Reasonの Aug/Sept 2021 の目次

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN’S proposed $2.25 trillion infrastructure spending bill is more than just a huge barrel of federal cash for road, bridge, and rail projects. It is also a vehicle for reauthorizing America’s surface transportation laws, providing an opportunity for special interests to write new rules and mandates into federal policy. While most of those niche fights are unremarkable, the one shaping up between the railroad industry and its labor unions presents an interesting conundrum for the Biden administration, and it could have significant ramifications for the economy and even for efforts to reduce carbon emissions. At issue: How many people does it take to drive a train? Labor unions such as the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers have been lobbying federal regulators to mandate that all freight…

IT HAS BEEN more than 15 years since Congress passed the REAL ID Act. Presented as a national security safeguard, the law requires that American citizens and legal residents have a specific type of identification, incorporating proof of not just their identity but their citizenship, to enter federal buildings or board domestic flights. Implementation of REAL ID has been a real mess. The National Conference of State Legislatures initially estimated that 245 million government-issued IDs would need to be replaced at a cost of $11 billion. To get these new IDs, applicants have to provide additional proof that they are citizens or lawful U.S. residents. Unsurprisingly, many states and citizens have resisted these requirements. While compliance was always intended to be phased in, the slow pace of implementation has prompted…

YOU KNOW WE have crossed a fiscal Rubicon when a presidential administration does not attempt to justify its spending, instead simply claiming that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans must now welcome with joy and gratitude any spending bill, no matter how big, frivolous, or cronyist. Based on that belief, President Joe Biden first backed a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that could not be justified by any broadly accepted economic theory. He then announced a $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” package that he described as a “once-in-a-generation investment in America unlike anything we’ve done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades ago.” A closer look reveals that the plan is instead a jackpot for public unions and big business. Coming after two decades of spending indulgence…

IN NOVEMBER 2020, George White sent his mother a birthday card from where he lives in Ohio to her home in Virginia. The typical United States Postal Service (USPS) promise is to get first-class mail to most destinations within three days. White—as the president of an Ohio-based greeting card company, Up With Paper, that makes heavy use of the postal service—suspected that an on-time delivery wasn’t in the cards. To be on the safe side, he mailed his mom’s birthday card a week early. It got there a week late. “That was a bummer for me,” says White, who serves as the president of the Greeting Card Association, a trade group. It was also a bummer for his industry. The value of greeting cards rests on timely delivery of products…

FOR CENTURIES, AMERICANS have worried that immigrants could overwhelm and negatively alter economic and political institutions in the United States. In 1783, at the end of the American War of Independence, even Thomas Jefferson had misgivings about too rapid an influx of immigrants, writing that they “will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.” John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and co-author of The Federalist Papers, thought that Catholicism was inimical to the principles of individual…

FOR ROUGHLY HALF a decade, a small contingent of criminal justice reformers has beseeched Americans to divert some of our attention from opposition to the drug war to mercy for violent offenders. “We can’t get from where we are to where we need to be just by releasing the innocent and harmless,” the late criminologist Mark Kleiman wrote in 2015. “More than half of today’s prisoners are serving time for violent offenses, and even those now in prison for nonviolent crimes often have violent histories. Solving mass incarceration requires releasing some seriously guilty and dangerous people. The problem is how to do that while also protecting public safety by turning ex-criminals into productive, free citizens.” The Fordham law professor John Pfaff made a similar argument in 2017’s Locked In (Basic…

Margo St. James is considered the mother of the American sex worker rights movement. In 1973, she founded Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) to push for the decriminalization of prostitution and the destig-matization of sex work. The San Francisco–based group became known for its annual “Hooker’s Ball” fundraiser, for spawning spinoff groups around the country, and for putting sex worker–led activism on the U.S. map. COYOTE and St. James fought for sex workers at a time when the mainstream U.S. feminist movement was hostile to them and leftist organizers mostly wanted to portray them as victims. Lacking those allies, St. James still helped position the sex worker rights movement as a broad and classical liberal battle for civil rights, sexual freedom, economic liberty, and bodily autonomy, while advancing…

Philly D.A., an eight-part documentary series by Independent Lens on PBS, follows progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a former civil rights attorney who made a career out of suing the police, through his tumultuous first few years in office. Krasner’s was among the first and most significant victories in a well-funded campaign to elect civil libertarians to district attorney offices across the country, but he encountered political headwinds as violent crime in the city spiked. For Krasner, getting elected was the easy part. Philly D.A. shows him facing fierce attacks for refusing to pursue the death penalty, for his support of supervised injection sites, and for his attempts to rein in the police. After his improbable victory, he immediately begins trying to ram reforms through a recalcitrant system. Impolitic…

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, recently described a psychological experiment that found “moral judgments impact perceived risks from COVID-19 exposure.” The HBO documentary COVID Diaries NYC, which assembles contributions from five young filmmakers, provides further evidence to support that hypothesis. Late one night, 21-year-old Marcial Pilataxi is hanging out on a Manhattan street with a few friends when they are accosted by an angry, inebriated cyclist. After stopping and throwing his bicycle down in disgust, he berates them for congregating without face masks, thereby endangering their grandmothers. The rant is comical, since biking while intoxicated is hardly a model of safe behavior and the drunk guy is not wearing a mask either. But Pilataxi takes the admonition to heart and later tearfully apologizes to his grandmother at the…

