newsstand owner to give him the names of customers who bought the “survivors” issue of Charlie Hebdo, published after the attack on the publication’s offices. The department subsequently said the officer will face no disciplinary measures, but…

Reason magazine is published with the help of supporters who invest more than the price of a subscription by making contributions to Reason Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. We are grateful for their support of our journalism and public policy research. In this issue of Reason, we acknowledge members of our Torchbearer Society, a community of people who advanced the cause of “Free Minds and Free Markets” by making a contribution of $1,000 or more in 2014. Torchbearer Council Anonymous Tom & Suzy Beach Lynde and Harry Bradley Fdn Chase Fdn of VA (M/M Derwood S. Chase Jr.) Cintra Adolph Coors Fdn E.L. Craig Fdn Dunn’s Fdn Friends of Susan Combs Committee Bob & Sandy Gelfond Gleason Family Fdn Paul F. Glenn The Honorable C. Boyden Gray Philip D. Harvey…

MODERN BIOTECHNOLOGY could put dairy farms out of business. And not just dairy, but lots of other farms as well, including those that produce meat, leather, and even staple starches. In fact, the amount of land devoted to agriculture could shrink by 80 percent in the next few decades. In the mid-1960s, when I was growing up on a dairy farm in the Virginia Appalachians, there were 3.2 million farms in the United States. About 600,000 of them produced some milk for sale. Nationally, there were just under 15 million milk cows, and dairy-producing farms averaged about 20 per operation. (My family ran about 40 head of cows.) Fewer than 2 percent of dairy farms operated with more than 100 cows. Each cow produced a bit more than 8,000 pounds…

Triggered Neil Gaiman, best-selling author of American Gods, first encountered the phrase trigger warning online, where it served as a heads-up that clicking on a link might reveal ideas or images that could cause traumatic flashbacks. He was “fascinated,” he says, “when trigger warnings crossed…into the world of things you could touch.” He wondered if universities might someday warn students about his work, which often contains elements of the gorgeous grotesque (an ancient religious site made sacred by the ground up remains of hundreds of dead cats) or the hauntingly human (a first-person story of an aggressive case of aphasia). These stories and many more appear in his new collection, pre-emptively titled Trigger Warnings (William Morrow). Gaiman makes the case against treating fiction as a “safe space.” Upsetting stories can…

Contractual Relations Marriage is not the only option for men of means and beautiful women in Belle Époque France. The delightful revival of the Lerner and Loewe musical Gigi, about sex, money, jewelry, love, and ironclad contracts, is now on Broadway after a successful run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical) plays Gigi with impish glee as a high-spirited teenage girl being groomed, in the tradition of her family, to become a high-class courtesan. Young Parisian bon vivant Gaston Lachaille falls in love and seeks to make her his mistress. Much of the drama revolves around the negotiations conduced by Gigi’s Aunt Alicia, who extracts sumptuous guarantees from Lachaille’s lawyers concerning real estate, servants, gowns, dinners out, and the quantity and quality of the…

In “Hacking Marriage” (page 36), DIANA ADAMS draws on her practice as an attorney to explore legal alternatives to traditional marriage. Adams, the managing partner at Diana Adams Law & Mediation PLLC, says she decided to focus on nontraditional family arrangements because “I’m a queer woman with personal interest in LGBTQ issues and the freedom to form families of our choice. I saw a need for more support for families in my community, and this felt like the right social justice issue for me to devote my passion.” When not practicing law, Adams—a former jujitsu national champion in her weight class—teaches self-defense and tweets at @DianaAdamsEsq. MARK HEMINGWAY is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. On page 24, he discusses the Obama administration’s repeated failures at matching its grandiose…

“Me likey Broke Girls.” r —deleted tweet from Rep. Raúl Labrador (R–Idaho), February 3, 2013 “Honored to join my colleagues & @OfficialCBC at #USAfrica Leaders Summit to discuss the valuable relationship between our two countries!” —deleted tweet from Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), August 6, 2014 “Look what city showed up on #Jeopardy tonight! #Youngstown #Ohio #Trebek” —deleted tweet from Rep. Tim Ryan (D–Ohio) pointing to a picture of Youngstown as the answer to a puzzle on Wheel of Fortune, January 7, 2014 “Chavez nationalized oil companies, censored opposition media and banned guns. Democrats lost a true believer.” —deleted tweet from Rep. Steve Stockman (R–Texas), March 5, 2013 “On Initiative 71: It is my job to carry out the will of the people and I will do so.” —deleted tweet from…

