Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i Reason

“STUDIES SHOW THAT debate is good for you” is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect someone in an ill-fitting blazer and awkward shoes to say at a high school debate competition. Despite what you might think about libertarian magazine editors, I wasn’t a high school debater. So technically, I don’t have a dog (or a cat) in this fight. But studies really do show debate is good for you. A 2011 study by the University of Michigan’s Briana Mezuk and her colleagues found that compared with their nondebating peers, participants in the Chicago Debate League were more likely to graduate, were more likely to meet ACT college-readiness benchmarks, and had greater gains in GPA. The study went to great pains to control for self-selection, suggesting that what matters is…

BACK IN THE pre-COVID days of 2019, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) proposed an annual “wealth tax” of 2 percent on assets for households worth more than $50 million, plus additional surtaxes on households worth $1 billion or more. There were several problems with the idea. Such a tax would be incredibly difficult to administer, requiring tax authorities to regularly assess and value unusual assets like art collections. It might drive wealthy individuals and households to move their holdings to other countries with more favorable tax policies, as has happened in multiple countries. Most wealthy Western democracies that have experimented with wealth taxes eventually ended them. Warren pitched her plan as a way to make the “tippy top 0.1% of U.S. households” pay “their fair share,” providing revenue to “accelerate badly…

WHEN THE LIBERTARIAN philosopher Robert Nozick dragged his landlord before the Cambridge Rent Control Board, Murray Rothbard, who also lived in a rent-controlled apartment and also did philosophy, argued that there is a moral difference between accepting a subsidy and agitating for one. “One is living your life within a State-created matrix, while trying to work against the system,” Rothbard wrote in a 1987 issue of Liberty. “The other is actively using the State to benefit yourself and screw your fellow man, which means initiating and abetting aggression and theft.” Christians might call this being in the world but not of it. Rothbard called it “rationality and good sense” to take a handout you never asked for. In that spirit, I recently set out to learn what federal subsidies my…

COMPARED TO DICTATORSHIP, one-party states, and oligarchy, democracy is pretty good for freedom. But that’s a bit like saying Karen is the nicest of the Plastics in Mean Girls. People often describe democracies as free countries and other forms of government as unfree. There are two different, though compatible, reasons why. As a matter of fact, democracies tend to be more liberal than nondemocracies. Despite being a critic of democracy, I’ve published papers making this point myself. Various think tanks and research centers (such as the Fraser Institute, Economist Intelligence Unit, or Freedom House) produce annual indexes which rate how democratic countries are, how much they respect the rule of law, how much they respect economic liberty, and how much they respect civil liberties (such as freedom of speech). As…

THE UNITED STATES should not increase its funding to Ukraine. Doing so is unnecessary to meet our vital national interests, would require spending further taxpayer dollars disconnected from the purpose of just government, and could seriously harm our security. America’s national interests are minimally implicated by the war. The most serious threat posed is that the U.S. and Russia would find themselves in an escalatory spiral leading to a nuclear exchange. While the odds of that may seem low, risk is probability multiplied by consequences. We are talking about huge risks and thus should be cautious about supporting Ukraine in a way that could get the U.S. into such a spiral. Increased funding heightens that danger, especially if it helps Ukraine threaten Russian territory. The increased risk might be justified…

SHOULD YOU NEED government permission to take a job offer from a willing employer, rent an apartment from a willing landlord, or buy a product from a willing merchant? Most libertarians will rush to say, “No; these are basic human rights.” Do all human beings have these rights? Most libertarians will rush to say, “Yes; we hold these truths to be self-evident.” If you snap these two answers together, they imply a policy of free immigration. If an American doesn’t need government permission to take a job offer from an American, why should a Mexican need government permission to take such an offer? Yet today, many libertarians oppose free immigration. Plenty favor even stricter regulations than we already have. What makes libertarians so open to immigration restrictions? Their favorite rationale…

AN INCREASINGLY UNCONTROVERSIAL view among policy wonks on the left, right, and center is that housing in America is too expensive and government regulation is to blame. The question, then, is which regulations we should prioritize repealing—urban growth boundaries that limit greenfield single-family development on the exurban fringe, or zoning restrictions that ban apartments and other forms of dense housing within the already-developed urban core. As a libertarian, I think neither set of regulations is a good idea. Both interfere with property rights, reduce housing production, and raise housing costs. That said, expensive urban metro areas would benefit most from upzoning already-developed neighborhoods to allow more infill development. If forced to choose, we should prioritize the legalization of more town homes, apartments, condos, and high rises downtown over eliminating restrictions…

