Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i Reason

FLORIDA IS A land of attainable possibilities. It’s sunny, it’s warm, there’s a magic castle anyone can visit, there’s no income tax, and there’s enough beach for everyone. It lacks the pristine glamour of California or Hawaii, but it’s cheaper and more accessible in nearly every sense. What it lacks in polish, it makes up for in unpredictability. It’s a paved paradise—with plenty of parking lots. As a child, I was shipped off to Jacksonville for a couple of weeks every summer to enjoy the kind of oversugared, understructured time that happens when you’re left in the care of out-of-practice grandparents. I’d stretch out on a patch of pinky-beige carpeting under the skylight in their house reading age-inappropriate Stephen King novels and waiting for the afternoon deluge, then head outside…

SINGER/SONGWRITER/ENTREPRENEUR JIMMY BUFFETT, who died of complications of skin cancer at age 76 in September 2023, seemed like a representative Florida Man. He embraced a popular image of louche, loose, canvas-flapping, soused insouciance, like the state he helped make iconic. But he was always, perhaps deliberately, misunderstood, with a complicated world of artistic depth and business productivity occluded by a reputation for hedonistic goofiness. Buffett’s fortunes grew even faster than the state he exemplified. He made Forbes’ billionaire list in 2023. Meanwhile, the state’s gross domestic product (GDP) has grown about 40 percent in the past couple of decades, its unemployment rate of 2.8 percent is lower than the nation’s as a whole, and droves of people have chosen the Florida Man life since 2020. Like Buffett’s wealth, Florida’s economy…

IT COMES AS no surprise that President Joe Biden—who has reportedly ridden Amtrak trains over 8,000 times—supports pouring endless amounts of taxpayer money into the outdated, slow-moving system. In 2021, as part of the massive federal infrastructure law, the Biden administration gave Amtrak $66 billion, the largest government subsidy for passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak in 1971. But private companies, like Brightline in Florida, are trying to find profitable ways to bring passenger rail to the United States. On September 22, Brightline opened service between Orlando and Miami. Topping out at 125 mph, it completes the trip in about three hours. For comparison, Amtrak takes roughly 6.5 hours to complete the same route, depending on the direction. Brightline is the first privately funded intercity rail line in the…

WHEN STORM DAMAGE caused by Hurricane Ian cut off access to Sanibel Island on Florida’s Gulf Coast in fall 2022, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) had to act quickly. It set out to repair the bridge and hoped to have the entire project completed by October 31—an ambitious goal. Yet thanks to a suspension of bureaucracy and red tape, not only did it meet the deadline, it beat it: The bridge reopened to trucks on October 11 and to the public on October 19. The hurricane made landfall as a Category 4 storm on September 28, destroying portions of the Sanibel Causeway, a three-mile bridge system connecting Sanibel Island to the mainland and cutting off any of the island’s 6,300 residents who hadn’t evacuated. The Sanibel Causeway used three…

IN1980, FLORIDA experienced an immigration restrictionist’s worstnightmare: ahuge, rapid, and unauthorized influx of largely unskilled migrants. That event was the Mariel boatlift, a mass migration that followed Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s April 1980 announcement that Cubans wishing to leave the country could do so. In just six months, 125,000 Cuban immigrants arrived in Florida, half of them settling in Miami. “Observers in Miami at the time of the Boatlift noted the strain caused by the Mariel immigration,” wrote University of California, Berkeley, labor economist David Card in his highly influential (and contentious) 1990 paper on the boatlift. “Widespread joblessness of refugees throughout the summer of 1980 contributed to a perception that labor market opportunities for less-skilled natives were threatened by the Mariel immigrants.” The boatlift increased Miami’s labor force by…

11 YEARS AGO February 2013 “In October police arrested Joseph Harris of Bradenton, Florida, for employing two unlicensed telemarketers at his air conditioning business. Calling people without a license is a third-degree felony in Florida, legally equivalent to cocaine possession, battery of a police officer, or burglary of an unoccupied structure. Harris faces up to five years in jail and a $5,000 fine. The Florida Telemarketing Act requires businesses that solicit sales over the phone to pay an annual fee of $1,500 and an additional $50 for each telemarketer. If salespeople use a script, it must be cleared by the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.” JOHN ROSS “Telemarketer Tax” 23 YEARS AGO March 2001 “For any constitutionalist, the proper reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Bush v. Gore…

