Innehållsförteckning för July 2024 från Reason

THE GOVERNMENT IS slow, especially at answering questions about itself. In theory, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lets Americans ask any federal agency for any public record and get a response back within 20 days. All 50 states have similar records laws. After all, government documents are the property of the taxpayer. In practice, almost no government agency meets its own deadlines. FOIA requests can take weeks, months, or even years longer than the legal deadline. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are notorious for sitting on requests for ages before handing back pages that are almost entirely censored with a black highlighter. Using data from the public records site MuckRock, Reason calculated the average response times for several agencies. It turns out that you can do a lot of…

BRYAN CAPLAN IS known for his unconventional approach to tackling big issues. With his latest book, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, he employs a graphic novel format to make the case for a more open approach to housing policy, partnering with illustrator Ady Branzei. It’s his second venture into the world of illustrated narratives, following 2019’s Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. Reason’s Christian Britschgi asked Caplan about his motivations and his outlook on the future of the “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) movement. Q: Why make the case for more housing in a graphic novel form? A: There is so much high-quality research out there on the topic, and yet almost no one would ever read it because most of it’s really…

IS THE AMERICAN family doomed? Fewer than half of U.S. adults are married. The nation’s fertility rate has fallen below replacement level. The percentage of children living with married parents has fallen drastically. There’s no denying the trend lines. That trajectory has spawned a public panic that sometimes verges on the apocalyptic, along with a related discussion about how best to use money and power to reverse course. Journalists, sociologists, and public intellectuals, most but not all of them right-of-center politically, have called for everything from tax credits to tariffs to transformations of the American welfare system in hopes of changing the way Americans conceptualize and form families. But the declinist narrative doesn’t tell the whole story—and the calls for big, centralized solutions misunderstand the issues at hand. The relevant…

IN APRIL, TEXAS state police tangled with University of Texas at Austin student protesters, pushing them off the campus and sending some into the streets. The protest began when students walked out of class with demands that the university divest from manufacturers supplying weapons to Israel in the ongoing war in Gaza. Gov. Greg Abbott posted on X, “Arrests being made right now & will continue until the crowd disperses. These protesters belong in jail. Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period,” teeing up challenges about whether the move complied with the First Amendment.…

THE U.S. DEPARTMENT of Education has jeopardized access to financial aid for millions of college students and their families—all because it failed to create a functional online form. In what is possibly the largest web-based government fumble since the rollout of HealthCare.gov in 2013, the updated Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) online form has been a glitch-filled fiasco, infuriating families and universities alike. Students seeking federal loans and grants must use the FAFSA form, but it’s also essential for those who don’t intend to take federal money, since the vast majority of U.S. colleges use it to determine institutional financial aid. The current problems stem from the 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which aimed to simplify the FAFSA process. That’s a wise goal, but the department’s botched implementation has…

“IT WAS A very safe city.” So said Mike Waters, owner of a pub in D.C.’s long-gentrified Dupont Circle area, in a neighborhood Zoom meeting this past January, neatly encapsulating a seemingly sudden deterioration in public safety. Violent crimes rose 39 percent in Washington, D.C., last year, including a 67 percent jump in robberies. Homicides increased a stunning 35 percent. Property crime rose 24 percent, with 3,756 motor vehicle thefts in 2022 becoming 6,829 in 2023. The city’s 911 system struggled to handle 1.77 million calls, more per capita than anywhere else in the country. The trend did not spare the powerful. In February 2023, an attacker in an apartment elevator grabbed Rep. Angie Craig (D–Minn.) by the neck. In October, three masked gunmen car-jacked Rep. Henry Cuellar (D–Texas) in…

REPUBLICAN CHINA HAWKS have a problem. They’re eager to sell us on the notion that China is, as old GOP hand Newt Gingrich puts it, “the greatest threat to a free America that we have faced in our lifetime.” Gingrich pins China’s ascendancy on its “totalitarian system, extraordinary organization, and immense population,” brushing aside the economic liberalization and market reforms initiated by former leader Deng Xiaoping—which ushered China out of Maoist isolation and into the global market—as mere smoke and mirrors, a “40-year-long propaganda campaign” masking the “real China.” This presents a quandary for the hawks. If they argue that China’s meteoric rise is indeed the fruit of its “totalitarian system and extraordinary organization,” does that mean they’ll have to eat their words on the virtues of free enterprise and…

THE FIRST PARAGRAPH of the book jacket lays it out: “There is a common belief that we live in unprecedented times, that people are too sensitive today, that nobody objected to the actions of actors, comedians, and filmmakers in the past. Modern pundits would have us believe that Americans of a previous generation had tougher skin and seldom complained. But does this argument hold up to scrutiny?” There’s a good point underneath the hyperbole. People tend to believe—and pundits, politicians, and activists tend to claim—that whatever issues trouble them are worse than ever. Why? Because these things are happening now. To us. Problems in the past weren’t as urgent or significant because they happened to others, and anyway things turned out OK (or if they didn’t, at least those problems…

