Índex per August - September 2018 a Reason

“CUDJO MEETEE DE people at de gate and tellee dem, ‘You see de rattlesnake in de woods?’ Dey say ‘Yeah.’ I say ‘If you bother wid him, he bite you. If you know de snake killee you why you bother wid him? Same way with my boys, you unnerstand me.’” With these words, Cudjo Lewis—né Oluale Kossula—explains his childrearing philosophy to an upstart anthropologist named Zora Neale Hurston in 1927. Captured by a neighboring tribe as a young adult in Africa, purchased by whites, and smuggled to U.S. soil 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, Lewis was freed just five years later in the wake of the Civil War and went on to have a family, found a town, and grow old in the Jim Crow era.…

FOR MANY OF the roughly 600,000 Americans to be released from prison this year, the best predictor of whether they become law-abiding citizens is their ability to land a job. Unfortunately, state licensing laws often shut the formerly incarcerated out of work. While there is wide variance in licensing requirements across the states, more than 10,000 individual regulations prohibit people with criminal records from working in dozens of professions. Some of the restrictions make sense. Banning a person convicted of harming children from working in a day care probably strikes the right balance. But in Maryland, a misdemeanor conviction means you can’t work as a cosmetologist, a plumber, or a fortune teller (what won’t Maryland regulate?). In Nebraska, a misdemeanor is grounds to deny a license in massage therapy, and…

JUNE WILL SEE the end of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Tom Homan’s brief but controversial tenure heading the agency. Homan is the chief architect, among other things, of the administration’s policy of taking kids from their border-jumping parents. The main reason he is quitting is that lawmakers were planning to use his confirmation hearings to air his record. Homan, who started as a border patrol agent in 1985, was White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s choice to run the agency because Homan is a true believer in President Trump’s immigration agenda. He informed Congress last year that he intended to go after anyone in the country without authorization, not just those who have committed a serious crime while here. “If you’re in this country illegally…

RECENTLY I BEGAN to search for a used GMC Yukon SUV. My goal was to bolt on an aftermarket supercharger. It wasn’t necessarily a sensible plan, but it did seem like a pretty cool idea. Thanks to a whopping 6.2-liter V8 engine, a Whipple supercharger would make that vehicle churn out nearly 600 horsepower of good ol’ American tire-shredding glory. I already knew about California’s draconian emissions regulations, which view the prospect of modifying an internal combustion engine with such hostility that they must have been drafted by electric car impressario Elon Musk himself. And I was prepared to dodge and weave around those requirements. But first I needed to figure out whether that much aftermarket fury would violate General Motors’ factory warranty. As the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) explains…

THE FIRST TIME New Hampshire State Rep. Sherman Packard (R–Rockingham) heard of the car-sharing startup Turo, it was from a lobbyist. Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Packard says, has a “huge footprint in my community. So they called me up and said, ‘Hey, let’s be fair about this.’” To the Enterprise lobbyists, being fair meant forcing Turo—which is basically Airbnb, but for your car—to pay a 9 percent tax, the same one the state charges on hotel rooms, meals, and other tourist expenses, including rental cars. (New Hampshire has no general sales tax.) The appeal to fairness worked. In January, Packard introduced a bill in the state legislature that would tax and regulate businesses like Turo as if they were rental car companies. Enterprise and its lobbyists had won. That may seem like…

STORIES ABOUT THE death toll from the opioid crisis have focused largely on the plight of rural and small-town Americans in the Midwest and Appalachia. But the perils of drug abuse and drug prohibition have also visited urban environments, and none so dramatically as Philadelphia. In 1999, the year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began tracking overdose fatalities by county, it topped the list of cities with populations over 1 million. For 2017, nearly 20 years later, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health reports that 1,217 residents died of a drug overdose. New York City, which has a population roughly five times that of Philadelphia, experienced only about 200 more drug poisoning deaths last year, according to a May report from that city’s Department of Health and Mental…

Jonathan Haidt, author of the 2012 best-seller The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, co-founded a network of academics committed to open inquiry and viewpoint diversity called Heterodox Academy in 2011. When college students began to act as if hearing from speakers they disagree with “bring[s] dangers rather than benefits,” he says, he was ready to convince them otherwise. Working with John Stuart Mill biographer Richard Reeves, Haidt produced a condensed, illustrated version of chapter 2 of Mill’s classic On Liberty, which Haidt considers “the best set of arguments for free speech ever written.” That condensation, titled All Minus One, can be purchased or downloaded at heterodoxacademy.org/mill. Senior Editor Brian Doherty spoke to Haidt in April about why these ideas are needed now more than…

IN RILEY V. California (2014), the U.S. Supreme Court held that law enforcement officials had violated the Fourth Amendment when they searched an arrestee’s cellphone without a warrant. “Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life.’ The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.” The requirement to get a warrant may not apply, however, when an American citizen is returning home from abroad and U.S. border officials want to search the contents of that person’s phone—at least according to a…

WHEN REP. JIM Jordan (R–Ohio), Rep. Mark Meadows (R–N.C.), Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.), and six other colleagues cofounded the House Freedom Caucus in January 2015, there was ample reason for libertarians to cheer. Unlike the soft-spined conservatism of the larger Republican Study Committee, the Freedom Caucus promised to be much more hardcore about spending, war, constitutionalism, and oversight of the executive branch. “We support open, accountable and limited government, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” a founding statement from Jordan’s office read. As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Health Care, Benefits, and Administrative Rules, Jordan frequently took a moralistic approach to calling out the Obama administration’s lies. “From the beginning, what President Obama told Americans about his health care law proved false,”…

