Table of contents for August-September 2024 in Reason

AN APRIL 1 federal indictment charged two men, Antonio Venti and Michael Kuilan, with supplying the drugs that killed transgender activist Cecilia Gentili in February. Among other things, Venti and Kuilan are accused of causing Gentili’s death by distributing a mixture of heroin and fentanyl, a felony punishable by a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison and a maximum of life. Gentili “was tragically poisoned in her Brooklyn home [by] fentanyl-laced heroin,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a press release. “Fentanyl is a public health crisis. Our Office will spare no effort in the pursuit of justice for the many New Yorkers who have lost loved ones due to this lethal drug.” The indictment “delivers a strong message to anyone…

THE FOURTH AMENDMENT guarantees that every person shall be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” This means government agents cannot enter your home or rifle through your stuff without a warrant, signed by a judge and based on probable cause. That right extends to the digital sphere: The Supreme Court ruled in 2018’s Carpenter v. United States that the government must have a warrant to track people’s movements through their cellphone data. But governments are increasingly circumventing these protections by using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to spy on citizens. Government agencies have found many creative and enter-prising ways to skirt the Fourth Amendment. Cellphones generate reams of information about us even when they’re just in our pockets, including revealing our geographical…

IN MAY, FORMER President Donald Trump traveled to Wisconsin, a battle-ground state crucial to his 2016 win and 2020 loss. The stakes are high. He made a few big promises to match. “We’re going to give our police their power back,” he told rallygoers in Waukesha, “and we are going to give them immunity from prosecution.” There are a few problems. As president, Trump would be constrained in immunizing anyone, including police, from prosecution, as most proceedings are in state court where his power wouldn’t apply. And while it’s true that some officers are charged federally—where he could lobby the Department of Justice to refuse to charge any cop—those prosecutions are often in addition to state charges. Take Derek Chauvin, who was convicted in a Minnesota court of murdering George…

IT WASN’T LONG before Jennifer Williams noticed there was something unusual about the two young girls she was fostering. Three-year-old Arya Hernandez was bright, outgoing, and without any of the behavioral issues Williams had become accustomed to over more than a decade as a foster parent in Georgia. But 4-month-old Emma seemed sickly. The baby’s soft spot was too big for her age and in the wrong part of her head, and the whites of her eyes were discolored. She was also bowlegged and held her limbs in an unusual, awkward way. Williams was only taking care of the girls for the weekend while their usual foster parent was out of town. She decided to call the girls’ foster mom to ask why she wasn’t told about Emma’s medical problems.…

“THERE’S GOING TO be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States in Afghanistan,” argued President Joe Biden in July 2021 as he prepared to end America’s 20-year war there. It was “highly unlikely,” he claimed, that the Taliban would be “overrunning everything and owning the whole country.” Biden was proven wrong just a month later. That August, the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the Afghan forces outmatched. Desperation engulfed the capital, Kabul. Afghans intent on escaping the impending regime clung to the side of a U.S. military plane leaving Hamid Karzai International Airport, several falling to their deaths. Outside the airport gates, scores of men, women, and children crowded together in the mud and summer heat in hopes of safe…

THE LAWMAKING AND policing powers of late 19th and early 20th century America did not think anarchist agitators deserved the protective penumbra of our Constitution. After Emma Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885 from czarist Russia, she became a dynamic and hugely popular traveling lecturer on anarchism and other rebellious causes, such as draft resistance and contraception. Consequently, she was arrested a lot—and in 1919, along with hundreds of other accused anarchists, she was deported to what was now Bolshevik Russia. (Goldman’s version of anarchism was not the free market kind; she wanted to eliminate private property as well as the state.) Many anarchists saw a bright side to these legal fights: an opportunity to preach their beliefs in a courtroom setting, where the press often amplified their…

A DISTRESSING AMOUNT of deliberate amnesia swirls around American trade policy these days—affecting not only the two men cynically pandering to voters in the presidential race, but also the experts who really ought to know better. “I think that link, in terms of tariffs to prices, has been largely debunked,” U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai told reporters during a mid-May press conference at the White House. Tai later walked back those remarks, but they were telling nonetheless. Of course that link hasn’t been debunked! The U.S. International Trade Commission concluded in a report released just last year that U.S. consumers and businesses “bore nearly the full cost” of the various tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump. Numerous other studies published in recent years have come to the same conclusion:…

MANDATORY GENOMIC SEQUENCING of all newborns—it sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi story. But it could become a reality in New Jersey, where health officials are considering adding this analysis to the state’s mandatory newborn testing regime. Genomic sequencing can determine a person’s “entire genetic makeup,” the National Cancer Institute website explains. Using genomic sequencing, doctors can diagnose diseases and abnormalities, reveal sensitivities to environmental stimulants, and assess a person’s risk of developing conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. Ernest Post, chairman of the New Jersey Newborn Screening Advisory Review Committee (NSARC), discussed newborn genomic sequencing at an NSARC meeting in May. An NSARC subcommittee has been convened to explore the issue and is expected to issue recommendations later this year. It’s considering questions such as whether sequencing would…