THE U.S. NATIONAL debt held by the public is currently almost $22 trillion, or about $67,000 per citizen, surpassing the country’s annual GDP for the first time since World War II. The Congressional Budget Office predicted in March that the U.S. debt would grow to 102 percent of GDP by the end of 2021, to 107 percent by 2031, and to 202 percent by 2051. Those estimates came before President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, which made the long-term budget outlook even worse. Fiscal hawks have been sounding the alarm about rising debt levels for decades, but their nightmare scenario of runaway inflation hasn’t come to pass. How do we know if this time is different? In April, Reason’s Zach Weissmueller spoke with the Hoover Institution’s…

I WAS BORN inside a growth machine. California in 1968 had a population of 19.4 million, double what it was at the end of World War II, which was itself triple what it had been at the end of World War I. My north Long Beach neighborhood was mostly alfalfa fields in the late 1940s; by the end of the ’50s, it was part of the biggest suburban subdivision west of Levittown. The numbers confound the modern mind: 50 tract houses built per day, 107 homes purchased in a single hour, a city that went from zero to 70,000 residents in just three years. Relentless, exuberant expansion, along with the salesmanship it requires, was baked into everything: sports, politics, real estate, art. Our baseball home team was the Angels, the…

“THERE WILL NOT be another foot of wall constructed in my administration,” candidate Joe Biden told NPR in August 2020. Referring to the private property that former President Donald Trump’s Justice Department was trying to seize for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, Biden said, “End, end, end, stop, done, over. Not gonna do it. Withdraw the lawsuits. We’re out.” Those lawsuits, it turns out, were not withdrawn. In April, a federal judge ruled that a Texas family will have to surrender land for the border wall. “We are utterly devastated,” says Baudilia Cavazos, whose family owns land in Hidalgo County, Texas. “We thought President Joe Biden would protect us. Now we’ve lost our land. We don’t even know what comes next.” The Cavazos clan has fended off similar attempts…

USEFUL AND INFINITELY malleable, plastics are ubiquitous in modern life. They are also a mixed blessing. Plastic detritus litters landscapes and befouls the oceans, and Americans are estimated to ingest about nine ounces of microplastics a year. The U.S. annually generates about 280 pounds of plastics per capita. Despite all the earnest sorting by householders, only about 9 percent of plastics is actually recycled, while 16 percent is incinerated. The remaining 75 percent is landfilled, accounting for 12.2 percent of municipal solid waste. But there is reason for optimism that we can have unproblematic plastics. One of the biggest obstacles to recycling current plastics is that they are usually mixed with dyes, adhesives, and metals that make isolating the plastics energy-intensive and expensive. Most current plastics also become increasingly brittle…

IN 2019, DEPARTMENT of Homeland Security Agent Ray Lamb was arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and misdemeanor criminal mischief. He’d had an altercation in a Conroe, Texas, restaurant parking lot with Kevin Byrd, the ex-boyfriend of Lamb’s son’s girlfriend. According to Byrd, Lamb threatened him with a gun and tried to smash the window of his car. After Byrd called the cops for help, Lamb pulled out his federal badge, which led the officers to handcuff Byrd and detain him for several hours. It was only after the police reviewed the security camera footage that Byrd was released and Lamb finally placed under arrest. Byrd sued Lamb over the incident, but in March 2021 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit flatly dismissed his civil…

The Jesuits at 112-year-old America magazine must have been surprised to learn there were “no Catholic magazines” in America. That claim appeared in the publisher’s statement of the inaugural edition of The Lamp, a Catholic journal launched last spring to fill the stated void. If you can stomach hubris at such a pitch—and if you’re not turned off by a publication declaring up front that its editors “reject the progressive left [as well as] the libertarian-conservative right” —there are insights to be gleaned in these heavy-stock pages. My sense of the world is richer for having read about how Europeans see private firearm ownership and citizen militias not as bulwarks against tyranny but as reminiscent of “the paramilitary units that facilitated not only Mussolini’s rise to power, but Hitler’s also.”…

IN THE 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban was invalid because it violated the constitutional right to armed self-defense. Two years later, in McDonald v. Chicago, the Court said states also are obligated to respect that right. Because both Heller and McDonald addressed laws banning handguns within the home, the Court left unresolved how the right to keep and bear arms applies in public. In April, the Supreme Court announced it would consider that question when it hears arguments in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Corlett. At issue is New York’s requirement that anyone seeking a license to carry a concealed handgun in public satisfy a local official that he has “proper cause” to do so. What…