SCANNING THE HEADLINES or checking your bank statement, it’s easy to succumb to pessimism. Humans are wired to focus on the negative—a useful trait in a dangerous environment characterized by scarcity, to be sure—so we are by nature a wary, gloomy, and regretful species. But a clear-eyed analysis of the conditions in which we live and the direction of most trend lines reveals a larger truth: Optimism is the only rational outlook. Let’s stipulate that politics—domestically and globally—are legitimate cause for pessimism among those concerned about the rise of populist authoritarianism and the decline of liberalism and pluralism. To worry about politics isn’t irrational; there have been times in human history when the political outpaced and swallowed the personal, private, and commercial. Now is not one of those times. The…

As a fan of the “theory of everything through the lens of a single commodity” genre, I knew I would like Lizzie Stark’s Egg: A Dozen Ovatures. The timing couldn’t be better for a book about the suddenly pricey staple. I do not share Stark’s variant of feminism—she celebrates the egging of a statue of Margaret Thatcher and describes industrial egg harvesting for science as “the theft of a female body’s labor”—but the book blends the personal and the scholarly in appealing ways. Perhaps due to the pun in the subtitle, I unfairly assumed this would be one of the field’s fluffier entries. Instead, from the “cosmic egg” of humanity’s creation myths to “space eggs” struggling in orbit, these 12 thematic chapters are dense and rich—like flan, but good.…

THE LAST THREE years have shown that the country cannot live together in peace. The largest, most obvious divorce-worthy incidents in this country were the COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Those of us who opposed these measures were dehumanized and effectively shut out of society. The proverbial line was finally drawn in the sand, but setting those grievances aside, we are still too culturally far apart to peacefully coexist. Our country has become an ideological war zone, with battles being fought over Black Lives Matter, abortion, school curriculums, and child gender reassignments. Everything has been politicized, from entertainment to diet to the FBI. While a large group of libertarians refuse to fit perfectly into the left or right paradigm, there are two culturally and politically dominant factions in this country,…

BACK IN 1983, at the ripe age of 24, I was dazzled by media reports of amazing progress in artificial intelligence (A.I.). Not only could new machines diagnose as well as doctors, they said, but they seemed “almost” ready to displace humans wholesale! So I left graduate school and spent nine years doing A.I. research. Those forecasts were quite wrong, of course. So were similar forecasts about the machines of the 1960s, 1930s, and 1830s. We are just bad at judging such timetables, and we often mistake a clear view for a short distance. Today we see a new generation of machines, and similar forecasts. Alas, we are still probably many decades from human-level A.I. But what if this time really is different? What if we are actually close? It…

TO PARAPHRASE THE aphorism attributed to Leon Trotsky: You may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in you. Just as ignoring the reality of war won’t keep your house from being bombed, ignoring the culture war isn’t going to obviate the threat it poses to individual liberty. As society and daily life become increasingly politicized, it is time for libertarians to accept that to preserve individual liberty, the government must affirmatively intervene in the culture war. The use of government power can be liberty-enhancing— most obviously by restraining the exercise of government action through the rule of law and constitutional limits, but also by restraining private actors by protecting property rights against theft or vandalism, enforcing contracts, protecting against assault or other bodily…

WALKING THROUGH DOWNTOWNS across the United States, one could be excused for becoming numb to outbursts from visibly disturbed and impaired individuals. Two decades ago, the idea that major American cities would condone (or in some cases, encourage) this situation was unthinkable. If a person was unable to take care of themselves, the options were moving to shelter or, if illness put themselves or others at risk, a clinical setting. Tent-filled homeless camps that stretch across city blocks or throughout public parks were simply not on the table. A recent UCLA study confirmed the obvious: More than 75 percent of the unsheltered homeless surveyed have a substantial mental health problem, 75 percent have an alcohol or drug addiction, and the majority suffer from both. These afflictions, not a lack of…

THE BEST WAY to understand the difficulty of open borders is simply to imagine it happening—not in the distant past when travel was difficult and the West was unsettled, but today Open borders wouldn’t simply let in the several million people already waiting to come to the country legally, or drop all efforts to control the influx across the southern border. The policy would welcome anyone who wants to come, full stop, even if they would not have found it worthwhile under the current system to deal with the hassle of legal immigration or the hazards of illegal immigration. Per Gallup’s 2021 polling, about 900 million adults across the world would leave their countries if they could; about 160 million of these name the U.S. as their top destination. The…

