Tabla de contenidos para June 2018 en Reason

SOMETIMES, WHEN THE leaders of a foreign country do something very naughty, the other nations of the world get together and punish them. Assuming bombing isn’t on the menu, a popular way to administer a political spanking is to dramatically curtail the export of certain goods to the troublemakers. The thinking is that if you want your enemies to suffer, you should deny them the incredible gains in productivity and prosperity made possible by comparative advantage and division of labor operating on the global scale. In other words, the penalty for behavior beyond the political pale—such as the development of a new nuclear arsenal, the use of chemical weapons, genocide, or widespread nationalization of industry—is to be cut off from trade. Slowing or eliminating the flow of cheap foreign raw…

THERE WAS A time when GOP lawmakers called for the elimination of entire federal agencies. Today, milquetoast promises to pursue smaller government are followed by votes for ever bigger government. As Milton Friedman noted, the true size of the state is measured by how much money it spends. Budget data show that all modern presidents, regardless of party affiliation, have increased the federal fiscal footprint—but Republican administrations have generally increased the amount spent at a faster rate than Democratic ones. Under George W. Bush, who was elected on a platform of fiscal restraint, total federal spending increased in real terms by 53 percent. Enabled and encouraged by a Republican-led Congress, his administration adopted the politically self-serving notion that “deficits don’t matter.” No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, and bank…

A FEW DAYS after the Parkland high school massacre, an aide to a Florida state legislator lost his job for claiming that two survivors were “not students here but actors that travel to various crisis [sic] when they happen.” Such “crisis actor” rumors, which have spread after several recent public tragedies, are a reminder that people are capable of believing bizarre stories that are supported by only the thinnest alleged evidence. But some pundits think they represent something more: a breakdown in the media ecosystem. A February 20 ThinkProgress article, to pick one representative example, announces in its lede that crisis-actor tales “have spread like wildfire across social media platforms—despite the repeated promises of Big Tech to crack down on fake news.” The author circles back to that idea at…

CHAINING PREGNANT PRISONERS to hospital beds as they give birth and forcing female inmates to wear blood-soiled clothes after denying them menstrual products: These are just a couple of the unjustifiable conditions common in U.S. jails and prisons, where populations of women have been skyrocketing. Fortunately, a number of state legislatures have mobilized this year to push criminal justice reforms aimed at the unique needs of female prisoners. In January, Arizona state Rep. Athena Salman introduced a measure requiring the free provision of tampons and menstrual pads to incarcerated women. It was blocked by the House Rules Committee chair, but this prompted an activist campaign (#LetItFlow) and ultimately a decision from the Arizona Department of Corrections to up the allowance of such products per inmate. Connecticut started discussing reform after…

IN THE ’50S and ’60s, when I was growing up, air travel was a luxury. People dressed up as if going to church. There were lots of empty seats, so on night flights you could often get a row of three together and sprawl out. There was ample legroom, and full meals were served in coach. My family and I were able to take vacations by plane only because my dad worked for an airline, and we flew on company passes when space was available. Since planes were typically only half full, we nearly always got seats on our chosen flights. But we were some of the lucky few. Flying was a luxury because it was expensive, and it was expensive largely because of detailed federal economic regulations governing how…

A CENTRAL ACCUSATION IN the uproar over “Russian influence” holds that Moscow is covertly in cahoots with the American alt-right, supplying the movement with fake news, memes, and social media talking points. The evidence for this tends to be more speculative than solid, but the general question of post-Soviet Russia’s cooperation with Western nationalist and racialist groups is certainly salient. Such links are at the heart of Anton Shekhovtsov’s new study, Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir. Shekhovtsov is a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and his book is exhaustively detailed in its description of Russian relations with the European far right. What impact this may have had on the American right comes up only in the book’s final three paragraphs, which mostly raise…

Mark Janus is a child support specialist for the state of Illinois who has lent his name to a Supreme Court case that could dramatically change the landscape for public sector unions. The former Eagle Scout sued the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees when he learned the assosiation could deduct dues from his paycheck even though he wasn’t a member and didn’t want its reps negotiating his salary and benefits. The high court heard arguments in February and will likely issue a ruling this summer. Days before he appeared before the justices, Janus spoke to Reason’s Nick Gillespie about what he’s hoping to accomplish. Q: What’s the crux of your case? A: That I have to pay a fee to the union even though I’m not a…

THANKS TO A law banning candy that contains “non-nutritive objects,” Kinder Surprise eggs were long prohibited in the United States. The toy they contained was considered an unacceptable risk. In early 2018, that finally changed—sort of. The new Kinder Joy looks similar from a distance but opens to reveal not a hollow chocolate egg but an egg-shaped plastic capsule. A pair of “wafer bites” in a sweet, creamy substance fill one half of the container; a tiny toy is sealed inside the other. A wrapper separates the two, and that apparently suffices to make the product acceptable to the American nanny state.…

JUST OVER A year ago, after the Trump administration gave the green light to move forward with construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, an activist group called Red Line Salish Sea staged a peaceful protest in Bellingham, Washington. Demonstrators blocked traffic on a highway for nearly an hour before dispersing. One of the organizers told The Bellingham Herald that “I hope that people take away that it was just a temporary inconvenience, but [pipelines] are impacting people’s lives” in more substantial ways. The county prosecutor’s office responded with a disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment investigation of the demonstrators. To uncover their identities, officials repeatedly attempted to obtain a warrant for private information from the group’s Facebook page. As the protesters’ attorney noted, “The warrant and the county’s pleadings do not…

