Statistician Aaron Brown and gun policy scholar Robert Spitzer debate the resolution, “Until there is convincing evidence that government-imposed gun control brings a net reduction in harm, all legal restrictions on adult possession of guns should be abolished.”

Taking the affirmative is Brown, a statistician, Bloomberg opinion columnist, and author of Wrong Number: How To Extract Truth From a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation. Subscribe to Brown’s Reason newsletter here.

Taking the negative is Spitzer, distinguished service professor emeritus of political science at SUNY Cortland and author of multiple books on gun policy.

The debate is moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.

The post Does Gun Control Make Us Safer? appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/bgycEGt
via IFTTT

From the longish opinion by Judge David Alan Ezra in East Plano Islamic Center v. Texas Funeral Servs. Comm’n, decided June 24 but just posted on Westlaw a few days ago:

East Plano Islamic Center (“EPIC”) brings this action to vindicate its right to conduct religious funeral and burial rites in accordance with Islamic faith and tradition. EPIC is a nonprofit Islamic organization in Plano, Texas, formed to “provide religious, social, and educational services to inspire the Muslim community to fulfill its responsibility and contribute to the betterment of society by following the principles of Quran and the noble life of Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him).”

One of the sincerely held religious beliefs of EPIC and its Muslim membership is the collective obligation held by the religious community to perform proper Islamic funeral rites for the deceased. Islamic religious law calls for prompt ritual cleansing, shrouding, prayer, and burial in which the integrity and dignity of the decedent’s remains are scrupulously maintained throughout. To that end, EPIC offers traditional, non-commercial, Muslim funeral services and burials; especially for Muslim families unable to afford the services. EPIC assists Muslim families by arranging and facilitating religious funeral services (washing, shrouding, and performing the Janaza prayer) in partnership with licensed funeral providers. …

Chapter 651 of the Texas Occupations Code regulates the funeral industry in Texas, requiring licensure for persons or entities that engage in the business of funeral directing or operating a funeral establishment. The Texas Funeral Services Commission (“TFSC”) is tasked with enforcing these provisions ….

On March 26, 2025, TFSC issued a cease-and-desist letter (the “C&D Letter”) to EPIC, ordering it to immediately halt what the Commission alleged were unlicensed funeral service operations. Specifically, the C&D Letter accused EPIC of operating as a funeral home without an establishment license, in violation of Texas Occupations Code § 651.351…. The C&D Letter did not include which specific practices EPIC was engaging in that were alleged to be in violation of the Occupation Code…. EPIC alleges it was not running a place of business and was not in the business of embalming or funeral directing….

EPIC contends that the TFSC’s action violates both state and federal constitutional and statutory protections for religious exercise, as well as exceeds its statutory authority. EPIC points to TFSC’s prior affirmations that religious organizations could perform burial-related rites so long as they were not doing so for profit….

The court concluded that, if the facts are as plaintiff has plausibly alleged them to be, the conduct of defendants TFSC and its then-Chair Kristin Tips would be unconstitutional:

[T]he Court finds that targeting an organization’s religious funeral rites for prohibition while allowing similar rites by others and departing from long-standing TFSC practice violates EPIC’s [clearly established] Free Exercise and Equal Protection rights ….

First, EPIC alleges that TFSC has historically recognized, as far back as 1987, that Texas law “allows a family or friends to prepare and bury a body so long as they do not receive compensation for services, file a death certificate and obtain a burial transit permit.” EPIC attaches a letter written in 1987 from the TFSC to the Islamic Center of Greater Austin confirming that it “may prepare and bury members of [its] mosque without being licensed by this agency so long as they follow the guidelines listed above.” In 2014, TFSC’s staff attorney again confirmed the same in a letter regarding the Texas Islamic Center of Houston.

EPIC alleges that for the past decade it has offered non-commercial Muslim funeral services and burials that have complied with the guidelines provided in Texas Occupations Code Chapter 651 and the guidelines provided by the TFSC itself. However, in March of 2025, TFSC allegedly changed course and issued the C&D Letter to EPIC “after years of EPIC performing the Janaza prayer without protest ….”

Lastly, EPIC discusses the alleged series of events leading up to and surrounding the C&D Letter as well as Tips’s actions around the same period, which EPIC contends demonstrate Tips’s hostility toward Islam. After EPIC began planning a development that would include housing, a mosque, a school, a senior living center, and a retail center; EPIC allegedly came under fire by “misguided activists” who saw the planned development as an “Islamic separatist agenda” that would promote “Sharia law.”