THERE WAS A time when it was fair to question whether bitcoin was an effective tool for liberty. In its first few years, when the digital currency didn’t have many users, wasn’t worth very much, and lacked global markets, it was more a dream than a lifeline. But those days are long gone. Today, millions of people—especially in dictatorships and collapsing economies—rely on bitcoin to give them liberty that governments and corporations try to steal away. Most bitcoin users aren’t “freedom fighters” or “dissidents” in the classic sense. Some are: human rights activists in Belarus, investigative journalists in Russia, humanitarians in Ukraine, feminists in Nigeria, pro-democracy organizers in Togo, educators in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, and even whistleblowers in the West. But the vast majority are simply people finding value in a…

SUPREME COURT JUSTICE Louis Brandeis said that “the right to be let alone is the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” By that standard, we’re descending into barbarism and it’s hard to muster anything but pessimism for the future. Both the right and the left in America—and a small but vocal faction of self-described libertarians—have turned their backs on the very American value of minding your own damn business. Unmoored from any limiting principles, these camps are clamoring to use government power against their enemies and to do away with viewpoint neutrality in the public square. The feckless left frets about “disinformation,” while the right daydreams about banning pornography and getting religion back in schools. Former President Donald Trump recently said that, if he…

“HE WHO KNOWS only his own side of the case knows little of that,” John Stuart Mill wrote in “On Liberty” (1859), laying out the essential case for open, robust, and systematic debate. If you don’t test your beliefs by engaging with people who disagree with you, you’re more likely to make weak, incomplete, self-serving, or irrelevant arguments, leading to ruinous outcomes in policy matters or acrimonious misunderstandings in social life. That’s where the group Open to Debate comes in. Founded in 2006 as Intelligence Squared U.S., Open to Debate has hosted hundreds of debates with the goal of “restor[ing] critical thinking, facts, reason, and civility to American public discourse.” Through a mix of online and in-person events, Open to Debate brings together artists, officials, public intellectuals, scientists, and entrepreneurs…

HISTORIAN RICHARD HOFSTADTER once wrote that “the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.” A compelling case could be made that this affliction has taken hold among the highest ranks of Hofstadter’s own profession. New academic “histories” now appear on a near-monthly basis, each blaming a variety of social ills on the conspiratorial machinations around a single idea: the free market. Almost everything in this genre follows the same formula. When the American electorate fails to embrace the political priorities of an Ivy League humanities department, these disheartened authors cast about for a blameworthy culprit. They settle on “market fundamentalism” or “neoliberalism.” The explanation then takes a paranoid turn, declaring the…

The Menu is a delightfully twisted horror-comedy served up with equal helpings of nihilism and sadistic scorn for status-obsessed foodies. In the movie, a star chef and his cultlike staff subject their rich patrons to an elaborate series of mind games and physical torture over the course of an exclusive dinner at an isolated island restaurant. The film’s heavy-handed message about the hollow faux sophistication of the wealthy isn’t particularly groundbreaking. But The Menu stays mean and funny enough to make it work. Unlike its characters, the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously. Early in the film, we’re told the island restaurant only serves what can be grown or raised on site. Right away, we should know the people who eat there are more interested in gimmicks and status than…

Writing generated by artificial intelligence tends to fall into two categories: the flat and the weird. Ask ChatGPT a simple question, and it will reply in the diction of a mediocre middle-school student trying very hard to please a teacher. But if you give it a sufficiently unusual assignment, you might get something more surreal. Nothing, Forever is an extended experiment in bot-generated surrealism. Since December 14, four figures modeled on the central characters of Seinfeld have been moving awkwardly across a Twitch landscape that looks like an ancient video game, with their dialogue scripted by an artificial intelligence. In theory this will go on forever, though as I write it has been taken temporarily offline while the creators try to find a way to keep the characters from saying…

Newcomers to the Victoria video game franchise should quickly notice its depth and complexity. Spreadsheetlike formulas seem to determine everything from the price of paper in hundreds of states to foreign relations between every country. The depth doesn’t necessarily mean more control for the players, though, as they might find themselves constrained by political parties, government budgets, or technology. Victoria 3, the latest iteration of the game, has glitches, a steep learning curve, and so much happening that even a computer can get overwhelmed. Still, Paradox Development Studio deserves praise for the incredible level of detail in their 100-year simulation of the broader Victorian era. The gameplay teaches players how economically interconnected the world was long before the internet and cellphones gave us instant access to the far reaches of…

