Innehållsförteckning för July 2023 från Reason

“IN POLITICAL OECONOMY, I think Smith’s wealth of nations the best book extant.” So Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend. Three hundred years after Adam Smith’s inauspicious birth in Kirkcaldy, it’s not hard to make the case that it’s still true. Claiming the endorsement of the greatest of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers for one’s own arguments has been a successful rhetorical gambit for at least as long as Smith’s books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, have been available to the public. Jefferson’s lifelong opponent Alexander Hamilton lifts entire passages from Wealth of Nations in his “Report on Manufactures” to Congress, for instance, only to be met—as Yuval Levin notes in his anniversary tribute to Smith at National Review—by…

BEFORE KATE L. gave birth to a baby girl last September, a nurse at New Jersey’s Hackensack University Medical Center collected a urine sample from the soon-to-be mother. Kate thought nothing of it, because she was accustomed to having her urine tested for protein levels during her pregnancy. She had no idea that her urine would be tested for drugs, which resulted in a terrifying, monthslong investigation aimed at determining if she was a fit mother. Kaitlin K. had a similar experience when she gave birth to a baby boy at Virtua Voorhees Hospital in Camden County, New Jersey, the following month. The immediate culprit in both cases seems to have been a poppy seed bagel that triggered a false positive for opiates. That, in turn, led to state investigations…

AS INFLATION RAISED prices on all manner of goods throughout 2022, eggs earned special attention. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the average price of a dozen eggs in urban areas rose from $1.92 in January 2022 to $4.82 in January 2023. Supply and demand explain the increase, but you wouldn’t know that if you listened only to progressives. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich both blamed “corporate greed” for the price hikes. The anti-corporate advocacy group Farm Action claimed “the real culprit” was “a collusive scheme among industry leaders” to “extract egregious profits reaching as high as 40 percent.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Rep. Katie Porter (D–Calif.) said the high prices “raise concerns about price gouging” by egg suppliers.…

MANY PEOPLE MAKE dubious claims about Adam Smith’s beliefs. The usual pattern is to claim that the economist was not really a wicked conservative (true) but a modern progressive (false). Three common claims are that Smith favored progressive taxation, public education, and government regulation of monopoly. Two are entirely, one partly, false. PROGRESSIVE TAXATION SMITH’S FIRST MAXIM of taxation, from Wealth of Nations, is that the “subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.” Taxation in proportion to revenue is not progressive taxation. It is proportional taxation—in modern terminology, a flat tax. Not only did Smith not endorse…

BY THE TIME Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared on March 9, 1776, the American colonies were in a state of revolt and the British authorities were furiously debating what was to be done. Smith’s Wealth of Nations presented two options. The first option was to let the colonies go. The second was to unify the American colonies with Britain the way Scotland had been united with England. Smith himself was Scottish and, looking back, was very glad of the 1707 Acts of Union, whereby Scotland quit its parliament in Edinburgh and henceforth sent parliamentarians to Westminster. In Wealth of Nations, Smith suggested the same course for the American colonies. He proposed that Americans send parliamentarians to sit as equals in…

In 1996, Nintendo released Pokemon: Red and Green for the Game Boy. An anime series quickly followed. It depicted the adventures of 10-year-old Ash Ketchum as he wandered the world collecting the titular pokemon, or “pocket monsters.” Today, the electric rodent pokemon named Pikachu, a minor character in the game but a star of the cartoon, is one of Japan’s most beloved exports, alongside Mario and Hello Kitty. The friendship between Pikachu and Ash forms the emotional core of the anime. And after 27 years, their journey has finally come to an end. In March, Japan aired the final episode of this arc; U.S. viewers can watch it on Netflix in May. Ash—still 10, somehow—has become a world champion trainer. In the final stretch of episodes, he decides to continue…