Texan politicians, including Governor Greg [Abbott] and Attorney General Ken Paxton, got involved and publicly announced that a dozen state agencies were investigating EPIC and its project. EPIC attaches several Tweets from Attorney General Paxton, Governor Abbott, and the RAIR {“Rise Align Ignite Reclaim”} Foundation founder raising the alarm about EPIC, its planned development, and the alleged rise of “Sharia law” in Texas.

To demonstrate the blatant Islamophobia of the RAIR Foundation founder, Amy Mek, EPIC highlights one of her Tweets from June 2025 which states, “At this point, if you’re not being called ‘Islamophobic,’ you’re doing something very wrong.” {As alleged, Amy Mek sparked the hysteria about Sharia law and EPIC with her 222-word Tweet in February of 2025, calling the planned development an “Islamic stronghold … pushing an Islamic separatist agenda right in the heart of Texas.” RAIR Foundation USA (“Rise Align Ignite Reclaim”) describes itself as a “grassroots activist organization comprised of everyday Americans leading a movement to reclaim our Republic from the network of individuals and organizations waging war on Americans, our Constitution, our borders and our Judeo-Christian values.”}

EPIC alleges that Tips herself “circulated and endorsed materials expressing hostility toward Islam” during the same period, “including content asserting that Muslims are ‘taught hate’ and that Islam promotes violence and inferiority compared to other religions.” She also allegedly shared a link to a Youtube video criticizing EPIC’s planned development and stating it would breed “terrorists.”

Although the text messages were sent in May of 2025, weeks after the Bingaman issued the C&D Letter, the Court agrees with EPIC that it is reasonable to infer that an official, or any individual, who expresses anti-Muslim views in May held those same views in March. Additionally, this inference is strengthened by the context of the political backlash surrounding the influx of Muslim communities and alleged “Sharia law” in North Texas, as well as Tips’s alleged communications with the Governor’s office regarding enforcement activity.

Taking the pleadings as true and drawing all reasonable inferences in favor of EPIC, the Court finds that the provided context illustrates plausible bias Tips’s alleged targeting of EPIC. When considered against the backdrop of TFSC permitting the same religious funeral rites for 38 years, the recent political backlash against EPIC’s planned development and the perceived threat accompanying the rise in the Texan Muslim population, combined with the lack of explanation in the C&D Letter identifying what specific guidelines EPIC violated, it can be reasonably inferred that the C&D Letter and Tips’s role therein was the result of religious discrimination. Therefore, considering the series of events and historical context surrounding the issuance of the C&D Letter, as the courts have done in the above cases, the Court finds that Tips’s alleged conduct and involvement in the C&D Letter violated EPIC’s clearly established right “that our laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion.” …

[T]he Court finds the most support in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civ. Rts. Comm’n (2018), which similarly involved discriminatory conduct by a government body in applying and enforcing its laws in a manner that reflected religious hostility and ultimately resulted in a cease-and-desist order. The Supreme Court found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission treated the plaintiff’s case in a manner that was “neither tolerant nor respectful of [the plaintiff’s] religious beliefs.” In reaching that conclusion, the Court considered the Commission’s disparate consideration of the plaintiff’s case compared to similarly situated cases and comments from commissioners in discussing the plaintiff’s case that reflected “clear and impermissible hostility” towards the plaintiff’s religious beliefs….

The Court has likewise considered the historical background of TSFC’s failure to enforce the law at issue against religious rites, the sequence of events and resulting political backlash against EPIC that culminated in the C&D Letter, and the alleged statements and shared content by Tips demonstrating animus toward Islam. This binding precedent should have made clear to Tips and TSFC that targeting a religious organization for differential treatment violates the Constitution….

For the foregoing reasons, the Court also finds that Tips’s alleged conduct also violates the clearly established law of the Equal Protection clause….

{Whether EPIC has, in fact, disregarded Texas or federal law in favor or “Sharia law” is not a question before the Court at this stage of the litigation. In resolving the present Order, and without purporting to be an expert in Islamic teachings, the Court simply notes the absence of any evidence or allegation that Islamic burial rites qualify as “Sharia law” of the sort that threaten Texas law, and that the C&D Letter does not identify any specific aspect of EPIC’s burial services that allegedly violates Texas law.}

Eric A. Hudson and Benjamin L. Dower (Terrazas, PLLC) represent EPIC.

