Category: reason

“I was a college student during the Vietnam War era, but I was putting myself through college and was way too busy with that to be one of those students… When I landed with Reason… I didn’t know what ‘Berkeley’ was… I didn’t know who Goldwater was,” says Marty Zupan, who started writing for the magazine in 1972. “But when I encountered libertarian or classical liberal ideas…they just resonated with me.”

Zupan became editor in chief in 1984, helming it during its move from Santa Barbara, California to Los Angeles. In 1989, she left Reason and the West Coast to take a job at the Institute for Humane Studies, where she would become president in 2001 before retiring in 2016. Her Reason archive is online here.

Founded in 1968 by Lanny Friedlander (1947–2011), Reason is celebrating its 50th anniversary by hosting a series of in-depth conversations with past editors in chief about how the magazine has changed since its founding, what we’ve gotten right and wrong over the years, and what the future holds for believers in “free minds and free markets.”

In this Reason Podcast, Zupan talks with me about her experiences and growth in the libertarian movement and focuses on the unique role that the magazine of “Free Minds and Free Markets” has played over the past half-century. “One of the virtues of Reason was that it drew on the multiple strands within the libertarian, classical liberal world out there,” she says. “Reason would publish a debate, say, between a non-interventionist and a, ‘No, really the Soviet Union and its empire is an existential threat to the US and we need to do something about it.’ We had the internal debates.”

Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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A gospel music group from Indianapolis is shouting the victory after Facebook reversed its decision to remove their music video.

The video, which accompanies a song from Zion’s Joy! called “What Would Heaven Look Like,” became a victim of Facebook’s crackdown on ad content after the social media giant deemed it political. Videos of the deadly 2017 demonstrations in Charlottesville, protesters holding “No Justice, No Peace” signs, and various volunteer works play as the group sings such lyrics as “bigotry and hate are absent” and “equality for you and me.”

The music video was uploaded to Facebook at the beginning of June. About a week after posting it to their Facebook page, The New York Times reports, Zion’s Joy! promoted the video to help it reach a wider audience. This was done by paying for a tool called a “boost.” But when the video then went through Facebook’s algorithm, it was classified as political content and removed.

Group founder Robert W. Stevenson says he was asked to verify his identity after the ad was classified as political content. He did not immediately provide his information, telling the Times that doing so “would be like admitting that it’s political content, and it’s not.” For Stevenson and the rest of Zion’s Joy!, the song was solely about “preaching peace and love and coming together.”

A spokesperson for Facebook has said in a statement that”we made an error by deleting the original post. As soon as we identified what happened, we restored the post since it does not violate our Community Standards and have apologized to Zion’s Joy.” The spokesperson also explained that Facebook’s ad policy is “new, broad and exists to prevent election interference.” This is Facebook’s justification for asking those who pay for content to identify themselves.

Facebook’s tougher content policies have faced criticism for being too broad. The Liberty County Vindicator of Liberty County, Texas, saw the removal of a Facebook post after it was flagged as “hate speech.” The hate speech in question was actually a section from the Declaration of Independence, which Vindicator had been sharing leading up to the Fourth of July. Facebook apologized for its error and restored the post.

Begun, the trade war has.

The Trump administration’s 25 percent tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods—hitting everything from industrial machinery to consumer goods such as televisions—went into effect Friday morning, prompting threats of an immediate response from the Chinese government, which also promised to haul the United States in front of the World Trade Organization.

“In order to defend the core interests of the country and the interests of the people, we are forced to retaliate,” the Chinese Commerce Ministry said in a statement shortly after the tariffs took effect.

Trump has promised another round of tariffs on $16 billion of additional Chinese goods if China follows through with its threat to retaliate. China did not specify what items would be targeted with retaliatory tariffs, but it has previously threatened to hit American agricultural products such as pork and soy beans. America is the world’s largest exporter of soy beans, and China is the world’s largest consumer of them.

A ship loaded with soy beans was racing the clock this week to reach China before any retaliatory tariffs could be imposed. Soy bean prices fell to nearly 10-year lows this week in anticipation of China’s response.

While the administration says the trade barriers will force China to stop stealing American intellectual property, it appears more likely that non-Chinese businesses will bear the brunt of the tariffs, according to an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“The tariffs are aimed at patent-intensive industries that rely on global supply chains, disadvantaging American producers and harming US allies operating in the region,” the PIIE analysis concludes.

That’s exactly the message that dozens of business owners delivered to the Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative prior to the administration’s decision. But Trump failed to heed those warnings, promising last weekend that “everything will work out” even as the warning signs of a trade war became clearer.

