Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2023 i Reason

IN CHINA, CROWDS of people line the streets. They are holding blank sheets of paper. There’s nothing special about the paper; it’s ordinary A4 letter size. The police nonetheless know what they mean. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party know what they mean. The world knows what they mean. By standing with empty pages in hand, the protesters’ goal is to make manifest the implied violence that authoritarian states use to keep order. If you want control over me, they silently declare, you must violently take my body away, for the world to see, even though I have done nothing more than exist. There’s an old Soviet joke about this. A man in a train station hands out leaflets to passersby. When the KGB arrests him, it discovers that…

IT WAS INEVITABLE that U.S. military and economic support for Ukraine’s self-defense against Russia would spark comparisons to our relationship with Taiwan. Each country is not exactly a U.S. ally but is unquestionably friendly, relatively democratic, and endangered by one of just two remotely plausible challengers for the title of global superpower. “China is watching what we do in Ukraine,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal(D– Conn.) said on CNN in August, arguing that expanded U.S. aid to fight Moscow could double as a warning to Beijing: If we back Ukraine to the hilt, perhaps Taiwan will never need the same help. There is no denying that Beijing is watching. But we—and, more important, Taipei—should be wary of overdrawing this comparison. For all the similarities, there are real differences here, and the war…

THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY has always been fractious, but its infighting has intensified since the Mises Caucus, a faction opposed to “wokeism,” took control of the organization. Many of the party’s more socially liberal members have exited since the takeover—and in some cases, they’re trying to take the party’s state affiliates with them. In New Mexico, two rival groups, one of them attached to the national organization, claim to be the real Libertarian Party. A similar conflict is playing out in Massachusetts. And in Virginia, the dissidents announced that they were dissolving the party entirely. At press time, the national Libertarian Party was working on assembling a new Virginia affiliate. We don’t know who will ultimately control these institutions. But we do know what it looks like when a political party’s…

DOCUMENTARY THE JANES JACOB SULLUM From 1968 to 1973, when abortion was illegal in Illinois and most other states, an underground network in Chicago helped women terminate some 11,000 pregnancies, offering a safer and more affordable alternative to the services sold by local mobsters. The HBO documentary The Janes, which tells that organization’s story, is a timely reminder of the potential fallout from criminalizing abortion, which the Supreme Court allowed states to do when it overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The situation now is different in two crucial ways from the one women confronted before the Court discovered a constitutional right to abortion. First, abortion remains broadly legal in most states. Second, the availability of abortion pills means that traveling to clinics in other states is not the…

It took Rich Martinez six years, $30,000, and an act of the Kansas Legislature, but he finally got his 1959 Corvette back from the Kansas High-way Patrol. His ordeal began in 2016, when he bought the vehicle for $50,000 and tried to register it. The firm that had restored the car had placed the vehicle identification number plate back on with rivets instead of the required Phillips screws, so the state seized it out of suspicion it might have been stolen. It sustained an estimated $28,000 in damages while in the government’s care. A federal jury has found Clayton County, Georgia, Sheriff Victor Hill guilty on six of seven charges of violating the rights of jail inmates. Hill ordered deputies to place inmates in restraint chairs for lengthy periods of…

ARGENTINA IS NO stranger to economic tur-moil, having defaulted on its national debt three times since 2001. Now the country is facing another bout of brutal inflation, with an annual inflation rate of 88 percent reported in October, up from 50 percent in January 2022. Argentine photographer Irina Werning captured the frustration working Argentines feel in a photo series. “Inflation destroys savings, impedes planning, and discourages investment,” she wrote in her introduction. In August, when the reported inflation rate hit 78.5 percent, Argentine workers held a mock funeral procession, complete with casket, to mourn the “death of wages.”…

AT LEAST ONE member of a federal advisory panel thinks it’s “treason” to oppose a law that protects the domestic shipping industry from foreign competition, even though the result of that law is higher prices for American consumers. Documents that the Cato Institute obtained from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) through the Freedom of Information Act in October included a March 2019 set of recommendations from the Marine Transportation System National Advisory Committee, which includes industry and union representatives. Among other things, the document suggested that the government “charge all past and present members of the Cato and Mercatus Institutes [sic] with treason.” Their crime: opposing continued enforcement of the Jones Act, a.k.a. the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, which requires that ships transporting cargo between…

TESTS MEASURING THE academic performance of American schoolchildren consistently show dramatic declines in scores between the years directly before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. While the full scope of learning loss is not yet known, the data indicate that many children entered the 2021 school year with unprecedented education gaps that were likely exacerbated by wide-spread school shutdowns. The National Association for Education Statistics tests a representative national sample of 9-year-olds on math and reading skills. From 2020 to 2022, according to a report published in September, reading and math scores declined by five and seven percentage points, respectively, reversing two decades of improvement in both areas. The drop was especially steep among students who already faced academic difficulties. While math scores fell only three points among students in the…

