ReasonApril 2025的目錄

“I’VE HAD MY youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age. Please leave a small light at the end of the tunnel.” In 2015, with his sentencing hearing looming, Ross Ulbricht begged for a glimmer of hope. Today, at age 40, he is free. On January 21, one day into his second term, President Donald Trump granted a full pardon to Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road online marketplace. He was 11 years into a double life sentence without the possibility of parole after being convicted on charges connected to commerce on the dark web platform, including drug trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering. Notably, he was not convicted of actually selling drugs himself. By punishing Ulbricht as if…

WANDER THROUGH THE streets of Seville or Porto, and you’ll find yourself immersed in a world of color and intricate patterns. Elaborately painted tiles, called azulejos, adorn churches, palaces, train stations, and sidewalks. These tiles are more than mere decoration—they’re storytellers, chronicling centuries of cultural exchange, artistic innovation, and political power in Iberia. Some whisper tales of ancient civilizations; others speak of grand adventures. Above all, azulejos reveal the story of a region that has long been at the forefront of globalization. The story of azulejos begins with the Muslim conquest of the peninsula. In the year 711, the Moors swept into the Iberian Peninsula from North Africa, bringing advanced ceramic techniques from the Muslim world. Their hallmark was the art of zellij, an Islamic mosaic style made from hand-chiseled…

THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION, the executive body of the European Union (E.U.), defines its role in international relations as designing development policy and delivering national aid. The commission should also acknowledge the role it plays in antagonizing American corporations on the world stage. The commission’s Directorate-General for Competition is charged with evaluating mergers, prohibiting collusion, and monitoring for abuses of dominant market position. Such abuses, in the commission’s eye, include “imposing unfair purchase or selling prices….limiting production, markets or technical development….and applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions.” On this last basis alone, the commission brought at least five major lawsuits against American firms during President Joe Biden’s administration. Meta was fined more than $817 million for tying Facebook and Facebook Marketplace this November. In March, Apple was fined about $1.84 billion…

IN THE EARLY 13th century, the warrior aristocracy of Christian Europe bound its ruling monarchs to a structured legal system—first with the Magna Carta in England in 1215, and then with a succession of other treaties across Europe. Slightly later, a complex code of moral norms and rules of conduct arose, aiming to restrain professional warriors. Force and power were now subjected to legal rules, and the path to constitutional government was underway. That story is well-known to Americans and Europeans. But it is not the only such case. Something very similar happened simultaneously in East Asia. That change is the subject of an important new paper forthcoming from Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University. With “Anākī: The Law and Economics of Samurai Organization,” Leeson examines the birth…

Source images: iStock, Gage Skidmore A MONTH BEFORE last November’s presidential election, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris that was edited to make her response to a question about Israel “more succinct,” as the show’s producers put it. But Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, complained that “her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better.” As Trump saw it, that was “A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal.” How so? According to a lawsuit that Trump filed against CBS in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on October 31, editing the Harris interview to make her seem slightly more cogent violated that state’s…

A POPULAR MEME depicts a road diverging. In one direction is a many-towered palace glistening in the sunshine. In the other is a crumbling castle beset by storm clouds and eerie purple lightning. The point of the image, known as “Dramatic Crossroads,” is not hard to apprehend: A single starting point can lead to very different outcomes depending on the path one chooses. At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, two unusually distinct possibilities await, and skirmishing has already begun between proponents of the two visions. Trump seems to find each appealing in its own way, so it’s hard to guess which path the new administration is more likely to take. In a surprisingly thoughtful keynote speech at last summer’s National Conservatism Conference, Vivek Ramaswamy took a stab…

LUDWIG VON MISES, a foundational figure of modern libertarianism, was also for decades a hero of the American right. In George H. Nash’s magisterial 1976 history The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, the very first chapter stars the Austrian economist and his students and associates, saying that “it would be difficult to exaggerate the contributions of… Ludwig von Mises to the intellectual rehabilitation of individualism in America.” Mises’ disciple Murray Rothbard complained that conservatives’ adoption of Mises occluded the more radical portions of the economist’s thinking: elements that were antistate, propeace, pro-immigration, even critical of the Christian tradition. In a 1981 essay in The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Rothbard griped that too many of Mises’ right-wing fans “have unwittingly distorted [his views] and made them seem at one…