DONALD TRUMP WAS not the first celebrity presidential candidate who could reasonably be accused of insurrection against the United States. Many decades before Trump, another best-selling author and charismatic leader in a rowdy movement to upend dominant American political mores aimed for the U.S. presidency—Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers’ minister of information and the author of Soul on Ice. Unlike Trump, who this year overcame challenges from Colorado, Maine, and Illinois about his eligibility due to the Constitution’s Insurrection Clause, Cleaver couldn’t be caught up by the 14th Amendment, Section 3, since that explicitly only bars insurrectionists who had already been government officials. But Cleaver faced his own eligibility hurdles. In 1968, as the first presidential nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), formed mostly by antiwar radicals disenchanted…

“DID YOU HEAR the one about the world’s greatest watch thief? He stole all the time.” But even that guy might be impressed by the sticky fingers of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC), a tiny corner of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that managed to pilfer nearly $75 million in tax-payer money last year to maintain, among other things, an official government repository of “dad jokes.” It’s funny—but not in a good way. The agency’s website is the source of the cringey joke above, along with other forehead-slappers such as “Why don’t you ever see elephants hiding in trees? Because they are really good at it,” and “Have you seen the new type of broom? It’s sweeping the nation.” In fairness, the National Strategic Dad Joke…

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to avoid the “strange bedfellows” cliché when reading about the criminal justice reform movement in the 2010s. Conservatives and evangelicals worked alongside bleeding-heart liberals and civil libertarians to fix what they all (at the time) agreed were unjust prison sentences and punitive policies. Fast-forward a decade, and the bipartisan sleepovers are over. Most of the same advocate groups are still lobbying for reform—and notching victories in some states—but the broad-based path for criminal justice reform bills has narrowed or altogether disappeared in other places. Claiming to be responding to rising crime and the excesses of progressive reformers, several Republican-controlled state legislatures have not only reversed progress but also rolled back key reforms: increasing prison sentences, limiting parole and probation, restricting charities that pay bail for offenders, curtailing…

BRETT BROWNLEE’S ENTREPRENEURIAL streak started simply: as a kid, for kid reasons, with his brother. “Growing up, he and I just used to push mowers around our parents’ subdivision to try to save up money to buy basketball shoes,” he says. The venture looks a bit different these days. Brownlee makes a living running Archway Lawn Care in the St. Louis area. The company brings in millions of dollars in revenue each year and employs around 50 people during peak season. That isn’t to say things have always been easy. Archway’s staffing has been a bit of a revolving door, with many employees working there for a year or less. “At times like now where it seems everyone’s hiring,” says Brownlee, “we don’t get very many, if any, applicants at…

IN MARCH, REASON’S Nick Gillespie talked with one of the great pioneers of podcasting: Dan Carlin, the host of Hardcore History. Carlin’s deeply researched and urgently delivered takes on everything from Julius Caesar’s wars in Gaul to Imperial Japan’s horrific conquest of Asia are downloaded by the millions. Gillespie and Carlin discussed how to understand the moral choices made in the past, how Carlin would update his 2019 book The End Is Always Near in light of COVID-19, and whether we can really learn meaningful lessons from history. Reason: Who are your listeners and what do you think they’re getting out of the show? Carlin: I don’t ask them questions about themselves or delve into who they are or what they make or where they live and how old they…

OVER THE LAST two decades, Alexander Hamilton has become a folk hero. In 2004, Ron Chernow’s massive Hamilton biography was a bestseller. A decade later, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s spectacularly successful Hamilton: An American Musical further heightened the popularity of America’s first treasury secretary, despite—or, more likely, because of—its inaccuracies and simplifications. And this year, The New York Times and Bloomberg have run stories titled “There is a Secret Hamiltonian in the White House” and “Industrial Policy and Alexander Hamilton,” celebrating President Joe Biden’s economic initiatives. Hamilton’s fondness for industrial policy was also one of the reasons the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard dubbed him the Mephistopheles of early U.S. history. William Hogeland’s new book, The Hamilton Scheme, essentially shares Rothbard’s view, although not for all the same reasons. Unaffiliated with any university…

5 YEARS AGO July 2019 “Calling someone a cop invokes the worst sorts of police overreach, a legalistic authoritarianism that exists for its own sake. During her 28-year tenure as a county prosecutor, district attorney (D.A.), and state attorney general (A.G.), [Kamala] Harris proved quite willing to live up to the epithet. In the public eye, she spoke of racial justice and liberal values, bolstering her cred as one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars. But behind closed doors, she repeatedly fought for more aggressive prosecution not just of violent criminals but of people who committed misdemeanors and ‘quality of life’ crimes.” ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN “Kamala Harris Is a Cop Who Wants To Be President” 10 YEARS AGO July 2014 “We all give up gigabytes of personal information to Facebook, Foursquare, Google,…