Aug/Sept 2021

Reason

Free Minds and Free Markets.

Reason2 min read
Reason
Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward (kmw@reason.com), Publisher Mike Alissi (malissi@reason.com), Editors at Large Nick Gillespie (gillespie@reason.com), Matt Welch (matt.welch@reason.com), Managing Editor Stephanie Slade (sslade@reason.com), Art Di
Reason1 min readCrime & Violence
Photo
HONDURAN SISTERS CHANEL, 7, and Adriana, 10, await transportation to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility after crossing the Rio Grande. The Department of Homeland Security reports that a record 15,918 unaccompanied children from
Reason5 min readPolitics
Darkness At Dawn
AS A MATTER of astronomical fact, it is not actually darkest just before the dawn. The brightness of the night sky is largely determined by the phase of the moon, a famously fickle celestial body. In the middle of the lunar month, for instance, it’s
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Scotus Revisits Gun Control
IN THE 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban was invalid because it violated the constitutional right to armed self-defense. Two years later, in McDonald v. Chicago, the Court said
Reason2 min read
Covid Power Proves Tough To Kick
“ONE STEP FORWARD, two steps back” is both a phrase that describes the pace of reopenings in America’s most COVID-averse jurisdictions and a dance move that was, for a brief time, illegal at weddings in Washington, D.C. Beginning in May, Democratic D
Reason3 min readAmerican Government
America’s Forever War Sputters Out
WITH TROOPS FINALLY scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan after two decades of conflict, America’s intervention there will go down in history as an accidental forever war. After the initial invasion, it was only peripherally part of the country’s po
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Biden’s Justice Department Goes After Police Misconduct
THE DEATHS OF George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, figured prominently in last year’s nationwide protests against police abuse. In April, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced investigations into the police depa
Reason3 min read
How Many Union Members Does It Take To Operate A Train?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN’S proposed $2.25 trillion infrastructure spending bill is more than just a huge barrel of federal cash for road, bridge, and rail projects. It is also a vehicle for reauthorizing America’s surface transportation laws, providing an
Reason5 min read
When Growth Grinds To A Halt
I WAS BORN inside a growth machine. California in 1968 had a population of 19.4 million, double what it was at the end of World War II, which was itself triple what it had been at the end of World War I. My north Long Beach neighborhood was mostly al
Reason3 min read
Six Marijuana Legalization Lessons
LEGISLATORS IN NEW JERSEY, New York, New Mexico, and Virginia voted to legalize recreational marijuana this year, bringing the number of states that have approved legalization to 18. While New Jersey was implementing a 2020 ballot initiative (the typ
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Even Covid-19 Couldn’t Kill Real ID
IT HAS BEEN more than 15 years since Congress passed the REAL ID Act. Presented as a national security safeguard, the law requires that American citizens and legal residents have a specific type of identification, incorporating proof of not just thei
Reason2 min readAmerican Government
Biden Continues Trump Seizures Of Private Land For Border Wall
“THERE WILL NOT be another foot of wall constructed in my administration,” candidate Joe Biden told NPR in August 2020. Referring to the private property that former President Donald Trump’s Justice Department was trying to seize for a wall along the
Reason3 min readPoverty & Homelessness
Why Welfare Reform Worked
IN HIS FIRST State of the Union address in 1993, President Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.” The system at the time famously disincentivized work by making it more lucrative for many to take benefits instead. He proposed placing t
Reason3 min readPolitics
The Bill Will Come Due On Biden’s Trillions
YOU KNOW WE have crossed a fiscal Rubicon when a presidential administration does not attempt to justify its spending, instead simply claiming that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans must now welcome with joy and gratitude any spending bill,
Reason2 min readChemistry
Plastic, Perfected
USEFUL AND INFINITELY malleable, plastics are ubiquitous in modern life. They are also a mixed blessing. Plastic detritus litters landscapes and befouls the oceans, and Americans are estimated to ingest about nine ounces of microplastics a year. The
Reason3 min read
The Post Office Pension ponzi Scheme
THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC created all sorts of new problems for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), but the most serious financial issue the agency faces was a crisis long before anyone had heard of COVID-19—and it won’t be solved with a vaccine. Like man
Reason3 min readPolitics
The USPS’ Semi-Secret Internet Surveillance Apparatus
POP QUIZ: WHICH federal agency runs a social media surveillance unit known as the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP)? If you guessed the FBI, the CIA, or the Department of Homeland Security—sorry. This one belongs to the U.S. Postal Service (U
Reason13 min readPolitics
Post Apocalypse
IN NOVEMBER 2020, George White sent his mother a birthday card from where he lives in Ohio to her home in Virginia. The typical United States Postal Service (USPS) promise is to get first-class mail to most destinations within three days. White—as th
Reason9 min readCrime & Violence
Why Is It So Hard To Sue A Bad Cop? Police Line Do No
IN 2019, DEPARTMENT of Homeland Security Agent Ray Lamb was arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and misdemeanor criminal mischief. He’d had an altercation in a Conroe, Texas, restaurant parking lot with Kevin Byrd, the ex-boyfriend o