A DECADE AGO, Colorado became the first state to legalize marijuana for recreational use, something 20 other states have done since then. Colorado set a new precedent for drug policy reform in November, when its voters approved a ballot initiative that decriminalizes a wide range of conduct related to consuming five natural psychedelics. Proposition 122 also authorizes state-licensed “healing centers” where adults 21 or older can obtain and use psychedelics. It represents the broadest loosening of legal restrictions on psychedelics the United States has ever seen. The 2022 elections contributed to the ongoing collapse of marijuana prohibition. Voters in Maryland and Missouri approved recreational legalization, raising to 21 the number of states that let adults consume cannabis without a medical justification. At the same time, voters in three red states…

THERE WAS A time when a groomer was a predatory grown-up preparing to molest a kid. Then Christopher Rufo, the activist who did more than anyone else to inject the term into today’s politics, redefined it as a “spectrum of behavior.” Children, he tweeted in 2022, “can be groomed into a sexual identity, groomed into an ideological system, and, in some cases, yes, groomed for abuse.” The rhetorical aim was clear: It was a way to raise the specter of the child molester without having to demonstrate that any specific person is a child molester. That specter has long haunted our culture wars. Whenever a sexual minority’s legal rights or social status seems to be increasing, someone is certain to raise the alarm that Pedo Power will surely be next.…

FOR ALL ITS pretense of futurism, EPCOT today feels like an anachronism. The first park to open after the death of Walt Disney, it dispenses with Disney World’s traditional cartoon characters and Main Street, instead celebrating its founder’s preoccupation with progress. Early promotional materials for the park—originally envisioned by Walt Disney as a full-scale Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow—invite visitors to imagine a world of technological progress, centralized planning, and scientific management. Proposed in the twilight years of our collective love affair with urban utopianism, the park was opened in 1982. But for the next 40 years, when cities of tomorrow came up at all in culture, they were invariably dystopian, from the rampant crime of RoboCop’s Detroit to the casual traffic violence of Akira’s Neo-Tokyo. Until quite recently,…

IN SUMMER 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order on “Promoting Competition in the American Economy.” A White House fact sheet declared that the economy was “booming under President Biden’s leadership,” saying the order was “building on this economic momentum” by pushing back against corporate consolidation, primarily through aggressive antitrust enforcement. A little more than a year later, the economy was flailing. Myriad economists and business leaders warned that the country was on the brink of a recession. Biden’s antitrust effort was not performing much better. In late 2022, the government suffered a string of losses in high-profile antitrust cases. Its biggest antitrust victory, meanwhile, demonstrated the strategy’s underlying futility. Early on, Biden staffed his administration with high-profile backers of aggressive antitrust enforcement, such as Columbia Law School professor…

“THE GREATEST DUTY of America today is to build up our educational system.” That sentiment probably seems anodyne, like something you might have heard on the campaign trail in the recently concluded midterms. A century ago, it represented the top priority of the Ku Klux Klan. “Throughout the boom years of the early 1920s,” the historian ​Adam Laats notes in a 2012 History of Education Quarterly article, “every local Klan group made education reform a leading goal of its public activism.” Eventually, Laats writes, a push for compulsory public schooling overseen by a federal cabinet agency became the “linchpin” of the organization’s agenda. Why the Klan’s sudden interest in education policy? First and foremost, because of the KKK’s virulent nativism and anti-Catholicism. Most private schools at the time were associated…

DESPITE PREDICTIONS THAT rising violent crime would sink candidates who support criminal justice reforms, those candidates mostly survived their 2022 midterm elections. What’s more, reform-minded prosecutor and sheriff candidates defeated incumbents in a few key races. After the recall last year of progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, opponents of criminal justice reform were confident that voters’ concerns about high crime in the COVID-19 era would translate into a national backlash. Polling seemed to back them up: An ABC/Washington Post poll released in September found that 52 percent of respondents favored the Republican Party to handle crime, compared to 38 percent preferring Democrats. In a Greenberg Research survey that asked voters what they feared most if Democrats won full control of the government, 56 percent of respondents chose “crime…

IN 2010 THOMAS Hoenig, then the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a member of the central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee, thought he was seeing history repeat itself. In the early 1980s, when he was a vice president at the Kansas City Fed overseeing bank examiners, he had a front-row seat to a boom and bust in land and oil asset values, which gutted the Midwest’s economy. That painful experience stemmed largely from the Fed’s loose money policy in the 1970s, followed by that policy’s sudden reversal. Hundreds of banks had loans that depended on soaring asset prices, and hundreds of banks failed. Hoenig was responsible for helping decide which banks would live and which would die. He saw “lives were destroyed in this…

MOST AMERICANS UNDERSTAND today that sex without consent is a no-go, both morally and legally. Sex without consent is rape. But consent should be the floor, not the ceiling, for ethical sexual encounters, suggests Washington Post columnist Christine Emba in Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. “Things don’t have to be criminal to be profoundly bad,” she writes. Consent is a “baseline norm,” but consent alone doesn’t make sex “ethical, or fair, or equally healthy for both participants,” argues Emba. Indeed, there are “many situations in which a partner might consent to sex—affirmatively, even enthusiastically—but having said sex would still be ethically wrong.” Emba’s vision of good sexual stewardship would involve everyone having less sex with fewer people and caring about those partners more. “In general,” she declares, “willing the good of…