Reason

“IN POLITICAL OECONOMY, I think Smith’s wealth of nations the best book extant.” So Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend. Three hundred years after Adam Smith’s inauspicious birth in Kirkcaldy, it’s not hard to make the case that it’s still true. Claiming the endorsement of the greatest of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers for one’s own arguments has been a successful rhetorical gambit for at least as long as Smith’s books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, have been available to the public. Jefferson’s lifelong opponent Alexander Hamilton lifts entire passages from Wealth of Nations in his “Report on Manufactures” to Congress, for instance, only to be met—as Yuval Levin notes in his anniversary tribute to Smith at National Review—by James…

WHEN MIRANDA DICKSON inherited her childhood home in the New Town section of Edinburgh, Scotland, she also inherited the curse of historical significance. After painting her front door pink in December 2021, Dickson was ordered by the City of Edinburgh Council to repaint her door a “dark and muted” color, in keeping with the character of the neighborhood, or face fines up to 20,000 pounds ($25,000). In April, after failing to overturn the order, Dickson waved the white flag with a government-approved green front door. Photo: The controversial pink door; Sally Anderson/Alamy…

ONCE CONSIDERED THE best example of a policy that undermined itself, rent control recently has received a rhetorical makeover from progressive policy makers. They claim smartly designed laws against “rent gouging” can prevent tenant displacement without constraining housing supply or quality, proven consequences of old-fashioned rent control. The trick, they say, is setting a relatively generous cap on rent hikes, exempting new construction, and allowing landlords to raise rents as they please on vacant units. Rent control 2.0 strikes “the right balance between protecting tenants from egregious rent increases [and] providing landlords with the ability to make a fair rate of return,” then–California Assemblymember David Chiu (D–San Francisco) said in 2019, when the Golden State was preparing to follow Oregon’s lead by passing the nation’s second-ever state-wide rent control law. Just four…

BEFORE KATE L. gave birth to a baby girl last September, a nurse at New Jersey’s Hackensack University Medical Center collected a urine sample from the soon-to-be mother. Kate thought nothing of it, because she was accustomed to having her urine tested for protein levels during her pregnancy. She had no idea that her urine would be tested for drugs, which resulted in a terrifying, monthslong investigation aimed at determining if she was a fit mother. Kaitlin K. had a similar experience when she gave birth to a baby boy at Virtua Voorhees Hospital in Camden County, New Jersey, the following month. The immediate culprit in both cases seems to have been a poppy seed bagel that triggered a false positive for opiates. That, in turn, led to state investigations of…

HUMAN BEINGS ARE terrible at foresight—especially apocalyptic foresight. The track record of previous doomsayers is worth recalling as we contemplate warnings from critics of artificial intelligence (A.I.) research. “The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century,” philosopher Bertrand Russell told Playboy in 1963, referring to the prospect of nuclear war. “Speaking as a mathematician, I should say the odds are about three to one against survival.” Five years later, biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that hundreds of millions would die from famine in the 1970s. Two years after that warning, S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, forecast that 75 percent of all living animal species would go extinct before 2000. Petroleum geologist Colin Campbell predicted in 2002 that global oil production would peak around 2022. The consequences,…

A SMALL CHANGE in wording by medical examiners could have a big impact on how deaths in police custody are reported. In March, the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME) said “excited delirium” should not be cited as a cause of death. “Instead,” the organization said, “NAME endorses that the underlying cause, natural or unnatural (to include trauma), for the delirious state be determined (if possible) and used for death certification.” While that guidance is not legally binding, it further undermines the concept of excited delirium, which proponents describe as a state of wild agitation or distress, often resulting from illicit drug use, that can lead to sudden cardiac arrest. NAME now joins the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association in not recognizing excited delirium as a cause of…