25 YEARS AGO April 2000 “[Bill] Clinton never actually won a majority of votes in either of his presidential campaigns, despite a roaring economy and an incompetent campaign by Bob Dole in 1996. The majority of voters who opted against Clinton’s reelection weren’t necessarily ready to give him an automatic pass on his problems so as not to rock the financial boat. He had to work hard to survive his various scandals. The question remains: What did Clinton do? The answer is deceptively simple: Clinton ignored traditional Washington wisdom for dealing with exploding scandal and instead used the capital’s notorious scandal machine against itself. Scandal is unlikely ever to be the same. Bill Clinton’s long-sought Legacy turns out to be a guide on how to rise from the dead.” CHARLES PAUL…

THE END OF a presidential administration always brings with it a last-minute pardon spree. In recent years the practice has led pundits and politicians to worry that the men occupying the Oval Office don’t have the ethics to handle such broad power. Outgoing President Joe Biden ignited controversy this time around when he pardoned his son Hunter, even though Biden previously promised the American public that he wouldn’t interfere in the prosecution. Under pressure from a coalition of criminal justice advocacy and religious groups, Biden also commuted the sentences of all but three of the 40 inmates on federal death row, reducing their punishment to life in prison. In this case, the pardon power was a substitute (or autocratic workaround, Biden’s critics charged) for death penalty abolition legislation that Biden…

TYLER COWEN, AN economics professor at George Mason University, chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center, and host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler, regularly invokes what he calls “The Great Forgetting.” This collective amnesia, he says, doesn’t apply only to ancient history but also to hard lessons learned only a few decades ago. In January, Cowen joined Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the Reason podcast Just Asking Questions to discuss what we are forgetting and what he predicts for Donald Trump’s second term. Q: What exactly is The Great Forgetting? A: One example would be a lot of individuals today—some of them even economists—think rent control is maybe a decent idea. Several decades ago, virtually everyone would have realized that rent control creates shortages, quality problems, corruption.…

I WAS A tenured full professor at the University of Colorado Boulder for almost 24 years. At the end of 2024, I left. Officially, it was a voluntary departure. But I sure felt like I’d been pushed out. My story started in 2015, when Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D–have been secretly taking money from Exxon in exchange for the substance of my congressional testimonies, in which I reported on the consensus scientific findings of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—that while heat waves and extreme precipitation had increased, there was vanishingly little evidence to support claims that hurricanes, floods, and drought have become more common or intense. I was not taking Exxon’s (or anyone’s) money—not in exchange for testimony and not for anything else. What was odd was that…

IN MCGIRT V. OKLAHOMA (2020), the Supreme Court rejected Oklahoma’s attempt to prosecute crimes committed on a reservation by an Indian. Henceforth, the tribe, not the state, would have jurisdiction over Indian crimes on Indian lands. It was such a win for Indian sovereignty that the Muscogee have dubbed July 9, the day the decision came down, as Sovereignty Day. If history had taken a different turn, the place now known as Oklahoma could have seen an even stronger win for Native American sovereignty. That area was once known as Indian Territory: a land where tribes displaced from other parts of the U.S. had been resettled. In 1890, a part of it was carved out to form the Oklahoma Territory, but a large portion of what is now the state…

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Former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Joseph Benza III faces up to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of deprivation of rights under color of law for beating a man who gave him the finger. Benza abandoned a domestic disturbance call when he saw Emmett Brock flip him off while driving by. He followed Brock for nearly two miles without ever attempting to stop him. When Brock stopped, Benza threw him to the ground and repeatedly punched him. Brock was charged with three felonies and, as a result, he lost his job as a teacher; the charges were later dropped when video of the encounter was made public. Several sergeants directed Benza not to include the real reason he stopped Brock in his incident report. When…