The post Islamic Center's Allegation of Religious Targeting by Texas Funeral Services Commission Can Go Forward appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/e7pfzdK
via IFTTT

As the cofounder of the massively influential Spy magazine in the 1980s, Kurt Andersen was among the first journalists to recognize Donald Trump as a significant figure in American culture. (Spy famously called the future president “a short-fingered vulgarian,” a description that still irks the billionaire). Over the past 40 years, Andersen emerged as one of the leading cultural critics of America, hosting the massively popular Studio 360 radio program for 20 years and writing a shelf of novels and nonfiction books.

His new novel, The Breakup, is set in 2045 and chronicles a married couple contemplating divorce as the United States reorganizes itself after a short but violent civil war. Like the best fiction, the characters in The Breakup are complicated and ambivalent as they deal with fast-evolving technology, generational strife, and the lingering effects of identity politics.

Andersen and Nick Gillespie talk about polarization, the baby boom’s senescence, and whether markets have failed today’s younger generations. They revisit and debate Andersen’s critique of Milton Friedman in Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America (“he gave people in business the green light to be entirely selfish”), civil libertarianism vs. economic libertarianism, inequality and mobility, and whether politics can ever return to what used to be called normal.

0:00—Summary of The Breakup

6:06—Could America have another civil war?

10:02—The 2024 Presidential election

12:45—Identity politics

15:52—Economic populism

17:23—Andersen’s Nebraskan roots

22:05—The Harvard Lampoon

28:43—MAD magazine’s cultural influence

30:20—Spy magazine and Donald Trump

36:09—Trump’s enduring appeal

41:50—Generational conflict

50:05—Milton Friedman

The post Can America Survive Its Political Divide? appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/ZLxHEsd
via IFTTT

Some excerpts from yesterday’s long decision in Planned Parenthood Great Nw. v. Comm’r, decided by Judge David Hamilton, joined by Judge Ilana Rovner:

In 2017, Indiana passed what we call the “aid-or-assist” law, which forbids knowingly or intentionally aiding or assisting an unemancipated pregnant minor in obtaining an abortion without first satisfying Indiana’s parental consent and notice requirements. Plaintiff Planned Parenthood provides to its clients factually accurate information about abortion providers who operate lawfully in other states. Plaintiff provides such information to unemancipated pregnant minors who seek it. Defendants are Indiana state officials who maintain that providing such information violates the aid-or-assist law unless plaintiff can show that it first satisfied the same stringent parental consent requirements that must be satisfied before a minor may obtain an actual abortion….

Defendants argue that First Amendment protections do not apply here on the theories that the information and referrals are “speech integral to criminal conduct” or merely “incidental” to conduct. We are unpersuaded by both arguments. The aid-or-assist law, as applied to the information and referrals at issue, is a content-based regulation of speech.

The court rejected the state’s argument that the law regulates only speech that fits within the First Amendment exception for speech “integral to unlawful conduct”:

Defendants argue that Planned Parenthood’s speech falls into this exception because the information and referrals violate the aid-or-assist law itself, which prohibits intentionally helping minors obtain abortions without first complying with Indiana’s parental consent requirements. This argument is of course circular: the speech is integral to unlawful conduct because the challenged restriction on speech makes it unlawful. In other words, the theory goes, the speech is illegal because it is illegal.

This exception to First Amendment protection demands more. It demands a separate underlying offense that is not the challenged restriction on speech itself…. “[T]he Giboney doctrine can’t justify treating speech as ‘integral to illegal conduct’ simply because the speech is illegal under the law that is being challenged.” … A broader reading of the exception would undermine First Amendment rights by shielding any statute that criminalizes speech from strict scrutiny solely because the legislature made such speech criminal.

To be clear, we can assume that speech aiding an unemancipated minor in obtaining an illegal abortion in Indiana would constitute speech integral to criminal conduct, violating Indiana’s near-total abortion ban. But Planned Parenthood’s practice of providing information and referrals to out-of-state abortion providers operating lawfully in other states does not go so far. Defendants do not point to a violation of any other statute, other than the aid-or-assist law itself, as the basis for this exception.

