Inhoudsopgave van March 2022 - Reason

THE FIRST YEAR of Joe Biden’s presidency has been precisely the kind of mushy nothingburger that he campaigned on. Many people voted knowingly for such an approach, which sounded restful and predictable after four years of Donald Trump’s high-variance antics. But as every lamp-rubber learns the hard way: Be careful what you wish for. The so-called infrastructure bill squeaked through in November with what passes for bipartisan support these days, with 19 Senate Republicans and 13 House GOP members backing the $1 trillion in new spending. This bill, unlike Biden’s initial comically elephantine spending proposals, was unremarkable. It successfully exploited the baseline fondness of nearly all American politicians—and the nation’s dads—for spending on roads and airports. (Though it wouldn’t be a modern spending bill if it wasn’t also laden with…

IN 2008, THE U.S. Supreme Court told President George W. Bush that fighting a global war on terrorism did not entitle him to evade constitutional limits on his authority. That decision, Boumediene v. Bush, would go down in the books as one of the most significant modern rulings against wartime government power. “We’ll abide by the Court’s decision,” Bush said. “That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.” What if Bush did not abide by the Court’s decision? What if he said the Court was dead wrong and his administration would not be bound by its erroneous judgment? What if subsequent presidents followed Bush’s lead and ignored the judicial branch whenever their own favored policies happened to lose in federal court? Such counterfactual scenarios are the driving force behind…

ON JANUARY 31, 2020, when there were six confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States, then-President Donald Trump imposed a travel ban on noncitizens who had recently visited China. A few hours later, Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden slammed Trump’s approach to the nascent pandemic. “We have right now a crisis with the coronavirus, emanating from China,” Biden said. “In moments like this, this is where the credibility of a president is most needed, as he explains what we should and should not do. This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysterical xenophobia and fear mongering to lead the way instead of science.” Biden’s speech did not specifically mention the China policy. But six weeks later, on the day after the NBA suspended its season and actor…

SINCE 2014, STATE and local governments have filed thousands of lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies they blame for causing the “opioid crisis” by exaggerating the benefits and minimizing the risks of prescription pain medication. The theory underlying these cases is pretty straightforward: Drug manufacturers lied, and people died. Two recent rulings show how misleading this widely accepted narrative is. Both decisions recognized that undertreatment of pain is a real problem and that bona fide patients rarely become addicted to prescription opioids, let alone die as a result. Three California counties, joined by the city of Oakland, started the flood of litigation against opioid manufacturers with a 2014 lawsuit arguing that they created a “public nuisance” by encouraging increased use of their products through a false or misleading marketing campaign. In a…

ON DECEMBER 6, 2021, in his last major act as mayor of New York City, Democrat Bill de Blasio announced that, to stop the spread of the omicron variant of COVID-19, all 184,000 private businesses in the city would henceforth be commanded to enforce vaccine mandates on their employees, and all children ages 5 and up (including tourists from countries that hadn’t yet approved pediatric vaccines) would need to show proof of full immunization before entering most indoor venues. “Look at a country like Germany right now—shutdowns, restrictions,” de Blasio explained in a follow-up interview. “We cannot let that happen. So we had to take decisive action.” Five days later, as the Northeast was experiencing a third consecutive winter surge of coronavirus cases, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that all…

DEACCESSION IS A classic euphemism. When I first heard it, I assumed it was a parody of bureaucracy-speak or a flimsy attempt at linguistic camouflage, like getting a breakup note that says, “I’m not leaving you, honey; I’m just failing to dis-exit the relationship.” I assume it was intended to ease the blow of a headline. If a museum of art “dumps,” “offloads,” “sells,” “liquidates,” or just “gets rid of” some of its holdings, that sounds like the museum is in financial difficulties. But if we call it “deaccessioning,” some coiner of weasel words decided, then no one will really mind or even notice. People notice anyway. It is widely acknowledged that there can be legitimate reasons for a museum to trim its collection—for example, to repatriate looted artworks to…

I walked into the heart of surveillance capitalism and left with a pre-packaged sandwich for lunch. That about sums up my experience at the Amazon Fresh grocery store in downtown Washington, D.C. The company made famous for bringing goods to your door is now expanding its presence into traditional brick-and-mortar spaces—but with a nontraditional tech twist. D.C.’s Amazon Fresh store has no cash registers or cashiers. A shopper must scan a QR code linked to an Amazon account at a turnstile to enter. Cameras synced to Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology track what items you remove from shelves as you browse. When you do “just walk out,” this technology totals up the cost of the items you took, charges your Amazon account, and sends you an emailed receipt. It’s pretty…

Norma Garcia-Lopez resigned as the co-chair of the Racial Equity Committee at Fort Worth Independent School District in Texas after media reported she doxxed several parents who challenged the school system’s COVID-19 mask mandate and who spoke out against critical race theory. Garcia-Lopez posted the names, home addresses, phone numbers, employers, and work emails of those parents. One parent said Garcia-Lopez also left a profanity-laced voicemail. Katrina Phelan, a teacher at Abraham Lincoln High School in Iowa, has been charged with three felony counts of terroristic threats. Police say Phelan wrote several anonymous notes threatening gun violence at the school. In at least one of the notes she reportedly posed as an unnamed student who had been bullied. Wishma Rathnayake moved to Japan from Sri Lanka with a dream of…

IN DECEMBER, OVER 1,000 crypto investors who together comprise FreeRossDAO pooled their money to buy Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s first-ever non-fungible token (NFT) for 1,446 ether, worth $6.3 million at the time of sale. NFTs are digital assets that live on the blockchain, with verifiable owners and transaction histories. The NFT in question is a virtual collection of 10 artworks made by Ulbricht at various stages of his life. Death, shown here, is an oil painting on canvas that Ulbricht created in prison. He is serving a life sentence for crimes related to his creation of the online marketplace Silk Road, where users could use cryptocurrency to buy and sell illicit goods.…