As the image-making powers of computer programs such as Midjourney startle and delight the masses, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art launches an exhibit of art made by or with computers in their early days (or just inspired by them). “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982” shows that the intersection between computers and art in those early days produced rather slight results. Sure: For those of us who remember the world before the TRS-80, the gosh-wow shines through of, say, making a machine dump ink at programmed points on a grid or draw nonintersecting lines between randomly generated points. It is amusing seeing psych-survey answers about people’s attitudes toward shoes numericized and plotted in what looks like a dot matrix printer who took a quarter hit of acid,…

When a British judge temporarily blocked Julian Assange’s extradition in 2021, the decision was based on concerns about the WikiLeaks founder’s mental health and the fear that he would kill himself in U.S. custody. The judge accepted the U.S. Justice Department’s counterintuitive argument that prosecuting Assange for publishing government secrets would be consistent with freedom of expression, because he “disclosed materials that no responsible journalist or publisher would have disclosed.” As the documentary Ithaka emphasizes, however, the Espionage Act makes no such distinction. Nearly all of the charges against Assange are based on conduct indistinguishable from what major news outlets routinely do. Indeed, that conduct resembles what they did in this very case by publishing articles based on the Defense Department files and State Department cables that WikiLeaks obtained from…

Flo Crivello is the founder and CEO of Lindy, a software company that has created an executive assistant powered by artificial intelligence (A.I.). Lindy can take care of your calendar, perform basic email correspondence, book travel, and take notes during meetings. The long-run goal is to automate as much work as possible and free up time for tasks that only humans can do. In April, Reason’s Natalie Dowzicky interviewed Crivello for a video about how A.I. will change the way we work. Q: You’ve described Lindy as creating a “one-time app that then gets thrown away.” What do you mean by that? A: When you ask Lindy to do something, she actually writes a little piece of code to perform the task for you. So, for example, if you say,…

WHEN MIRANDA DICKSON inherited her childhood home in the New Town section of Edinburgh, Scotland, she also inherited the curse of historical significance. After painting her front door pink in December 2021, Dickson was ordered by the City of Edinburgh Council to repaint her door a “dark and muted” color, in keeping with the character of the neighborhood, or face fines up to 20,000 pounds ($25,000). In April, after failing to overturn the order, Dickson waved the white flag with a government-approved green front door.…

AMONG ADAM SMITH’S scant surviving papers, one can’t find a flat statement such as “I attend every Sunday Old St. Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church on Jeffrey Street.” The phrase “the invisible hand” had some theological resonance at the time. Yet it is grossly overquoted by people who have not actually read Smith and instead want a bumper sticker. Smith used it only three times in all his surviving writings, once in each of his two published books and once in an unpublished treatise on astronomy. In each, it is used in diverging senses. But the Australian economist and Christian theologian Paul Oslington, who has read Smith, argues persuasively that numerous words and phrases in Smith’s writings, such as “natural,” and such rotundities as “the Author of nature” or “the invisible…

ON THE OCCASION of his 300th birthday, Adam Smith—the Scottish Enlightenment luminary and so-called father of capitalism—was not available for comment, despite attempts to contact him via Ouija board and seance. Smith was undeniably one of a kind, a pathbreaking thinker in his own time and a philosopher whose insights in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations still apply in ours. But he is not the only Adam Smith. For this special anniversary issue of Reason, we spoke with another, less-deceased economist named Adam C. Smith, this one a professor at Johnson & Wales University who was reachable via Zoom. Bearing the name of Adam Smith has had a profound impact on his life, he says. The name has its perks, says Smith. He’s used it to…

VALUE IS ESTABLISHED on the margins. That is a central insight of both Austrian and neoclassical economics, but it is useful in thinking about history as well. Consider the ostracized, marginalized pirates who settled in 18th century Madagascar, married local women, and birthed one of the lost wellsprings of the Enlightenment. With Pirate Enlightenment, his final book, the late anthropologist David Graeber has given us the best attempt to date to integrate these pirates into the wider world they occupied, drawing them in from the margins to see their contributions to modernity—and to liberty. If this sounds faintly familiar, it may be because of the legend of Libertalia, the pirate community described by Capt. Charles Johnson (probably a pen name for Daniel Defoe) in his popular two-volume history of Atlantic…

