March 2023

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 Jason Russell (jason.russell@reason.com), A
Reason3 min read
Private Companies, Public Pressure
WHEN I LOLLYGAGGED or dragged my feet as a small child, my mom used to say, “You have two choices: You can do it happily, or I can make you.” Even as a preschooler, I understood that wasn’t a choice at all, only a warning about how unpleasant things
Reason3 min read
To See The Country, Road Trips Are The Only Way To Go
I AM NOT an enthusiastic air traveler. Bustling through airports, getting probed by security, and standing in lines leave me cold. But road trips are different. While the transit time is longer, opportunities to get off the beaten path make it worthw
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
A Gorsuch LGBT Decision May Doom Affirmative Action
IN 2020, THE Supreme Court held that firing an employee for being gay or transgender violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers from discriminating against a job applicant or employee “because of” that individual’s “se
Reason3 min readCrime & Violence
Congress Protects Gay Marriage
CONGRESS IN DECEMBER passed the Respect for Marriage Act, granting formal federal recognition to same-sex and interracial marriages. President Joe Biden quickly signed the bill into law. While both types of marriages were already protected under fede
Reason2 min read
Kentucky’s Governor Protects Medical Marijuana Users
THE 37 STATES that allow medical use of marijuana do not include Kentucky, where polling suggests that 90 percent of residents favor that policy. Because state legislators have not delivered a reform that the vast majority of voters say they want, Go
Reason3 min readAmerican Government
The High Cost Of Expanding The Child Tax Credit
AT THE END of 2021, not quite a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, something unusual happened: Congress actually allowed a massive government program to expire. That program was the expanded child tax credit, which had been enacted as a temporary prog
Reason2 min read
Frustrated Foreign Talent Heads North
MUCH LIKE THE United States, Canada is grappling with an aging population and an economy ravaged by government-imposed COVID-19 restrictions. But Canada has crafted an immigration system centered on the idea that foreigners are critical to economic g
Reason3 min read
The Great Pizza Funeral
FIFTY YEARS AGO this March, dozens of people gathered in Ossineke, Michigan, for one of the strangest funerals in American history. They were there to witness the burial of nearly 30,000 frozen pizzas that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had d
Reason2 min read
Innovation Drives Down The Cost Of Powering Electric Cars
AMERICANS PURCHASED MORE than 500,000 fully electric vehicles in the first three quarters of 2022, accounting for more than 6 percent of all U.S. vehicle sales. The Biden administration wants that number to exceed 50 percent domestically, and the Int
Reason3 min readPolitical Ideologies
Ranked Choice Voting Wins At The Polls
RANKED CHOICE VOTING is relatively new, and most voters likely don’t know about it, but it is seeing a surge of attention after its role in the 2022 midterms. On a ranked choice ballot, rather than choosing only one candidate from a list, voters rank
Reason10 min readInternational Relations
The Iraq War At 20
ON MARCH 20, 2003, what was officially one of America’s shorter wars began with an airstrike on Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace in Baghdad. U.S. armed forces, 160,000 strong, moved out of Kuwait and across Iraq, and after overcoming a few small
Reason12 min readAmerican Government
How The CDC Became The Speech Police
ANTHONY FAUCI, THE federal government’s most prominent authority on COVID-19, had his final White House press conference two days before Thanksgiving 2022. The event served as a send-off for the longserving director of the National Institute of Aller
Reason4 min read
How A Public Housing Project unplanned Neighborhood Became An
FLORIANÓPOLIS, SANTA CATARINA—in some ways, this large island on the Atlantic coast is the opposite of what people imagine when they think of Brazil. Sure, it has white sand beaches and clear waters, but it is largely free of the crime and chaos foun
Reason13 min read
Government Health Care Systems Are Failing
IN SUMMER 2012, about 27 million Britons tuned in to the London Olympics’ opening ceremony, dreamed up by the Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle. Central to the show was an homage to the National Health Service (NHS), the United Kingdom’s singlepayer
Reason17 min readCrime & Violence
The Probation Quagmire
SHORTLY AFTER BECOMING a mother in summer 2013, Jennifer Schroeder was arrested for a drug charge. Schroeder, who lives outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve 365 days in Wright County Jail. And 40 years on proba
Reason12 min readDiscrimination & Race Relations
Rousseau, Malthus, and Thanos Were Wrong
“THIS UNIVERSE IS finite. Its resources, finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist.” So declares the Marvel supervillain Thanos near the end of Avengers: Infinity War, when he destroys half of humanity with the snap of his fingers.
Reason10 min readPolitical Ideologies
Pitchfork Populism Is Older Than Trump
AS DONALD TRUMP walked into the Mar-a-Lago ballroom where he was about to announce his 2024 run for president, the words “Do you hear the people sing, singing a song of angry men?” boomed over the loudspeakers. Whether or not their politics match tho
Reason5 min read
The Founding Mothers of Libertarianism
WITH FREEDOM’S FURIES, Timothy Sandefur shows how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand defended individualism and free markets while America was in the grips of Depression and war. Although these three furies have long been identified as t
Reason5 min read
The Militant Pacifists of World War II
IN 1940, DURING the twilight between peace and war, a divided Congress passed a law to conscript young men into the Army—the first federal “peacetime” draft, which lasted throughout American participation in World War II. Congress accommodated young
Reason6 min read
Reviews
EMMA CAMP The premise of Netflix’s Inside Job gives what sounds like an inventive twist to the workplace comedy. Its shenanigans are set at Cognito Inc., a shadowy government cabal that secretly controls world politics. While the premise seems rife w
Reason3 min read
From The Archives
March 2008 “Today, workplace drug testing is a billion-dollar industry. It has also spawned a thriving antitesting industry and entirely new crimes. In Indiana, simply owning a Whizzinator—a comically complex but allegedly effective device that consi
Reason3 min readCrime & Violence
Brickbats
Juniors at New York City’s Edward R. Murrow High School told the New York Post they were told to read “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and “The Tortoise and the Hare” for their American literature course. They were asked to answer basic questions and
Reason3 min readWorld
Hongkonger Anna Kwok on Human Rights
During the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, Anna Kwok worked as an anonymous online organizer for Freedom Hong Kong, a group that crowdfunded protests at the G-20 summit and elsewhere. Now exiled and living in Washington, D.C., Kwok is the stra

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