Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2024 i Reason

“AMERICANS CAN AND should have confidence in our election system,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray in January. “The other part, though, is the chaos…..And there is the potential, if we’re not all collectively on guard, that chaos can ensue at varying levels.” Wray, who was speaking at January’s International Conference on Cyber Security, was referring to the risk of foreign interference in U.S. elections by China, Russia, and Iran. But America is a proud, independent nation. We’re doing just fine sowing homegrown chaos at varying levels on our own. Wray can take solace in the fact that most Americans actually do have confidence in our election system. About two-thirds tell Gallup they are very or somewhat confident that votes will be accurately cast and counted in U.S. elections; that number…

WANT TO MAKE a social media account? If you live in Utah, you soon may have to hand over your ID. Or maybe not. The Utah Social Media Regulation Act, which was originally set to go into effect in March 2024, aims to restrict minors’ access to social media and the kind of content they can encounter once online. The law would require all social media users to verify their age through privacy-invading methods such as uploading their driver’s license, submitting to a facial scan, or providing the last four digits of their Social Security number. Minors must also obtain parental permission before they can create a social media account. Once online, the law would force social media companies to restrict minors’ ability to find new content and other accounts…

EMERGENCIES ARE, BY definition, unexpected and urgent situations requiring immediate action—except in Congress, where the term is increasingly used to justify spending decisions that should be part of the normal budget process. Congress has authorized more than $12 trillion in emergency spending over the past three decades, according to a report released in January by the Cato Institute. About half of that total was spent in direct response to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, but much of the other half was used for purposes that strain the definition of emergency. “We must not let fiscally irresponsible legislators hoodwink their colleagues and the public into accepting spending increases by slapping the ‘emergency’ label on them and calling it a day.”—Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy, Cato Institute…

WE ARE ON the path to nominating two presidential candidates well over the age of 75. From an actuarial perspective, this seems unwise. If a newly inaugurated president were to suffer a major medical event in the moments after being sworn into office, the path forward would at least be clear: The 25th Amendment would kick into gear. If the president were to die, the vice president would become president and would select a new vice president to be confirmed by the Senate. If the president were to be left severely impaired but alive, the president could voluntarily and temporarily turn over his duties to the vice president. If he were unable to do so voluntarily, the vice president and a majority of the members of the Cabinet could vote…

THE AUSTRIAN ECONOMIST Friedrich Hayek wanted to denationalize money. David Chaum, an innovator in the field of cryptography and electronic cash, wanted to shield it from surveillance. Their goals were not the same, but they each inspired the same man. Max O’Connor grew up in the British city of Bristol in the 1960s and ’70s. Telling his life story to Wired in 1994, he explained how he had always dreamed of a future where humanity expanded its potential in science-fictional ways, a world where people would possess X-ray vision, carry disintegrator guns, or walk straight through walls. By his teenage years, O’Connor had acquired an interest in the occult. He thought the key to realizing superhuman potential could perhaps be found in the same domain as astral projection, dowsing rods,…

TV FARGO BRIAN DOHERTY Season five of showrunner Noah Hawley’s TV version of Fargo tells a violence-filled story exploring domestic abuse, PTSD, the concept of debt (on multiple levels), and the purpose and efficacy of the institutions of marriage and police. Its villain is designed to cause discomfort for libertarians: Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), who self-identifies as a libertarian and a constitutionalist, and does seem to adhere to a certain peculiar right-wing belief in the county sheriff as the main source of authority. The only libertarianish qualities he evinces are a contempt for the FBI and the ability to recite a few silly, pointless laws. But the writers seem to want his stated ideology to add spice to the audience’s dislike of him for being an abusing, murdering, and…

IT WAS EARLY 1793, and the situation in France after its revolution had begun to spiral out of control. The Jacobins by then had split into factions. The Girondins, initially at the revolutionary vanguard, were disturbed by the movement’s tendency to descend into violent radicalism. The previous year, mobs had slaughtered thousands of alleged counter-revolutionaries in their jail cells; in January, the deposed King Louis XVI had been guillotined as a tyrant. The Girondins blamed their rivals, the Montagnards, for these excesses. Now rioting was breaking out again, spurred by rising food prices. So in March, in an effort to tamp things down, “the Girondins set a precedent that was later used against them,” wrote Jeremy D. Popkin in A Short History of the French Revolution, “by stripping the Montagnard…

MAGATTE WADE IS author of the memoir and manifesto The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied to about African Poverty— and What That Means for Human Flourishing (Cheetah Press), in which she argues the soultion to Africa’s problems lies in “the cheetah generation” of young Africans who embrace free markets, individualism, human rights, and transparency in government. Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network and the founder and CEO of Skin Is Skin, which sells skin and lip products sourced in Africa. In December, Reason’s Nick Gilles-pie sat down with Wade to discuss her book, entrepreneurship in Africa, and startup cities. Q: The controlling metaphor of your book is the cheetah and…