One reviewer referred to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves as a “third-tier Lord of the Rings ripoff.” That’s not wrong, exactly, but appropriately humble warmed-over J.R.R. Tolkien is still good. Cocky bard Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine) and barbarian-with-a-heart-of-gold Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez) lead a crew of goofy improvisers against a cronyist and corrupt Lord of Neverwinter (Hugh Grant). The grand finale finds our heroes locked in a gladiatorial combat that serves a dual function: It provides bread and circuses for the ordinary townsfolk, and it’s a way for Grant’s character to separate the kingdom’s elites from their treasure after reassuring them it was safe in a government vault. In the end, the movie is more like The Princess Bride, with the same lessons: Never trust anyone with political ambitions,…

6 YEARS AGO May 2017 “By improving workers’ skills and encouraging purpose-built machinery, the division of labor leads to miraculous productivity gains. Even a small and ill-equipped manufacturer, [Adam] Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, could boost each worker’s output from a handful of pins a day to nearly 5,000. In the early 19th century, that number jumped an order of magnitude with the introduction of American inventor John Howe’s pin-making machine. It was ‘one of the marvels of the age, reported on in every major journal and encyclopedia of the time,’ writes historian of technology Steven Lubar. In 1839, the Howe factory had three machines making 24,000 pins a day—and the inventor was clamoring for pin tariffs to offset the nearly 25 percent tax that pin makers had…

SCOTLAND AND EDINBURGH in the latter half of the 18th century were uncommonly prolific of genius. This year we celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith, and the coming years will see similar milestones for David Hume, James Watt, and many others. Why, or how, did these scholars give us modern free liberal social and economic communities, constitutions, and nations? I think it was because they created an unsurpassed community of themselves, meeting in “societies” regularly for seminars in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and for dinner every Sunday in Smith’s home in Canongate, across High Street from the sidewalk statue of Robert Burns, Scotland’s most famed poet. Scotland was famous for its “clubs and societies,” regular seminars that met in pubs for discussion and debate. Unlike the university…

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 2022. Larry Abbott John Adams John Aglialoro & Joan Carter Charles E. Albers K. Tucker Andersen Cindy Anderson Armstrong Fdn. Arnold Ventures Greg & Rebecca Arnold Charles Atkins The Atlas Society Dennis & Jan Austin Richard Allen Avner The Bader Family Fdn. Neera Badhwar Lalita Balasubramanian Beth Ballentine Vaughn Barnard Ted Barnett George Bartell…

BEFORE WRITING THIS review, I asked Microsoft Bing: “When was capitalism invented?” Bing said: “1776.” Then I turned to Google: “What was the first capitalist country?” Google’s answer: “Great Britain.” I then asked the chatbot Lia27, “Was a strong state necessary to back the formation of capitalism?” It replied: “Yes, strong states are necessary to provide the infrastructure and legal framework that allows capitalism to thrive. Without a strong state, it would be difficult for businesses to operate and for markets to function efficiently.” These answers are neat, clean, and wrong. Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden, two economic historians who do not have an obvious political agenda, tell a different story in a deeply researched and well-written new book, Pioneers of Capitalism. Differentiating small-scale markets from capitalism, they…

Henry George, a 19th century reformer who famously favored an end to all taxes except a levy on land, believed his system would allow us to “approach” the “abolition of government” as a coercive force. He also wrote that his single tax could fund various public services, transforming the state into “a great co-operative society.” Depending on which way you tilt your head, he can sound like he’s either almost an anarchist or almost a social democrat. In Land and Liberty, the Georgetown University historian Christopher William England shows that both sides of George’s thinking bore fruit after his death. In the early 20th century, George’s followers found homes in a host of progressive reform movements and progressive-run governments. But other followers—sometimes the same followers—helped create contemporary libertarianism. (Some even…