THE DEATHS OF George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, figured prominently in last year’s nationwide protests against police abuse. In April, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced investigations into the police departments of both cities. The announcements signaled that the Justice Department under President Joe Biden was revving up its Civil Rights Division to investigate systemic police misconduct. That effort represents a sharp turnaround from the DOJ under President Donald Trump, which insisted that the problem with American policing was limited to a few bad apples. The Obama administration launched 25 of these “pattern-or-practice” investigations, meant to determine whether a police department routinely violates federal law or the Constitution. The Civil Rights Division issued scathing reports on widespread misconduct, excessive force, and unconstitutional policing in cities…

LEGISLATORS IN NEW JERSEY, New York, New Mexico, and Virginia voted to legalize recreational marijuana this year, bringing the number of states that have approved legalization to 18. While New Jersey was implementing a 2020 ballot initiative (the typical route to legalization), legislators in the other three states acted on their own, although Virginia has not yet approved rules for commercial production and distribution. The four bills reflect six big lessons policy makers have learned—and in some cases ignored—since Colorado became the first state to allow recreational use in 2012. 1. EXPUNGEMENT: Unlike the first few states to legalize marijuana, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, and Virginia are simultaneously trying to alleviate the damage done by prohibition. All four states are creating expungement programs to remove the taint of…

GET READY FOR the next stage in the never-ending tussle over “net neutrality.” The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is prepping to craft yet another regime for internet service providers (ISPs)—the seventh in 13 years. Even by contemporary standards of partisan unpleasantness, the debate about net neutrality is acrimonious. In 2018, a man was convicted of threatening to kill then–FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s family because he didn’t like Pai’s approach to the issue. The hysteria does not reflect reality. The “open internet” that regulatory rules purportedly preserve emerged from a world without net neutrality rules. Early commercial internet innovations such as AOL and voice over internet were impeded by “common carriage” and “universal service” rules, which imposed an array of costly requirements (including compliance with licensing and pricing rules, tax liabilities,…

THE DAY AFTER the nation’s first COVID-19 lockdown took effect in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he would never impose similar restrictions. Telling residents they may not leave their homes except for “essential” purposes “scares people,” the Democratic governor told The New York Times on March 18, 2020, and “the fear, the panic, is a bigger problem than the virus.” Cuomo unequivocally ruled out a stay-at-home order in New York. “That is not going to happen,” he said. Two days later, after California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a fellow Democrat, announced a statewide lockdown, Cuomo changed his mind. “We’re all in quarantine now,” he declared on March 20 while issuing an order “mandating that 100% of the workforce must stay home, excluding essential services.” Cuomo’s…

IN NOVEMBER 1900, Jane Stanford forced the resignation of the noted progressive economist Edward A. Ross from the faculty of the university that bears her surname. The Ross incident has since become a cause célèbre in the history of academic freedom, setting into motion the events that led to the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as a safeguard for faculty rights and freedom of scientific inquiry. Far less known is the occasion for Ross’ dismissal. Mrs. Stanford objected to a speech in which Ross appealed to the racial pseudoscience of eugenics to preserve California, which he deemed the “latest and loveliest seat of the Aryan race,” from the “stern wolfish struggle for existence as prevails throughout the Orient.” Ross makes a brief appearance in historian Elizabeth…

Shary Flenniken began her career with a brief stint in underground comix in San Francisco before earning a coveted regular slot in National Lampoon, from the early ’70s to the early ’90s, for her comics about a pubescent girl named Bonnie, her talking dog, Trots, and their pals. It seems hard to believe these appeared in an over-the-counter national magazine (even one with a rep for edgy naughtiness). They portrayed with wildness, honesty, and humor this “dangerous time in a young woman’s life… with a complete lack of adult-world moralizing or editorial restraint,” writes cartoonist Emily Flake in her introduction to Trots and Bonnie, a new book collection of Flenniken’s old strips. Flenniken gives heft to the comics through sharp ironic feminism. When Trots writes porn on walls with his…

Fans of locked room mysteries and boorish detectives will find much to love in Fugitive Telemetry, an outer space version of those classic tropes. This short novel is the sixth installment of Martha Wells’ Hugo-winning Mur-derbot Diaries, which follow the adventures of a cynically charming security cyborg who has hacked its way to something resembling free will and is now trying to solve the puzzle of a dead body on a space station where nobody can get in or out. Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s famously misanthropic detective, Murderbot exhibits a Holmesian disdain for the fallibility and frailty of the human investigators with whom it’s forced to collaborate, as well as bafflement at their irrational customs. In the end, Fugitive Telemetry is as much about the price that unusual people (or…

20 YEARS AGO August/September 2001 “Although unions have often been criticized for crafting unyielding work rules, legal standards actually impose greater rigidity on the workplace. Unions can be bought off, persuaded to relax a rule in a trade for money. Legal standards, on the other hand, are set in stone. If the Fair Labor Standards Act forbids a four-day, 10-hour-a-day week, then that’s that. The employer can’t offer more money for the flexibility, nor can an employee who desperately wants the new schedule offer to take less.” JAMES DELONG “Old Law vs. the New Economy” “If you live in the United States, then you are bound in some way by laws or professional regulations that are publicly enforced but privately owned. Portions of building codes and fire regulations in every…