Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i Reason

THE U.S. FOOD and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared the first continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) for over-the-counter sale—a major win for health freedom and common sense. “Giving more individuals valuable information about their health, regardless of their access to a doctor or health insurance, is an important step forward in advancing health equity for U.S. patients,” said Jeff Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, in a press release announcing the change. CGMs are wearable devices that continuously monitor blood sugar levels in real time. They’ve been invaluable for diabetics—but their potential goes much further. For instance, those with chronically elevated blood sugar levels, even if they don’t meet the threshold for diabetes, could use CGMs to manage their health early and avoid a future diagnosis.…

IF YOU HAVE a mortgage on your home, the odds are that it’s backed by one of two congressionally chartered, government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those agencies buy up mortgages, bundle them into securities, and then sell those to investors. Defenders of the GSEs say they’re important for boosting homeownership generally and sustaining the standard 30-year fixed-rate mortgage specifically. Critics argue they serve mostly to make the financial system riskier and more statist. One such critic is Mark Calabria, the former head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency that has acted as conservator of the GSEs since 2008. In an interview with Reason’s Christian Britschgi, he argues that Fannie and Freddie do little to expand homeownership. Q: Supporters of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac argue that they’re…

WHEN HE WAS hired for his current position, Joe Biden set ambitious goals for himself on the drug policy front. He promised to “eliminate mandatory minimums”; “end, once and for all, the federal crack and powder cocaine disparity”; “decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions”; and “use the president’s clemency power to secure the release of individuals facing unduly long sentences for certain non-violent and drug crimes.” As president, Biden had the unilateral power to accomplish just one of these five things. Not coincidentally, that is the only action item on which he made progress after starting work in January 2021. As of early November, Biden had commuted 132 sentences, nearly all of which involved drug offenses. That was 38 more commutations than his…

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN spent summer 2023 pitching voters on Bidenomics—how his policy agenda contributed to the American economy. Voter perceptions were gloomy: A majority rated Biden’s handling of the economy as unsatisfactory. In summer 2022, inflation had hit a 40-year high, and prices remained elevated even after the rate of inflationary increase came down. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve had begun to raise rates, making it much more expensive to finance homes, cars, and new construction. But Biden had a different story to tell. Three big pieces of legislation, he argued, had made the U.S. a roaring success and the envy of the postpandemic world. Biden wasn’t just arguing that the economy was strong; he was arguing that it was strong because of his performance as president. Putting your name on…

WHILE HE WAS interviewing for the job, President Joe Biden demonstrated an acute awareness of how tariffs work. It’s worrisome that he seems to have forgotten that—or, worse, chosen to ignore it—since he’s been president. In June 2019, Biden correctly described the effects of higher taxes on imports. Donald Trump, who was president at the time, “doesn’t get the basics,” Biden said. “He thinks tariffs are being paid by China. Any beginning econ student… could tell you the American people are paying his tariffs.” Around the same time, he criticized Trump’s reliance on tariffs as a tool of foreign policy, saying that higher taxes on Americans was a “shortsighted” way to combat China’s “abuses.” In place of his predecessor’s zero-sum view on trade, Biden advocated for a “united front of…

WHEN JOE BIDEN described his vision for the U.S. immigration system in 2020, the presidential candidate painted himself as the antidote to Donald Trump’s cruel restrictionism. “Trump has waged an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants,” Biden’s campaign website charged. He promised to “take urgent action to undo Trump’s damage.” In some ways he did that. On his first day in office, Biden rescinded Trump policies restricting the entry of people from several Muslim-majority and African countries and revoked the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement priorities, which had dramatically expanded the pool of immigrants prioritized for deportation. Biden sent Congress a comprehensive immigration bill, which included a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and retention measures for foreign STEM graduates of U.S. universities, among…

THE WENDY’S BACONATOR is a beast of a burger. Introduced in 2007 as part of a back-to-basics rebranding of the perpetual fast-food underdog, the Baconator consists of a half-pound of beef, multiple slices of gooey American cheese, and six pieces of bacon, plus condiments. It contains 57 grams of protein and just shy of a thousand calories—about half the daily recommended intake for an average person, and more than twice the average caloric intake of the estimated 800 million people globally who are perpetually undernourished. How much would you pay for a miracle food like the Baconator? How much should you pay? Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has some ideas. In February, Wendy’s CEO Kirk Tanner announced the burger chain would invest $20 million in digital menus. These virtual menu screens…

ARGUMENTS FOR LIBERTARIANISM typically take two forms. Some libertarians base their creed on natural rights—the idea that each individual has an inborn right to self-ownership, or freedom from aggression, or whatever—and proceed to argue that only a libertarian political regime is compatible with those rights. Others take a consequentialist approach, claiming libertarianism is the best system because it produces the best results, defined according to some philosophical conception of the good. Libertarians have been making these arguments for the last 170 years or so, and by this point the weak spots are fairly well known. As a result, the arguments on both sides have the character of the opening moves in a chess game: It’s all by the book. Once in a while, however, an argument opens a genuinely different…