CAN’T WE GET back to some version of normal? That’s a fair question now that every American who wants a COVID-19 vaccine has had the opportunity to get one. But we still get breathless coverage of every variant and new rounds of travel restrictions, mask mandates, and vaccine document checks as if it were still the early days of the pandemic. Why do so many people seem eager to fret and impose emergency measures even as COVID-19 becomes endemic and restrictions take a growing toll? It’s as if they actually enjoy living in a permanent state of crisis—and maybe they do. “Crisis-prone individuals don’t just like to live in a state of high alert—they seem to relish being called upon to fix all those problems that are causing the crisis,”…

BEFORE CALIFORNIANS APPROVED Proposition 12 in 2018, the measure’s opponents warned that it would effectively ban the sale of bacon in the Golden State. That was a bit of a stretch. Prop. 12, which was supported by 63 percent of voters, outlawed the sale of pork or chicken products (including eggs) unless they were produced by farms that complied with new minimum space requirements for each animal. The Humane Society of the United States, which backed the initiative, calls it the world’s strongest law protecting the welfare of farm animals. When the new rules took effect on January 1, 2022, bacon was not banned from the state, but Californians had cause for concern. California consumes about 13 percent of the pork eaten in the United States every year but produces…

UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY-GENERAL António Guterres hailed the Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s, which the U.S. and China issued at the U.N.’s 26th climate conference (COP26) in November, as “an important step in the right direction.” But the declaration includes very little in the way of new promises from China. Under the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement, countries report their plans to address man-made climate change as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Just before COP26, China submitted its supposedly updated NDC, which said it “aims to have carbon dioxide emissions peak before 2030.” China set the same goal in a 2014 Joint Announcement on Climate Change, while also promising that it would “work to increase ambition over time.” China’s updated 2021 NDC did increase its 2030 target…

ON NOVEMBER 30, English soccer teams Newcastle United and Norwich City played to a 1–1 draw in a Premier League matchup. The teams were last and second-to-last in the league at the time, so even most diehard soccer fans didn’t care much about the result. But I cared. I kept a close eye on the match as Newcastle had a player sent off, managed to take the lead anyway in the second half, and relinquished that lead with about 10 minutes left. The result cost me $10. Shortly after that match ended, Leeds United scored a late penalty kick to get a win over Crystal Palace, and I made $6.25. I lost a few dollars overall, but it was worth it for the entertainment of having a financial stake in…

HAS AMERICA BECOME a nation of quitters? It might seem so. As the COVID-19 pandemic progressed, workers abandoned their jobs in record numbers. In 2020, as the virus tore through the economy, the labor force participation rate saw its largest drop ever, from 63.2 percent in the final quarter of 2019 to 60.8 percent in the second quarter of 2020, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which also noted that the first year of the pandemic saw about 2.4 million “excess retirements,” involving people who in normal times would not have been expected to stop working for good. In November 2021 alone, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a record 4.5 million people, nearly 3 percent of American workers, quit their jobs. As the end of…

INSIDE THE VAST apparatus of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), there’s a bureaucrat who is tasked with investigating the tenets of psychedelic churches. That improbable job figures in the legal troubles encountered by Arizona’s Vine of Light Church. That group used to sponsor monthly meetings at which paying guests drank ayahuasca, a powerful psychoactive brew that originated in South America. Those gatherings ended in May 2019, when a federal drug task force raided the Phoenix home of Clay Villanueva, the church’s pastor. The task force says it seized dozens of pounds of ayahuasca, along with psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana. But Villanueva was not arrested until 18 months later, under a Maricopa County warrant that neither he nor his attorney knew existed. He now stands accused of running an illegal…

THE $1.2 TRILLION Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in November, shifts federal highway policy further away from the free market model of “user pays, user benefits” by requiring taxpayers to cough up more money for socialized roads. The infrastructure law, supported by legislators of both major parties, allocates about $54 billion a year to federally subsidized highways, which account for a quarter of all public roads in the U.S. That’s an increase from the roughly $45 billion included in the last highway bill. All told, the law authorizes $110 billion in new spending on roads and bridges. Where will all that money come from? Not from road users, at least not directly. Biden’s (unevenly honored) commitment to not raising taxes on people earning…

The Netflix animated series Arcane stars characters from and is set in the world of popular video game League of Legends, but nonplayers needn’t care: Almost nothing about the show attempts to mimic the game. That’s its genius. Rather than just gamer fan service, the show offers a gripping, lush nine-part epic tragic drama about the painful friction between the privileged innovators of steampunk city Piltover and the impoverished, alchemy-fueled slums underneath it. Heroes and villains abound on both sides, and a core subplot involves attempts by the underdwellers to liberate themselves from the rule of a city that doesn’t seem terribly interested in their needs. The series strives not to take sides; it focuses instead on who is harmed by the value judgments that feed this struggle, how the…

ALL RESPIRATORY PANDEMICS follow a script, one that’s as much social and political as it is medical or epidemiological, says Yale sociologist and medical doctor Nicholas Christakis, who has just released a new paperback edition of his authoritative book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live (Little, Brown Spark). “A plague of this kind has been seen as a national security threat by right-wing and left-wing administrations for decades,” Christakis says. “Yet I saw nothing to prepare us.” Misinformation has been spread by pundits and politicians who seem more interested in pushing ideology than science. That’s why Christakis says the best way forward is through robust debate in the public square. In November, Reason’s Nick Gillespie spoke with Christakis about these ideas. Q:…