By the time Josie Duffy Rice graduated from Harvard Law School, she knew she didn’t want to be a lawyer. Instead, she became a journalist sitting at the intersection of politics and the criminal legal system. Her latest story—Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children—is a podcast delving into Mt. Meigs, a staterun institution where black children suffered “physical and sexual violence, unlivable facilities, and grueling labor in the fields surrounding the school.” That history had largely gone unreported. Centered around a moment in the 1960s when five girls escaped and tried to blow the whistle, the podcast is filled with uncomfortable truths that too many people would prefer to ignore. In February, Reason’s Billy Binion interviewed Duffy Rice by phone. Q: Why do you think…

THE NUMBER OF federal sentences for low-level marijuana possession has plummeted in recent years, thanks mainly to a dramatic drop in prosecutions of people arrested in Arizona. But prior state convictions for simple possession are still boosting federal penalties for other offenses by increasing the number of “criminal history points” considered under sentencing guidelines. Under federal law, simple marijuana possession is punishable by a minimum fine of $1,000 and up to a year in jail. Federal charges have always accounted for a tiny share of marijuana possession cases, which typically are prosecuted under state law. But according to a recent report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), federal courts sentenced just 145 defendants for simple marijuana possession in fiscal year 2021, down from 2,172 in FY 2014. Most of these…

CALLS FOR NATIONAL divorce imply that Americans are too different to share a country. Better to retreat to enclaves. Better to cluster with those who share your political affinity and religious beliefs. Let’s stick to our own kind. This crude tribalism is the most disturbing feature of national divorce discourse. It’s self-reinforcing: Insist Americans’ differences are irreconcilable, cherry-pick extreme but rare examples to exaggerate those differences, and presto, the increased hostility bolsters the case for national divorce! National divorce is not devolving policy from the federal government down to the state and local levels. That’s federalism. It’s not governors challenging federal authority through the courts. That’s also federalism. It’s not citizens banding together to flout immoral laws. That’s civil disobedience. And it’s not engaging in off-grid, hard-to-trace activity. That’s agorism.…

THERE ARE COUNTLESS drawbacks to democratic government, but most of these are problems with the government part, not the democratic part. It is true, as the old joke goes, that unconstrained majority rule is two wolves and a sheep debating what to have for dinner. But unconstrained minority rule is just the same debate with more sheep. The lesson should be that we need constraints on any state, democratic or not. Constitutional constraints on power are often described as countermajoritarian measures, but the best of them are counterminoritarian too. (The same First Amendment that is there to protect us if Congress passes a law criminalizing speech is also supposed to protect us if an unelected police chief starts harassing his critics.) Democratic input itself can be a constraint on power—not…

WAR DESTROYS. IT does not create, build, or beautify. Among the four horsemen of the apocalypse, it rides through our imagination along three decidedly nonlibertarian scourges: conquest, famine, and death. In contemporary political warfare, libertarians can do better than government as a means to elevate our vision of a good society. We can and must take steps to limit the problems addressed by government. This will preserve liberal values like individual liberty, dynamism, property rights, and pluralism. From these precepts, not the diktats of government bureaus and agencies, we can expand the realm of private action. We must not confuse means with ends. Libertarians can identify a role for government to protect, or even enhance, individual liberty. This baseline is found, among other places, in the preamble of the Constitution.…

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION announced a $2.2 billion aid package for Ukraine in February. It includes, among other things, longer-range bombs than the ones Ukraine has received until now. In a sense, the question of whether the U.S. should be giving Ukraine more money is moot: Even among Republicans, pushed by circumstance into the more dovish position in this conflict, support for military aid remains strong. But does aid to Ukraine, broadly, make the world more free? This question goes to a fundamental tension in the liberty movement. There is the impulse to adamantly oppose interventionism (particularly of an overtly military nature) as fundamentally connected to outsized government, and there is the impulse to support liberty not only in the United States but all over the world. The disastrous outcome of…

IN 1963, NEARLY 600,000 Americans lived in state-run hospitals because medical authorities insisted they were mentally ill and couldn’t live alone or with loved ones. In an address he gave that year to Congress, President John F. Kennedy described the facilities where these men and women were held, many against their will, as “unpleasant institutions from which death too often provided the only firm hope of release.” The libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in a 2000 interview with Reason’s Jacob Sullum, called them “feudal slave estates.” When a midcentury progressive Democrat and a firebrand classical liberal conclude that a government policy stinks, it stinks. Kennedy’s alternative to mass institutionalization for both the mentally ill and the intellectually disabled (who accounted for an additional 200,000 victims of institutionalization in 1963) was to…