In an effort to discourage alcohol consumption during the late 19th century, British temperance groups produced and circulated “drink maps” showing where people in particular cities could buy booze. That counterintuitive strategy reflected the conviction that easy access to alcohol was patently scandalous—a threat to public morals and health that could be mitigated by local licensing authorities once they knew exactly how easy it was to get drunk. As Kris Butler explains in his copiously illustrated Drink Maps in Victorian Britain, those magistrates were empowered by a judicial determination that pubs and other alcohol vendors had no legally cognizable interest in continuing to do business. The courts also held that magistrates, in deciding whether to award or renew annual licenses, could consider local needs as they saw them. The maps…

Sandy Snakenberg, a San Diego street performer whose act involves blowing bubbles, was performing in a park when two park rangers cited him for “littering in bubble form.” Video shows one of the rangers telling Snakenberg that he will cite him again if he continues to perform and recommend that prosecutors handle it as a misdemeanor instead of a lesser offense. But the ranger added he’s not eager to do that, saying he would “feel like the biggest idiot taking this to court.” A student at Missouri’s Liberty Middle School was suspended for three days after posting a photo online of Dr. Pepper cans he had laid in the shape of a rifle. The district superintendent said there was “enough information to believe the video has caused fear to at…

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN came to office promising to end “forever war,” and that’s the promise that could have been the easiest to fulfill. When it comes to war and peace, the U.S. president is more powerful than anyone else on earth. His promise was put to the test with the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. With each crisis, Biden seems to have grown more hawkish, embroiling the United States deeper in foreign wars. Biden’s most courageous foreign policy decision was also the one he received the most political punishment for. By the early 2020s, the war in Afghanistan had become unwinnable without a major escalation by U.S. forces. Biden, like his predecessor (and successor) Donald Trump, decided to…

ON DOMESTIC REGULATORY issues, Biden has shown initiative and a willingness to go above and beyond what is called for. It’s too bad that’s the opposite of what a good presidential job performance entails. The ideal candidate here is someone unwilling or unmotivated to find new outlets for regulation, but the Biden administration has proved all too eager to expand the regulatory state’s reach. Take Biden’s obsession with “junk fees,” by which he means basically anything a business charges for perks (such as checking bags during a flight) or as penalties (like bank overdraft fees). Such fees can serve important and legitimate purposes, but Biden has framed them all as simple points of corporate “greed.” Because it can’t directly eliminate them, the administration has decided they must be disclosed in…

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS OCCUR in an open-access commons: areas or resources where private property rights either have not been asserted or are defective. The biggest commons problem is occurring in the global atmosphere, where man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to climate change. President Joe Biden believes climate change “is an existential threat to us all.” So he aims to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, and he wants to reach 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035. To achieve these goals, the Biden administration promotes a “clean energy transition.” The administration is encouraging consumers to switch from greenhouse-gas-emitting fossil fuels by spreading around an estimated $370 billion in subsidies to electric vehicles and to solar and wind power. It is also…

AMANDA KNOX’S STORY is one of the most infamous and controversial criminal cases in recent memory. In 2007, while studying abroad in Italy, she was accused of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in what the lead prosecutor claimed was a bizarre sex game gone wrong. Despite mishandled DNA, a coerced confession, and a lack of credible evidence, Knox was convicted and spent nearly four years in an Italian prison before being exonerated in 2015. Her wrongful conviction was a media spectacle that sensationalized every aspect of her life. In March 2024, Hulu announced an eight-episode limited series about Knox’s story, with Knox joining Monica Lewinsky as an executive producer. Notably, this is one of the rare times Knox has been offered a say in the way her story is told…

“The new needs friends,” says food critic Anton Ego in the Disney movie Ratatouille. Arena magazine doesn’t just echo that sentiment—it emblazons it on the cover of its inaugural issue. “Misunderstandings and misinterpretations of new things are used to make the public fear innovation, and to hate innovators,” writes editor and publisher Maxwell Meyer in a “manifesto for the future” at the start of the Texas-based publication’s first issue, released in summer 2024. “Our mainstream media is hell-bent on tearing down the future before we can get too good a glimpse.” For someone eternally frustrated by the doomerism, tech panic, and casual anti-market sentiment permeating both mainstream and avant-garde media, reading Arena was refreshing. The magazine delivers a hefty dose of optimism and excitement not in spite of the current…

It’s one of pop culture’s great questions: Why did MTV, a cable network literally called “Music Television,” stop playing music? Written and hosted by Dave Holmes—himself a former MTV host—the podcast Who Killed the Video Star? offers an answer. As Holmes demonstrates, what took the M out of MTV was largely supply and demand. When MTV premiered in 1981, music videos were a novelty; a network that played them 24/7 appealed even to cynical Gen Xers. But the format wasn’t conducive to setting competitive ad rates: The entire programming lineup was identical—a random music video, then another one—and viewers could change the channel when a song ended if they didn’t like the one that came on next. “MTV doesn’t play music anymore” is a complaint nearly as old as the…