I’M KIND OF hating how much I love it,” my wife Lindsey says to me on a Thursday evening stroll through Market Square in Lake Sumter Landing at The Villages. I’m a fully fledged Florida Man now, having moved my family from Los Angeles to Jacksonville in October 2021. So, naturally, I invited the love of my life to celebrate our 12th wedding anniversary by driving 2.5 hours deep into rural central Florida to visit “America’s top-selling master-planned community for active adults” for 14 years straight, according to the RCLCO Real Estate Consulting ranking touted in The Villages’ promotional materials. We’re almost 20 years too young to purchase most of the homes here, since federal law requires 80 percent of home purchases in a qualified retirement community be occupied by…

IT WOULD BE more accurate to describe Jeff Brandes as a Republican from Florida than a Florida Republican. The former legislator—who left the state Senate in 2022 after term limits precluded another run—is a heterodox conservative who breaks with standard positions on such issues as criminal justice reform. Since returning to the private sector, Brandes has led the Florida Policy Project, an organization he founded to be a “policy bank” of research. In October, Reason’s Billy Binion spoke with Brandes by phone. Q: One of your primary issue areas is criminal justice reform, which isn’t typically a hill Republicans die on. How’d you get there? A: I sat on the criminal justice committee back in 2014 and recognized pretty quickly that there was no real leadership on that issue statewide…

ANATIVE TEXAN, Jeb Bush moved to Florida in 1980. He was governor of the Sunshine State from 1999 to 2007, where he quickly became known as a champion of school choice. In 2016, he made an unsuccessful run for president. Now he resides in Miami-Dade County, retired from political life. A self-proclaimed “old-school conservative with libertarian blood running through my veins,” Bush is frustrated by the “cyclical world” we live in where “people are very comfortable with advocating government solutions to everything.” Reason’s Nick Gillespie spoke with Bush in October about how Florida has become home for many people—from in and outside of the U.S.—who are looking for less government intervention in their everyday lives. Reason: Florida has become the fastest-growing state in the country. What explains Florida’s growth as…

ON APRIL 22, 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District, ending perhaps the most successful experiment in private governance in U.S. history. The bill ended an arrangement that turned a swamp on the edges of Orlando into the home of Walt Disney World, one of the busiest tourist destinations on Earth. The governor’s victory is not yet final—while the district was formally dissolved earlier this year, Disney attorneys quickly outfoxed DeSantis, delegating many of the district’s powers back to the company. The company is now suing to reverse the change altogether. For all the media sound and fury over the duel between the would-be president and the Mouse, experts seem to agree that Disney will retain most of its longstanding autonomy when all…

FOR THE AVERAGE American, the phrase “Florida drug kingpin” is more likely to evoke cocaineslinging Cubans or meth-cooking bikers than a middle-aged science-fiction nerd who invited the police to inspect his facilities. Yet in the eyes of federal prosecutors, Charles Burton Ritchie was no less a kingpin—just smarter and less violent than the folks they were used to dealing with. The story of Ritchie’s rise and fall, as told by Jordan S. Rubin in Bizarro: The Surreal Saga of America’s Secret War on Synthetic Drugs and the Florida Kingpins It Captured, is every bit as compelling as a more Scarfacian tale. Rubin, a former narcotics prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, has written a period-defining study of federal drug prosecutions at the beginning of the synthetics boom. Our Dantes…

ACROSS 1. Sullum who wrote Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use 6. Soldiers, for short 9. Elizabeth who gave us the drinking age of 21 13. Light on one’s feet 14. Feature of the U.S. Capitol building 15. Sign that can be good or bad 16. Defeated in a chess game 17. Boehm who hosts Why We Can’t Have Nice Things 18. Flatbread from South Asia 19. Privately owned passenger rail connecting Miami and West Palm Beach 21. No ___ Traffic 22. Boo-boo, to a little kid 23. Bottled water brand owned by Coca-Cola 25. Criminal accusation 29. Queen of ___ (royal mentioned in the Bible) 31. Ice cream shop purchase 32. East, in Spanish 34. Eight bits, in computing 37. Thaw in international hostilities 39. Orville, Wilbur, and…