Nor can an abortion performed lawfully in another state serve as the underlying offense…. Indiana’s parental consent and abortion requirements for minors simply do not apply to the activities of out-of-state providers. A state does not have the power to regulate or prohibit lawful activities in another state “merely because the welfare and health of its own citizens may be affected when they travel to that State.” Any contrary argument disturbs long-held principles of horizontal federalism that confine a state’s legislative and police powers to within its own borders.

The court also concluded that the law operated as a content-based speech restriction, even though it didn’t mention speech on its face, but generally banned “knowingly or intentionally aid[ing] or assist[ing] an unemancipated pregnant minor in obtaining an abortion without the consent required by section 4 of this chapter”:

[P]laintiff’s speech is covered by this law because of its subject matter. The statute targets any activity, including speech, that aids minors in obtaining an abortion without first satisfying Indiana’s parental consent laws

If plaintiff shares information with pregnant minors about out-of-state care for prenatal care or ovarian cancer or sexually transmitted infections, the aid-or-assist law is no obstacle. But if the information shared or the referral made concerns abortion, the statute is triggered. Because defendants maintain that plaintiff and its employees would violate the law by continuing to share the information and referrals for legal out-of-state abortion care, the statute turns on the message the speaker conveys even if it seems facially neutral….

And the court concluded that the law failed “strict scrutiny,” under which content-based speech restrictions “may be justified only if the government proves that they are narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests”:

As a practical matter, strict scrutiny is “fatal in fact absent truly extraordinary circumstances.” …

At the outset of our analysis, we must focus on Bigelow v. Virginia (1975). Bigelow ran a newspaper in Virginia. In 1971, before the Supreme Court recognized a limited constitutional right for pregnant women to obtain abortions, he had run an advertisement that told readers in Virginia that abortions were legal in New York. The advertisement provided contact information for counseling to arrange for a legal abortion in New York. Bigelow was convicted of violating a Virginia statute that made it a crime to encourage the procuring of an abortion. The Supreme Court reversed, holding that the First Amendment protected publication of the advertisement. The Court explained that a state “may not, under the guise of exercising internal police powers, bar a citizen of another State from disseminating information about an activity that is legal in that State.” …

Defendants seek to distinguish Bigelow on the basis that Indiana’s aid-or-assist law applies only to information that plaintiff provides to minors. Defendants write that “States have greater leeway to protect children’s wellbeing” …, citing Prince v. Massachusetts (1944) (upholding criminal convictions for violating state law restricting child labor when child was employed to sell religious magazines).

That general principle is surely sound, especially as applied to child labor …. But authority over activity is very different, for First Amendment purposes, from restricting the flow of information….

[T]he Supreme Court has struck down … restrictions on providing information or entertainment to minors, with the lone exception of pornography. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass’n (2011), the Supreme Court applied strict scrutiny to hold that a state statute prohibiting the sale or rental of violent video games to minors violated the First Amendment. The Court recognized that states may restrict the sale of explicit sexual material to children. But the Brown Court rejected the effort to broaden Ginsberg to violent materials. The Court called California’s effort to create a new category of regulations for speech directed at children “unprecedented and mistaken. ‘[M]inors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection, and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them.'” “Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.” That reasoning in both Brown and American Amusement weighs against efforts to deny minors the benefit of Bigelow v. Virginia.…

[W]e have no difficulty acknowledging that … the state’s interest in safeguarding the sanctity of the parent-child relationship is compelling. The fundamental problem here is that defendants have not shown that the aid-or-assist law, as applied to plaintiff’s speech about health care that is legally available in other states, is narrowly tailored to serve those interests….

First, … defendants failed to present any evidence that the state’s interests in safeguarding the parent-child relationship or protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors would actually be furthered by prohibiting private individuals from disseminating truthful information to pregnant minors about lawful abortion practices in other states. Are minors less likely to consult their parents after receiving the information at issue from plaintiff? Or conversely, does satisfaction of Indiana’s parental consent requirements before receiving that information aid the parent-child relationship in ways that a less stringent consent requirement in this provision would not? Defendants offered no evidence to answer those questions….

Indiana’s aid-or-assist law is [also] not narrowly tailored to serve the state’s legitimate and even compelling interest in protecting the parent-child relationship. For that interest, it is both overinclusive and underinclusive.