Now he has his war. He will have to take responsibility for the results.

If I said I was about to show you a government film about how to survive a nuclear war, you’d probably guess that it came from the 1950s, that golden age of absurdly optimistic civil defense films. But Protection in the Nuclear Age was released in 1978, and it was made with an aesthetic that those of us who were in school in that era will recognize quickly. Some moments in these animations of pre- and post-apocalyptic life aren’t that different, in form if not content, from a 1970s guidance counselor’s collection of posters about emotions.

Like that guidance counselor, the movie strains hard to stay positive. “Defense Department studies show that even under the heaviest possible attack, less than five percent of our entire land mass would be affected by blast and heat from nuclear weapons,” the narrator claims at one point. “Of course,” he adds mildly, “that five percent contains a large percentage of our population.” But those people just might have time to flee to the rest of the country, which “would escape untouched—except possibly by radioactive fallout.” Oh, you and your little caveats.

The movie may also be the only official government document to ask the eternal question, “Why not just give up, lie down, and die?” Existentialists have pondered that problem for years, but only the Pentagon has produced this pithy answer: because “protection is possible.” Suck it up, Sartre.

(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here. For another edition involving nuclear survival, go here. For another edition involving nuclear explosions, go here.)

Military spouses are 10 times more likely to move across state borders in any given year than the average American. They often face a particularly galling problem when they do: obtaining a new license for a job they were already doing.

This problem is not unique to military families, and it’s a good argument for lowering licensing barriers across the board. But the frequency with which licensing disrupts employment opportunities for military spouces—35 percent of whom work in fields requiring a state permission slip, according to the American Legion—has made it an easy target for licensing reformers.

While most licensing reforms are state-level matters, this one can benefit from the involvement of the federal government. Indeed, the Obama and Trump administrations both deserve credit for working to ease the licensing burdens facing military spouses. The latest effort, announced this week by the Department of Labor, is a professional license and credential finder portal. The website offers a one-stop shop for information about state licensing requirements and details on which states will accept licenses from elsewhere.

“States should act to remove excessive regulatory barriers to work, so that our military spouses can help support their families,” Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta said in a statement. “This new site highlights states’ efforts to help military spouses secure good, family-sustaining jobs.”

While it’s no replacement for state-level efforts to reduce licensing burdens or to accept licenses from other states as valid, the website is yet another sign of the ongoing bipartisan push towards easing workers’ ability to move from place to place.

As part of a 2017 feature for Reason, I told the story of Karla Mettling, whose husband Daniel was a colonel in the U.S. Army at the time. Prior to being relocated to Georgia in 2016, Mettling had worked as a social worker in Virginia. But Virginia’s licensing requirements didn’t match up perfectly with what Georgia required, so she was left with a difficult choice after the move.

“You had to work in the state, full-time, for three years,” Mettling told me. That wasn’t going to be possible with her husband in the Army, where relocations are likely to happen every two to four years, on average. “After so many moves, sometimes you think, well, how much is this really worth to me?” she said.

Licensing laws also restrict economic opportunity for people who aren’t being moved by the military. In a 2016 study, the Brookings Institution identified a gap in migration rates between states with high licensing burdens and those with lower licensing burdens. Two labor economists at the University of Minnesota used that data to conclude last year that more than 100,000 workers are passing up the opportunity to move each year, losing out on between $178 million and $711 million they could have collectively earned.

Janna Johnson and Morris Kleiner, those two Minnesota economists, suggested that states increase the number of licensing reciprocity agreements, like the ones that allow lawyers to practice across state lines with limited relicensing costs. That’s something the Federal Trade Commission has been encouraging states to consider as well.

A number of states are doing just that, at least for military families. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, as part of a sweeping licensing overhaul proposed last month, called for greater licensing reciprocity for military spouses. “We must cut the red tape, reduce the bureaucracy and ensure overly burdensome rules and fees do not block hardworking people—especially our military spouses—from getting a good job, supporting their families and growing our economy,” said Wolf, a Democrat.

Gov. John Bel Edwards, another Democrat, has similarly highlighted the role of military spouses while calling for sweeping licensing reforms in Louisiana.

Reciprocity agreements are not a substitute for the elimination of unnecessary licenses that do little to protect public safety. But the ongoing effort to reform licensing laws for military families could be an opening for a broader reform effort. The Department of Labor’s new efforts is a modest step towards that larger goal.