“I HAVE A history of being the only vote that was a ‘no,’” says Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.). “I’ve developed some trust with my constituents on those lone votes.” In the second episode of Reason’s new video podcast Just Asking Questions, Massie joined hosts Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe in mid-December to talk about his recent votes against aid to Ukraine and Israel and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Reform and Reauthorization Act, as well as his attempt to force an in-person congressional vote on a $2.2 trillion COVID-19 relief bill in March 2020, a move that prompted former President Donald Trump to label Massie “a third-rate grandstander.” Reason: In light of the vote on the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act and the reauthorization of Section 702, which essentially allows…

KYLE CHAYKA’S FILTERWORLD: How Algorithms Flattened Culture is engaging, refined, and well-composed. My only objections pertain to its startlingly flimsy thesis, its parodically bleak tone, and nearly every argument it makes. Chayka’s theory is that, on an internet now dominated by algorithmic recommendations, culture has become insipid, generic, and “marked by a pervasive sense of sameness.” He outlines this thesis with the style and erudition you would expect from a staff writer for The New Yorker (which he is). His extended lament is peppered with witty insights, leavened with arresting similes, and garnished with learned citations to such works as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. He is not always wrong. Who among us has never caught himself puzzling over how to…

5 YEARS AGO April 2019 “Pot, and the impoverished undocumented immigrants who often bring it, are no longer flowing across the border at the rate they once were. This decline has virtually nothing to do with expensive security innovations at the border and everything to do with legalization in the United States. If it were any other industry, one imagines the president would be delighted: When it comes to pot, customers prefer to buy American.” DAVID BIER “The Wall Won’t End Pot Smuggling at the Border. Legalization Will.” “It’s just accounting. If you spend more than you earn, someone is giving you a loan. If the U.S. imports computers from China more than it exports soybeans to China, ‘we’ have to provide nice-looking IOUs—for example, engraved portraits of Ben Franklin that…

SINCE 1970, MARIJUANA has been listed in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, a category supposedly reserved for drugs with “a high potential for abuse” that have “no currently accepted medical use” and cannot be used safely even under a doctor’s supervision. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has consistently rejected petitions asking it to reclassify marijuana, citing advice from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). But HHS changed that advice in August 2023, and its rationale, explained in a document it released five months later, confirms that marijuana’s classification has always been a political question, not a medical one. HHS was responding to an October 2022 directive from President Joe Biden, who instructed the department and Attorney General Merrick Garland to “initiate the administrative process to review…

THE TWO AFRICAN refugees arrived in Oneonta, New York—a quaint, upstate college town of just over 12,000 people—in summer 2023. By then a group of volunteers had been preparing for them for “six, seven, eight years.” Mark Wolff, communication chair of The Otsego Refugee Resettlement Coalition (ORRC), says his group had to put its hopes of helping refugees on hold during the Trump administration, which cut the refugee cap to its lowest level ever. Even after Joe Biden’s inauguration, with promises of a more humane immigration policy on the horizon, things didn’t look good for their plans: Oneonta was more than an hour away from the requisite refugee caseworkers in Utica. During the bitter upstate New York winters, help would be even slower to arrive. The ORRC had already begun…

“I SEE NO reason,” the late Sen. Harry Reid (D– Nev.) once declared on the Senate floor, “why those in this country who enjoy drinking tea need someone else to tell them what tastes good.” Yet for nearly 100 years that is exactly what the government did, thanks to one of the strangest agencies ever to be a part of the federal bureaucracy. In addition to the usual beverage regulations aimed at ensuring proper storage and safe handling, imported tea was required for decades to pass a literal taste test before it could be sold in the United States. The task fell to a group of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) appointees, who would gather annually in a converted Navy warehouse in Brooklyn to smell, slosh, sip, and spit the…

AS AMERICA HAS grown wealthier, it has paradoxically suffered from higher levels of social decay: broken homes, loneliness, drug overdoses, decreased life expectancy. Many writers have offered solutions to such problems, but most of their proposals view the hollowed-out neighborhoods of Detroit or Appalachia either as empty vessels to be filled or as backward vestiges that need to be reorganized and rescued. Seth Kaplan sees those communities differently. In each place, he argues in Fragile Neighborhoods, leaders and activists are working to make things better. Rather than replace these leaders with fancy new policy interventions, public policy should help communities build on what’s working. Kaplan, who teaches at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, brings a unique perspective to these issues: He has spent his career working…