The first problem is the statute’s requirement that plaintiff obtain, or “seek[ ] to obtain,” consent under Indiana’s stringent parental consent requirements—the standards that apply before actually having an abortion—merely to provide the information and referrals at issue. Under the aid-or-assist law, plaintiff must receive a parent’s written consent form, government-issued proof of identification, and some evidence “that provides an articulable basis for a reasonably prudent person to believe” the pregnant minor and parent are related before uttering the name of a single website.

As Judge Scudder highlights in his concurrence, the law also requires that the parent’s signature even be notarized. That requirement seems both unprecedented and extraordinary as a condition of sharing truthful information about legal activities in another state.

If a pregnant minor does not wish to notify her parents, the minor must prove to a juvenile court that she is mature enough to make this decision independently, and then that it is in her best interests to obtain an abortion without parental notification, all just to receive information about health care legally available in another state, especially where time is critical for that health care. The judicial bypass procedures evolved to apply to a minor’s actually obtaining an abortion. Extending that requirement of filing a legal action as a minor before she can obtain factual information otherwise available with a quick on-line search seems to be another unprecedented and extraordinary obstacle. We are not aware of any other comparable legal limits on providing to a minor factual information about legal activity….

Plaintiff also points to situations in which its minor clients do not know where their parents are, risk physical or mental abuse if they try to obtain their required consent, or might be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term once their parents are alerted. The state has not engaged with those effects of its statute, which, far from advancing the state’s compelling interest in child welfare, would harm pregnant minors, including mature minors, by depriving them of information that could help them make a decision protecting their health and safety.

Further undermining the state’s argument for narrow tailoring, the aid-or-assist statute is underinclusive as a means to protect the state’s asserted interests. The contents of the speech at issue—information for minor patients—are readily available to a pregnant minor without help from plaintiff. The information Planned Parenthood provides (often just the name of a website) is not exclusive to plaintiff. The minor patient herself can access it easily with a computer or smartphone….

More fundamental, defendants do not address why the statute incorporates such stringent parental consent requirements just to receive information that can readily be found online. In this digital age, this fact undermines the state’s assertions, unsupported by evidence, that prohibiting plaintiff’s speech would actually further the state’s asserted interest in minors’ well-being.

And we see no permissible basis upon which the state could try more broadly to prohibit a minor from seeking or receiving the information at issue here. Information about legally available health care is not comparable to pornography that can be denied to minors….

Judge Michael Scudder concurred in the judgment; an excerpt:

I agree with the majority that section 5 targets speech instead of conduct, at least for this as-applied action…. I also agree that section 5 restricts speech based on content….

[But] the majority diminishes the weight of Indiana’s interest underpinning section 5. It does so by relying on Bigelow to support the proposition that Indiana has no authority to regulate in-state speech about the availability of out-of-state medical procedures. But Bigelow did not involve minors, nor did the Justices say anything suggesting that the case’s principles extend to children….

Not only does Indiana have the authority to regulate this sort of in-state speech to minors, it has a compelling interest in doing so. The State’s interest is in keeping parents involved in their children’s most consequential, life-altering decisions, including at the information-gathering stage. The Supreme Court has recognized this interest many times over [in upholding parental consent and notification requirements for abortion -EV]….

I also part ways with the majority’s narrow tailoring analysis. My colleagues insist that section 5 is overinclusive because there may be “situations in which [Planned Parenthood’s] minor clients do not know where their parents are, risk physical or mental abuse if they try to obtain their required consent, or might be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term once their parents are alerted.” But that is exactly why Indiana included a judicial bypass….

The majority additionally sees section 5 as underinclusive because it does not stop minors from learning about legal out-of-state abortions through a quick Google search. But “[a] State need not address all aspects of a problem in one fell swoop; policymakers may focus on their most pressing concerns.” …

I agree that section 5 fails strict scrutiny for one narrow reason. To my eye, the aid-or-assist statute is overinclusive solely because of its notary requirement. Indiana not only requires a parent to prove their identity (e.g., government-issued identification) and to prove their relationship with the minor (e.g., birth certificate), it also requires the parent to submit “notarized written consent.” Notaries seem to be going extinct in today’s digital age and, at the very least, are not as easy to find as they were yesterday.

Notice, too, that Indiana’s notarization requirement means that a verified parent could expressly consent—in writing and before a witness—to a physician telling their minor child about lawful abortion in other states and still not satisfy the parental consent requirement. An alternative consent framework that allows non-notaries to serve as witnesses would sufficiently protect Indiana’s interest in the parent-child relationship….