During the 2012 election, Steven Greenhut was appalled by the loutish behavior displayed by incumbent Joe Biden in his vice presidential debate against GOP challenger Paul Ryan, as Biden smirked and interrupted his way through the contest. In fact, Greenhut’s column about the debate argued that Biden’s behavior was “an affront to civility” because of its bullying nature. Civility doesn’t meaning rolling over, but it does mean behaving with a little decorum.

How things have changed.

From the persepective of 2018, that debate brings to mind a term from the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York: “defining deviancy down.” Basically, the Democratic senator argued that as society becomes accustomed to deviancy, societal standards are lowered. What seemed outrageous yesterday, is accepted today. Life begins to resemble a game of limbo. How low can you go?

That six-year-old debate wouldn’t even be noteworthy today, given the antics of the current president and his foes. It’s pretty clear from social media that the president’s crudity and personal attacks are not a flaw in his presidency, but one of its high points. Many conservatives are thrilled to have someone who isn’t playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules, Greenhut writes.

View this article.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) is on the hook for $3.5 million because it put the wrong Statue of Liberty on a stamp.

In late 2010, the Post Office released a “Forever” stamp that featured a photograph of the Statue of Liberty. But the stamp didn’t depict the famous landmark in New York City. The image came from a photo of a Statue of Liberty replica outside New York-New York, a casino-resort in Las Vegas.

The USPS didn’t find out about the mix-up until three months after it issued the stamp—and because the stamp was popular, the agency didn’t withdraw it even then. The government kept printing the stamps until 2014, by which point 4.9 billion of them had been sold.

But in 2013, the sculptor who created the replica, Robert Davidson, sued the Postal Service for copyright infringement. Last week, Judge Eric Bruggink of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled in Davidson’s favor, awarding him $3.5 million in damages.

Davidson’s lawsuit argued that his replica was different enough from New York’s Statue of Liberty that it should be considered an original work. The replica “brought a new face to the iconic statue—a face which audiences found appeared more ‘fresh-faced,’ ‘sultry’ and even ‘sexier’ than the original located in New York,” the suit said.

Bruggink agreed. “The portion used was entirely of what we consider to have been the original work contributed by Mr. Davidson,” the judge wrote. “The government’s only real defense is that its use did not particularly harm plaintiff’s business as an industrial sculptor. That may be true, but we also note that it certainly did not benefit him. The Postal Service offered neither public attribution nor apology.”

Not only did the Postal Service not apologize to Davidson, but it actively attempted to sell stamps off the error. “We really like the image and are thrilled that people have noticed in a sense,” a USPS spokesperson told CNN in 2011. “It’s something that people really like. If you ask people in Vegas, they’re saying, ‘Hey, That’s great. That’s wonderful.’ It’s certainly injected some excitement into our stamp program.” In 2013 a USPS spokesperson told The Washington Post that the Post Office “would have selected this photograph anyway,” even had it been aware of the error from the start.

The agency couldn’t have it both ways. The USPS stated in public that the stamp’s originality made it special, while the agency’s lawyers argued that the Vegas replica was no different than the original. It’s no surprise that Davidson won his suit.

Embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt is out. President Donald Trump accepted his resignation Thursday.

Pruitt stood accused of a litany of petty abuses of power: wasting public dollars on lavish trips, renting a condo from a lobbyist, using his position to find a job for his wife, making his aides pay for stuff, holding off-the-books meetings. According to CNN,

Pruitt left EPA having faced more than a dozen inquiries or reviews into his practices at the agency….A spokesman for the EPA’s Office of Inspector General told CNN that ongoing or pending reviews of Pruitt will continue, even though he has resigned.

“Any ongoing or pending OIG reviews related to the Administrator and/or his team will continue—regardless of the Administrator’s resignation,” the spokesman said.

Pruitt was a committed deregulator, though, and had worked to undo the Obama administration’s aggressive approach on climate change. Many conservatives were sad to see him go:

Lesson to other Trump officials from Pruitt resignation: Give the left/media/organized greens any molehill and they will turn it into K2. Most of the accusations were overwrought, but the barrage was overwhelming. Let’s hope an equally reformist successor denies them a repeat.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) July 5, 2018

Scott Pruitt is a good friend and a very good man, caricatured by left and MSM. I hope he sets to work on a memoir ASAP and deals out a tenth of what he took. He’s a man of great faith and perseverance so he probably won’t, but the attacks on his family were unconscionable. https://t.co/Ob69m6fctg

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) July 5, 2018

‘The permanent progressive state finally ran Scott Pruitt out of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, and the tragedy is that Mr. Pruitt gave his enemies so much ammunition.’ https://t.co/EVrTRIFtHC via @WSJOpinion

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 6, 2018

Conservative commentator S.E. Cupp disagreed, writing, “Pruitt is not a hill to die on. He was graft personified. I talk to his ex-staffers, more will come out and it will be awful. Save your powder for other battles. He was a despicable abuse of power that no conservative should defend.”