IN TOO MANY metropolitan areas, housing is no longer affordable for middle-class households, especially in markets subject to “urban containment,” now the world’s dominant planning regime. According to planning experts Arthur C. Nelson and Casey Dawkins, urban containment draws “a line around an urban area”; it includes urban growth boundaries and greenbelts. It is “explicitly designed to limit the development of land outside a defined urban area, while encouraging” infill, to limit or block organic urban expansion. Urban containment is intended to increase urban land costs. Shifting demand inside the contained area produces an abrupt increase in land values at the boundary, distorting the land value gradient. As Nelson and Dawkins say, “This shift should decrease the value of land outside the boundary and increase the value of land inside…

I COME TO praise bitcoin, not to bury it. I certainly don’t come to praise government fiat money or central banking, which I’ve been criticizing in print for my entire career. My first two books, Free Banking in Britain and Competition and Currency, present the case for free and decentralized banking over central banking. I would love it if the world economy were to run on a completely private monetary standard with free banking. My forthcoming book, Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin?, argues that gold would be a better monetary standard than bitcoin, and that gold is the standard more likely to emerge bottom-up from free choice by money users. We should appreciate bitcoin for the remarkable thing that it is, not for what it isn’t and not for…

CATS DON’T TAKE orders from anyone. It’s not that cats don’t understand human speech or can’t be trained. Cats just do what they want. “Cats don’t do what you expect them to do,” Charlotte de Mouzon, a cat behavior expert at the Université Paris Nanterre, told The New York Times last year. “But if cats don’t come when we call them, it may be because they’re busy doing something else.” Thus, it should be no surprise the queen of self-interest, Ayn Rand, was a cat owner. She wrote in a letter to Cat Fancy magazine: “I love cats in general and own two….I can demonstrate objectively that cats are a great value” (emphasis in original). She was seemingly referring to pictures she enjoyed in the charter issue of Cat Fancy,…

DEREK CHAUVIN, THE policeman who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, had a history of citizen complaints and was thought to be “tightly wound,” not a trait ideal for someone patrolling the streets with a deadly weapon. But under the police union’s collective bargaining agreement, the police commissioner lacked the authority to dismiss Chauvin, or even reassign him. The lack of supervisory authority resulted in harms that continue to reverberate in American society. No society, organization, or group of people can function effectively without accountability. Accountability is essential for mutual trust. The prospect of accountability is the backdrop for a culture of shared energy and values. “A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty,” philosopher…

WHILE PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON produced dozens of books on a wide range of topics from 1839 until his death in 1865, the French autodidact is generally remembered as the first public figure to seriously declare “I am an anarchist” and for his equally provocative declaration that “property is theft.” (He also wrote that “property is liberty,” launching debates about his views that would long outlive him.) Proudhon was seldom far from conflict and controversy, at times paying a considerable price for his bold assertions. After he joined the provisional government following the French Revolution of 1848, his conflicts with soon-to-be emperor Louis Napoleon led to years of prison and exile. Writing before an anarchist movement existed, Proudhon spent years addressing any audience he thought might listen and any subject that seemed…

In HBO’s The Last of Us, a handful of human survivors struggle to get by in a world overrun by formerly human, zombielike monsters. It portrays its post-apocalyptic America as bleak and authoritarian, with a quasi-federal security apparatus, FEDRA, maintaining brutal control over the remaining population centers. Trade and travel are heavily restricted—the show presents the zombie apocalypse as a libertarian nightmare. The third episode specifically can be understood as a vindication, or at least humanization, of libertarian survivalists, who are normally portrayed as cranks. The story follows Bill, a gun-nut bunker-dweller who mumbles rants to himself about how FEDRA is the New World Order. When an uninfected man named Frank falls into a trap Bill has set, he lets Frank into his home. Over time, they fall in love,…

5 YEARS AGO May 2018 “President Donald Trump and some Republican lawmakers in Congress insist that the president and his aides were inappropriately snooped on by politically motivated federal intelligence officials during the 2016 election. Yet when given the opportunity to scale back the FBI’s power to secretly engage in domestic surveillance of American citizens, the president and the GOP did not take advantage of it. In fact, they did the opposite.” SCOTT SHACKFORD “Republicans Love Federal Snooping” 15 YEARS AGO May 2008 “But if the U.S. is to ever make progress toward budgetary sanity, the federal government must stop pretending that war-related costs are somehow separate from the budget of a department whose mission is to fight and win the nation’s wars. That won’t happen until Washington stops pretending…