Andrew Beck (ACLU) and Gavin M. Rose, Kenneth J. Falk, and Valentina De Fex (ACLU of Indiana) represent plaintiffs.

The post Seventh Circuit Strikes Down Restriction on Informing Indiana Minors About Out-of-State Abortion Providers appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/gE8HZeF
via IFTTT

The Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism is now available – for free! – on Amazon Kindle. I don’t know how long this generous offer will last, so interested readers should act fast. The volume is edited by big-name libertarian/classical liberal scholars Richard Epstein, Mario Rizzo, and Liya Palagashvili. Epstein, of course, is probably the most prominent living libertarian legal scholar in the world. There are chapters on a wide range of issues in law, economics, and political theory, including one by me on “Land-Use Regulation.” A version of my chapter is also available on SSRN here. Other contributors include such luminaries as Peter Boettke, Tom Merrill, Richard Wagner, Alex Nowrasteh, and many, many more.

Here is the publisher’s summary of the book:

The Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism provides a comprehensive analysis of classical liberal theory including a survey of the theory’s central ideas and arguments, and the application of these ideas to contemporary issues.

Chapters providing theoretical analyses are interwoven with coverage of wide‑ranging, concrete applications such as public health and healthcare, technology, policing, taxation and wealth, constitutional structures, and more. Across these areas, this handbook demonstrates how classical liberalism provides a unified approach over a divergent set of problems, providing a statement of modern classical liberalism serving as a research tool for a wide variety of individuals across the ideological spectrum. Classical liberalism is a systematic effort to ensure that the existence of the state does not abridge the fundamental rights and liberties of individuals, especially including property and contract rights. It holds that laws must satisfy the criteria of the Rule of Law so that stable relations between the individual and the state may develop.

The Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism is an authoritative and key reference text for students, academics, and researchers engaged in the study of political ideologies, political science, political economy, economics, law, social policy, and related fields.

And here is the abstract for my chapter:

Land-use regulation is a major function of virtually every government in the world. It raises many issues for classical liberalism. This chapter provides an overview of three of the most important areas of land-use policy: the use of eminent domain to forcibly take property for government-approved projects, regulations that restrict property owners’ use of their land, and the relationship between property rights in land and migration restrictions.

Section 2 covers the use of eminent domain to take private property and arguments for its limitation to genuinely “public” projects, as opposed to coerced transfers between private owners. Unconstrained use of eminent domain is a serious threat to property rights and hampers economic development.

Section 3 considers regulatory restrictions on land use that do not involve physical occupation of property. There is a long-standing debate about the value of such restrictions and whether the government should pay owners compensation. The most significant regulatory restrictions of this type in many nations are zoning rules restricting housing construction.

Finally, Section 4 provides a critical overview of property rights rationales for restricting mobility, particularly in the form of international migration. Such theories justify severely constraining the liberty and property rights of both migrants and natives.

Although I’m a contributor to both this volume and the earlier Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism, as well as the Cambridge Handbook of Classical Liberal Thought, I am still not sure whether there really is a meaningful difference between libertarianism and classical liberalism. See here for my analysis of possible distinctions between the two, and why I’m not convinced they work. I myself prefer the term “libertarian” to describe myself. But that’s mostly an aesthetic preference, not one based on substance.

The post Routledge Handbook of Classical Liberalism Available for Free on Amazon Kindle appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/C80ldZ3
via IFTTT

“Free healthcare is cool,” comedian Shane Gillis recently said on The Joe Rogan Experience. “We should have that.”

“You should treat the entire country like it’s a community,” Rogan replied. “If you had a community, would you want the sickest person to fucking die who could be very valuable if you could take care of them, and do you have the resources to take care of them?”

While support for “free” healthcare in the United States is not new—Harry Truman campaigned on universal health insurance in 1948, and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has popularized the “Medicare For All” slogan in recent years—the policy has received renewed interest of late. The Democratic Socialists of America have made universal healthcare “at no cost to individuals” a key component of their party’s expensive platform.

But it is not just political hopefuls who like the idea of universal healthcare; academics seem to as well. A recent study by the Yale School of Public Health claims that single-payer universal healthcare would save more than 100,000 lives a year, and would supposedly cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed yet, appears to come to its conclusions by modeling a scenario that assumes cheaper pharmaceutical prices, less administrative overhead, reduced fraud, and fewer emergency visits.