FREE MINDS

Nineteen Cornell University law professors have sent a letter to the administration imploring them to end a Title IX investigation into student Yogesh Patil and let him graduate. (Title IX is the federal state understood by the Education Department to require schools to adjudicate sexual misconduct.) An unnamed female student—”LA”—accused Patil of “retaliation” because he defended the reputation of his advisor, Professor Mukund Vengalattore, whom LA had accused of sexual harassment.

Patil operates a website that compiled information about LA’s Title IX case against Vengalattore, according to The Cornell Daily Sun. If anyone is guilty of retaliation, it’s LA, who retaliated against Patil for defending the professor, writes Cornell Law Professor Kevin Clermont:

All the website did was publicly discuss a case of immense academic importance. Yogesh’s involvement comprised only “good faith actions” to question Cornell’s treatment of his professor and to pursue his own professional self-interest so impacted by Cornell’s actions against his lab. Restrained speech of this sort should not be deemed suppressible by a university.

If there was retaliation in this sequence, it was the complaint made by her against Yogesh, retaliating for his actively supporting his professor’s case against Cornell, for being an honest witness against the complainant during the investigations into her allegations against the professor, and for having lodged complaints against her with Cornell’s Judicial Administrator and other University officials as well as with the federal Office of Civil Rights. The circumstances of her new complaint are suspicious: After waiting months or years, she filed on May 23, 2018. Yogesh’s parents and brother were en route from India and Australia to see him graduate. At the last moment, he learned that Cornell, without investigation, was automatically withholding his degree in response to her mere filing of the complaint. Indeed, there is the injustice: the automatic withholding of a degree based on a complainant’s say-so.

This is another example of a troubling aspect of Title IX investigations: Criticizing Title IX is frequently held to constitute a violation of the underlying policy.

FREE MARKETS

Trump’s massive tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect this morning. China has already retaliated. The results could be catastrophic for the economy, reports The New York Times:

The escalation of the trade war from threat to reality is expected to ripple through global supply chains, raise costs for businesses and consumers and roil global stock markets, which have been volatile in anticipation of a prolonged trade fight between the United States and almost everyone else.

On Thursday, President Trump showed no signs of backing down from his fight, saying aboard Air Force One that the first wave of tariffs on $34 billion in goods would quickly be followed by levies on another $16 billion of Chinese products. And Mr. Trump continued to threaten Beijing with escalating tariffs on as much as $450 billion worth of Chinese goods.

For now, it is unclear how—or whether—the trade war might conclude. Mr. Trump’s threats have been met with vows from China to retaliate, a stalemate that will require one side to blink first in order to avoid a protracted fight. With no official talks scheduled between the two countries, and disagreements within the Trump administration about how best to proceed, a quick resolution seems increasingly unlikely.

No one knows exactly what Trump hopes to achieve with all this. Tanking the economy is one of the surest ways to doom his reelection chances.

QUICK HITS

• Ed Schulz, the former MSNBC news anchor and current host of a program on Russia Today, has died:

Depending on your politics, you’ll remember Ed Schultz for one reason or another. But I’ll never forget his show’s artfully crafted, hilariously bizarre polls: pic.twitter.com/4GmgH8mPRL

— Andrew Kirell (@AndrewKirell) July 5, 2018

• “I stopped going to the gym because of Trump. Now I can’t open jars.”
• Chris Brown was arrested in Florida due to an outstanding warrant.
• New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is willing to issue more food cart permits, which would shrink the city’s booming black market.
• Pokemon Go turns two years old today. Do you remember life without it?
• A Michigan State University professor says Latino students are perpetuating “colorblind racism” by emphasizing hard work and self-reliance.

Check out the infographic in this month’s issue of Reason to find out if you can have a legal March Madness pool.

View this article.

Last week, the Welsh government approved take-home abortion pills, meaning most medical, non-surgical abortions can be done at home, without the supervision of a doctor.

Currently, Scotland, Sweden, and France have similar protocols in place, though England lags behind on this front. Given that around three-fourths of the total abortions performed in Wales last year were medical, this recent change could mean easier abortion accessfor women who live in remote parts of the country, writes Liz Wolfe.

View this article.