THERE HAVE BEEN several theories floated about why former President Donald Trump refused to hand records back to the National Archives, choosing instead to keep sensitive government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in what has become Palm Beach’s most famous bathroom. But the simplest and most durable explanation is the viral “my boxes” theory, which I initially hatched on Twitter: Trump likes boxes of stuff, and he wants to keep them. According to the federal indictment filed against Trump, he told one of his attorneys: “I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes.”…

IF YOU SIT on the bench outside Natural Beautiii Haircare in Eatonville, Florida, and stare across East Kennedy Boulevard, you’ll see the grassy lot where Zora Neale Hurston’s house once stood. Hurston was a novelist and a folklorist, a champion of the culture that African Americans created for themselves, a Taft Republican of a fiercely decentralist and antiimperialist bent, and a proud daughter of Eatonville, this barely-a-square-mile patch of Orange County that in 1887 became one of the first all-black municipalities to be incorporated in the United States. Long before the hair salon was here, the place where you’re sitting was the site of Joe Clark’s store. That shop “was the heart and spring of the town,” Hurston wrote in her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road. “Men sat around…

ANY DISCUSSION OF Florida’s education system is incomplete without mentioning this: Nearly 50 percent of the state’s K-12 students attend a school other than the one in their neighborhood or geographically closest to them. That’s about 1.6 million students, according to 2021–22 data from Step Up For Students, a nonprofit that encourages school choice and funds scholarships for Florida students. School choice in Florida doesn’t just mean attending private schools (which over 170,000 students do), attending publicly funded but privately operated charter schools (which over 360,000 students do), or homeschooling (which over 150,000 students do). The state has a strong open enrollment system, mandated by law, that gives parents wide permission to shift their children to other public schools to take advantage of academic, athletic, or extracurricular opportunities they can’t…

THE RACE TO save the only barrier reef in the U.S. hit a major setback this summer when a heat wave turned the waters off the Florida Keys into a Jacuzzi. The Florida Reef Tract is used to weathering warm water during fall months, but unseasonably hot water arrived this summer, meaning those coral colonies had to endure months of extreme water temperatures. A buoy off Florida recorded 101-degree water temperatures this July. When corals are stressed by hot or cold water, they lose their color—a result of expelling algae that provides corals with most of their energy—and eventually die. Throughout the summer and into early October, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch program placed the Florida Keys under a coral bleaching Alert Level 2, meaning…

No state banned more books than Florida in the most recent school year, according to free expression nonprofit PEN America. Over 40 percent of school book bans in the U.S. happened in Florida, though a slight majority of Florida school districts had no bans at all. Justifications for the challenges vary, but scenes depicting nonconsensual sex are a common motivator. PEN America’s definition of a “book ban” is admittedly broad, and all these books remain available for purchase from private sellers, but most challenges against books still end up hindering free speech and open debate. Combined, 1,098 different books were banned in Florida in the 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 school years.…

FOOD THE CUBAN SANDWICH NATALIE DOWZICKY Even though the Cuban sandwich is essentially just a fancy ham, pork, and cheese sandwich, the controversy over its origin is piping hot. In the late 19th century, the sandwich was a lunchtime staple of Cuban cigar factory workers. So it’s no surprise that Tampa, nicknamed Cigar City, claims to have put the Cuban sandwich on the map (in America, at least). The sandwich itself was not mentioned in any U.S. records until 1906, in The Tampa Tribune. But the Cuban-American haven of Miami is unwilling to concede the fight, claiming that Tampa’s Cuban sandwich is not authentic. The Miami preparation of the sandwich is more traditional, while Tampa’s includes salami—an Italian meat. This is explained by the droves of Italians who moved to…

Kary Jarvis spent more than a year behind bars facing multiple felony charges after a traffic stop that left two Daytona Beach police officers injured. But video of the stop showed that after officers gave Jarvis a warning they asked multiple times to search his vehicle; each time he refused. Officers then ordered Jarvis out of his vehicle for them to search. Jarvis instead drove off, dragging the officers along as they clung to the car. When a judge saw the video, she ruled that “Mr. Jarvis was unlawfully detained after his first denial of consent. Had officers allowed Mr. Jarvis to leave, as he was entitled to, no one would have gotten hurt. The injuries resulted from the officers’ own illegal activity.” When Jennifer Heath Box scanned her ID…