But we do not need modeling of unrealistic scenarios to see what universal healthcare could do for Americans; we just need to look at countries that have already implemented this system.

In Canada, the closest country to the United States that has universal healthcare, healthcare spending is responsible for 12.7 percent of GDP, several percentage points higher than the average spend of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Despite this higher spending, the median waiting time between referral from a general practitioner and receiving treatment has hit 28.6 weeks, which is 208 percent longer than the wait Canadian patients would have expected in 1993. From April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024, almost 15,500 people died waiting for healthcare in Canada, according to data compiled by SecondStreet via a Freedom to Information Act request. In 2025, 9.1 percent of Canadians “expressed unmet needs for healthcare,” compared to the OECD average of 3.4 percent.

In 2020, 62 percent of Canadians who needed specialist care waited at least a month to get it, compared with just 31 percent of patients in the United States. Drawing on results from the Commonwealth Fund’s International Health Survey, the OECD found that in 2023, more than one in 10 Canadians who needed a specialist appointment reported waiting over a year. Among the 10 countries surveyed, the only other country where this proportion of patients reported waiting over a year was the United Kingdom.

When the U.K. established the National Health Service (NHS) after World War II, NHS architect Clement Attlee envisioned a welfare state that provided care for British citizens from “cradle to grave.” Today, like Canada, long waiting lists are a common fixture. Latest figures from the NHS show that 7.3 million people—or around 1 in 10 people in the U.K.—are on NHS waiting lists. Over 105,000 cases involved patients who had been waiting over a year for treatment.

On Tuesday, The Telegraph reported that patients have died after doctors were encouraged to refer fewer people to hospital under the NHS Advice and Guidance (A&G) system introduced earlier this year. The A&G attempts to reduce hospital waiting lists by encouraging doctors to consult a hospital specialist before formally referring a patient. The Health Services Safety Investigations Body recently said that “poorly designed or inadequately monitored pathways have contributed to physical harm, delayed and missed diagnoses, and in some cases to delays in cancer care.” For instance, The Telegraph reported on one patient who was suffering from regular seizures when their doctor made an A&G request. After waiting for weeks, the patient had a seizure and died of cardiac arrest at home.

The NHS performs poorly on almost every available measure compared to other systems. In the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.K. reported an avoidable mortality rate of 71 per 100,000 people—the second-highest avoidable deaths in all of Western Europe (though it did perform better than the United States). For the most common types of cancer, U.K. survival rates rank near the bottom of Europe, often only marginally ahead of the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Among comparable high-income countries, the U.K. has some of the lowest five-year survival rates for breast, cervical, colorectal, and lung cancers. “Cancer exemplifies the problems with the UK’s health system,” according to the King’s Fund. “Early detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer is critical for improving patient outcomes, yet the UK compares poorly on all.”

The lack of quality care in Britain has had serious ramifications for patients like Carly, a 31-year-old mother of two. She tells Reason that while pregnant with her second child, doctors discovered a “basketball-sized tumor” that needed to be removed through emergency surgery. Yet “for the next four weeks,” she says, “every week it would come up to like the day before, maybe two days before my surgery had been scheduled for, and they would cancel it.” 

After eventually undergoing a successful surgery at 23 weeks pregnant, Carly says her morphine pump repeatedly ran out, despite doctors warning her that unmanaged pain could trigger labor. She was also told that she, not hospital staff, was in charge of staying on top of her medications. “I didn’t shower. I was there for five days, and I didn’t shower. Nobody changed my bedding,” she says. Looking back, Carly says, “I feel like I was let down horrendously,” adding that she “would have happily gone into medical debt in the U.S. to avoid what happened to me in that situation.”

Failures like these are not surprising in universal healthcare systems. “Every time someone advocates a government activity…they say this is going to save lives. Almost never do they provide evidence establishing that,” Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies, tells Reason. “No one ever tallies all of the costs of extracting that money out of the economy…[or] the foregone benefits of whatever the people who earn that money would have spent it on.”

The U.S. healthcare system has plenty of problems. While the promise of “free stuff” may sound tempting, the experience of countries with universal healthcare should make Americans deeply skeptical of the idea that putting the government in charge of the entire system is a panacea.

The post Universal Healthcare Sounds Great. Here's What's Happening in Countries That Have It. appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/CnKY2hG
via IFTTT