In this issue of Reason, we acknowledge members of our Torchbearer Society, a community of people who advanced the cause of free minds and free markets by making a contribution of $1,000 or more in 2017. COUNCIL John Aglialoro & Joan Carter Anonymous Armstrong Fdn AT&T Inc. The Beach Fdn The Bond Fdn Lynde & Harry Bradley Fdn Jim Caruso Chase Fdn of VA (M/M Derwood S. Chase Jr.) Cintra CLAWS Fdn Peter Copses & Judy Mueller E.L. Craig Fdn Richard Dennis Jason Dorsett The Dunn Fdn Bob & Sandy Gelfond Gleason Family Fdn Paul F. Glenn Robert A. Granieri Burton C. Gray Jr. Ambassador C. Boyden Gray Matthew E. Greco Philip D. Harvey Norma Horvitz James D. Jameson David & Annette Jorgensen Charles Koch Fdn John Kunze The Lampert…

AYN RAND WAS a blacklist truther. The novelist and screenwriter had been a friendly witness during the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ 1947 hearings on Hollywood subversion—the probe that prompted the studios to announce that they would not hire Communists. But when she was asked about her testimony two decades later, she claimed that the blacklist was a myth. “I do not know of any red blacklisted in Hollywood,” Rand told a Boston audience in 1967. “I do know, if the newspaper stories can be trusted, that many of those ‘blacklisted’ people…were working in Hollywood thereafter under assumed names.” The real victims, she insisted, were the hearings’ friendly witnesses. “You talk about the blacklisting of reds. I don’t know of one leftist who has suffered for his views, and conversely,…

“I WAS FINALLY able to process all the dark stuff that happened,” Nicholas Blackston, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, told The New York Times, describing his experience with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. “I was able to forgive myself. It was like a clean sweep.” MDMA, which was banned by the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1985, could be available by prescription as soon as 2021. The rehabilitation of MDMA, a.k.a. “ecstasy” or “molly,” is directly related to the rehabilitation of veterans like Blackston, who participated in a study that confirmed the drug’s potential as a catalyst for catharsis. The trial was sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and reported on May 1 in The Lancet Psychiatry. It involved 22 military veterans, three fire-fighters, and one police officer, all…

IN HIS SECOND inaugural, Abraham Lincoln declared that “if God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk…as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” It is a noble sentiment. Yet the economic idea implied—that exploitation made us rich—is mistaken. Slavery made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally, including at last the descendants of the slaves. It’s hard to dispel the idea embedded in Lincoln’s poetry. TeachUSHistory.org assumes “that northern finance made the Cotton Kingdom possible” because “northern factories required that cotton.” The idea underlies recent books of a new…

IN FEBRUARY 2018, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, an appointee of President Donald Trump, argued in support of Trump’s 2017 executive order banning immigrants from certain largely majority-Muslim countries. The president enjoys “broad authority” to act in this area, the government insisted in its brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, “when he deems it in the Nation’s interest.” Among the legal authorities Francisco cited in support of this argument was a 1936 ruling on presidential power known as United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation. The same ruling has come up under both of Trump’s immediate predecessors as well. In 2007, for example, Solicitor General Paul Clement, an appointee of President George W. Bush, cited Curtiss-Wright while urging the U.S. Supreme Court to deny the writ of habeas corpus to enemy combatants…

IN TIMES OF economic trouble—and with gross domestic product (GDP) growth still below 2 percent in the United States, today surely qualifies—many Americans instinctively become more cautious about immigration. If we let in more workers, they fret, the newcomers will be a drain on the economy, dragging down wages and gobbling up services. In fact, precisely the opposite is true. The National Academy of Sciences recently released a comprehensive report finding that immigration has an overall positive impact on economic growth. Moreover, while new immigrants may have a slight depressing effect on the wages of prior immigrants, they have small to no effects on wages and employment for the native-born population. If we want our economy to grow, what America needs more than anything is workers. Domestic fertility rates are…

IF YOU FIND it hard to imagine how bitcoins could ever replace dollars as the world’s primary medium of exchange, consider the bizarre tale of the donut-shaped “rai” stones on the island of Yap. Weighing up to four metric tons and standing up to 12 feet tall, these rocks couldn’t be slipped into a wallet, deposited in a bank, or even moved around without enormous effort. Yet for centuries they served the Yapese people as an effective form of money, because “the high cost of acquiring new stones” made them hard to debase, writes Saifedean Ammous in The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking. The system lasted until the 1870s, when the Irish-American ship captain David O’Keefe managed to overwhelm the island’s economy with a new supply of…

20 YEARS AGO August/September 1998 “Employers should have every right to restrict speech, forbid the display of pictures, or limit dating on the job. But when the state and the courts impose these rules, which businesses adopt ‘voluntarily’ to avert legal action, that’s a different matter.” CATHY YOUNG “Groping Toward Sanity” “Effectively the right is arguing what it has always argued: Suffer this and the world will come undone. ‘This’ has been the vote for women, access to high culture for those without educations, admission to law schools and medical schools for ‘outsiders.’ ‘This’ was always made to seem the last defense of civilization, the innovation that would send the world into a downward spiral from which recovery was impossible. And…. nothing happened.” GRANT MCCRACKEN “The Politics of Plenitude” “Time…