WHEN THE IDEA of measuring the United States’ population every 10 years was first codified, the mission was pretty straightforward: Tally up the “Number of free Persons” living in each state so that seats in the U.S. House of Representatives can be apportioned accordingly. Many things have changed since then, not least the definition of “free persons.” But the primary directive of what has come to be known as the Census has remained the same. Until now. On March 26, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that the decennial survey in 2020 will for the first time in 70 years ask all respondents about their citizenship status. Ross made that call despite warnings from six previous directors of the Census Bureau that doing so would place the “accuracy” of the study…

THE FIRST ATTEMPT to treat cancer in humans with chemotherapy happened within days of doctors realizing that it reduced the size of tumors in mice. The year was 1942, and we were at war. Yale pharmacologist Alfred Gilman was serving as chief of the pharmacology section in the Army Medical Division at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, working on developing antidotes to nerve gases and other chemical weapons the Army feared would be used against American troops. After a few months of researching mustard gas in mice, Gilman and his collaborator, Louis S. Goodman, noticed that the poison also caused a regression of cancer in the rodents. Just a few days later, they persuaded a professor of surgery at Yale to run a clinical trial on a patient with terminal cancer; within…

“IF YOU THINK tough men are dangerous,” University of Toronto psychologist and overnight YouTube superstar Jordan Peterson writes in his new book, “wait until you see what weak men are capable of.” It’s a warning shot for would-be social engineers trying to defang maleness and for Peterson’s startlingly large audience of young dudes teetering on the edge of nihilism. Perhaps it is also a subconscious caution to the author himself. January 2018 was the month Jordan Peterson went from unknown to inescapable. The two reasons for that were a Channel 4 News (U.K.) exchange that went viral after an increasingly hostile and flustered female interviewer failed to hang an unflappable Peterson as a misogynist, and then the appearance one week later of his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to…

WHEN MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL Inc. was considering relocating its global headquarters from Baltimore to Northern Virginia in 1999, Maryland handed over $44 million in grants to keep the hotel chain in the state. In 2016, after Marriott again made noises about moving out of Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan, state lawmakers, and local officials coughed up another $62 million in taxpayer subsidies to support the construction of new headquarters in the affluent D.C. suburb of Bethesda. But even that wasn’t good enough. After padding the bottom line of the world’s largest hotel chain, Maryland lawmakers are now trying to protect it from competition from home-sharing options like Airbnb and HomeAway. A bill given serious consideration in Annapolis this spring would require platforms like Airbnb to collect detailed information about hosts and guests,…

I FELL IN love with the wide-open West during a cross-country drive that followed what’s left of Route 66, starting in over-governed Boston, ending in overcrowded Los Angeles, and traversing the wonderful places in between. I remember looking down crumbling strips of pavement, across the empty desert, up at the brightly speckled night sky, and thinking, “Hot damn. There isn’t a soul around to screw with me.” To roam the West at all is to inevitably cut across the trail of the late Edward Abbey. The writer with a fondness for untamed places famously commented, “We cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no…

ESCALATING ELECTRICITY PRICES are regressive—poorer people pay a higher proportion of their incomes heating and cooling their houses than do richer people. Low-income folks also tend to live in draftier dwellings and retain older, less energy-efficient appliances and climate-control systems. Consequently, anything that raises the price of power will impose bigger relative costs on the poor. As renewable energy mandates and rising “ecological” taxes have driven up electricity prices, an increase in energy poverty has become a problem in countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom. There are varying definitions for the term, but the newly launched European Union Energy Poverty Observatory defines energy poverty as not being able to afford adequate warmth, cooling, lighting, or the energy to power appliances that guarantee a decent standard of living and…

LOCATED ON THE outskirts of Philadelphia, American Keg is the type of small, blue-collar manufacturing business that might earn praise from President Donald Trump. It’s the only remaining American manufacturer of stainless steel beer kegs, and CEO Paul Czachor is proud to use only American-made steel. But American Keg is in jeopardy of going out of business, and the culprit is none other than Trump himself. The president’s 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum apply only to imported metal, but they will increase the price of domestic products too, because, well, that’s what tariffs do. Although they’ve been blunted by the White House’s decision to exempt imports from Canada, Mexico, and a few other major American trading partners, the tariffs are bad news for beer…

STEVEN PINKER IS famous for observing that human material well-being has undergone tremendous, and vastly underrated, improvement over the last few hundred years. “We’ve got this problem called obesity,” the famous Harvard linguist and psychologist wryly notes. “Historically, as problems go, that’s a pretty good one to have compared to the alternative of mass starvation.” In 2012’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker argued persuasively that we’re “living in the most peaceful moment in our species’ existence,” with war, crime, and abject poverty all at historic lows. Microsoft founder Bill Gates called it “the most inspiring book I’ve ever read.” Many people assume this all means Pinker sees advancements as inevitable, irreversible. Not so, he insists: “We’re always in danger of losing them,” particularly if we forget the principles…

THE IMPOSING TORRE del Mangia is a 289-foot tower rising over Siena’s city hall. Below, the Piazza del Campo serves as the Tuscan town’s market square, civic meeting place, and entertainment venue. Together they form the metaphor in the title of The Square and the Tower, the British historian Niall Ferguson’s new book about networks, hierarchies, and how they have interacted throughout history. How hierarchies operate is not a conceptual mystery. The emperors of Rome, the caliphs of Islam, the autocrats of the Kremlin, the armies of Napoleon and Eisenhower, the corporate managers of General Motors, the bosses of the Teamsters Union: In each case we see a Mr. Big at the top of the tower directing lieutenants, satraps, prefects, and legates, all the way down to the grunts at…