Reason2 min readPolitics
Postal Censorship and Surveillance: A Timeline
A year before independence, the Continental Congress creates the Postal Service—not as a government agency, but as one of several new independent alternatives to the British postal system. One advantage: This allows American dissidents to communicate
Reason20 min readCrime & Violence
Why Didn’t COVID-19 Kill the Constitution?
THE DAY AFTER the nation’s first COVID-19 lockdown took effect in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he would never impose similar restrictions. Telling residents they may not leave their homes except for “essential” purposes
Reason9 min readWorld
How Mass Immigration Stopped American Socialism
FOR CENTURIES, AMERICANS have worried that immigrants could overwhelm and negatively alter economic and political institutions in the United States. In 1783, at the end of the American War of Independence, even Thomas Jefferson had misgivings about t
Reason6 min readCrime & Violence
Mixed Martial Messages
FOR ROUGHLY HALF a decade, a small contingent of criminal justice reformers has beseeched Americans to divert some of our attention from opposition to the drug war to mercy for violent offenders. “We can’t get from where we are to where we need to be
Reason5 min readPolitics
Autonomous Mexico
I FIRST HEARD ABOUT the autonomous movements in Mexico from my anarcho-communist college buddies in the early 1990s. They loved the idea of indigenous people taking up arms and seizing control of their communities—and of the lucrative natural resourc
Reason14 min readCrime & Violence
Meet The New York Times’ Libertarian Podcaster
JANE COASTON IS the new host of The Argument, a massively popular New York Times podcast that seeks to showcase civil and informed discussions about the most pressing issues of the day. A 33-year-old Cincinnati native, Coaston has worked at Vox, MTV,
Reason13 min read
Who Gets To Decide the Truth?
UNTIL THE 1600S, the average annual rate of economic growth in human history was approximately zero, on a per capita basis. Economies developed haltingly and, by today’s standards, minimally. Politics consisted of a long and bitter series of wars, re
Reason1 min read
Trots And Bonnie
Shary Flenniken began her career with a brief stint in underground comix in San Francisco before earning a coveted regular slot in National Lampoon, from the early ’70s to the early ’90s, for her comics about a pubescent girl named Bonnie, her talkin
Reason1 min read
Fugitive Telemetry
Fans of locked room mysteries and boorish detectives will find much to love in Fugitive Telemetry, an outer space version of those classic tropes. This short novel is the sixth installment of Martha Wells’ Hugo-winning Mur-derbot Diaries, which follo
Reason3 min readCrime & Violence
From The Archives
“Although unions have often been criticized for crafting unyielding work rules, legal standards actually impose greater rigidity on the workplace. Unions can be bought off, persuaded to relax a rule in a trade for money. Legal standards, on the other
Reason3 min readCrime & Violence
Brickbats
Body camera video shows two Colorado Springs, Colorado, police officers using their Tasers on Carl Andersen Jr. in April 2019 as he stood in his daughter’s hospital room and refused to give them his phone. Police were there because Andersen’s daughte
Reason3 min readPolitics
Economist John Cochrane Is Still Worried About the Debt
THE U.S. NATIONAL debt held by the public is currently almost $22 trillion, or about $67,000 per citizen, surpassing the country’s annual GDP for the first time since World War II. The Congressional Budget Office predicted in March that the U.S. debt
Reason2 min read
Falcon And The Winter Soldier
There’s an interesting question at the heart of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: What happens when Captain America dies—and the next in line for his shield is a black man? Set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the aftermath of a comic book catacl
Reason1 min readCrime & Violence
Philly D.a.
Philly D.A., an eight-part documentary series by Independent Lens on PBS, follows progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a former civil rights attorney who made a career out of suing the police, through his tumultuous first few yea
Reason5 min readTechnology & Engineering
Net Neutrality Is Far From Necessary
GET READY FOR the next stage in the never-ending tussle over “net neutrality.” The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is prepping to craft yet another regime for internet service providers (ISPs)—the seventh in 13 years. Even by contemporary sta
Reason1 min readPsychology
Covid Diaries NYC
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, recently described a psychological experiment that found “moral judgments impact perceived risks from COVID-19 exposure.” The HBO documentary COVID Diaries NYC, which assembles contributions from f
Reason1 min read
The Lamp
The Jesuits at 112-year-old America magazine must have been surprised to learn there were “no Catholic magazines” in America. That claim appeared in the publisher’s statement of the inaugural edition of The Lamp, a Catholic journal launched last spri
Reason5 min read
America’s Cross-Partisan Dalliance With Eugenics
IN NOVEMBER 1900, Jane Stanford forced the resignation of the noted progressive economist Edward A. Ross from the faculty of the university that bears her surname. The Ross incident has since become a cause célèbre in the history of academic freedom,
Reason1 min readGender Studies
Celebration Of Life For Margo St. James
Margo St. James is considered the mother of the American sex worker rights movement. In 1973, she founded Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) to push for the decriminalization of prostitution and the destig-matization of sex work. The San Francis

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