Developers, please feel free to tear down nearly any building erected during the 1960s and ’70s in the United States. Capital Brutalism, an exhibit on view through February 17 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., amply demonstrates why. Brutalist buildings are unornamented concrete hulks. Perhaps the most iconic is the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, declared the ugliest building in the U.S. and the second ugliest in the world in a Buildworld survey. As documented in the exhibition, our nation’s capital is pockmarked with many other Brutalist piles. The Brutalist concrete behemoth home of the Department of Housing and Urban Development arose as part of an “urban renewal” project that displaced some 1,500 businesses and 23,000 residents, comprising primarily African American and immigrant families. Yes: The housing bureaucracy’s…

THE PANIC FOLLOWING the catastrophic meltdown of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in April 1986 resulted in nearly 400 fewer new nuclear power plants being built than had been projected. Fewer clean nuclear power plants led to increased air pollution from fossil fuel–fired plants. That extra air pollution killed far more people than the meltdown, by several orders of magnitude. This is the preliminary conclusion of a recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study by three applied economists. The researchers found that new nuclear plant construction flatlined immediately after Chernobyl. Had previous trends continued, the study indicates that the United States would have built more than 170 new reactors by now. In the late 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission anticipated that 1,000 mostly fast…

IT’S OFFICIAL: AMERICA’S 46th president is headed out the door. After a single term marked by ambitious plans but modest follow-through, Joe Biden is wrapping up his time in office and somewhat reluctantly shuffling off into the sunset. Despite lofty promises on everything from drug policy reform to tackling climate change, Biden’s presidency has been a master class in how good intentions don’t always yield good results. His domestic initiatives produced regulatory quagmires, and—despite getting out of Afghanistan—his international diplomacy grew increasingly entangled in the sorts of conflicts he once pledged to avoid. On student debt, his mouth wrote checks Congress and the courts wouldn’t cash. On civil liberties, trade, the war on drugs, and Bidenomics, the American public saw mixed results and, at times, flat-out disappointment. “I made a…

WHEN JOE BIDEN was sworn in as president in January 2021, he had good reason to be optimistic about the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being widely criticized for—and arguably losing his first reelection because of—the perceived insufficiencies of his coronavirus response, President Donald Trump had successfully overseen Operation Warp Speed. As a result of this public-private partnership, federal health officials were able to grant emergency authorization for COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2020, a much faster than expected timetable. In the first few months of Biden’s presidency, millions of Americans got vaccinated and COVID-19 cases dropped rapidly. The fantastic news was short-lived. Infection numbers began to climb again in the summer of 2021 with the rise of the delta variant. While health officials had initially suggested that…

BIDEN’S CHANGES TO education policy are among the central achievements of his first—and only—term in office. Chief among them are his sweeping reforms to the federal student loan program, increasing opportunities for debt forgiveness. While the largest of these changes has now been blocked in court, Biden has nonetheless managed to forgive billions in federal student loans. In August 2022, Biden announced a blanket forgiveness of up to $20,000 in federal student loans for single borrowers earning less than $125,000 or couples earning less than $250,000. This plan—estimated to cost over $500 billion—was swiftly blocked in federal court, and the Supreme Court later struck it down as an unconstitutional exercise of the spending power. While Biden couldn’t quite bring home the grand prize, he managed to cancel billions in student…

TO WIN THE Democratic primaries four years ago, Joe Biden had to take a left turn on criminal justice, offering voters a smorgasbord of reforms to a carceral system he had helped build over his decades as a tough-on-crime senator. As Biden’s presidency sputters to an end, the White House has made strides on some of those goals but failed to deliver on many others. Biden’s voluminous 2020 criminal justice platform (now scrubbed from his website) advocated eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, cash bail, and the federal death penalty. It called for ending the “school-to-prison pipeline” and heavily investing in mental health counselors at schools and in juvenile justice programs that provide alternatives to incarceration. Biden also promised to use the Justice Department to investigate systemic misconduct by police departments, and…

Michael Huemer’s new book Progressive Myths aims to inoculate readers against what the author calls the “progressive mind virus”: an infection, he writes, that “deactivates one’s truth-seeking capacities” and teaches “us to identify with some group other than the whole society.” While Huemer locates this “virus” on the left, his core message is nonpartisan: “We need to know what is true if we are to make progress on any of the actual, real problems we face.” Huemer combs through the specious statistics, data, and testimony progressives peddle to persuade Americans to cede more power to the state—to rectify historical injustices, to correct systemic biases, or to avert armageddon. Huemer himself is an anarchist who argued that states are morally indefensible in his 2013 book The Problem of Political Authority, but…

5 YEARS AGO January 2020 “I wonder how many more tens and hundreds of thousands will die needlessly before I can again freely visit the country of my birth. Socialism kills in Venezuela, like everywhere else it has been implemented. It kills regardless of local flavoring or whatever branding the individual dictator employs. It is beyond reason that this ideology, which has led to the deaths of more people than any other during modern history, which was thoroughly and tragically discredited in the 20th century, is still racking up body counts in 2019. May we finally learn this tragic lesson.” JOSÉ CORDEIRO “Socialism Killed My Father” 30 YEARS AGO January 1995 “The Internet is that concatenation of linked computer networks that allows far-flung researchers, writers, and citizens instant or almost-instant…