TWO YEARS AFTER Harvard gave him the boot and three years before Congress banned LSD, Timothy Leary set out on a road trip from Millbrook, New York, in a rented station wagon. The 45-year-old psychologist and psychedelic enthusiast was accompanied by his girlfriend, Rosemary Woodruff, and his two teenaged children, Susan and Jack. They had planned a month-long family vacation in Yucatan, Mexico, after which Leary and Woodruff would stay behind to work on his newly commissioned autobiography. Leary and his companions arrived in Laredo, Texas, on the evening of December 22, 1965, and crossed the international bridge to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. At the customs station on the Mexican side of the bridge, Leary recalled in his 1983 memoir Flashbacks, he learned that the visa he needed would not be…

“ALL YOU NEED, besides the cocaine, is a lighter, water, baking soda, some Q-Tips, high-proof alcohol, a ceramic mug, and a piece of cheesecloth or an old T-shirt,” writes Glenn Loury in his riveting Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. The book is surely the only memoir by an Ivy League economist that includes a recipe for crack cocaine along with technical discussions of Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, Fried-rich Hayek, and Albert O. Hirschman. Born in 1948 and raised working class on Chicago’s predominantly black South Side, Loury tells a story of self-invention, ambition, hard work, addiction, and redemption that channels Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism & Freedom. An alternative title might have been “Rise…

A GALAXY OF brilliant scholars have tried to account for the economic transformation of England in the 18th and early 19th centuries—the period that began the Great Enrichment that created the modern world. What could Geoffrey M. Hodgson’s The Wealth of a Nation add to this mountain of scholarship and disputation? Quite a lot. Building on his earlier work, especially 2015’s Conceptualising Capitalism, the British economist argues that the Great Enrichment and the associated rise of liberalism stemmed from institutional change, particularly a legal and political system that protects property and contracts and provides a secure space for individual enterprise. He combines that view (which owes much to the Nobel-winning economist Douglass North) with a redefinition of capital and capitalism, where he draws on Joseph Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and other…

JAY BHATTACHARYA IS a professor of health policy and economics at Stanford University and a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which rejected COVID-19 lockdowns in favor of focused protection of older Americans and other high-risk groups. Bhattacharya is now involved in a high-profile lawsuit before the Supreme Court, alleging that the government improperly pressured social media platforms to censor scientific opinions that deviated from official narratives. Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with him in May at Reason Weekend in Boston. Q: You’re originally from India, but you grew up here. What did it feel like when you first read that you were on a blacklist at the government’s behest? A: It was surreal. The American civic religion is free speech. Blacklists are a thing of the past. That could…

WHEN PRESIDENT JOE Biden delivered his 2023 State of the Union address, Washington was drowning in a sea of red ink. The annual budget deficit was in the process of doubling from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in a single year due to some student-debt cancellation shenanigans. That year’s budget deficit would become the largest share of gross domestic product (GDP) in American history outside of wars and recessions. Economists at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and across the political spectrum warned that continuing to ignore the escalating Social Security and Medicare shortfalls while also opposing new broad-based taxes was unsustainable and could bring a painful debt crisis. How did the nation’s highest elected officials respond to this economic challenge? Biden promised that “if anyone tries to cut Social Security…

Reason magazine is published with the help of supporters who invest more than the price of a subscription by making contributions to Reason Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. We are grateful for their support of our journalism and public policy research. 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 2023. Larry Abbott John Aglialoro & Joan Carter Charles E. Albers Terry Allen Michael Allman Altria Client Services LLC Amazon.com, Inc. Cindy Anderson Douglas Anderson & Mary Barnicle Anonymous Doug Anton Armstrong Fdn Arnold Ventures Greg & Rebecca Arnold Charles Atkins Janet Ann Austin Richard Allen Avner Richard Ayres The Bader Family Fdn Neera…

ONE WINTER NIGHT in 1924, a 19-year-old named Dorr Legg snuck away to a “charming park,” where he had his first sexual experience with another man, something he had been desiring—and studying—for several years. Born in a large home overlooking the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Legg came from a long line of Republicans: His family had been active in the GOP since its first convention in their state in 1854. Like many Midwestern Republicans, his father deplored Wall Street and the fat-cat bankers of the Northeast, even if they largely belonged to his political party; he taught his son that prosperity grew out of self-reliance and individual endeavor, not collusion and backroom deal-making. As for the Democrats, his father added, they ran corrupt machines in…

THE END OF the world takes less than two hours in Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. It begins one spring day when a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) erupts from a mobile launcher in North Korea. Before it hits the Pentagon, a North Korean submarine in the Pacific fires a second nuclear salvo at California. Neither missile is intercepted. Within 40 minutes of the first launch, millions of Americans are dead on both coasts. The U.S. retaliates by firing a barrage of missiles from underground installations in the Mountain West and from submarines in the Pacific. Russia, aware that the United States has been attacked but unable to communicate with the U.S. president, mistakes the launch of the American ICBMs for an attack on Moscow and fires its nuclear…

5 YEARS AGO Aug/Sept 2019 “Money is flowing toward cultured meat, which is beginning to attract investment from traditional players. Tyson holds a minority stake in Memphis Meats and put $2.2 million into Future Meat Technologies, an Israeli company that wants to cut the price of cultured beef to $2.27 per pound by 2020. Just, in addition to its chicken nugget product, recently announced a contract with the Tokyo-based farm Toriyama to produce lab-cultured wagyu beef. If ‘clean meat’ can scale up, it could mean a world with less animal suffering, the restoration of ecosystems damaged by industrial livestock operations, a reduction in harmful emissions, and, ultimately, a cheaper source of delicious protein engineered to satisfy a growing global population.” ZACH WEISSMUELLER “Meatless Meat Is Better Than Ever” 10 YEARS AGO…