“In a paramilitary-style operation, government agents invaded the neighborhood of Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Tungren,” the vignette reads. “A four-block area was sealed off, the neighborhood evacuated, and the Tungren home surrounded. Some of the agents ransacked their home, while others stood over the Tungrens with automatic rifles.” As John D. Lewis Jr. wrote in “American Gestapo,” the cover story of reason’s April 1980 issue, the couple was wrongly thought to have violated Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) regulations at a time— 1978—when the agency was trying to transition from targeting bootleggers to enforcing gun control laws. The ATF’s toolbox included entrapment, unsavory informants, and vague regulations, all tactics familiar among the numerous armed agencies operating in the United States today. In 1993, an ATF siege of the…

THERE ARE TWO ways to view the video of Richard Rynearson’s March 2010 encounter with U.S. Border Patrol agents at an immigration checkpoint in Uvalde County, Texas. Authoritarians will say Rynearson should have been more cooperative, while libertarians will say the agents should have been less vindictive. Both perspectives were on display in a February 26 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Unfortunately, the authoritarians won, passing up an opportunity to impose limits on an alarming exception to the Fourth Amendment. In a free society, armed government agents are not supposed to detain and interrogate people without a good reason. Since 1976, however, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized catching illegal immigrants as a good reason to stop cars at random, not only at the…

ON MARCH 2, The New York Times revealed that Democratic Party presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton had used a private email account to conduct official business for her entire four-year tenure as secretary of state. Clinton emailed President Barack Obama on an insecure server hosted in her own home. She destroyed many of her own messages, as she admitted after the Times article; the State Department had to conduct negotiations with her lawyers to get their hands on what remained of her official records. One can safely conclude that Hillary Clinton was more concerned about shielding her correspondence from scrutiny by American taxpayers than by foreign intelligence services. Clinton’s defenders made several half-hearted attempts to justify her behavior, but it was longtime aide Paul Begala who cut to the heart of…

THE UNITED STATES government really wants you to get hitched. Married couples enjoy over 1,000 specific rights and responsibilities under the law, from tax credits to immigration to health insurance. Here’s the problem: Over 50 percent of American adults are unmarried, yet many of those people are nonetheless part of families or relationships that could and should benefit tremendously from official status. As same-sex marriages gradually win legal and social status, it’s becoming harder to make the case that these other relationships shouldn’t be similarly recognized. Luckily, thanks to the powerful tool of private contracts, families of all kinds can and do figure out ways to protect their love and family relationships with the people they choose. Build Your Own Family As a family law attorney and family mediator who…

Lead Belly and the Left Belly was plagued by career and financial troubles, and he had tendencies toward violence and self-sabotage. But a superficial new documentary from the Smithsonian Channel, Legend of Lead Belly, elides the most controversial aspects of his life and imposes a relentlessly positive spin. It also leaves out his fraught relationship with the American Left. Lead Belly was wary of labor unions and loved commercial music, but to the Communist Party activists who became his champions, he was a vessel for their theory that “authentic” black and working-class Americans were natural proponents of socialist dogmas. So they supported his flagging career, and in exchange he sang protest songs and pretended to be the “embodiment” of the “entire folk culture of the American Negro,” as a 1937…

Free Leonard Read! In 1946, Leonard Read founded the first organization dedicated to recognizably modern libertarian ideas, the Foundation for Economic Education. In his quest to spread the core tenet of his vision—the acceptance of “anything that’s peaceful”— Read strove to reach small business owners and the working class in language and arguments they could understand. He was happy to give pamphlets and magazines away to all. Read would doubtless be thrilled that, more than three decades after his death, his successors at the foundation have made all 36 of his books available for free reading and download at fee.org. Read would have flipped over the Internet: a way to reach the American everyperson with ideas at almost zero cost, thanks to a division of labor and knowledge that produces…